John Trevor “Jack” Kelly was found guilty of kidnapping on 23rd September 1937, and was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, with a recommendation that he undergo observation following concerns about lasting effects from a motor accident.
Released in November 1938, Kelly committed murder less than three months later. He stood trial before the same judge who had sentenced him for kidnapping, but this time he was sentenced to death, becoming the last prisoner executed in New South Wales.
At the Central Criminal Court in Sydney, 30-year-old Yvonne Gladys Fletcher of Newtown was sentenced to death after a seven-day trial for the 1948 murder of her first husband, Desmond George Butler, who died after months of wasting illness caused by thallium poisoning. Asked if she had anything to say before sentence was passed, she replied simply, “No, your Honor,” but moments later a prayer book she had carried through every day of the trial crashed to the floor and she collapsed in the dock, sobbing, as police lifted her out.
Mr Justice Kinsella told the court the crime was “horrible” because the poison had been “secretly administered within the family circle” to an unsuspecting victim, destroying him “mentally and physically while permitting him to linger for months in wretched agony.” Fletcher was the first person in Australian criminal history convicted of murder by thallium poisoning, and the jury recommended that the sale of the poison to the public be banned outright.
What the sentencing did not reveal to onlookers was already known to the court: Fletcher had also been committed for trial over the death of her second husband, who had died from the same poison at Newtown only months earlier. The Crown Prosecutor noted the chilling parallel between the two cases, telling the jury, “There is no question that both Butler and Fletcher died from thallium poisoning… the same matrimonial discord, the same hatred towards each man, the same sudden illness, and the same dreadful symptoms.” The judge himself observed that had this conviction concerned her second husband, evidence of his cruelty toward her might have offered some mitigation, but no such excuse existed for the killing of her first.
On September 22, 1933, ten prisoners broke out of the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City in a violent escape that killed two guards. The breakout was planned from inside by seasoned bank robber Harry Pierpont, with handguns smuggled to the crew by John Dillinger, freshly paroled after nine years behind bars, using arrangements made by Pierpont’s girlfriend.
In a strange twist, Dillinger himself was not among the men who walked free that day. Just days earlier he had been arrested and jailed in Dayton, Ohio, meaning his former cellmates had to turn around and break him out shortly after springing themselves. The escapees would go on to form the core of the notorious Dillinger gang, launching a violent crime spree across the American Midwest.
A Government agent later wrote that Dillinger’s career “graphically illustrates the inadequacies of our system,” noting that nine years in prison had done nothing to rehabilitate a man determined to become a professional bank robber.
Ernest Austin was the last person ever executed in Queensland. The 23-year-old farm labourer was hanged in Brisbane in September 1913 for a murder committed at Samford three months earlier. Reporters noted that the brilliance of the spring morning made it hard to grasp what was happening a few yards away. A chaplain led the procession to the scaffold, reciting the burial service. The condemned man looked in remarkably good health; his appetite had stayed “voracious to the very last”, and he had gained 28 pounds in gaol. Asked if he had anything to say, he spoke in low, clear tones, waving his right hand for emphasis: “I say straight out that I quite deserve this punishment.” As the white cap was drawn over his face he added: “Send a wire to my mother.”
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