Robert Rice Howard (known as "Nosey Bob" Howard) (c. March 1832 – 3 February 1906) was an Australian executioner. He was employed as a hangman for the colony of New South Wales from 1875, initially as an assistant hangman. Howard held the position of senior executioner from 1877 until he retired in 1904. Throughout a career spanning twenty-eight years, Robert Howard assisted or supervised the execution of sixty-two persons in New South Wales. Howard had a facial disfigurement, resulting in the loss of his nose, that occurred while working as a cabman in the mid-1870s. His missing nose and lengthy high-profile career as an executioner led to him being generally known, in newspapers and common parlance, as 'Nosey Bob'.

Jimmy Governor was an Indigenous Australian who was proclaimed an outlaw after committing a series of murders in 1900. His actions initiated a cycle of violence in which nine people were killed. Governor and his brother Joe were on the run from police for fourteen weeks before Jimmy was captured and Joe was killed by authorities.