Category Archives: Outlaws

1837: Luis Candelas, urban bandit

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The brigand Luis Candelas was garroted in Madrid on this date in 1837.

Candelas — that’s a Spanish link, as are most available sources on the man — was a bad boy from a bourgeois family with a penchant for high living and high blood, the latter of which got him kicked out of school when a priest slapped him by way of discipine and Candelas repaid him in kind.

From here he went on to the life of a sybaritic picaro, worthy of remembrance in various song and verse.

He was a dashing Don Juan type, smartly dressed and famed for his love of the written word and the opposite sex; he was a triumphant duelist, that noble old sport; and he was the king of a gang of robbers that haunted the taverns of Madrid and won both treasure and popular affection by their exploits.

“Money is badly distributed,” ran one of their reported aphorisms of social banditry, “and it is not fair that while some are dragged in coaches, while others trudge through the mud.”

In this last he had a Jekyll-and-Hyde double life, posing as the respectable Luis Alvarez de Cobos by day only to transform into lovable underworld rogue by night.

As ought to happen to such a romantic desperado, he was betrayed in the end by his heart. Feeling inordinate police heat due to robbing some inordinately important people — the Queen‘s personal dressmaker, the French ambassador — Candelas attempted to slip out of the country with his lover, a woman named Clara. The latter went with him as far as Gijon before she was overcome with longing for hearth and home and convinced Candelas to return to Madrid and ride out the manhunt there. He was caught.

They tried him for 40 different robberies, and he hung with a jaunty “Adiós Patria mía, sé feliz!” (“Farewell, my country, be happy!”)

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1938: Adam “Eddie” Richetti, Pretty Boy Floyd sidekick

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On this date in 1938, Adam “Eddie” Richetti was gassed for a notorious gangland bloodbath, the Kansas City Massacre. Whether he was actually involved in said massacre is a different question.

Richetti was a sidekick of the much better-known outlaw Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, a guy who earned his cred in social banditry by taking time during his many Depression-era bank robberies to set fire to the mortgage liens.*

J. Edgar Hoover promoted this looker to Public Enemy Number One after the slot was vacated by the late John Dillinger — and that spotlight was much due to a railroad station shootout in 1933 known as the Kansas City Massacre. There, three gangsters led by Vernon Miller ambushed lawmen escorting Miller’s arrested associate Frank “Jelly” Nash. It was an attempt to free the latter, but he was shot dead in the fusillade — along with FBI agent Raymond Caffrey, two Kansas City detectives, and the McAlester, Oklahoma police chief who had helped arrest Nash only the night before. Several other John Law types were injured in the shootout.

While Miller’s role is known, the identities of his two confederates have never been established to the satisfaction of a historical consensus. The FBI tabbed Floyd and Richetti as the other gunmen involved, and the bureau’s page on the event still asserts this positively. Floyd and Richetti always denied it — while still a fugitive, Floyd even sent Kansas City police a postcard disavowing the attack — and there has long been a suspicion that the FBI’s conclusion was born of expediency instead of investigative rigor. Robert Unger’s 1997 book on the case is subtitled “The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

It would do for both Floyd and Richetti, however.

In 1934, the two had a one-car accident while driving in the fog. A suspicious passing motorist alerted police and in no time Floyd had been gunned down in an Ohio cornfield; his subsequent funeral in Oklahoma would draw a crowd tens of thousands strong.

Less mourned, Eddie Richetti was taken into custody and executed in the judicial way for the Kansas City Massacre, his trial a parade of eyewitnesses of questionable veracity. He was just the fifth person executed in Missouri’s brand-new gas chamber, which had just come online that same blessed year: any less time on the run, and he would have been bound for the hangman instead.

Eddie Richetti lives on in the culture as a supporting role in any film about Pretty Boy Floyd.

* Possibly an urban legend, but Floyd’s public popularity was real.

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1664: Sawny Douglas, Chevy Chaser

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From the Newgate Calendar:

SAWNY DOUGLAS

A Scottish Highwayman who laid England under toll, and took a Copy of “Chevy Chase” to Tyburn when he was hanged on 10th of September, 1664

SAWNY DOUGLAS, a Scotsman, was the son of a tanner, and born at Portpatrick in the shire of Galloway, where he lived till the unnatural Civil War broke out in 1641. Sawny at this time being very zealous on the side of the Kirk, and consequently against the King, entered himself into the service of the Parliament, was at the siege of Dundee, and boasted after that bloody action was over that he killed with his own hands no less than twenty-nine persons.

Those who have read the histories of that time will remember that Dundee was taken by storm, and that the garrison was put to the sword; which gave Sawny an opportunity to discover his cruelty.

After the restoration of King Charles II, when the Scots were reduced to obedience, Sawny found himself obliged to seek some other subsistence than the army.

He had now been a soldier about twenty years, and though he had never been advanced higher than to carry a halberd [i.e., a sergeant -ed.], yet he was something loth to lay down his commission. However, there was no opposing necessity, and he was obliged to submit, as well as many of his betters, who were glad they could come off thus, after having been so deeply concerned in the rebellion.

Coming into England, and being destitute of both money and bread, he was not long in resolving what course to take in order to supply himself. The highway, he thought, was as free for him as for anybody else, and he was both strong and desperate. But the question was, where should he get a horse and accoutrements? “What,” said he again, “should hinder my taking the first that comes in my way, and seems fit for my purpose?” Pursuant to this last resolution he kept on the main road, with a good crab-tree stick in his hand, till he saw a gentleman’s servant alone, well mounted, with pistols before him.

He had some question ready to ask, and after that another, till the poor footman was engaged in a discourse with him, and rode along gently by his side. At last Sawny observes an opportunity, and gives him an effectual knock on the pate, which, followed with four or five more, left him insensible on the ground, while our young adventurer rode off with the horse till he thought himself out of the way of any inquiry.

The first robbery he committed was in Maidenhead Thicket, in Berkshire, in those times a very noted haunt for highwaymen. The person he stopped was one Mr Thurston, at that time Mayor of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire. He got about eighteen pounds, and was so uncivil as to refuse the poor gentleman ten shillings to bear his charges home; which was all he required, and for which he begged very hard.

Another time he robbed the Duchess of Albemarle* of diamond rings to the value of two hundred pounds, besides a pearl necklace, rich bracelets and ear-rings. After this he came and took lodgings at the house of one Mr Knowles, an apothecary in Tuthil Street, Westminster, where he set up for a gentleman, appeared very fine, and made love to his landlord’s daughter, who was reputed to be a two thousand pounds fortune.

For some time he was very well received both by the young lady and her father; but when his money was gone, and they found him full of shifts, arts and evasions, they not only discarded him as a husband and son-in-law, but turned him fairly out of doors.

Sawny now took to the road again, and committed more robberies than before, ranging all over the north of England, and being often so fortunate as to escape justice when it pursued him. He moreover contracted a familiarity with Du Vall, the most generous-spirited highwayman that ever lived, which friendship continued till Death parted them by his deputy Jack Ketch.

Sawny’s last attempt was on the Earl of Sandwich,** who was afterwards admiral in the Dutch war, and unfortunately lost his life, together with his ship. This noble commander, having arms in the coach, resolved not to be insulted by a highwayman, and discharged a pistol into Sawny’s horse, which immediately dropping down under him, the servants came up and secured our bonny North Briton, who was thereupon committed to Newgate, and in less than a month after ordered for Tyburn.

The Ballad of Chevy Chase, a popular song that survives in several variants, tells the story of a great battle between Scotsmen and Englishmen — won by the Scottish side, as occurred in its likely real-life inspiration, the Battle of Otterburn (1388).

Much beloved on both halves of Britain, it survives in several variants to the present day. The ballad also directly inspired the naming of Chevy Chase, Maryland (which once contained a number of street names alluding to Otterburn), as well as the stage name of National Lampoon/Saturday Night Live comedian Cornelius Crane “Chevy” Chase.

While he was under sentence he behaved in a very profane and indecent manner, cursing the bellman for his bad English when he repeated the usual Memento the night before his execution. At St Sepulchre’s the next day, when the appointed ceremony was performed, instead of composing his countenance, and looking as a man in his condition ought to do, he only told the spectators that it was hard a man could not be suffered to go to the gallows in peace; and that he had rather be hanged twice over without ceremony, than once after this superstitious manner.

He read no Prayer Book, but carried the ballad of Chevy Chase [see sidebar -ed.] in his hand all the way to Tyburn. When he came thither he took no notice of the ordinary, but bid the hangman be speedy, and not make a great deal of work about nothing, or at most about a mere trifle. He died 10th of September, 1664, aged fifty-three, and was buried in Tyburn Road.

* There were only three legitimate Dukes of Albemarle. The first was ancient history, a casualty at Agincourt centuries before. Chronologically, this robbery victim should refer to the wife of the first Duke, who was also the great Roundhead commander — and indeed, the robber’s very own commander at Dundee — George Monck. However, the text might instead be an anachronistic invocation of the wife of the second Duke of Albemarle who attained notoriety, and great wealth, as the “Mad Duchess” even though she didn’t attain the title until 1669. These entries, especially the ones dating back to the 17th century, were full liable to crisscross the unmarked boundaries between history and legend.

** Not the Earl who gave us sammiches, but his ancestor.

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1874: Sid Wallace

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On this date in 1874, colorful outlaw Sid[ney] Wallace was hanged for murder in Reconstruction Arkansas.*

A large enough figure to merit his own entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Wallace was a little boy on a farm near Clarksville in Johnson County when his father was murdered by Union men in 1863.

The legend has it that his family’s slave, Missouri Blackard, kept the identities of the killers from the youth until he turned 20 or 21 … whereupon Wallace served his revenge cold, tracking one of them as far as Kansas to murder him.

How Sid learned that one of the killers had relocated to Kansas is never explained, but the account describes him traveling to Kansas, finding the murderer, and staying the night with him and his family, claiming to be a peddler. He even displayed his wares to the family to make his story convincing. Only in the morning, as he was taking leave of the family, did he identify himself as the son of Vincent Wallace, as he drew a pistol and shot his host dead. No charges were ever filed against Sid for this cold-blooded act, nor was it mentioned during his trials for the killings that happened in Johnson County. (Unvarnished Arkansas: The Naked Truth about Nine Famous Arkansans)

Back in Clarksville, Wallace carved out a niche (with his brother George, until the latter got shot) as a colorful James Gang-like populist criminal with a knack for escaping actual or would-be jailers: the most charming adventure attributed him is dodging a posse by hiding under Missouri Blackard’s (evidently quite capacious) skirts while the latter took a casual stroll to the well. We’re not vouching for this story, just reporting the allegation.

To return to Unvarnished Arkansas, Clarksville

was shattered by a pair of murders in the last days of August 1873. Constable R.W. “Doc” Ward was the first victim to be assassinated. Doc Ward had first come to Arkansas with the Federal army during the Civil War; like some other northern soldiers, Ward had stayed in the South after the war to make his fortune. Such men often were described as “carpetbaggers,” suggesting that their only motivation to remain in the South was to profit at the expense of the defeated and demoralized southerners. Carpetbaggers had rebuilt the government of Arkansas and other southern states, even representing these states in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as in state legislatures and in governors’ offices. Carpetbaggers had opened banks, built railroads, started businesses, and constructed houses for themselves and their famlies. Many carpetbaggers, like Doc Ward, had been appointed or elected to positions of local authority. Ward does not appear to have been generally disliked in Johnson County; he was just a man doing his job, like so many other men around the county. Still, as constable, he had a responsibility to arrest criminals, and anyone pursuing a life of crime could expect to profit from the elimination of the local enforcer of the law.

Doc Ward was sitting on a wooden sidewalk in front of W.P. Rose’s drugstore one fine summer evening — August 20, 1873 — when a single gunshot rang out, and the constable fell, mortally wounded. He did not die until September 12, however. The shocked witnesses reported that a gunman had fired a double-barreled shotgun at the constable and then ridden away on horseback. No one was arrested for the crime. Exactly one week later, county judge Elisha Mears was walking home for his noontime meal after a pleasant visit to Blind Bob’s Saloon in Clarksville when, once again, a single shot rang out. Mears fell, badly injured — he died an hour after midnight. Witnesses said that the gunman had been concealed, but no one claimed to know who had fired the shots. Tongues began to wag, though, and fingers of blame were being pointed at Sid Wallace. Even in Little Rock, the Arkansas Gazette took notice of the crimes, grumbling that no effort was being made to bring the assassin to justice.** Citizens of Johnson County were not as blind to criminal behavior, however, as the Little Rock journalist suggested. More than a century later, one writer would characterize their attitude with these words: “The killing of Judge Meers [sic], a progressive Johnson County native, turned the tide of public opinion in Clarksville against Sid Wallace. Sid was the prime suspect, and most thought he should not have shot the judge, even if he was a Republican.”

But even under sentence of death, the roue got a pass to escort the prison warden’s daughter to a dance. Unsurprisingly, she returned home begging for her date’s life.

He was hanged publicly in Clarksville on March 14, 1873, with the manful last words, “I have no confession to make to man, but whatever I have to confess must be to God. I die in defense of myself and friends, and I regret not having a dozen deaths to die.” He had only the one, but that hasn’t hindered his rich posthumous life in folk hero-dom, regional class, including a highly dubious rumor that he survived his execution and lived on to rob and murder again on western trails.

* The very tail end of that post-Civil War era: in Arkansas, the terminal event was a factional bush war that broke out in April 1874 and brought about a new state constitution followed by nearly a full century of Democratic governors.

** Arkansas, which was out on the frontier at this point in America’s march across the continent, had a national reputation: the New York Times threw it some shade while reporting Wallace’s hanging: “The determination which has been shown during the past year by the decent citizens of Arkansas to bring murderers to justice will eventually result in making the State a desirable place of residence. For many years it has been heard of almost entirely in connection with the reports of dark deeds.”

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1903: Mathias Kneissl, Bavarian bicycle bandit

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Bavarian bandit Mathias Kneissl was beheaded by the fallbeil guillotine in an Augsburg prison on the morning of February 21, 1903.

Kneißl/Kneissl got a juvenile start on his delinquency — the family trade, one might say; his parents were part-time thieves and fences and an uncle was a famous robber of the Munich-Augsburg roads named Johann Pascolini. He caught his first serious jail time at the tender age of 18 in an affair when his brother Alois shot dead a police officer who had come to investigate them for poaching.

Alois died of tuberculosis in prison but Kneissl emerged from his cell in 1899 — 24 years old and penniless. He soon returned to his vomit, mounting a bicycle-borne crime spree around Bavaria’s Dachau district.

Quaint though it might read in retrospect, a mobile gunslinging cyclist could be a hell of a menace in a world without cars or telephones. Kneissl proved it over the span of about a year and a half before his March 1901 arrest, raiding farms and passersby trying to accumulate a stake sufficient to vanish with his sweetheart to America.

Instead that sweetheart betrayed his hideout to authorities, who require an hourslong siege to capture the wanted outlaw. Two Altomünster gendarmes whom he had killed in a shootout supplied the requisite capital charge, notwithstanding the popular “social bandit” glow he had gained from his many months on the lam. (Folk songs celebrating him are still in circulation to this day; there have also been 1970 and 2008 cinematic treatments of this criminal legend.)

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1803: Mathias Weber, Rhineland robber

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On this date in 1803, robber Mathias Weber was guillotined.

“Fetzer” made a scintillating career in brigandage in 1790s Rhineland — whose west bank Prussia had been forced to cede to revolutionary France. (The legendary bandit Schinderhannes plied his trade in the same unsettled environs; the two men shared a ride to Mainz as prisoners.)

Fetzer’s gang robbed liberally and violently on the roads; their pinnacle capers were twice raiding the river town of Neuss.

Tried (and eventually executed) in Cologne, he was persuaded to confess — albeit not regret — his considerable career in villainy by a prosecutor named Anton Keil, who made use of his access to this notorious figure to print a little biography of his famous prey. Fetzer, for his part, amused himself by sketching guillotines on his cell wall and building a tally of the distinct robberies he could recollect, eventually cataloguing 178 of them. He wowed the standing-room crowd at his trial with his nerve in the courtroom, joking and sparring and readily revealing all without any expectation of trading admissions for leniency.

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1779: Claudius Smith, Cowboy of the Ramapos

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Claudius Smith, a feared Tory guerrilla during the American, was hanged in Goshen, N.Y., on this date in 1779.

“The Cowboy of the Ramapos” for his penchant for livestock-rustling in the Ramapo Mountains, Smith headlined a gang of pro-British criminals/partisans operating out of Monroe, N.Y., near the New Jersey border — a zone of dirty irregular warfare.

Quite a lot of legends apparently proliferated about this guy, including in his own time: one wanted poster described him as seven feet tall.

If you were a British loyalist in his neighborhood you might have figured him along the lines of an Anglo hajduk — the Balkan freebooters who straddled the line between social bandit and hero insurgent. To a Patriot, he was little better than a brigand, and not satisfied with riding off cattle and horses ventured also to invade farm houses for plunder. After one of his band’s deadly raids, Orange County Whigs complained to New York Gov. George Clinton, “we have not thought ourselves secure for a long time. We live so scattered that they can come in the dead of night to any one family & do what they please.”

So unsettled were the wartime frontiers that Gov. Clinton was notably unable to satisfy their petition for quite some time, and Smith’s raids, sometimes working in concert with the pro-British Mohawk commander Joseph Brant, continued to frighten those scattered revolutionists.

A Continental Army major named Jesse Brush finally captured Smith on Long Island late in 1778, and delivered him back to authorities at Orange County who gave him a proper trial and condemned him to hang for several robberies. (Murder wasn’t on the rap sheet.)

One month later, Smith’s son Richard with a band of cowboys revenged the execution by slaying a Goshen man named Richard Clark — and pinning to his corpse a warning to their persecutors.

A Warning to the Rebels

You are hereby warned from hanging any more friends to the government as you did Claudius Smith. You are warned likewise to use James Smith, James Flewelling, and William Cole well and ease them from their irons, for we are determined to hang six for one, for the blood of the innocent cries aloud for vengeance. Your noted friend, Capt. Williams and his crew of robbers and murders we have got in our power, and the blood of Claudius Smith shall be repaid. There are particular companies of us who belong to Col. Butler’s army, Indians as well as white men, and particularly numbers from New York that are resolved to be revenged on you for your cruelty and murders. We are to remind you that you are the beginners and aggressors, for by your cruel oppressions and bloody actions drive us to it. This is the first and we are determined to pursue it on your heads and leaders to the last till the whole of you is massacred.

Dated New York February 1779.

It was tall talk that the raiders couldn’t back up: rewards and informants soon broke up the band, leaving the cowboys and Claudius Smith to pass into history.

Ramblers might enjoy a visit to Claudius Smith’s Den, a cave that formerly served as a refuge for Smith’s gang. Beware of ghosts!

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1816: Marci Zöld, Hungarian outlaw

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Legendary Hungarian outlaw Marci Zöld was executed on this date in 1816.

Zöld — Hungarian link, as are most in this post; we’ve inverted the Hungarian surname-first naming convention for ease — followed his father’s footsteps into outlawry; his heyday comprised the months following a Christmas 1815 escape from a previous imprisonment after which he and a confederate “kidnapped and plundered for several months in Sárrét, and in Bihar, Szabolcs, Heves and Szolnok counties.” (Heves was his native soil, so he’s also known as Marci Hevesen.)

By summer he had teamed up with another bandit named Pista Palatinszky and formed a gang that raided promiscuously throughout Transdanubia, escaping justice until he didn’t.

The allure of the road — moreso than any evident virtue distinguishing the brigand’s actual conduct — qualified him to be taken up by poets of the emerging Romantic age, like Sandor Petofi‘s poem which inaccurately portrays Marci doing Robin Hood wealth redistribution. Mor Jokai, Jozsef Gaal, and Lajos Kormendi are among the many other authors who have paid him tribute.

To some extent, his defiance of the Austro-Hungarian empire expressed an inchoate longing for rebellion, like the Balkan hajduks. Even moreso, it was a matter of good timing — for the 18th-19th century pivot was a peak era for romanticizing highwaymen, now that the species was disappearing into the crucible of modernity. This is the same period for the likes of Schinderhannes and Diego Corrientes Mateos; equally, it’s the moment when artists of various nationalities elevated into the cultural canon decades-dead outlaws like Dick Turpin (England) or Juraj Janosik (Slovakia).

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1740: Ned Darcy, of the Kellymount Gang

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On this date in 1740,* Ned “Darcy, one of the Kellymount gang, was tried at Carlow, on the Proclamation; and, being proved to be the man, in ten minutes he was taken from the dock and hanged, and his head fixed on the Court House.”

The Kellymount gang — named for a County Kilkenny town it frequented — was a band of outlaws who were the terror of Leinster in 1740, a famine year due to a brutal frost.

Numbering as many as 30 strong, this troop had the boldness even to lay siege to manors and the ferocity to put gentlemen in mortal terror; we find our same principal just weeks before his execution going the full monster:

August 30 — Yesterday morning, one Ned Darcy went to the house of one Doran, in the County of Carlow, took him out of his bed and, naked as he was, put him on horseback, and in that manner carried him through part of the Counties of Carlow and Kilkenny; and being met by several, were asked where they intended to take him, to which they replied they were going to hang him, he having been the occasion of hanging a brother and a father of Darcy’s; and we have been since informed that, having taken him into Kellymount Wood, they cut out his tongue, cut off his ears, and pulled out one of his eyes, then desired him to go to Sir John, in Capel Street, give in his examination to him of their proceedings, and tell him they would serve him in the same manner were he in their power, as also Mr. Bush.

Mr. Bush, who came from Carlow three days ago, had one hundred men armed to guard him, and Mr. Gore, the same from Waterford; so by this you may see in what fear we travel in this country.

The Kellymount Gang was mostly busted up in these months with no small number of executions, but its remnants survived to launch the career of one of Ireland’s most celebrated bandits, James Freney — for a few years later, Freney, a failed tavernkeeper mired in debt, chanced to find himself neighbor to “one John Reedy, who had formerly been one of the robbers, commonly known by the name of the Kellymount Gang, but who had been pardoned for making some discoveries.” Reedy advised Freney in a moment of financial desperation that “there was a fair at hand, and that there was a number of drovers to be there; who, he said would have a great deal of cash; and told me, that my only remedy to extricate myself from my creditors, was to make to the highway, and that he would get three or four men to assist me.”

The former publican took up the offer to good effect, and proceeded to make his name and fortune on the roads.

We hope our readers will recognize this famous criminal from the stickup he perpetrates upon the title character in Thackeray‘s 1844 serial The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and likewise in Stanley Kubrick‘s masterpiece 1975 adaptation, Barry Lyndon. (He’s called “Feeney” in the film.)

* Julian date: the quoted blurb comes from Reilly’s Dublin News-Letter of November 8th, 1740.

** Much to the disadvantage of Executed Today, Freney/Feeney was the rare outlaw who was able to retire with his earnings, emigrating abroad and eventually returning to work as a customs official in Inistioge. The account of his criminal origins we have from Freney’s own memoirs.

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1866: The Richard Burgess gang, for the Maungatapu Murders

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On this date in 1866, Nelson, New Zealand was marred for the first time by a gallows — which revenged in triplicate one of the most notorious crimes in New Zealand’s European settlement era.

The gang of toughs led by London-born transport convict Richard Burgess formed itself at the fringes of the early 1860s *gold rush in the South Island’s Central Orago wilderness. The gold strike was nicely timed to attract veterans of the California (USA) gold rush and the Victoria (Australia) gold rush, both of which were ten-plus years old and into their petering-out stages; in those places and many others where gold stirred men’s feet sticking up lucky prospectors was just a lucrative tertiary sector supported by all those the pickaxes, like boom town saloons and cathouses.

And Burgess was an old pro at rendering his peculiar “service”. He’d made his own way for some time robbing miners in Victoria, before he followed his market to Otago and attracted to his train fellow-desperadoes Thomas Kelly (aka Thomas Noon), Joseph Sullivan, and (an old associate from Aussie days) Philip Levy.

Along a stretch known as the Maungatapu track — at a spot now remembered as Murderers’ Rock — the quartet set up an ambush for a group of businessmen whom they learned were moving their money to a bank in Nelson. On June 12, a luckless passing laborer named James Battle passed their way and wound up strangled to death for his mischance. The next day, four businessmen appeared as expected and were all shot and strangled to death, yielding a total haul north of £300.

To their grief, the previously impecunious men were quite indiscreet about throwing their earnings around back in Nelson, and when a friend reported the victims’ party missing the Burgess group became suspect almost immediately. All were in custody within a week of the crime, even before the bodies were located — which only occurred on the 29th when Joseph Sullivan, seeing where the wind was blowing, made a full confession in exchange for clemency.* His statement was the death warrant for his former confederates.

In the account of the next day’s Nelson Examiner, Burgess died boldly and Levy, after favoring the audience in Nelson Gaol with an extended vindication of his innocence, did likewise. But Kelly was entirely unmanned by mounting the scaffold where

ensued a scene of the most painful nature, one which almost baffles description, but which, nevertheless, it is hardly possible to regard otherwise than as a consistent and appropriate finale to this most extraordinary tragedy … [Kelly] for some time resolutely refused to obey the directions of the officials, literally screaming and ejaculating in the most piteous tones, “Don’t do it yet, let me speak. I am forced, I am not hanged, but murdered.” And then, with an almost idiotic expression on his features, “God bless me, where am I? I ought to be allowed to speak.” … During this time the various ministers were engaged in whispering consolation to their respective charges, and the scene of confusion which Kelly’s violent conduct produced may be more easily imagined than described. The ropes were then placed round their necks and the white caps drawn over their faces, but during the whole time Kelly never ceased talking, or rather whining out, in a half broken voice, saying, “I did not write that name on the gun, Burgess did it. I hope I may go to God, and every one here.” …

Our readers may picture to themselves the distressing nature of this scene, which visibly affected every spectator present, and which seemed to increase in intensity every moment it was prolonged. Kelly’s shrill and discordant voice was still heard continually shrieking forth, in the most heartrending accents … Once Kelly attempted to move himself aside from the drop, but was immediately replaced by the officials in attendance.

Kelly kept on babbling as a minister began reading the Anglican Burial Service, and he was still at it when the trap was dropped. Perhaps due to his agitation on the scaffold, Kelly died hard the hard, requiring the help of the executioner’s rough grab on his legs to enhance the pressure of the noose. “The dead silence which followed on the consummation of the tragedy seemed almost a welcome relief,” the Examiner remarked.

After hanging, science and pseudoscience had their way with the bodies: doctors dissected the necks, it being “a matter of dispute amongst medical authorities whether death in such cases is caused by strangulation or by dislocation of the spinal column … it was satisfactorily proved that death has resulted in each case from strangulation, the spinal column being found to be perfect in each instance; thus setting this much vexed question at rest.” Meanwhile, the heads were removed altogether so that phrenologists could cast them.

Those casts are still in the possession of the Nelson Provincial Museum. An obelisk in memory of the five men they slew stands at Nelson’s Wakapuaka Cemetery.

* Sullivan served seven years in prison, then was pardoned on condition that he remove himself permanently from both New Zealand and Australia, although he later violated that condition. His ultimate fate is uncertain but he’s known to have outlived the rest of his party by many decades.

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