Male prisoners weren't the only ones to face the hangman's noose and the death mask creator. Here we see the image of Martha Needle, described by some as an attractive woman with a kindly disposition.

Her only slight character flaw was having murdered her husband, three daughters and prospective brother in law.

Born in 1864, she grew up in a violent household before marrying Henry (aka "Harry") Needle, a carpenter, when she was 17. They moved to Richmond in Melbourne in 1885 and by 1891 Henry and the girls were all dead. She then became a housekeeper and landlady to three brothers, one of whom (Otto Juncken) proposed marriage to her in 1892. Another brother (Louis) objected, and down he went with severe stomach pains in 1894. As in, permanently. A second brother (Herman), who had expressed strong objections to Martha marrying Otto, almost suffered the same fate but his doctor became suspicious and called the police who caught her offering him tea laced with rat poison. The bodies of her former family were exhumed and revealed traces of arsenic. She was hanged in 1894.
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Edit August 2024: When I wrote that a decade ago, I felt a bit of sympathy for Martha. You can't know what being brought up in a violent home can do to a person unless you've been through it, and it's not like working class wives were necessarily treated with love and respect by their husbands back in the day. That said, reporting on the case in its Saturday 16 June 1894 edition, The Argus said:
The marriage was celebrated in North Adelaide by the Rev. Charles Marryatt, M.A., and after the first few years of married life, which were pleasantly spent, they came to Melbourne.
The problem is that there is no attribution for the claim that their initial married life was "pleasant".

During Martha's trial a witness (Eliza Louisa Martin) was asked whether she had seen Henry Needle strike his wife. As reported in the South Australian Register of Fri 3 Aug 1894, she said:
"I saw him strike her open-handed across the nose. Then he struck her with a piece of deal on the side just before Elsie was born. She told me that on another occasion Needle knocked her about with very serious results."
("Deal" is a word that only carpenters would know these days. It means "the pale, soft wood of a pine or fir tree".)
First, It's worth noting that Mrs Martin was a childhood friend of the accused. Second, "She told me..." is just hearsay. Third, it's not clear whether she saw the incident with the "piece of deal" or just heard about it. The first incident she claims to have seen, but by that time it would have been in Martha's interests to have her childhood friends portray Henry as a violent thug. That doesn't discount her evidence, but a grain or two of salt may be needed.

I've found some additional details about her on the State Library of Victoria website. The photo doesn't do her justice. She was indeed attractive; not "Instagram model hot" attractive (though she may have the right personality for that), but pretty enough.

But then, I also saw a photo of her oldest and youngest daughters, Mabel and May. They were pretty too, and appeared sweet, and innocent... and more importantly, they never had a chance to live their lives.

But the killer (no pun intended) is this part, which I did not know at the time. A life insurance policy had been taken out on Henry. Sources conflict on whether Henry took it out on himself or Martha took it out on him. Mabel was already dead by then; she had died in 1885. According to Matha's Wikipedia entry, Martha received £100 in insurance for her death. No contemporary sources are cited for this. I'm going to hit the "doubt" button on that one. To insure someone or something you need to have an "insurable interest". The point of insurance is to try to put you back to the financial state that you would have been in, had the insured event not happened. Her daughter was an infant. She was, and would be for at least another decade, a financial drain on the family and her death would have been (and don't blame me for facts here) a financial benefit to the family. (Long term, that may have been different. But you can't get insurance policies against what might be 10 or 20 years into the future.) Henry was different. He was the breadwinner and the loss would have impacted the family greatly, so he WAS insurable by Martha and the surviving girls.

When Henry died in 1889, Martha received £60. Apparently, the rest was held in trust for their remaining daughters. But when Elsie (the middle girl) died shortly after that, Martha received another £60, being the money that would have been Elsie's. However there was still another £80 in trust for May. That's right, she was gone by 1891, and that money also passed to Martha.

Is that why she did it?? If so, then she was a ****ing evil psychotic b1tch, stealing her own daughters' lives and future from them and taking away everything they ever were, and everything they ever would be... for money?? (Mind you, we still don't have a clear motive for what happened with Mabel, as I discussed above.)

Otto was a little over-smitten with this psychopath. He regularly visited Martha in jail and wrote to his mother that he hoped Martha "will be proved to be insane, and therefore not responsible for her misdeeds". Mmm. "Misdeeds". Well, that's one way of putting it, I suppose.

Martha left an estate worth £25 to Otto (which is the least she could do I guess, having killed one of his brothers and having tried to kill the other one), but think about that amount, for a moment... she had received in aggregate £200 a mere three years earlier. That was a pretty fair rate of cash burn in only 3 years. I'm not sure that she was, shall we say, a "woman of modest needs".

Her final letter to Otto was deeply bathed in delusion:
"When you receive this you can think of me as being in a happy home with my loved ones, waiting and watching for you. I know, dear Otto, that you will get ready for that happy meeting with us all."

Your "loved ones" being... who, the three children whose lives you stole for (apparently, in two cases) money? Oh yes, I'm sure that they'll shower you with love and affection if they see you in the afterlife. And tell me, how happy is Henry going to be about waiting for Otto? (Although by this point Martha was painting Henry as a wife beater, and told a friend that she wouldn't speak to him if she saw him again. Which, since he was dead by then... no, I suppose she wouldn't.) Not that it matters because if there is an afterlife? Henry and the girls (and Otto too, by the sounds of it) will be taking the "up" escalator, whereas Martha will have taken the "down" one.

I guess the moral of the story is "Never feel bad for a murderer". Which allows us to segue neatly into the next photo.