Murder - Execution Site

**Murder - Execution Site
by Celia Walker
**

It can be difficult to imagine the sleepy seaside suburb of Devonport as the setting for one of New Zealand’s more brutal murders, but in the early hours of October 23, 1847 it was just that, with a family killed while they were sleeping in their waterfront home. The grim discovery of the mutilated bodies of signalman Lieutenant Robert Snow, his wife Hannah, and their four-year-old daughter Mary, was made after a fire in their house was spotted from the deck of a ship in Auckland Harbour.

Despite his attempts to implicate local Maori in the crime, the culprit was discovered to be the Snows’ neighbour Joseph Burns, his culpability coming to light the following March after he was prosecuted for seriously wounding his partner Margaret Reardon by inflicting similarly vicious knife wounds. Papers at the time didn’t hold back on reporting the grim details of the crime and pronouncement of the punishment, stating that the murderer Joseph Burns ‘will be hung up from the neck like a dog, at the spot where he so savagely killed his innocent victims’, with the hanging carried out a week or so later in October 1848, a year after the original murders, the location now marked by a memorial plaque.

Image Credit: Celia Walker