of 24 August 1939. Samuel Rosenberg ended his self-imposed thirteen-day fast after Kelly was hanged, having lost 13 pounds (5.9 kilograms) in weight. He stated his intention to enter a nursing home "to recuperate". Rosenberg vowed the campaign to abolish the death penalty "will go on" and lamented that "the public becomes interested in reform only when a man is to be hanged". Kelly was the last person to be judicially executed in the state of New South Wales. Capital punishment remained a possibility in the state until 1955, but after Kelly's execution in 1939, successive governments automatically commuted death sentences to a term of imprisonment. In 1955, with the Labor party in control of both houses of the State Parliament, New South Wales abolished the death penalty for crimes such as murder and rape. Crimes such as treason and piracy remained as legislated capital offences until 1985. The victims The victims of Kelly's violence were members of a large and well-known landholding family in the New England district. The original family property, 'Spring Valley' near Tenterfield, was settled in the 1870s by the German immigrant John Henry (Johan Heinrich) Sommerlad and his wife Louisa (Marjorie and Eric Sommerlad's grandparents). By the 1930s, many of the male members of the Sommerlad family were landholders in the Tenterfield and Glen Innes districts. Ernest Sommerlad, Marjorie and Eric Sommerlad's uncle, was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1932. Marjorie Constance ('Connie') Sommerlad – born in 1903 at Tenterfield, the daughter of Albert Sommerland and Emma (née Mansfield). She was the second-born of 14 children in the family and was known as 'Connie' by her family. Her father, Albert Sommerlad, died in December 1933 after which her mother Emma moved to Glen Innes to live with two of her daughters. Connie and her mother, together with Tolla Gibson-Briant, formed a company called Child Study Health Food Co. In May 1934, a creditor petitioned for the bankruptcy of the company. A sequestration order was granted on 2 July 1934. In May 1935, an application to annul the sequestration order was approved, on the basis of ten shillings in the pound having been accepted by the creditors. By 1939, Connie Sommerlad was living and working as a housekeeper on her brother's 'Hillcrest' farm near Tenterfield and was engaged to be married to Walter Bridgeman, a grazier with holdings in the Pelican district