After thirteen periods of imprisonment totalling sixteen years and two months, her most audacious fraud involved impersonating a man named "Percy Redwood" in order to marry the daughter of a wealthy Otago family.

Her mother was in fragile mental and physical health, amongst other things suffering from a delusion that she was Lady Macbeth,[6] and was committed to a psychiatric institution in January 1872.

[11] In a statement to the Dunedin City Police Court in 1888, Bock herself said:[12] When I was very young I remember going to a shop in the town we lived in and buying a lot of books ... without my father's knowledge, and giving them away.

I did so many times, and at last, when his patience was worn out, he took me into his room and told me of my mother's fate, and said he feared I showed the same symptoms.In 1876, at the age of around 17, Bock was sent to boarding school in Melbourne, where she stayed for nearly two years.

[16] The Age in its editorial wrote that her salary of £9 per month was "found not nearly sufficient to cover her rather extravagant habits", and noted that it was argued she was not responsible for her conduct because "insanity exists in her family on the side of the mother, who died many years ago in a Tasmanian lunatic asylum".

[18] On the basis of her ill-health and lack of responsibility for her actions, she was discharged without conviction, and bound on a pledge of good behaviour for twelve months.

[8][22] Bock subsequently moved to Lyttelton, where she entered service as a governess to family friends from Victoria who now ran a hotel.

She subsequently obtained goods on credit again and travelled to Wellington, but was apprehended and brought back to Christchurch before the Resident Magistrate's Court in April 1886.

[8] This was Bock's first experience in prison, and on her release she moved to Wellington, where she in short order resumed obtaining goods by false pretences.

[24] In July 1887, she appeared again before the court on fraud charges, and was sentenced to six months' detention at Caversham Industrial School in Dunedin.

[26] She was discharged in January 1888 and took up independent music instruction, only to fall afoul of the law once again and appear back in court in April 1888 for her habitual offence of receiving goods under false pretences.

[35] After her release, she first made contact with local branch of the Salvation Army, and committed several further thefts, including pawning her landlady's husband's watch in April 1893, which led to a six months' prison sentence.

[38] She now applied for formal membership into the Salvation Army, but the local captain was aware of her history and said he would await proof that she had changed her lifestyle.

[42] In 1902, masquerading as Miss Mary Shannon in Christchurch, she befriended Alfred William Buxton, a well-known landscape gardener and nurseryman, and became a guest at his home.

[43] Through him she met and defrauded investors of sums required to start a fictitious poultry farm in Mount Roskill, and was again imprisoned for two years with hard labour in March 1903.

At Christmas she was left in charge of the house and set out to obtain loans using the household furniture as collateral and under the assumed name of Charlotte Skevington.

[52][8] In January 1909, under the invented name of "Percival Leonard Carol Redwood", and posing as an affluent Canterbury sheep farmer, Bock became a popular guest at a respectable boarding house in Dunedin.

Here, under cover of her male identity, she wooed Agnes Ottaway (known as Nessie to her family), the daughter of the landlady of Albion House, a large private guesthouse popular with tourists.

[54] Bock maintained her male impersonation through adept use of letters purported to be from lawyers and from Redwood's family, postal orders and small loans.

[57][58] The morning after the wedding, the bride's parents and a number of close family friends confronted Redwood about his finances and gave him a week's grace to pay his debts, on the basis that there would be no honeymoon until he had done so.

Two of the family friends subsequently made further enquiries and found they were unable to trace the existence of Redwood's mother; they reported their concerns to the police.

[65] She was also declared a "habitual criminal",[8] which meant that she would be detained in prison "till such a time as the Governor is convinced that she can be granted her liberty with perfect safety to the public" (an early form of preventative detention).

Robert William Robson, a journalist who worked for the Otago Daily Times, wrote a four-part serialised pamphlet that was published widely, and newspapers saw unprecedented demand for editions covering the story.

[79][80] Bock's behaviour in prison was exemplary, and she was released on probation in early February 1912 notwithstanding her "habitual criminal" status.

[81] Upon her release, Amy Bock worked at a New Plymouth retirement home and subsequently as a housemaid in the small town of Mokau.

[91] Bock was given a two-year probationary sentence in October 1931, conditional on her residence at a Salvation Army home supervised by Annie Gordon.

On the other hand, Agnes Ottway quickly had the marriage annulled when she found out her "husband's" actual gender, and there is no other evidence of Bock having romantic relationships with women.

[96][58] Any potential homosexual connotations were largely ignored by newspapers at the time; the media instead treated the idea of a marriage between two women as absurd or humorous.

[99][100][101] In 1997 New Zealand playwright Julie McKee, then a recent drama school graduate, wrote a play called The Adventures of Amy Bock, which was professionally staged at Yale Repertory Theatre.

[104] In 2009, to mark the centenary of the Redwood-Ottaway marriage, South Otago Museum organised various events including a re-enactment of the wedding with the audience encouraged to wear period costume, an afternoon tea and a brass band concert.