Thompson denied any knowledge of such involvement, and the police believed him. When this ploy failed, Frances Knorr dramatically changed her evidence in the middle of the trial. She admitted to burying the babies in the backyard, saying they had died of natural causes. This was a contradiction of the autopsies, which proved that they had definitely been murdered.
At the end of her five-day trial Frances Knorr was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. As she sat back in the dock sobbing at the sentence, she turned to Edward Thompson, who was sitting in the court and screamed: "God forgive you for your sins Ted. God help my poor mother. God help my poor babies."
In the days leading up to her hanging Frances Knorr embraced God and finally confessed to her sins of murder. "Placed as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the same practice. I now desire to state that upon the two charges known in evidence as Number 1 and Number 2 babies, I confess to be guilty."
Although the man who was appointed to hang Frances Knorr, Thomas Jones, had a record of sending 15 men to their deaths on the gallows, he wasn't too keen about the prospect of hanging his first woman, who also happened to be the first woman to be hung in Victoria in 30 years, so he took to the bottle.
Two days before Frances Knorr's execution date, Jones committed suicide by cutting his own throat while in a drunken stupor.
But the hanging was scheduled to go ahead with a new hangman despite the desperate pleas of hundreds of Melbourne citizens for a reprieve on the grounds that it was inhuman to hang a woman and mother.
On the Sunday night on the eve of her hanging — at 10 a.m. the following morning on Jan.15, 1894 — a crowd of 200 protesters gathered outside Old Melbourne Jail and sang hymns through the night and petitioned for a last-minute reprieve. But the government stood its ground.
As the execution party reached the scaffold to await the arrival of the condemned woman, they heard hymns being sung from her cell in a strong, yet plaintive voice. Frances Knorr had been singing hymns since dawn and continued to do so as she walked the few paces from her cell to the scaffold unaided, was tied hands and feet and had the noose placed around her neck.
She only stopped singing in the last few seconds to say in an unbroken voice: "Yes. The Lord is with me. I do not fear what men may do to me, for I have peace, perfect peace."
Then Knorr, killer of defenseless babies entrusted into her care, dropped the two and a half meters to her instantaneous death.
After Knorr was hung, authorities assessed that, given the period of time that she was in the child minding business and the amount of women who clandestinely came forward later and told police that they had given her their babies, it is believed that she could have murdered as many as 13 infants.
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