Martha Charles was born in South Australia in 1863 into a violent household and married Henry Needle, a carpenter, at seventeen. They moved to Richmond in Melbourne and had three daughters.
Between 1885 and 1891 she killed all four of them with Rough on Rats, a commercial arsenic preparation. Mabel died in 1885, aged three. Henry died in 1889 after a long illness the doctors put down to gastric fever, and she collected two hundred pounds of insurance. Elsie died in 1890 and May in 1891. She wept at every funeral, tended every grave, and was widely pitied.
In 1894 she was keeping house for two brothers, Otto and Louis Juncken, and was engaged to Otto. Louis objected to the marriage and asked about the deaths of her family, and shortly afterwards fell ill. He recovered when he went away and relapsed when he came back, and died in May 1894. Otto's doctor, who had grown suspicious, arranged for Otto to eat a cup of tea she had prepared under observation; he became violently ill, the tea was analysed, and it was full of arsenic.
The bodies of her husband and children were exhumed and all contained arsenic. She was tried in October 1894 for the murder of Louis Juncken only, convicted, and hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on October 22, 1894, aged thirty-one. She admitted nothing and gave no reason. What she gained across nine years of it was a few hundred pounds in insurance.