The Man They Could Not Hang

Begin with a murder that was never solved. In the hours before dawn on 26 August 1803, a constable named Joseph Luker was found dead at the edge of Sydney, beaten so savagely that the iron guard of his own cutlass was lodged more than an inch into his skull. He was the first police officer ever killed on duty in Australia. Four men faced trial. Not one was convicted of his murder. Yet within the month, the colony had a noose ready for a young Jewish convict named Joseph Samuel — and what happened when they used it has defied explanation for more than two centuries.

A CONSTABLE’S MURDER

Sydney in 1803 was barely fifteen years old — a raw penal settlement policed at night by a handful of constables, many of them emancipated convicts. Luker was one of these: transported on the Third Fleet for stealing lead, freed in 1796, and then sworn over to the other side of the law. On the evening of 25 August, thieves broke into the home of Mary Breeze in Back Row and carried off a small desk containing papers and about twenty-four guineas. She went straight to Luker, a neighbour, though his watch did not begin until midnight. He told her he believed he knew the culprits — and where they would gather: at the lodgings of Isaac Simmonds, himself a serving constable.

After midnight Luker went into the scrub behind Back Row, hunting the stolen desk. He found it. He never came back. His body lay near the road to Farm Cove with sixteen wounds about the head; beside him, the bloodied desk and the wheel of a barrow.

The investigation that followed was a shambles. Simmonds was arrested in bloodstained clothing and blamed a lifelong tendency to nosebleeds; acquitted. Another constable, William Bladders, said the blood on his clothes came from a pig he had slaughtered; acquitted. John Russell walked free for want of evidence. Only Samuel — tried at the Old Bailey at fourteen and transported for seven years — went to the gallows, and only for the burglary, a capital offence in that place and time. He admitted the robbery to the end. The murder, he always swore, was not his.

THREE TIMES

On the morning of 26 September 1803, Samuel was carted to the gallows — usually placed near Brickfield Hill, though some accounts say Parramatta — alongside a second condemned man, James Hardwicke. Asked by the Reverend Samuel Marsden to confess, Samuel did the opposite. He pointed at Simmonds, who had been deliberately brought from custody to watch him die, and declared that Simmonds had confessed the killing to him in their cell — in Hebrew, so that no one else would understand. The crowd surged at Simmonds and had to be held back by soldiers. Then Hardwicke was abruptly reprieved, and Samuel stood alone.

The cart drew away. The rope snapped in the middle, and Samuel fell face-down and lay still. A second rope was fitted; this time the line unrove at its fastening and paid out until his legs trailed along the ground, his body only half suspended. A third rope, carefully checked, went the way of the first — snapping short, up by the noose.

The Sydney Gazette, reporting within days, wrote that onlookers openly declared “the invisible hand of Providence” was at work. The Provost Marshal, Thomas Smyth, stayed the execution and galloped to Governor Philip Gidley King, who extended the King’s mercy and commuted the sentence to life. Samuel, half-strangled and incoherent, had to be told afterwards that he lived. WHAT THE ROPES SAID Afterwards, the ropes were examined. No cut, no tampering, no flaw that anyone could find. Later accounts say they were tested and bore astonishing weight — the figure shifts with the telling, from around 130 kilograms to nearly 180, in some versions with strands part-severed. The nooses were five-strand hemp, made to hold far more than one slight young man. Nothing explains why three sound ropes failed on a single prisoner within minutes.

THE SEA TOOK HIM Mercy bought Samuel less than three years. Sent to the coal mines at Newcastle, he stole a boat with seven other convicts in April 1806 and ran for the open sea. A storm rose. None of them was ever seen again.

He remains the only person in recorded history known to have survived three consecutive hanging attempts. And there is a quiet cruelty in how the story is remembered: Joseph Luker, the man actually murdered, lies in a grave few could find — while the man tried for that night became immortal as the man they couldn’t hang. In Parramatta, a café has traded under the name Three Ropes, in honour of the nooses that would not hold him.

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