Before the Kaka Point incident, she had already served prison terms at Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Timaru, the sentences ranging up to three years, and the crimes including false pretences, forgery, and larceny.
She used several aliases, with Shannon, Channel, Vallane, and Skevington among her most popular choices, but it was as Percy Carol Redwood that she married Miss Ottaway, of The Nuggets, in the grand manner, with the Anglican vicar officiating, and the local Presbyterian minister assisting.
Her gifts to the bride included 100 worth of jewellery obtained by false pretences in Dunedin, and for which she had given the name of her father-in-law as a guarantor.
The honeymoon was to have been in Melbourne, and even in this she was able to persuade someone else to purchase the steamer tickets.
While the wedding was being planned, the police were searching high and low for their old friend Amy Bock in connection with another matter.
Bock had passed off a fraudulent bill of sale for the furniture and household effects of the family for whom she had been working as a domestic.
The end came when police followed up a Dunedin man's suspicion about her sex.
She was arrested on the eve of her honeymoon (on which, she confessed, she had no intention of taking her bride) and was taken to Dunedin.
Her appearances in court drew large crowds of excited people, and there was no secret about the public disappointment over the failure of a sensational trial to eventuate.
Amy Bock admitted the worst the police could charge against her and after she had appeared in the Supreme Court for sentence on charges of masquerading as a man, forgery, false pretences, and theft, she was returned for a few more years to the prison cell where she had already spent not much less than half the quarter-century of her time in New Zealand.
