Assassination - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1306: The Murder That Ended the Premysl Dynasty

On 4 August 1306, Bohemian King Wenceslas III was stabbed to death in Olomouc, cutting short the reign of a young ruler who had held the crowns of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. He was just 16 years old. His death extinguished the male line of the Premysl dynasty, a royal house that had shaped Central Europe since the ninth century.

With no male heir, the dynasty that had produced kings across three kingdoms collapsed in a single moment of violence. The Luxembourg clan seized Bohemia; the Piasts took Poland. The age of Premyslid rule was over.

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Assassination Czech Republic Europe Medieval History Olomouc Poland Political Crime Royalty

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1876: Wild Bill Hickok Shot Dead at the Poker Table in Deadwood

James Butler Hickok, known as Wild Bill Hickok, was shot and killed on August 2, 1876, while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. The killer was Jack McCall, an unsuccessful gambler who approached from behind and fired a single shot. Hickok, 39, had built a formidable reputation as a frontier lawman, Union army scout, marksman, and showman, though much of his legend rested on exaggeration, including his own.

The cards Hickok held at the moment of his death, two pairs of black aces and eights, passed into folklore as the dead man’s hand. McCall was initially acquitted but later retried, convicted, and hanged. Hickok remains one of the most mythologised figures of the American Old West.

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Assassination Gambling Murder Organised Crime USA

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1589: Monk Jacques Clement Stabs King Henry III to Death in Saint-Cloud

On 1 August 1589, Jacques Clement, a Dominican lay brother and zealous supporter of the Catholic League, gained an audience with King Henry III at Saint-Cloud, where the king was besieging Paris during the French Wars of Religion. Concealing a dagger beneath his cloak, Clement stabbed the king under the pretence of delivering a confidential message. The royal attendants cut Clement down immediately, but Henry III lingered until the following morning, dying after urging Henri of Navarre that conversion to Catholicism was the only path to lasting peace.

Clement, born in 1567 at Serbonnes in Burgundy, had been radicalised by League ideology and the targeted killings of its leaders, the Duke and Cardinal de Guise. His plot had the quiet blessing of Catherine de Guise, Duchess Montpensier, who saw it as righteous vengeance. The League faithful hailed him as a martyr; Royalists and Protestants condemned him as a fanatic. His corpse was posthumously quartered and burned.

Portrait of Jacques Clement assassin of King Henry III

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Assassination Europe France Political Crime Religious Conflict

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1835: The Infernal Machine: Fieschi’s 25-Barrel Assassination Attempt on King Louis Philippe I

On 28 July 1835, Giuseppe Marco Fieschi fired a homemade 25-barrel volley gun, dubbed the ‘infernal machine’, from a third-floor window at 50 Boulevard du Temple in Paris, directly into the convoy of King Louis Philippe I of France. The weapon unleashed around 400 projectiles in a single volley; the king escaped with only a graze to the forehead, but 18 people were killed and 22 more wounded, at least four of whom had limbs amputated.

The gun’s design proved its own undoing: French artillery officers later concluded that if Fieschi had understood ballistics well enough to angle the barrels so they diverged and crossed, he could have killed up to 200 additional people and destroyed the king entirely. Instead, the parallel configuration limited the carnage. Fieschi himself was badly wounded when several barrels burst; he fled but was tracked by a trail of blood and captured shortly after.

Illustration of an assassination attempt on a king

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Assassination Europe France Paris Political Crime Trial

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