by Carol Baxter
So why were these problems ignored? Why was she hanged?
Of the two dozen New South Wales women deposed for homicide between 1880 and 1900, nine were convicted; yet Louisa was the only woman to be sent to the gallows—and it wasn’t because she was a suspected double murderer. Baby farmer Sarah Makin, for example, had her 1893 death sentence commuted although she and her executed husband were considered responsible for killing a dozen infants for financial gain. Rather, the driving force in Louisa’s case seems to have been the social and political environment of her time.
Louisa broke not only the written criminal law but the unwritten social law. She breached society’s expectations of ‘womanly’ behaviour when it was particularly unwise to do so. Moreover, the face she presented to the world was cold and unemotional—‘unwomanly’. This was a time when society believed that external appearance denoted internal nature, that crime was most often a male behavioural trait, therefore, an unwomanly woman—that is, a more manly woman—was more likely to be criminal by nature.
This, also, was a time when women were becoming more assertive in demanding equality in employment, educational opportunities and voting rights, so the question of gender inequality was topical. One gender inequality that favoured women was the application of capital punishment. Men were executed; women were not. The Mount Rennie executions two years previously had shone a spotlight on this form of gender inequality. Four youths had been executed for a ‘single’ crime, one considered much less heinous than murder. As one newspaper argued, if men were to be hanged to protect women, then women should also be hanged to protect men.
It was time to set an example, time to show the public that society was not as unequal as the reformers might claim—and, conversely, that society was making efforts to increase women’s autonomy. By a bizarre piece of logical illogic, it was time to hang a woman. The cold-hearted killer of one husband (if not two), a killer who had failed to endear herself to the public and had offered no mitigating explanation, was the ideal choice. Louisa Collins was to be hanged, not only because of what she had done but because a female sacrifice was needed. She was the perfect scapegoat.
Yet even though Louisa breached society’s womanly rules, she was not completely unwomanly. She was an attractive, soberly dressed mother of seven children. Thus, while the ‘hang her’ advocates used womanhood as one of their supportive arguments, the ‘mercy’ advocates were able to do so as well. A tug-of-war began with Louisa in the middle: Louisa the stereotype rather than Louisa the person.
Capital punishment would always be a politically divisive subject; however, when Ninian Melville introduced Louisa’s case into parliament, he forced the members of this especially adversarial House to take sides along party lines. It became another contentious issue confronting parliament. Parkes reacted by, ostensibly, taking the decision-making power away from his cabinet and passing it to the one person who could rise above the maelstrom of New South Wales politics—the governor.
Lord Carrington was an intelligent man with progressive views. He would have seen the myriad problems in the material submitted with the mercy pleas. His words rejecting these mercy pleas suggest that his response would have been different if he had truly enjoyed unfettered authority, but Parkes’ government had made it clear that to pursue such a course would be political suicide. Carrington had little choice but to toe Parkes’ line. His shame at doing so, though, is evident in his refusal to see Louisa’s children.
Ultimately, Louisa was hanged because Parkes was determined to get his own way and was willing to push New South Wales towards a constitutional crisis to achieve it. Yet Parkes was a social progressive who deplored capital punishment and favoured women’s rights, so why was he determined to hang Louisa? He justified his government’s decision on the grounds that capital punishment was ‘the law’, that the law was gender-blind, and that women had the same rights and responsibilities as men so should be treated similarly when they broke the same law. On the surface, this seems a valid ‘progressive’ argument. Nonetheless, Parkes was soon reminded that the law was not gender-blind and that women had no vote so, clearly, they hadn’t the same rights and responsibilities as men. Moreover, as everyone knew, Parkes had himself breached the law six months previously when he responded to public concerns about Chinese immigration. Accordingly, his ‘it’s the law’ argument lacked any moral authority. Even Parkes must have been aware, at some level, of his hypocrisy, especially as the press was keen to point it out. That being the case, it seems surprising that he didn’t dismiss all the rhetoric and embrace the opportunity to grant her a reprieve, particularly in view of his statement to parliament that his government would render every conceivable assistance that would serve the ends of justice in her favour.
The explanation for Parkes’ wrathfulness seems to lie in the community’s long-held and widely embraced views about women. Parkes and his brethren still maintained a patriarchal and patronising attitude to women. While the conservatives were determined to control and silence women for fear that those who had money, knowledge and power would destroy the fabric of society, the progressives were at least willing to allow women a say in their own future so long as the decision was made by men in a timeframe that suited their own agenda.
These men had a primal attitude to power. They saw it as a dichotomy—either they had it or fought to gain it, or they chose to support someone else who had it. They did not share power or accept its imposition lightly. This type of attitude was carried into their strongest relationships with women. Marriage was never intended to be a power-sharing arrangement. The word ‘obey’ made that clear—to everyone.
Then along came a ‘black widow’ who dished out love and arsenic and nearly got away with killing two husbands.
While husband-killing was no longer ‘petit treason’ in the eyes of the law, the notion that this act reflected a profound betrayal of trust and a serious social threat still permeated the community consciousness, as the contemporary articles and correspondence about Louisa’s case reveal. Since husband-killing had long been considered nearly as heinous as killing a king, a woman who could kill two husbands, two ‘petit kings’, must therefore be the personification of evil, a destroyer not just of souls but of society and its core values.
Additionally, Louisa inflicted on her two husbands a humiliating death. Dying in battle was noble. Being poisoned by one’s wife? Effectively, she didn’t just kill them; she castrated them. And impotence for a man is one of the greatest fears of all.
Fear unbinds the ropes that cage superstition. To Parkes, Louisa was a reminder that, while everyman’s home was his castle, Eve still lurked in the dungeon. He stated his attitude clearly when he said, ‘At all times, and under all circumstances, when woman once forgets the character of her sex, there is no barrier to the lengths she will go to in crime.’ Clearly, a message needed to be sent to those lurking Eves.
Evil women were no longer burnt at the stake. The gallows would have to do.
Epilogue
A popular writer has said we may begin to believe in modern civilisation when it abolishes the hissing of actresses and the hanging of women.
South Australian Advertiser
‘It is forty years since a woman was hanged in New South Wales,’ wrote the disgusted Clarence and Richmond Examiner in the aftermath of Louisa’s bungled execution, ‘and I am inclined to think that it will be forty years before another is executed. The probability is that Louisa Collins is the last woman who will be subjected to that punishment.’
Prophetic words indeed. Despite more prolific killers facing the courts in the decades to come, Louisa was the last woman to die on a New South Wales scaffold. The name ‘Louisa Collins’ had come to represent the barbarity of capital punishment—for women at least—in the same way that, a century later, the name of an equally inscrutable woman, Lindy Chamberlain, would warn of the danger that would be inherent in its reintroduction.
The horror of Louisa’s execution fa
iled to deter some other Australian colonies. Five more women were later executed, including four in Victoria, the colony most strident in its demands for Louisa’s blood. Victoria also had pride of place in executing the last woman in Australia—Jean Lee in 1951—and the last man—Ronald Ryan—as recently as 1967.
Even so, New South Wales was the last state to abolish capital punishment, in 1985, for all that the law had lain dormant for half a century.12 Federally, it was struck from the statutes in 1973. The reasons for its abolition included those raised by the people who had called for Louisa’s reprieve, along with statistical evidence showing that harsh punishments failed to deter crime and that, conversely, murder rates were higher in states and countries that actively pursued the death penalty. The evidence also showed that the executed were mostly the poor and marginalised. Then—and now—they were the people like Louisa who couldn’t afford skilled legal representation and hadn’t the ear of the moneyed or the powerful, such as Sir Henry Parkes.
In 1888, this political Methuselah, who would become Australia’s most famous and revered nineteenth-century politician, was in his fourth of five terms as premier. In his next term, he would play a pivotal role in the drive for federation and in the early introduction of female suffrage. He was also a man before his time in his attitude to capital punishment. Thus, it seems ironic that he, of all people, should pass into history as the man responsible for the last execution of a woman in New South Wales. The Parkes who decried capital punishment in 1852 would have been horrified at such an ignominious legacy.
Louisa’s name, too, will forever be inscribed in Australian history books—along with her notorious nickname, Lucrezia Borgia. Unlike her unjustly accused predecessor, however, she was indeed a femme fatale, a poisoner of lives and souls.
Yet Louisa’s story is more than just the tale of a ‘black widow’ serial killer. This figure of well-deserved infamy also provoked public concern and outrage at a time of social and feminist upheaval. New South Wales feminists such as Rose Scott and Louisa Lawson (Henry Lawson’s mother) sometimes lent their voices to the mercy pleas when female murderers were facing the wrath of the law; however, they kept ominously silent in Louisa’s case. Without mitigating circumstances to justify her actions or an appealing persona to engage the community, the case of a drunken adulteress who murdered two husbands could not be used to further the feminist cause. These feminist leaders recognised the need to engage with rather than alienate the establishment if they wanted to improve the status of women. They recognised that Louisa’s portrait on the banner of feminism would have shouted of revolutionary ideals, of the desire to improve the status of women at the expense, indeed the destruction, of men. While Louisa Collins as a woman was politically problematic, Louisa Collins as a metaphor was politically toxic.
Following her execution, Louisa became a juicy tale to be drawn from the archives when other husband-killers graced the courts and a cry of warning against the dangers and horrors of capital punishment. Today, she remains a figure of interest, largely because of her historical importance but also because the question ‘did she?’ has continued to be asked, because her motive could not be determined. Now that the matter of her guilt has been established, we can reassure ourselves that, while her conviction and execution were legally and morally questionable and her death a sacrifice to appease society’s pro- and anti-feminist concerns, she at least wasn’t an innocent who was condemned unjustly.
But what of Louisa herself? Wherein lay the seeds of her downfall? Female serial killers usually remain undetected for longer than their male counterparts because women are less likely to kill so they are trusted more than men. Moreover, female serial killers generally target those in their care while hiding behind a benevolent mask. As it happens, Louisa’s crimes were discovered because she made a mistake. Some might argue that her biggest mistake was in forgetting to dispose of the contents of the arsenic-laced tumbler. In truth, it was her decision to take her second husband to the same Elizabeth Street surgery that had treated her first husband. Thanks to a chance meeting between two brothers-in-law, a chance comment, Louisa’s web of deceit and duplicity began to unravel.
The only question remaining to be answered was why she would make such a fatal mistake. Was it a witting or unwitting decision to engage with the doctors, to draw them into her cat-and-mouse game, to see if she could outwit them? Or was it an unspoken plea for them to stop her? Whatever the reasons for all of her actions, her failure to publicly protest her innocence suggests an integrity of sorts, a refusal to deny what she had done. On the other hand, her failure to confess suggests a refusal to admit what she had become.
Louisa Collins, the woman, will always remain an enigma, an intriguing mystery that cannot be solved. Louisa Collins, the murderer, however, has achieved a notoriety that will never be eclipsed. She was the first female serial killer in Australia, appearing on Sydney’s criminal stage in the same year that Jack the Ripper launched himself onto the world stage. And she was the last woman executed in New South Wales, her gruesome death on the gallows a Calvary that warns against the sacrifice of human life in the name of justice and the greater good.
Author’s Note
Six court hearings; hundreds of pages of depositions and court transcripts; a hundred thousand words of testimony: for a writer of historical true-crime thrillers, this amount of original source material makes Louisa Collins’ case a dream story.
While my account of her trials and tribulations is non-fiction, it reads in part like fiction because the characters are allowed to live their own stories. To write history in this way, I require information from the characters themselves or from others who were engaging with them at the time. Most of the characters testified in court on multiple occasions, some as many as six times, providing the detailed description and dialogue I need to bring such a story to life.
I did not make up the dialogue in this book. One of the reasons I write true crime stories is because the witnesses, during their testimonies, quote the words they spoke at the time of the events in question and the words others said in response. Thus, the dialogue comes straight from the mouths of the characters themselves.
Sometimes I use the description and dialogue recorded in the court cases to recount the events at the time they occurred. In other parts of the book, I use the dialogue as part of the developing court case. Dividing the information in this way lends drama and tension to the tale.
In terms of Louisa herself, to gain an understanding of her character I used only the original records rather than any of the sensationalist accounts of her story that have been published in books and newspapers during the last half century. The authors of these accounts have sometimes depicted Louisa as a highly strung woman who wails and shouts hysterically and flings herself from the room in a fit of pique. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the original records make clear is that Louisa was extraordinarily calm and emotionally cold even under the most trying of circumstances. She occasionally wept during extremely emotional times (after her first husband died, when her second husband was dying and then dead, and when her daughter ‘betrayed’ her in court) and alcohol stimulated an aura of excitement in her, but that was all. Otherwise, she was the opposite of the overwrought woman imagined by other authors. And, like Lindy Chamberlain a century later, her emotional coldness was one of the reasons for her conviction.
Louisa Collins’ story is not just the tale of the woman herself. It takes us on a journey through a time when society was beginning to recognise that women had a right to social autonomy and a political voice—but that, nonetheless, their desire for autonomy could not be expressed in the serial killing of two husbands.
I hope you enjoy reading Louisa’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
• • •
A book such as Black Widow could not be written without the help of others. I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the following: to Louisa’s descendant Joy Harper, who reminded me at a talk
I gave some years ago about Louisa’s fascinating story and who provided a wealth of birth, marriage and death certificates and other information about the family; to Emeritus Professor of Law Bruce Kercher, who listened to my concerns about Louisa’s case, realised that some of the law and evidence questions I was troubled about would be best answered by an expert on colonial criminal law, and reached out to the perfect person; to District Court judge Gregory Woods, the author of A History of Criminal Law in New South Wales, who read the manuscript in twenty-four hours and agreed with my conclusions and who also provided two critical pieces of information that helped me to answer the question as to whether Louisa was guilty (her failure to make a dock statement in any of her four trials was a strong suggestion of her guilt) and why she was executed (partly because killing a husband had been considered ‘petit treason’ under the common law); to James Whorton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the author of The Arsenic Century, who answered the critical question as to whether a person was likely to kill themselves slowly by arsenic poisoning; to Deborah Beck, author of Hope in Hell, who took me around Darlinghurst Gaol and showed me the important sites so I could picture the scene; to Inspector Ann Brown of the Sheriff ’s Office who escorted me through Darlinghurst Courthouse; to my literary agent Tara Wynne, publisher Rebecca Kaiser, editor Angela Handley and copyeditor Ali Lavau for their continued support and much appreciated suggestions to improve the manuscript; and to my ever-helpful readers, Kate Wingrove, Keith Johnson and Mike Elliott. And last, but never least, I wish to thank my beloved family: my husband, Allan Ashmore, offspring Camillie and Jaiden Ashmore, and mother Jill Baxter, who are with me at every stage of the researching/ writing journey—whether they want to be or not.