by Carol Baxter
Was this a tacit admission? He had long realised that she of all people was unlikely to confess to a mere mortal. A confession to God was probably all that could be hoped for.
Nosey Bob came in and pinioned her, attempting to soothe her as if she were a plump turkey sensing its imminent demise. She stood there passive yet uncowed, seemingly a willing participant in the coming sacrifice.
As they prepared to leave the cell accompanied by two sobbing female warders, Canon Rich realised that his strong-nerved charge was bearing up far better than the warders assigned the responsibility of carrying out the law’s fatal decree.
Chapter 49
What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Dressed in his white robes of office, Canon Rich appeared on the balcony that led from the condemned cells to the gallows platform. The spectators could hear him reading aloud as he began his funereal march, stepping slowly but surely towards the gallows.
Behind the clergyman, Louisa came into view. She was dressed in a long, loose prison gown of dark, reddish-brown wincey, drawn in slightly at the waist. A piece of common cord, cheaper even than a clothesline, bound her arms above her elbows so tightly that she couldn’t move them forwards or backwards. Her hands lay listlessly at her side, not even clutching her gown. Her head was bent forward, drooping onto her chest, and her shoulders were stooped. For a woman who had kept her chin high throughout the nightmare of four trials, it was a sign of her deep despair. She hadn’t been vanquished, though. Apart from a slight shuffle in her gait, she moved with a firm step.
A female warder walked on either side of her, there to provide a helpful arm as much as a hindrance to any attempt to flee. But Louisa, dry-eyed, disdained the support offered by these weeping women.
She glanced down at the pressmen. They noticed that her face seemed gaunt, her expression haggard. The contrast from a month earlier was shocking. The mental agony she had endured had clearly crushed the resolute spirit manifested at her various trials. Still, traces of colour remained on her cheekbones, evidence that she still retained some of her stoutheartedness.
Canon Rich stepped onto the gallows platform and stood to one side of the trapdoor. He fell silent.
Louisa’s gaze was still fixed on the ground as she neared the platform. Suddenly, she looked up, and appeared to falter. Then she continued walking. The warders stepped to one side. She alone took the two steps up to the gallows platform.
As she stepped beneath the beam, Canon Rich pronounced the closing words of the burial service. ‘I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’
Her voice low but clear, Louisa responded, ‘Amen.’
The clergyman whispered a few final words to her. She inclined her head slightly but said nothing further. Not a sob passed her lips nor a tear fell from her eye.
Canon Rich stepped away from the trapdoor. The assistant hangman passed Nosey Bob the white cap and he pulled it over Louisa’s head and face. Bending her head, she managed to raise her right hand high enough to pull down one of the cap’s lower corners. Her face was now invisible.
The hangman slipped the rope over her head and positioned the knot carefully under her left ear. He pulled the noose tight with a couple of hard jerks so the knot was close to the angle of her jawbone. The shock of feeling the noose’s coarse embrace caused her body to slump. Even so, she managed to remain standing.
The executioner stepped away from the trapdoor and motioned to his assistant that it was time. The assistant pulled the lever that would withdraw the bolt and allow the trap to open. Nothing happened. He tugged again. Still nothing.
Louisa stood there waiting, blinded by the hood, unaware of what was going on.
The executioner glared at his assistant and sent more silent but now peremptory signals. The assistant prodded and tugged to no avail.
A look of alarm crossed the executioner’s face. He stepped onto the trap and pulled the noose tighter around Louisa’s neck. Realising the foolishness of his action—what if the pin suddenly gave way?—he took a hasty step off the trap. The last thing he needed was for drama to turn into farce.
When it was clear that the assistant’s endeavours were not working, the executioner cried out for someone to find a hammer.
The spectators were too far below the gallows platform to see exactly what was happening, but they could see the assistant struggling to release the lever. What was the problem?
Louisa remained standing alone in the centre of the trap, her fortitude surely weakened by the shock of the delay, although she still wasn’t trembling. Truly, the woman had exceptional courage.
Then she staggered slightly.
Loud gasps greeted her movement. What if she fainted and fell across the trap? What if her courage failed and she attempted to flee? The noose would jerk her back, causing her to tumble to the ground. It might even strangle her.
A male warder rushed forward with a wooden mallet and hit the pin. Nothing. He pounded again . . . and again. Each blow sent a jolt through the spectators.
At the sound of the thumps, a roar arose from the crowd lining the gaol walls. ‘She is off!’
Louisa heard the crowd announce her demise. Her strength of will began to dissolve. She began to tremble.
Again the warder pounded . . . and again.
How long had it been? Half a minute? A minute? More? The horror seemed interminable.
Without warning, Louisa dropped through the trapdoor like a sack of potatoes. Through the opening in the scaffold base, the spectators could see her body continue dropping until the rope stretched to its fullest then jerk up again.
A gush of blood spurted from her neck. It looked as if her head was being severed from her body. Still, the spectators watched, unable to drag their eyes away. Could this hanging fiasco get any worse?
Blood ran down her prison dress, dripping into the pit below. Her head lolled. Her hands remained loose by her sides. She showed no sign of pain or suffering. She was unconscious at least, unaware of this next torment. But was she dead?
All eyes remained frozen on the horrible sight. The spectators could see that the noose, tightened an extra notch or two by the distressed hangman, had ripped her neck open. The noose knot partly filled the gap, but it didn’t hide the sight of her severed windpipe. Her head remained attached to her body only by her vertebrae. She couldn’t be alive, surely, not with such an injury. Still they watched. She didn’t move, not a muscle quiver. Her hands began to turn purple. The deed was done.
‘There at the end of a hideous cord,’ wrote the sickened Australian Star reporter, ‘dangles a mutilated corpse, all that remains of one that was a woman, a wife, a mother—but a murderess—and now—aye, God rest even her soul—the law is satisfied; she is dead.’
• • •
The doctor examined Louisa and pronounced her dead but her body was not removed. It dangled for twenty minutes in accordance with the regulations. All the while, a thin stream of blood trickled down the front of her dress.
By ten am, the body was on its way to the gaol mortuary, where it was placed on a table. The spectators had been unable to see Louisa’s hood-covered face and could only imagine how her terror must have contorted her features. Surprisingly, when the hood was removed, the reporters could see that her features were unaltered. Indeed, her face bore the same stolid expression she had worn during her many trials, apart from the closed eyes and purple lips and traces of blood oozing from her nose and mouth.
After her body had been examined, the female warders washed and dressed it and placed it in a coffin, leaving the lid off so the inquest jury could see her remains for themselves. ‘Death by hanging’ was their unsurprising verdict.
• • •
The authorities had planned to bury Louisa that afternoon; however, the hanging debacle necessitated an investigation, which delayed their plans. At eight o’clock
the following morning, her coffin was taken from the gaol’s deadhouse to Redfern station and loaded onto a train destined for Rookwood cemetery. An anonymous gentleman had purchased a grave in its Church of England section rather than leave her to be buried in the gaol’s unconsecrated ground. There, without any of the remorseless publicity of the past six months, she was buried. No family or friends were present to mourn her departure.
Chapter 50
The semi-savages who insisted that Louisa Collins’ blood was shed have had their wishes fulfilled to the very letter, and they should now feel as content as the ancient Romans did after a holiday spent in the Coliseum.
Australian Star
‘The scene was a disgrace to humanity’ was the community’s disgusted opinion of the botched execution, even among those who had demanded Louisa’s death. The press wrote that the public was prepared to allow a criminal’s life to be taken when it was justly forfeited, but it was not prepared to allow even the worst of criminals to be tortured. And, without a doubt, Louisa Collins had been cruelly tortured when she stood on the gallows awaiting death.
How could such a thing happen? The machinery was simple. The hangman had ample time to practise. Indeed, why were so many executions bungled? No one could forget the Mount Rennie fiasco of two years previously when three of the four youths had taken interminable minutes to die.
Sheriff Cowper tried to minimise the extent of the delay, saying that it was only of a few seconds’ duration and that, since death was instantaneous, it was a successful execution. Few were fooled.
Most of the press recognised that the impact of such brutality would be to intensify the feelings against capital punishment, in particular against the execution of women. ‘It is evident that a strong feeling must inevitably grow which will sound the death-knell of execution by hanging.’
• • •
Sir Henry Parkes wouldn’t lead the abolitionist charge. The day after Louisa’s execution, the death-knell tolled for his government. ‘Their light goes out like that of a tallow candle,’ wrote the disenchanted Daily Telegraph, ‘leaving nothing to mark the place where it was but a disagreeable political smell.’
It wasn’t Louisa’s execution that toppled the government, although it added significantly to the political tensions of the moment. In truth, what happened was little short of farcical. The trail leading up to that strange day included corruption charges against a government-appointed railway commissioner; a government inquiry that exonerated the appointee; Parkes’ promise to stand by the man; a declaration in the House that the correspondence supposedly clearing the man actually substantiated the charges; and a demand that Parkes respond. Far from supporting his appointee as promised, Parkes said arrogantly and dismissively, ‘I have nothing to say.’
Only half the Assembly was present that evening. The summer session had commenced before the end of the Christmas break and, unusually, the numbers were evenly divided. Parliamentarian John Want moved for an adjournment in order to deal with the correspondence relating to the corruption charges. Seven of Parkes’ supporters crossed the floor on the grounds that the premier’s response was a ‘treasonous betrayal of political trust’. The motion passed by thirty-seven votes to twenty-three. Effectively, it became a motion of censure, leaving Parkes little choice but to resign. Parkes’ government wasn’t defeated on a noble issue like the morality or efficacy of capital punishment, or even on a formal motion of censure. It was merely a motion ‘that this House do now adjourn’.
As the public looked on, perplexed, the Sydney Morning Herald asked if, perhaps, Parkes had intended such a result—because, otherwise, his actions were impossible to explain. Had the House’s obstructiveness and the challenges facing him on more serious political issues beaten him down until, in a fit of pique, he had abdicated the throne?
While Louisa’s case was not the trigger for the government’s downfall, it was at least symbolic, according to those who had little love for the premier or his politics. ‘The hideous spectacle of the execution of Louisa Collins was a fitting termination to their career in office,’ declared the Clarence and Richmond Examiner. ‘The manner in which this last victim to our sanguinary criminal code met her fate is symbolical of the manner in which the octopus of Parkesism has strangled the energies and progress of this unfortunate country.’
• • •
The government’s fall became the new topic of conversation, eclipsing any further discussion of capital punishment in general. Regarding Louisa’s case, though, one letter-writer made a helpful suggestion. He said that those who had demanded mercy should turn their philanthropic minds towards helping the innocents who had suffered the most from her crimes—her children. Of course, the same could be said for the ‘hang her’ advocates, those determined that the children should lose the single parent that did remain.
The fate of most of Louisa’s children is known. May’s adoptive father, James Geehan of Wilberforce, was perhaps the ‘Windsor gentleman’ said to be employing Arthur and Fred at the time of Louisa’s death. These two boys, along with their elder brother Herbert, all married and had families of their own; however, Reuben and Edwin slipped into the mists of history. Louisa’s youngest surviving son, Charles, was sent to live with John Gilby and later Samuel Grimson, both of Crookwell, New South Wales, but his whereabouts in adulthood is not known.
As for May, she was described as being ‘pretty and intelligent’ by the Windsor and Richmond Gazette when it praised the Geehans for their kindness in adopting her. May called herself Mabel thereafter. A feisty girl, she was in 1894 assaulted by a woman for having slapped the woman’s sister for impudence. Within the next few years, she moved to the Newcastle district, presumably to be closer to her siblings. She was a resident of West Wallsend in 1898 when she married railway fettler John McGuiness. She named the eldest of her three children Alice Louisa, although this child and another died in infancy. May herself died of heart failure in 1911, a week before her thirty-fourth birthday.
Louisa’s offspring failed to pass on to their own families the details of their parents’ fates. This particular skeleton was not pulled from history’s closet until a century later, when Louisa’s descendants began tracing their family histories. By then, enough time had passed for them to treasure the infamy rather than feel personally tainted—or publicly condemned—by the disgrace.
If Louisa Collins is the sister of anyone, she is probably the sister of the celebrated ‘Jack the Ripper’.
William Johnston Allen
Chapter 51
There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.
Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge
Louisa, the stout-hearted, the defiantly inscrutable, refused to appease society’s concerns by confessing her guilt or publicly professing her innocence. It falls to history’s detectives to reassess the evidence in order to determine the truth about this celebrated historical case.
The question of causation is pivotal: how did Andrews die? While the chemical evidence conclusively shows that Collins died of arsenic poisoning, it is inconclusive in terms of Andrews’ death. Nonetheless, the similarities between their illnesses are glaring: the vomiting and diarrhoea, suggesting that their bodies were attempting to expel substances that acted as irritants; the failure of the prescribed medicines to ameliorate their symptoms or slow down their deterioration; the evidence of arsenic, an irritant, in their remains.
There are other less obvious but no less significant similarities, including the fact that both men vomited green matter; industry once used arsenic to produce green dyes. Both men included ‘shoulder pain’ in their short list of symptoms—not foot pain or knee pain or wrist pain but shoulder pain—and arsenic poisoning can cause joint pain. Also, Andrews complained of a severe burning in his stomach and bowel, which resembles the ‘bowels of fire’ mentioned by other victims of arsenic poisoning. And the region of Andrews’ torso covering his stomach and gut—that is, the region that would have s
uffered most from short-term arsenic poisoning—was surprisingly well preserved, which is worth noting because the exhumed remains of Styrian arsenic-eaters showed considerably less decomposition than other corpses from the same period. Thus, while it is impossible to state with one hundred per cent certainty that Andrews died of arsenic poisoning, the body of evidence supports the conclusion ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Moreover, this was the verdict of the treating doctors and other expert medical practitioners once they had assessed all the evidence for themselves.
So how did arsenic enter Andrews’ body? Although Andrews might have been exposed to tiny amounts of arsenic while working as a wool-washer, evidence now shows that this type of exposure does not cause fatal arsenic poisoning. The authors of an article published in The Lancet in 1899 could find no cases of arsenic poisoning resulting from contact with items made from the wool of arsenic-dipped sheep. The arsenic bonded so tightly to the wool that even carding and combing failed to release it.9
Importantly, though, Andrews was not working in the month before his death because his employer’s business had closed. Therefore, workplace absorption could not have been responsible for the arsenic traces found in his stomach remains. His continued vomiting and purging throughout his illness suggests that he received a moderate dose of arsenic around ten days before his death and another dose or doses in the days following. As his body had expelled most of the arsenic prior to his death, the last dose was probably administered a few days beforehand.
Since there is no evidence that Andrews accidentally ingested or absorbed the arsenic and no evidence of suicidal intent, it is clear that he was murdered. This brings us to the question of culpability, not only in terms of Andrews’ death but in relation to Collins’ as well. Putting Louisa aside for the moment, there are others who need to be considered as possible perpetrators.
