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James Yardsley was drinking keg beer with fellow farm servants in a hut near Deloraine on the night of 26 July 1851 when, after a separate scuffle outside, he strode back in and told Robert Hudson he would be his “butcher to night.” He stabbed Hudson three times with a pocket knife while another labourer, Bush, wrestled for the blade and begged him to stop; Hudson collapsed with wounds to his chest, arm and back.

Convicted of wounding with intent to do bodily harm, Yardsley was hanged at Launceston on this day in 1851, the same port where he had landed as a transported convict sixteen years earlier.

When his employer confronted him that night, Yardsley answered flatly, “I’ve done it, and am willing to suffer,” and later said he was ready to “die on the gallows for it.”

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Attempted Murder Australia Convict History Deloraine Execution Launceston TAS Trial

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Francis Duke, a servant on George Hill’s farm near Deloraine in northern Tasmania, woke his employer in the middle of the night with an urgent story: the bullock being fattened was choking and needed help. When they reached the shed the animal was calm and Duke complained only of the cold, but as Hill turned back toward the house Duke knocked him down with a piece of firewood and began stabbing him as the two men grappled on the ground. It was Hill’s wife who turned the fight, beating Duke with a brick until neighbours arrived to help subdue him.

Searching the property afterwards, they found Duke’s fellow servant, a ticket-of-leave man named William Smith, already dead in his bed, a wound driven more than an inch into his skull while he slept. Duke was convicted of murder and sentenced to death without hope of mercy. He was hanged at Launceston on 31 October 1851.

Duke, a Spaniard who reportedly spoke unintelligibly in court, insisted to the end that the evidence given by Hill and his wife was false from beginning to end.

Old Launceston Gaol, viewed from Wellington Square. State Library and Archives of Tasmania, LPIC147/4/62.

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Australia Deloraine Execution Launceston Murder TAS Trial

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Margery Campbell, an Irish woman also known as Margaret Docherty, was lured into William Burke’s lodging house in Edinburgh on 31 October 1828 after Burke struck up a conversation with her on the street, claiming a shared homeland. A night of drinking followed, and before it ended Burke and his accomplice William Hare had suffocated her, the sixteenth victim in a killing spree that had run through the city for months.

Her body was found hidden under straw by fellow lodgers Ann and James Gray, who went straight to the police. The discovery ended the partnership for good: Hare turned Crown witness to save himself, and Burke went to the gallows for a murder that finally could not be concealed.

Burke murdering Margery Campbell historical crime illustration

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Edinburgh Execution Murder Scotland Serial Killer Trial UK

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A boy’s dog scratching at a rubbish heap near a flour mill uncovered a charred human head, its features burned beyond recognition. Days later a woman’s torso turned up nearby, but no one had been reported missing, and the case stalled until police found a torn scrap of calico left in a landlady’s cellar by a young butcher named William Henry Scott. It matched, thread for thread, a fragment of chemise recovered with the remains.

After nine days of police court hearings, Scott was committed for trial on 31 October 1866, accused of a murder most foul: that of a Sydney woman with whom he had been living as husband and wife. The magistrate praised the remarkable police investigation, which had traced an entire body back to a single scrap of fabric, describing the case as “unprecedented in our annals of crime”.

William Henry Scott under sentence of death 1867 for murder most foul

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Australia Dismemberment Forensic Science Murder NSW Sydney Trial

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