Frederick Bailey Deeming was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on May 23, 1892, for the murder of Emily Mather, a 26-year-old woman from the village of Rainhill near Liverpool who had married him in September 1891 believing him to be an army inspector named Albert Oliver Williams. He killed her in a rented cottage at 57 Andrew Street, Windsor, a Melbourne suburb, about Christmas 1891, nine or ten days after they landed in Australia, and buried her under a bedroom hearthstone.
Her body was found on March 3, 1892. Within days a banquet invitation from Rainhill led Victorian detectives to cable the police in Lancashire, and on March 16 the kitchen floor of Dinham Villa, the house he had rented at Rainhill, was dug up. Beneath it lay his first wife, Marie, and their four children. A coroner's jury at Rainhill found that he had murdered them. He was never tried for those deaths, because Victoria tried and executed him for Emily Mather's murder first. The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that Deeming was identified, arrested, tried and hanged in less than three months, and the speed of it, together with a press campaign that treated him as guilty from the start, has drawn criticism from historians ever since.
Deeming was born on July 30, 1853, at Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, the son of Thomas Deeming, a brazier, and his wife Ann, née Bailey, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). Little is documented about his early years. By 1892 his family was described in the press as respectable people living at Birkenhead, on the Cheshire side of the Mersey opposite Liverpool. A Melbourne dispatch published in May 1892 described him as the youngest of three brothers; his brothers Albert and Sam appear in reports, and Albert lived in Birkenhead.
He ran away to sea at about 16, the ADB says. Much of what was later said about his childhood came from Deeming himself while he was awaiting trial, and it was disputed. He claimed that he had spent years in asylums, that both his parents had been confined in them, that his father had died in a Birkenhead asylum, and that he had suffered from epilepsy since about 18. His brother Albert denied these claims, and people who knew the family told reporters that its members, apart from Frederick, were steady and clear-headed. Those claims became the raw material of his defense.
On February 28, 1881, at Tranmere, Cheshire, Deeming married Marie James. She had worked for a fishmonger in Liverpool, and she had three brothers and two sisters living in Birkenhead. One of those sisters, Bertha, married Deeming's brother Albert, so the two families were joined twice over.
Soon after the wedding Deeming went to Australia. In August 1881 he deserted his ship, the Vereus, at Sydney, and found work as a plumber and gas fitter. In April 1882 he was sentenced to six weeks in jail for stealing eight gas burners. Marie joined him in Sydney on July 1, 1882. They had three daughters, two of them born in Sydney, and a son.
The family moved with his work. He was a gas fitter in Melbourne and at Rockhampton, Queensland, before returning to Sydney in 1884, where for a time he did well in business on his own account. It did not last. In December 1887 he was declared bankrupt and served 14 days in jail for perjury. A doctor at Darlinghurst jail in Sydney later certified, in a statement sent to the Privy Council in May 1892, that he had treated Deeming there for severe epilepsy.
By January 1888 Deeming was in Cape Town under the name Harry Lawson. The ADB records frauds and thefts at Klerksdorp and Johannesburg in the Transvaal. Marie was with him in Cape Town for part of this time, according to a man who knew the family and spoke to the press after the Rainhill discovery.
On February 18, 1890, at Beverley in Yorkshire, still posing as Lawson and now calling himself an Australian sheep farmer, he went through a form of marriage with Helen Matheson. He paid for the wedding with money from fraud, then left England alone on the ship Coleridge. Matheson swore out a warrant accusing him of stealing the presents he had given her. He was arrested at Montevideo, Uruguay, extradited, and served nine months in jail at Hull for fraud. He was never prosecuted for the bigamy. The ADB dates his release to July 1891.
That month a man who gave his name as A. O. Williams arrived at Rainhill, a village about nine miles from Liverpool, took lodgings at the Commercial Hotel, and described himself as an inspector. He arranged to rent Dinham Villa, on the edge of the village, through Mrs. Mather, who kept the stationer's shop and acted as agent for the owner. The lease, which he drew up himself, included a clause, added at his suggestion, that he would cement the floors. Contemporary accounts read that clause, after the fact, as evidence that the deaths were planned before he took the house.
While dealing with Mrs. Mather he met her daughter Emily and began courting her.
Marie Deeming and the children had returned to England in 1891 and stayed with her sister Bertha in Birkenhead. Bertha told the Rainhill inquest that Marie left her on the last Saturday in July to join her husband, saying they meant to settle at Rainhill. Bertha believed Marie was worried about her husband's conduct and had decided to bring matters to a head by moving the family into the villa. In the village, Deeming introduced Marie as his sister. After she and the children were no longer seen, he said she had gone to join her husband abroad.
Marie Deeming had followed her husband across the world, from Birkenhead to Sydney and back, and had raised four children through his moves, his jail terms and his bankruptcy. The 1892 reports give the children's names and ages as Bertha, 9; Marie, 7; Lilla, 5; and Sydney, a boy of about 18 months. The spellings vary between reports: Marie also appears as Mary, Lilla as Lilia, and Sydney as Sidney. Bertha's school copybook, with her name written in it, was found in the house, and boxes the family had shipped were labeled with the children's names followed by the words "of Sydney."
The doctor who examined the bodies told the Associated Press that the children's well-fed condition and neat clothing showed the good care their mother had given them. They had eaten their evening meal shortly before they died.
No one saw what happened in the house, and the date can only be estimated. A neighbor, a gardener, told reporters that he saw a woman in the yard of Dinham Villa on August 9, 1891, and heard children crying out the next day, and never saw the family again. Benjamin Young, a plasterer's laborer, said Deeming hired him on August 1 to help mix and lay cement on the kitchen floor, saying he was preparing the house for an old gentleman with valuable carpets. These two dates do not sit easily together, and the inquest evidence as reported in 1892 does not settle the exact day. The deaths can be placed only in late July or early August 1891.
At the inquest the doctors testified that Bertha had been strangled and that the others had died of throat wounds. The five were buried under the kitchen floor, which was then cemented over.
Emily Lydia Mather was 26, the daughter of the Rainhill stationer. Her marriage certificate, found later among Deeming's belongings, records the wedding on September 22, 1891, at St Anne's church, Rainhill, between Albert Oliver Williams, 36, "army inspector," and Emily Lydia Mather, witnessed by the curate. The wedding was followed by a lavish banquet. An account cabled at the time of his execution described her as admired in the village. In Deeming's luggage in Australia police later found her autograph album, her prayer book, a list of the addresses of her friends in England and her certificate of membership of the Rainhill Band of Hope, the temperance society.
When Deeming, in prison, tried to blacken her name by claiming she had been married before, the reports from Rainhill rejected it entirely: she had been engaged only once before, had broken that engagement off herself, and was known as a woman of unblemished character.
The couple left England in the autumn of 1891. Her mother received letters regularly during the voyage, describing the journey and saying they were very happy. One, written by Deeming with a few words from Emily in the margin, spoke of the time when he could spend all his days in her company without the cares of business. They arrived in Melbourne on the steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II on December 15, 1891. Her letters then stopped. Her mother learned what had happened to her only from the newspapers in March 1892.
Under the name Druin, Deeming rented a small brick cottage at 57 Andrew Street, Windsor, which was still standing when the ADB entry was written. He had bought cement a week before the killing. On or about Christmas Day, the ADB says, he struck his wife on the head, cut her throat and buried her under the hearthstone of the second bedroom, sealing the body in cement. American dispatches put the date at December 24.
Neighbors gave evidence later. A butcher named McNaughton, who slept at a neighboring house in Andrew Street over December 24, 25 and 26, told the trial that early one morning he heard heavy knocking, like a plumber cutting through a wall, for about three hours. Another neighbor, Jeannette Spedding, said she saw the prisoner in the garden of No. 57 with a bucket and a trowel. Deeming had asked a tradesman whether he did gas fitting, saying he wanted new chandeliers because he was expecting his sister from Sydney.
In January 1892, using the name Dawson, Deeming auctioned his African belongings and Emily's clothes, defrauded a jeweler, and wrote to a Melbourne matrimonial agency, under the name Duncan, asking for a wife. The agent, John Kemp, later said "Williams" had described himself as 32, with money in the bank and a good appointment ahead.
He then sailed for Sydney. On the voyage he met Kate Rounsefell, a 19-year-old from Bathurst, New South Wales, whose father had died some years before and who worked for a stationer and newsagent. He told her he was a man of wealth, and he gave her jewelry, including a diamond ring that she later learned had belonged to Emily. They became engaged at Bathurst. He then went west alone.
In Western Australia he called himself Baron Swanston and found work as an engineer at Fraser's gold mine at Southern Cross. From there he wrote to Kate Rounsefell urging her to come at once, telling her he had an appointment as managing engineer at six pounds a week with a house, and that everything would be ready for their marriage on her arrival. She was on her way to join him when he was arrested. Reports said that he had already taken a house there and arranged for one of its floors to be cemented.
On March 3, 1892, the ADB records, an unpleasant smell at 57 Andrew Street led to the discovery of Emily's body beneath the hearthstone. American dispatches said workmen preparing the house for a new tenant noticed that the cement around the fireplace had been laid unevenly by an amateur, and found the body when they broke it up. Inside the house police found a banquet invitation from Rainhill in the name of A. O. Williams.
The body was shown at the city morgue, and after several days a fellow passenger from the Kaiser Wilhelm II, a Mr. Hirschfeldt, came forward and identified the woman he had known on board as Mrs. Williams. With his help and that of others who had met the couple, police published a detailed description of "Williams." A boarding-house keeper in Sydney recognized it as a man named Deeming who had lodged with her years before. At Sydney police also found that "Swanston" had stayed at the Wentworth Hotel and had left for Bathurst with a young woman to whom he was engaged. His courtship of Kate Rounsefell helped lead detectives to him.
Deeming was arrested at Southern Cross on March 11, 1892, according to the ADB; some 1892 wire reports give dates up to March 14. Press reports said a constable walked in while he was reading a newspaper account of the discovery at Windsor. After a moment of shock he pointed to the paragraph and asked whether that was the crime he was accused of, and said he thought he knew the woman and could not believe anyone would hurt her. He gave his name as Swanston and at first denied knowing anyone called Williams.
He was taken to Perth. There his counsel fought his return to Victoria, and his possible extradition to England, by every legal means available. A former neighbor from Sydney identified him in Perth as the man he had known as Deeming. The court ordered him surrendered to Victoria. He was taken to Melbourne on the steamer Ballarat in the custody of Detective Cawsey, with Hirschfeldt on board to confirm his identity. Because his cabin opened within a few feet of the ship's rail, special constables were sworn in from among the marines on board to watch him and prevent him from going overboard. Crowds gathered wherever he was moved. He was in Melbourne by April 1.
Once Victorian detectives knew that "Williams" had come from Rainhill, they cabled the Liverpool police. Remembering how much cementing the tenant of Dinham Villa had done, police took up the kitchen floor on March 16, 1892, and found the bodies of Marie Deeming and her four children.
Two of Marie's sisters and Deeming's brother identified the bodies. When Albert Deeming arrived at Rainhill for the inquest, people in the crowd mistook him for his brother and rushed at him, and he had to take refuge in his hotel. At the inquest he told the jury he had dreamed of the killings. On the afternoon of March 18 the mother and children were buried in the parish churchyard at Rainhill. The mourners included Deeming's brothers and their wives, and many of those present wept during the address. The curate denounced the killer from the graveside, and the crowd applauded him.
The inquest at Rainhill heard evidence from Bertha Deeming, from the keeper of the hotel where "Williams" had lodged, from cab drivers, a joiner and a barmaid, and from Emily's mother, Mrs. Mather. Witnesses described his movements, the work done on the floors and his habit of introducing his wife as his sister. On March 28, 1892, the coroner's jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Deeming.
That verdict was a formal finding by an inquest jury. It was not a criminal conviction. In 1892 an English coroner's jury could name the person it believed responsible, but the accused was not tried by it, and in this case no English trial ever followed. Victoria had custody of Deeming and the stronger case, and it went ahead first.
In Melbourne a two-day inquest on Emily's death was held before the acting coroner, Dr. J. E. Neild, in early April. Deeming sat through it with an air of indifference, at times laughing aloud. To settle his identity he was placed in the jail yard among about 20 other men, and 52 witnesses who had known him under some 15 different names picked him out. Hirschfeldt described the voyage from Perth, during which Deeming had questioned him closely about how the body had been found and how the cement had been removed. Kate Rounsefell gave evidence; Deeming called out to her by name, and she did not respond.
Asked his name at the close of the hearing, Deeming refused to answer. His solicitor, Mr. Lyle, told the coroner that his client had a defense that would raise questions the English-speaking world would have to face, and that his first duty was to secure him a fair trial. On April 7, 1892, the jury found Deeming guilty of the wilful murder of his wife, and he was committed for trial.
The ADB describes the public mood as mass hysteria, which Melbourne called "Deemania." Newspapers declared him guilty before his trial and called him "the criminal of the century" and "a human tiger." A play based on the Windsor murder, Wilful Murder, staged by the actor-manager Alfred Dampier, ran in Melbourne in March and April 1892, before the trial. The State Library Victoria notes that postcards linked him to Jack the Ripper, cheap pamphlets sold his story and copies of his portrait were traded like collector cards. A few papers described his face as "ape-like." The ADB's author, Barry O. Jones, observes that contemporary photographs show nothing abnormal about him, and that many people, his victims among them, must have found him charming. In his judgment the uproar destroyed Deeming's right to be tried by an unprejudiced jury.
Deeming was defended by William Forlonge and Alfred Deakin, then a 35-year-old barrister and member of the Victorian parliament who would later become prime minister of Australia. Deakin's own ADB entry describes his defense of Deeming in 1892 as the best known of his cases at the Bar, and records that he took it without a fee. Counsel asked for a month's adjournment so that evidence of Deeming's medical history could be gathered from England and elsewhere, and so that public feeling could cool. Mr Justice Henry Hodges of the Supreme Court of Victoria granted one week.
The trial was held on April 28, 29 and 30 and May 2, 1892. Deeming was tried under the name Williams, for the wilful murder of Emily Williams. The Crown prosecutor was Mr. Walsh. The ADB entry on Hodges notes that the judge, whose rudeness toward litigants, witnesses and lawyers drew a formal protest from the Victorian Bar in 1913, was conspicuously fair when presiding over criminal trials, and that he presided over this one.
The Crown called the people who had seen Deeming at Windsor, at the morgue and on his travels. Kate Rounsefell described meeting him on the steamer and identified his letters to her, including the one from Southern Cross. Hirschfeldt was cross-examined at length by the defense about whether Deeming had shown any sign of insanity on the voyage from Perth; he said that in his opinion Deeming was entirely sane.
The defense was insanity. Dr. John Springthorpe described what Deeming had told him: that at Rainhill a man named Ben Young had offered to take his first wife off his hands for 50 pounds, and must have killed her, and that Emily had left him in Melbourne after confessing she was already married. The reporters covering the trial pointed out the flaw in this account: no one but Deeming had known anything of Rainhill until Emily's body was found in Melbourne. Dr. J. W. Y. Fishbourne testified that he had examined Deeming and found symptoms of brain disease. The ADB concludes that the psychiatric evidence was poorly presented, although it seems clear that Deeming was epileptic. Forlonge closed for the defense, arguing that no healthy nature could have produced such crimes and that the evidence showed Deeming's irresponsibility at every step.
When the Crown counsel told the jury there was no evidence of insanity, Deeming interrupted and addressed the court himself. It was the press, not the law, that was trying him, he said. Witnesses had lied; his own witnesses had been kept away; he had not been given time to reach people in England and India. He said he suffered lapses of memory lasting weeks, that he had always treated Emily gently and affectionately, and that in his own mind he knew he was not guilty. The light was failing, and candles and gas were lit while he spoke.
On May 2, 1892, the jury found him guilty and added that he was not insane. Hodges sentenced him to death. In passing sentence, according to the reports, the judge said he had never seen such a criminal in all his experience, and remarked on Deeming's conduct during the trial.
The case moved quickly from there. On May 9 the Executive Council of Victoria confirmed the death sentence and set the execution for May 23. Letters asking for mercy poured into the Governor's office, according to the University of Melbourne's Encyclopedia of Melbourne. Deeming's lawyers applied to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London for leave to appeal. Material sent in his support included a statement signed by his two brothers that he had always been eccentric, and the Darlinghurst doctor's certificate about his epilepsy. On May 19, 1892, the Judicial Committee refused leave to appeal. The decision is reported as Ex parte Deeming in the Law Reports, Appeal Cases, for 1892.
Deeming spent much of his time in prison writing an account of his life, which he said he would leave to Kate Rounsefell so that any profit might make up to her for the trouble he had caused. The ADB records that the manuscript was destroyed. He was kept in irons, and the Melbourne press reported his moods day by day, from defiance to dejection. In early May he was quoted as saying he was now partly convinced that he had killed Emily but could remember nothing of it.
His statements about Rainhill never changed in substance. To the chaplain, on the Sunday before his death, he repeated that he had committed only the Windsor killing and said that to admit Rainhill would be a lie. In a letter to the chaplain he wrote that he died a penitent Christian and that he had not intended to kill "poor Emily" and had been unconscious of doing so. Some reporters treated a prayer he was overheard making, asking forgiveness for the harm he had done his family, as a confession to Rainhill. It was not one.
On May 21 he wrote to the governor of the jail thanking him and the warders for treating him with great kindness. The letter survives in a scrapbook on the case compiled by the collector Harry Chaplin and held by the State Library Victoria.
Deeming was hanged at Melbourne Gaol shortly after 10 o'clock on the morning of Monday, May 23, 1892. American wire reports said that his manacles were removed that morning for the first time since his arrest, that he told the governor he had made his peace with God, and that he thanked the prison staff and his lawyers. On the scaffold he shook hands with the sheriff and, asked whether he had anything to say, answered faintly, "May the Lord receive my spirit." The witnesses included government and city officials, magistrates, police, clergy and a number of reporters. The State Library Victoria puts the crowd waiting outside the prison at about 10,000.
He was 38. He was hanged 12 years after the bushranger Ned Kelly, at the same jail.
As was then the practice, a death mask was made. The Encyclopedia of Melbourne notes that the masks of hanged prisoners were used for phrenology, the now-discredited study of skull shape, and that Deeming's survives. The State Library Victoria holds his death mask and a cast of his right hand, along with photographs, letters and newspaper material on the case. The Old Melbourne Gaol, which closed as a prison in 1929 and was reopened by the National Trust as a penal museum in 1970, displays a number of death masks. A photograph of Deeming in about 1891, used by the ADB, comes from the Victoria Police Museum.
His skull had an odd later history. Years afterward the anatomist Sir Colin MacKenzie remarked that it resembled a gorilla's, a comment the ADB records as an example of how Deeming was caricatured. In 2009 a skull long believed to be Ned Kelly's, which had been taken from a display at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978, was handed to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. In 2011 its scientists found that it was not Kelly's. The State Library Victoria reported that a documentary following the investigation suggested it might instead be Deeming's. That remains a possibility only.
The families in England were left to grieve twice: the James family for Marie and her children, and the Mather family for Emily, whose mother learned of her death from the newspapers and then gave evidence at the inquest into the deaths of the woman and children who had been hidden in the house she had let to him.
In Australia, the case became a lasting reference point in arguments about trial by newspaper. The ADB's assessment that Deeming's right to an unprejudiced jury was destroyed, and the State Library Victoria's observation that the case raised the question of how anyone could get a fair trial amid such publicity, reflect a view that has outlasted the crime itself. Deakin's part in it is a standard episode in accounts of his career.
The crime produced its own literature at once, including a pamphlet titled The Windsor and Rainhill Murders, published in Melbourne in 1892. Later books include J. S. O'Sullivan's A Most Unique Ruffian (1968) and Rachael Weaver's The Criminal of the Century (2004), whose title borrows the 1892 newspapers' label for him. In 2012 Frank Gauntlett's play Deeming, which centered on Dampier's 1892 melodrama and the actor who played Deeming in it, premiered at the King Street Theatre in Sydney.
Proven by a final conviction: the murder of Emily Mather (Emily Williams) at Windsor, Melbourne, about Christmas 1891. The jury rejected his plea of insanity, and the Privy Council refused leave to appeal.
Attributed but never tried: the deaths of Marie Deeming and her four children at Rainhill. The evidence pointing to him was strong, and a coroner's jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against him on March 28, 1892. But an inquest verdict is not a conviction; he was never tried in any court for these deaths, and he denied them until his death. Reports in March 1892 that he had confessed to Rainhill, spread from a story in the Melbourne Argus, were not borne out by anything he said later.
Jack the Ripper (press speculation, 1892 and later): within days of his arrest, newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States suggested that Deeming was the Whitechapel killer of 1888. On March 26, 1892, the Argus reported that he had confessed in Perth to the Rainhill deaths and to two of the Whitechapel murders; the report was cabled around the world. A London dressmaker was quoted as saying that a man calling himself Lawson had courted her in the autumn of 1888 and was with her on a night of two of the murders. American papers also printed claims that his appearance matched a witness description. Scotland Yard was reported at the time to attach little importance to the claims and to suspect that he hoped to be sent back to England by making them. London police also pointed out that when Frances Coles was killed in Whitechapel he was serving his sentence at Hull. The ADB, which records frauds by him in the Transvaal from January 1888 and his presence in South Africa as Harry Lawson, mentions the Ripper idea only to note that "some writers" accused him of it, alongside the other abuse heaped on him. No evidence placing him in London during the 1888 murders has been produced. The idea has nonetheless been revived from time to time: in 2009 The Daily Telegraph reported that a researcher, Dr. Geoff Crawford, believed Deeming could have been responsible. The claim rests on comparisons of method and appearance, not on any record of his presence in Whitechapel, and it is treated here as unproven speculation.
Other claims: letters reaching the Victorian police and the Governor in 1892 accused him of murders in South Africa and South America; none was substantiated. Sydney police looked into what had become of a woman he had lived with there and found her alive. His own claims of hereditary insanity and of years in asylums were denied by his brother and by people who knew the family. His last story, that he had tried four times to kill Emily under the influence of his dead mother's spirit and had paid a stranger to bury her, was reported by the press as one of several shifting accounts and was not believed.
Details that vary between sources: the exact date of the Rainhill deaths (late July or early August 1891); the day of the Windsor killing (December 24 or about December 25); the date the body was found (March 3 in the ADB, March 5 in one American report); the date of his arrest (March 11 in the ADB; other accounts give dates up to March 14); the spellings of the children's names; and his age when he went to sea (about 16, or 17).
July 30, 1853: born at Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire; the family later lives at Birkenhead.
About 1869: runs away to sea.
February 28, 1881: marries Marie James at Tranmere, Cheshire.
August 1881: deserts his ship at Sydney; works as a plumber and gas fitter.
April 1882: six weeks in jail for stealing gas burners.
July 1, 1882: Marie joins him in Sydney; they have three daughters and a son.
1884: back in Sydney after work in Melbourne and Rockhampton.
December 1887: declared bankrupt; 14 days in jail for perjury.
January 1888: in Cape Town as Harry Lawson; frauds in the Transvaal follow.
February 18, 1890: bigamous marriage to Helen Matheson at Beverley, Yorkshire; he leaves England, is arrested at Montevideo and returned.
1890 to July 1891: nine months in jail at Hull for fraud.
July 1891: arrives at Rainhill as A. O. Williams; rents Dinham Villa; Marie and the children join him at the end of the month.
Late July or early August 1891: Marie Deeming and her four children are killed at Dinham Villa (attributed; never tried).
September 22, 1891: marries Emily Lydia Mather at St Anne's, Rainhill.
December 15, 1891: they arrive in Melbourne on the Kaiser Wilhelm II.
About December 24 or 25, 1891: kills Emily at 57 Andrew Street, Windsor.
January 1892: auctions belongings, seeks a wife through an agency, sails to Sydney, becomes engaged to Kate Rounsefell; goes to Western Australia as Baron Swanston.
March 3, 1892: Emily's body is found at Windsor.
March 11, 1892: arrested at Southern Cross, Western Australia.
March 16, 1892: the bodies of Marie and the four children are found at Rainhill.
March 18, 1892: Marie and the children are buried at Rainhill.
March 26, 1892: the Argus reports an alleged confession, including Whitechapel; Scotland Yard discounts it.
March 28, 1892: Rainhill coroner's jury returns a verdict of wilful murder against Deeming.
By April 1, 1892: returned to Melbourne on the Ballarat.
April 7, 1892: Melbourne coroner's jury finds him responsible for Emily's death; committed for trial.
April 28 to May 2, 1892: trial in the Supreme Court of Victoria before Mr Justice Hodges; Alfred Deakin and William Forlonge defend.
May 2, 1892: found guilty and not insane; sentenced to death.
May 9, 1892: Executive Council confirms the sentence.
May 19, 1892: Privy Council refuses leave to appeal.
May 21, 1892: writes to the jail governor thanking the staff.
May 23, 1892: hanged at Melbourne Gaol.
1929: Melbourne Gaol closes; the National Trust reopens it as a penal museum in 1970.
1981: ADB entry by Barry O. Jones published.
2011: forensic scientists find that a skull long displayed as Ned Kelly's is not his; it is suggested it may be Deeming's.
2012: Frank Gauntlett's play Deeming premieres in Sydney.