Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen Read Online Free Page A

to her master, a farmer, because people there were harsh to her. Later in the year she did the same to her new employer, and also stole clothing belonging to him and one of his workers, because, she said, in their opinion she could do nothing right. On the scaffold she stood upright while Franz Schmidt, the Nuremberg executioner, beheaded her with the sword, her body afterwards being burnt.

Barbara Ludtwigin, a barber’s wife of Nuremberg, must have had a vocabulary to be envied, for she was charged with ‘having blasphemed so horribly against the Almighty that a galley and two small ships besides could have been filled with her profanities.’ A picturesque description indeed, and one that resulted in her being pilloried in the town square, a target for all, and then whipped out of town.
    Benwell, Eliza (Australia)
    There is a marked difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘keeping watch’, and this distinction was never more crucial than when Eliza Benwell was on trial for murder. Regrettably in her case, that difference, literally a matter of life or death, was fatally blurred.
    In the days when English convicts were transported in prison ships to penal colonies on the other side of the world, many were then put to work on farms and large estates, some as house servants or members of hotel staff. On the arrival of one such ship in Hobart, Tasmania, four convicts, Thomas Gomm, Isaac Lockwood, William Taylor and Eliza Benwell, were employed in that city’s Derwent Hotel, their various tasks being to attend to the general welfare of the guests. Among the visitors accommodated there in 1845 was a wealthy couple who had brought their own maid, Jane Saunders, with them. One evening, on being told to go to the hotel larder for some food for her employers, she went – but never returned. The entire premises were searched but no trace of the young woman was found until a few days later when a body, identified as hers, was discovered floating in the nearby River Derwent, stab wounds to the head and neck being indicative of a brutal murder.
    Among the hotel staff on duty on the night of her disappearance were Taylor, Gomm, Lockwood and Eliza Benwell. The three men were charged with murder, Eliza Benwell with aiding and abetting them. At their trial, damning evidence against the accused was given by Keo-Moi Tiki, a native of the Sandwich Islands, through an interpreter. He swore that he had witnessed the attack being carried out by the three men and that the maid had also been there, keeping watch for them. After a day’s deliberations the jury found the men guilty of murder, and all three were subsequently hanged, protesting their innocence to the last.
    When Eliza faced the court the same evidence was presented, following which the jury retired. After due consideration, they came to the conclusion that because the murder had not been planned but had resulted when Jane Saunders resisted the men’s advances, they declared the defendant to be innocent. But Eliza had hardly time to breathe a sigh of relief before the judge ordered them to reconsider their verdict on the grounds that the accused was just as blameworthy for keeping watch while a rape was attempted. Again the jury retired, again failing to reach a conclusion; sent back for a further hour’s deliberation they returned to pronounce the prisoner at the bar guilty, whereupon she was sentenced to death.
    In the condemned cell she swore she was innocent, that she had not been ‘keeping watch’ as stated in court, but purely by accident had happened to see Lockwood dragging the murdered maid’s body from the building; moreover, she declared, she had seen neither Gomm nor Taylor at the scene. But despite her statements no attempt was made to reopen the case. To do so might well have been disastrous for the judiciary, forcing it to admit that a gross miscarriage of justice had been committed. Gomm, Lockwood and Taylor were already dead, and the Benwell execution would