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The Poisoner of Frog Hollow

Despite unsubstantiated rumours that she was related to the famous bushranger Ben Hall, there was no reason to believe that when baby Louisa Hall was born in 1849 she would grow up to be the last woman to be hanged to death in New South Wales.

Louisa’s parents Henry and Catherine Hall worked at a country property called Belltrees in the lush Hunter Valley, a little more than 300 kilometres northeast of Sydney. A curly-haired little darling whose eyes sparkled with the freshness that comes from a childhood spent in a rural area, the young girl was a favourite among the locals of the village where she grew up with her hard-working mother and father.

But Louisa matured physically at an early age and it wasn’t long before she started to attract wandering gazes from the males in the area. It was something the buxom girl would come to play on.

Louisa was 16 years old when she took on her first job, working as a housemaid in Merriwa, not far from where she had grown up. Her flirtatiousness meant that she was already popular with the opposite sex, and she is said to have had several boyfriends. It wasn’t long, though, before her jolly nature and fast-developing body stirred something in Charles Andrews, a hard-working, widowed butcher who, at the age of 36, was 20 years older than the popular housemaid.

Even though they seemed to have little in common – Louisa was high spirited, the life of the party, while Charles was a calm man with a sober outlook on life – Louisa’s mother convinced the young girl that the earnest butcher would make her a good husband. Even though Louisa found her suitor boring, the couple were married on 28 August 1865. It wasn’t difficult to see that the union would end in trouble.

The newlyweds soon moved south to Sydney, setting up home in the inner-city suburb of Waterloo, where Charles had grown up. Indeed, his father had owned a shop next to the Cauliflower Hotel which, still operating, was the first pub in the South Sydney area. It was in Waterloo that Louisa and Charles had the first of what would be seven children, a little boy named Herbert.

After a while, the couple moved further south, taking up residence in a semi-detached cottage in Lower Botany, near Botany Bay. The spot where they settled was known as Frog Hollow, and visitors could only reach it by crossing a narrow bridge that stood over a swamp.

With their growing family, Louisa – still wild at heart – rapidly grew bored with what she saw as a mundane and lonely life of motherhood and household chores. She took her feelings out on her husband and, whenever the opportunity arose, she would head straight for the Pier Hotel on nearby Botany Road. The locals at the pub got to know Louisa well, and though described as ‘pleasantly plump’, she was considered good looking and rather lively, especially with a few beverages under her belt. As a result, she wasn’t short of drinking partners.

While at the Pier Hotel, Louisa would hit the bottle and talk openly about her dissatisfaction with home life and her husband. She also began to play around, taking on sexual partners whenever the mood struck her.

While Louisa was out drinking and being unfaithful, Charles Andrews worked and benignly accepted that his wife had a flighty temperament – though it’s unclear whether he knew that she was expressing her sexuality with random men at the local pub.

It wasn’t long before Louisa decided that the couple should take in boarders at their cottage as a way of earning extra money. Charles had no other choice than to accept the idea, and in no time at all stories began to spread through the community that Louisa was playing around with their boarders while her husband worked hard to put food on the table.

The increasingly boisterous wife still frequented the Pier Hotel, though, and it was there, in 1886, that she first met Michael Peter Collins, a 22-year-old knockabout from Ballarat in Victoria. Michael was best described as a casual labourer who had recently found a job at a local wool-washing shed. Even though the laid-back, handsome man was 14 years younger than Louisa, she felt an immediate spark, and easily convinced him to move in to the cottage as a boarder in June that year.

The resulting affair was anything but a secret in the area. Indeed, it wasn’t hard to find the pair holding hands on public transport or enjoying each other’s affections in nearby scrubland. Perhaps if they had been more discreet Charles Andrews would never have found out, but the patient man finally blew his lid nine days before Christmas that year, grabbing Michael by the neck and literally throwing the young man out of his house.

Louisa was shocked to see her normally placid husband make such a stand, and she ran to the local police station to report the situation. The officer on duty, Constable Jeffes, somehow managed to calm Louisa down, and even convinced her to return home and try to smooth things out with her cuckolded spouse.

Louisa did as Jeffes suggested, but her mind was running wild. The more she thought about what had happened, the easier it was to blame Charles for her behaviour. He was older than she was, and he was always working, while she was lumbered with the responsibilities of raising their large family. With her contempt growing by the day, she could see only one way to find the happiness that she believed she deserved – and Charles Andrews was not part of the picture. She had a conversation with the local draper, a man by the name of Bullock, asking if he knew just how long after a person died that life insurance money could be collected. It was only a matter of time before Charles took ill.

A physician named Dr Marshall visited Frog Hollow on Monday, 31 January 1887. At 3pm the next Friday, Charles Andrews was dead. Filling out the death certificate, Dr Marshall wrote down acute gastritis as the cause of death. That very afternoon, Louisa claimed £200 from the offices of the Australian Widows’ Fund in the city. Even though her children were alone in the house and hungry, she didn’t return home until 9.30pm that evening. In her mind, she was now a free woman.

The local draper Mr Bullock was shocked to say the least when, just a few days after Charles had passed away, Louisa called on him to order some dress material in bright colours. Shouldn’t a recent widow wear the more traditional dark and sombre colours while mourning? Louisa explained to the merchant that just because her heart may have been heavy, it didn’t mean her clothes had to reflect that. And she proved her point by throwing a wild party at her cottage just three days after the death of her husband. The high-spirited affair lasted all night and, once it was over, Michael Collins returned to the house as a permanent resident. Louisa now had what she thought she wanted all along. But if she thought the sailing was to be smooth from this point she was mistaken.

In between collecting her insurance money, throwing a party and getting on with her life as she saw fit, Louisa forgot to tell her oldest son, Herbert – by now an adult living in Maitland – that his father had died. Herbert only learned the news through the proverbial grapevine. Understandably put out, he went to the cottage at Frog Hollow, only to find Michael Collins ensconced there. He confronted his mother about the situation, and brought up the matter of the insurance money, explaining that she should have at least given him a share of it; he could, he said, have opened a shop, which in turn could have supported the whole family. Louisa seemed to care little.

Nine weeks later, the merry widow married her younger suitor at St Silas Church of England in Waterloo – not far from where her dead first husband had grown up. On the official papers, dated 9 April 1887, Louisa took a decade off her age, writing 28 instead of 38 – only four years older than her new spouse. The happy couple then rounded up Charles and Louisa’s children and relocated to a cottage in Johnsons Lane, North Botany.

But Michael, Louisa would soon realise, didn’t provide the stability of homelife once offered by the hard-working Charles. Indeed, while he had only previously had jobs on and off, with a free roof over his head and food on the table whenever he needed it, now, thanks to Louisa’s insurance payout, he seemingly gave up the search for employment all together. Louisa – no doubt realising that their windfall would not last forever – hounded him to get a job, but Michael resisted. In fact, he became more of a drain on their funds than a help – especially with his penchant for gambling, a habit that Louisa had no time for. Her new husband constantly dipped into their ever-diminishing finances to support the vice.

Even when he did manage to find a job after eight weeks of doing nothing, Michael was fired after just three days. Louisa could not believe it, yet she dipped into her savings and lent him another pound, which he used – as usual – to gamble. This time, however, was different. Luck, it seemed, was on his side and Michael came home with over £4. With such good fortune, Michael managed to convince Louisa to part with the last £20 of their insurance money. Needless to say, it wasn’t a smart move. Louisa was already in bed when Michael came home that night, dead broke. The married couple cried together thinking about their hopeless situation.

Having fallen on hard times, Louisa seemed to reminisce about happier, more carefree days. She wanted to return to Frog Hollow, but her old cottage had new residents. They moved, instead, to a place nearby, where Louisa seemed to let Michael continue with his ambitionless ways. Seven months after they were married, they had a child. Michael was proud of his son and seemed to care greatly for the infant boy, so he was extremely sad when the little baby died at the age of five months. A neighbour would comment that the child had ‘swollen lips and tongue’ when it passed away, but little was thought of the strange condition.

By now, Louisa was growing weary of her seemingly dead-end existence and second marriage. She started to hit the bottle harder than ever, and it didn’t take much to get her back to the Pier Hotel, where she took any opportunity to tell her fellow drinkers what a no-hoper her new husband was. On more than one occasion, she mentioned that she would be better off without him.

Back home, Michael did nothing to change his ways. He spent the majority of his days lying around on their dirty bed, while the children ran amok naked through the filthy house. Having done away with her first husband and most recent baby, it’s easy to see why Louisa thought she had an easy solution to her problems.

Still, Michael had no life insurance, and was uncharacterist-ically employed and earning a decent wage of 36 shillings a week when Louisa put her poisonous plan into effect once again. It’s unclear why she chose such a time to do away with Michael, but there has been speculation that she already had another man on the side, or that the large amounts of alcohol she was consuming had driven her mad. Either way, Michael soon began to experience acute abdominal pain, which stopped him from attending his job. Dr Marshall came to check on him, and while the physician was there, Louisa played the role of the loving, attentive wife. It didn’t help, though, and following Michael Collins’ death – and a two-day booze binge by Louisa – Marshall informed the police of his suspicions.

The authorities wasted no time searching the Frog Hollow cottage. Louisa, as usual, was at the Pier Hotel while they went through her house from top to bottom. In the sink, the police found an unwashed glass. A quick check revealed it to contain traces of arsenic. Given her history, and Dr Marshall’s suspicions, it was all the evidence police needed to arrest Louisa Collins, and she was taken into custody on 12 July 1887. The bodies of her first husband Charles Andrews and the baby she had with Michael Collins were exhumed the next day. After being examined at South Sydney Morgue, the results came in that both contained traces of arsenic. Louisa would have to face a court of law to answer for her actions.

When the trial began, the two-time widow tried to convince the jury that Michael had committed suicide, but no one believed that a person who wanted to kill himself would chose such a painful and drawn-out method as arsenic poisoning.

Because of the circumstances, though, Louisa would have to go through four separate trials. But there was little surprise when she was finally found guilty at the last one. On 8 December 1888 Louisa Collins was sentenced to death. The quiet Frog Hollow soon became known by the wider public as Arsenic Flat.

A short time after the trial, a dozen witnesses – five of those being reporters – gathered near the gallows at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Gaol. They were there to see the first woman executed there in the prison’s by-then 48-year history, as well as the last woman to ever be hung in New South Wales.

Days earlier, Louisa had written a letter to her blind mother, inexplicably praising Michael Collins, calling him ‘tall and handsome’, and describing him as ‘good, loving, attentive, sober and honest’. She also wrote of the love he showed for his own son, adding that it ‘was beyond all I could describe.’

When it came time for her to face the executioner, two female guards led Louisa to the noose. She wore a long brown prison dress and behaved as if the walk to her death was an everyday occurrence. The jail’s priest followed behind the group as Louisa stepped up on to the platform and stood on the trapdoor. The priest whispered in the three-time murderer’s ear and then the lever was pulled to open the trapdoor.

But confusion reigned when a pin got stuck and the hole in the floor didn’t open. A quick-thinking warder immediately grabbed a nearby mallet and hit the pin until it gave way and the trapdoor flung open. Louisa Collins was left to hang for 20 minutes to ensure she was dead, which was the regulation of the time. The priest told the assembled reporters that she had shown ‘great courage’.