The trial of Ned Kelly
Capture, trial and execution
The gang discovered that one of their sympathisers, Aaron Sherritt, Joe Byrne's erstwhile best friend, was a police informer. On the 26 June 1880 Dan and Joe Byrne went to Sherritt's house and murdered him. (Ian Jones, authority on the Kelly Gang, has made a compelling case in his book, The Fatal Friendship that the police manipulated events so that Sherritt appeared a traitor and to provoke the gang into emerging from hiding to dispose of him.) The four policemen who were living openly with him at the time hid under the bed and did not report the murder until late the following morning. This delay was to prove crucial since it upset Ned's timing for another ambush.
The Kelly Gang arrived in Glenrowan on 27 June taking about 70 hostages at the Glenrowan Inn, owned by Ann Jones. They knew that a train loaded with police was on its way and ordered the rail tracks pulled up in order to cause a derailment.
The gang members donned their now famous armour. The armour was made with stolen and donated plough parts. It is not known exactly who made the armour. Some suggest they made it themselves, others suggest it was made by sympathetic blacksmiths. Each man's armour weighed about 96 pounds (44 kg); all four had helmets, and Joe Byrne's was said to be the most well done, with the brow reaching down to the nose piece, almost forming two eye slits.
While holed up in the Glenrowan Inn, their attempt to derail the police train failed when a released hostage, schoolmaster Thomas Curnow, gave the alert, at great risk to his own life, by standing on the railway line near sunrise, waving a red scarf illuminated by a candle. The police then laid siege to the inn.
At about dawn on Monday 28 June, Ned Kelly emerged from the inn in his suit of armour. He marched on to the police firing his gun at them, while their bullets bounced off his armour. His lower limbs however were unprotected and he was shot up to twenty-eight times in the legs (sources vary, some saying six times). The other Kelly Gang members died in the hotel, Joe Byrne allegedly by loss of blood due to a gunshot wound that severed his femoral artery, and Dan Kelly and Steve Hart, which the witness Father Gibney said was by suicide. The police suffered only one minor injury: Superintendent Francis Hare the senior officer on the scene, received a slight wound to his wrist, then fled the battle. For his cowardice the Royal Commission later suspended Hare from the Victorian Police Force.[7] Also, several hostages were shot, at least two fatally.
Kelly in the dock
Ned Kelly survived to stand trial, and was sentenced to death by the Irish-born judge Sir Redmond Barry. This case was extraordinary in that there were exchanges between the prisoner Kelly and the judge, and the case has been the subject of attention by historians and lawyers (see Philips). When the judge uttered the customary words "May God have mercy on your soul", Ned is reported to have replied "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go".[8] He was hanged on 11 November at the Melbourne Gaol. Although two newspapers (The Age and Herald Sun) reported Kelly's last words as "Such is life" and two other newspapers as "Ah well, I suppose it has come to this. Such is life", another source, Ned Kelly's gaol warden, writes in his diary that when Kelly was prompted to say his last words, he (Kelly) opened his mouth and mumbled something that he couldn't hear—and since the warden's office is closer to the scene of the hanging than the witnesses' allotted space, Ned Kelly's last words actually remain uncertain. Sir Redmond Barry died of the effects of a carbuncle on his neck on 23 November, 1880, twelve days after Kelly.
Stories abounded of Ned's altruistic and gentlemanly behaviour, casting him as a modern-day Robin Hood. About 32,000 Victorians signed a petition against Kelly's sentencing.
