Harold Dutton Mallallieu

A Campfire. A Razor. A Child Who Never Forgot What She Saw.
Jerome Carey was a good-natured man. On 22 March 1891, near the Moonagee road five miles beyond Nyngan, he shared his provisions, made camp, and brewed billy-tea with a fellow itinerant shearer named Harold Dutton Mallallieu. They talked, they argued about shearers' grievances, and eventually Carey fell asleep by the fire — trusting the man beside him completely.
He never woke up.
While Carey slept, Mallallieu opened his swag, took out a razor, and slashed the throat of the man who had fed him. Then he tried to burn the body. It was the peculiar smell of the smoke that caught the attention of boundary rider McCaull, employed on Moonagee Station, who rode over to investigate — and discovered what remained of Jerome Carey.
Harold Dutton Mallallieu was arrested, tried, and condemned to hang at Dubbo Gaol on 26 November 1891. On the morning of his execution, when asked if he had anything to say on the scaffold, he had only one request:
"Don't bungle the job — get it over as soon as you can. I don't want to break down."
The man who granted that request was Robert Rice Howard — Nosey Bob — New South Wales' infamous state executioner, assisted by James Goulder. Nosey Bob had performed dozens of hangings across the colony. But this particular morning at Dubbo Gaol would be remembered for something no one could have anticipated.
Among those present was a ten year old girl named Kathleen Mary Josephine Beahan.
Her father Timothy had brought her deliberately. Kathleen was already a handful at ten — a school bully with a history of theft, truancy and assaults on other children dating back to the age of eight. Timothy Beahan, a man who knew better than most what the gallows meant — his friend Andrew George Scott, the notorious Captain Moonlite, had been hanged for his crimes — decided to show his unruly daughter exactly where a life of crime leads.
The lesson did not take.
The horror of what Kathleen witnessed that morning gave her nightmares for the rest of her life. And the little girl Timothy Beahan had tried to frighten straight grew up to become Kate Leigh — one of the most feared and powerful figures in the Australian criminal underworld.
The Life & Death of Harold Dutton Mallallieu tells the complete true story of both killer and victim — from their separate beginnings to their fatal meeting on a dusty road beyond Nyngan. Author Helen Cottee draws on court transcripts, police files, inquest records and newspaper reports to reconstruct every detail of the murder, the discovery, the trial and the execution — while also uncovering the extraordinary story of the child witness whose life would become as notorious as the crimes she watched punished.
Richly illustrated with historical photographs, maps and documents sourced directly from colonial records, the book concludes with the complete family trees of both Harold Dutton Mallallieu and Jerome Carey — restoring to history two men whose paths crossed briefly and fatally on an autumn evening in 1891.
Part of the Life & Death series — preserving the untold stories of colonial Australia, one execution at a time.
For readers who love Australian history, colonial true crime, and the extraordinary hidden connections that bind our past together.