White lies, Black blood

The tragic case of Australian Indigenous man Kipper Billy, a convicted rapist condemned to hang in 1862 before a watertight alibi was established for him and his co-accused, Billy Horton. While Horton was pardoned before the execution could be carried out, no such acknowledgment of innocence was extended to Kipper Billy, who had been killed during an attempted jailbreak. Dogged crime reporter Ken Blanch wrote the first edition of this book White Lies, Black Blood: The Awful Killing of Kipper Billy in 2015, which resulted in an historic posthumous Queen's pardon for Kipper Billy by the Governor of Queensland in 2018, possibly the world's first pardon of an Indigenous man who died while a prisoner in custody. This is the story of that pardon and what happened next.