John Knatchbull was born into a noble family in England in the early 1790s. Charged with stealing in 1824 and transported to NSW, he committed increasingly serious crimes over two decades. In 1844, newspapers clamoured to share details of how Knatchbull brutally killed widowed shopkeeper and mother of two, Ellen Jamieson, with a tomahawk. Knatchbull’s controversial lawyer Robert Lowe made a case for moral insanity, arguing his client was not responsible for his crime. Lowe failed, and the former officer of the Royal Navy was hanged on 13 February 1844. Knatchbull’s handwritten autobiography — made possible by Gaol Governor Henry Keck, who supplied the killer with paper and ink — begins with a plea for sympathy: ‘I will open to the eyes of the world [to] such persecutions and deprivations that the hardest of hearts would bleed and commiserate with me in my sufferings.’