User:Elizabeth Lhuede/sandbox

Louisa Collins was the first and last woman to be hanged at Darlinghurst jail. She was convicted of poisoning her second husband, and was widely believed to have poisoned her first. The poison she used was arsenic-based product,'Rough on Rats'.

The case was widely publicised in the media at the time and Collins was subsequently referred to as. It was referred to in the press as "The Botany Mystery". Louisa was convicted of murder by poisoning and hanged at 9am on January 8, 1889, despite much protest (no woman had been hanged in NSW for more than 20 years). Her execution caused an outcry, partly because Collins was a mother - she was farewelled by three of her children - and partly because there was a view at the time that women, barred from voting and sitting on juries, should not be held accountable to the same laws as men. The report of the hanging in The Sydney Morning Herald the next day said that Collins, dressed in a common brown wincey prison dress, walked slowly and firmly towards the door which led to the scaffold. A chaplain said that in her last days she had shown great courage which did not desert her in her final hour.

Her execution was graphically described in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Issues surrounding the trial were the subject of a paper by Nancy Cushing in 1996: