John Austin (highwayman) John Austin (highwayman) John Austin (died 7 November 1783) was an English footpad who became the last person to be hanged at the Tyburn gallows outside London. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a labourer called John Spicer from Kent. The Recorder of London, James Adair, described it as a "robbery with violence" that involved "cutting and wounding [...] in a cruel manner." This hanging would mark the end of Tyburn, a village then in the county of Middlesex, being a place of executions for almost 600 years. Austin was brought from Newgate prison in the City
Highwayman Circus", in which John Cleese played the titular criminal who stole only lupins. In "Blackadder the Third", Mr. E. Blackadder turns highwayman in the episode "Amy and Amiability". In the British children's television series "Dick Turpin", starring Richard O'Sullivan, the highwayman was depicted as an 18th-century Robin Hood figure. Additionally the actor Mathew Baynton played Dick Turpin in "Horrible Histories". A singing highwayman appears in the fourth episode of the animated mini-series, "Over the Garden Wall", "Songs of the Dark Lantern". The highwayman known as Juraj Jánošík (1688–1713) became a hero of many folk legends in the Slovak, Czech, and