When farmer Richard Strang, 37, sacked labourer Glen Valance, 23, he made an enemy he hadnt reckoned with. In June 1964, Valance, bent on revenge, broke into Strangs farmhouse after tying up three farm workers at gunpoint. Then he shot Strang while he was asleep and raped his wife while she lay on the bed next to her dead husband.
At his trial in September Valance pleaded insanity. Abolitionists mounted a determined effort to spare him from the gallows but to no avail, and on Tuesday, November 24th, 1964, a masked hangman executed him in the Hanging Tower of Adelaide Prison. He was the last person executed in South Australia and his was the penultimate execution in Australia.