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 failed 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.