Karen Hollenbach, from Oakley in Melbourne, studying History Goulburn archives in December 2025. Karen aims to honour her third great-grandmother by viewing her crime through a 21st-century lens. Photo: Julie Penman.
Few, if any, tears were shed for the last woman hanged in Goulburn, for killing her husband with a hammer and burning his body.
But today this tragic case evokes a much different response: what must this woman have endured to have committed such a savage attack?
Far from attracting any empathy in 1860, Ellen Monks’s hanging became an unplanned spectacle in Goulburn.
Walls blocked views of the gallows in a jail precinct near the existing courthouse for the mother-of seven’s final breath, but spectators on rooftops and on a hill to the west gathered to watch.
“The town turned itself into a grandstand,” says researcher and Substack author Karen Hollenbach, who accidentally uncovered the fate of her third great-grandmother.
Her initial shock at finding such a violent event in her family’s history gave way to extreme curiosity to uncover more information. “Is this true?” she wondered.
Now she is returning to Goulburn on 27 August for Family History Month, to retell a poignant story of a woman from County Cork, Ireland, transported for stealing a sheep, losing her first-born son when he was only three, and enduring a drunken husband until she killed him.
On the night of 31 October, 1859, after swinging three fatal hammer blows to Thomas Monks’s skull, Ellen dropped to her knees to thank God for giving her the strength to do it.
She then hauled her dead husband onto the fire in their home at Long Nose Creek, near Binda, built it up and watched his body burn for several hours.
She later declared she killed Thomas because he had scandalised her from one end of the district to the other, claiming none of the children was his.
Karen believes that if Ellen were tried before a court today, the outcome might be different.
Citing the introduction in NSW in 2024 of Coercive Control as a criminal offence, she says she would love to have the case tested through a 21st-century lens with someone who understood criminal law.
Ellen had arrived in NSW in 1834 on the convict ship Andromeda, to serve a seven-year sentence for stealing a sheep.
Also transported from Ireland earlier and assigned to a chain gang building roads was Thomas Monks, who was a ticket-of-leave man and landowner at the time of his death.
“They had been together for 18 years before they actually married,” Karen said. Restrictions on convicts marrying one another lingered because they could not prove her first husband in County Cork, Daniel Murphy, had died.
Eventually, Thomas and Ellen did marry.
Monk’s waterhole, near Binda, where Ellen Monks had attempted to dispose of her husband’s burnt remains in 1859. Photo: Karen Hollenbach.
“If you were married and you had a certain number of children, I believe at that time, that allowed you to get more allocation of land,” Karen said.
Ironically, their first son, Thomas, had died of accidental burning when he was aged three.
Their daughters, Mary, 21, and Bridget, 17, had thought the house was on fire after the savage slaying. Mary had later seen Ellen chopping a charred bone with an axe and dumping Thomas’s remains in a waterhole 20 yards away.
Despite Ellen’s warning not to tell anyone, Mary later told a neighbour, Christina Anna McKennon, who didn’t believe her at first.
When word finally reached Binda’s constable, John Pagett, he managed to recover bones and ashes from the waterhole.
The court later concluded Ellen had lived an unhappy life because of her husband’s drunkenness.
In March the following year, Justice Wise said on sentencing her:
“Had the slightest feelings of woman’s tenderness, or the recollection of the love you once bore him, crossed your mind, one cannot believe you would have done what you did.”
On Tuesday morning, 8 May, 1860, Ellen Monks was hanged. Her son was in jail at the time, serving 12 months for horse-stealing.
Shortly before she was led out, he was allowed to see her. The report says he fell on his knees and kissed her hands. She told him to live a virtuous life and remember her fate.
Accompanying her body in her coffin were the charred remains of her husband.
Karen’s talk, ‘’The Last Woman Hanged in Goulburn’’, will be held at Goulburn Mulwaree Library on Thursday, 27 August, at 12:30 pm. Bookings can be made here. Karen is hoping more descendants of Ellen Monks will join the two who will be coming to her talk. She also wants to know more about the history of Goulburn and surrounding areas Binda, Crookwell, Laggan and Boorowa.
