The botched execution of the last woman hanged in NSW stuck with author Janet Lee. Her novel imagines those last moments
It was the manner of her death that was so brutal. It was gruesome. When Louisa Collins became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst jail and the last woman hanged in New South Wales, the executioner botched the job. The trap door didn’t open, and then, after being banged with a mallet, it did open, and she fell through with so much force that her head was nearly severed and her windpipe left exposed.
It was an image, says author Janet Lee, “that stuck with me, the image of the woman on the scaffold. Here was this woman who had never been known to confess, who expected a reprieve – was that what she was thinking in those last few moments?”
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