Australia - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1894: Caught Serving Poisoned Tea: Martha Needle Hanged in Melbourne for a Family Poisoning Spree

Martha Needle had already buried her husband and both young daughters, each death blamed on a mysterious wasting illness, when she turned her attention to the family of her fiance, Otto Juncken. Months before her arrest she fed his brother Louis arsenic, and when his only surviving brother also sickened, doctors found arsenic disguised as rat poison in his vomit. Police lay in wait and caught Needle in the act, offering him a cup of tea laced with ten grains of poison.

Tried for Louis’s murder, her lawyer argued that she suffered fits of unconsciousness and should not be held responsible, but an insanity plea was dismissed. Convicted with no recommendation for mercy, Needle was hanged in Melbourne on 22 October 1894. Exhumations later found arsenic in the bodies of her husband and both daughters as well, confirming a killing spree that had gone undetected for years. She left everything she owned to Otto, the man who had stood by her to the end.

Martha Needle: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 516/P0000, Central Register of Female Prisoners, register nos. 5926–6415 (1891–1896).

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Australia Execution Melbourne Murder Poisoning Serial Killer Trial VIC

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1818: A Dream Diary Written in Kangaroo Blood: the Death of Bushranger Michael Howe

Michael Howe styled himself the Governor of the Ranges and spent years terrorising colonial Tasmania at the head of a bushranging gang, turning on his own allies whenever it suited his hold on command. When two kangaroo hunters, Worrall and Pugh, finally cornered and killed him on 21 October 1818, his knapsack was found to hold a crude journal bound in kangaroo skin and written in kangaroo blood.

The little book revealed a man haunted by his own crimes: dreams of being murdered, of dead comrades, of narrowly escaping capture, and, in one unexpected line, of the sister he had left behind. Alongside the dreams were long lists of seeds and flowers, the quiet fantasy of a killer who always meant to vanish into the bush and farm it in peace. Howe never got the chance; after Pugh clubbed him to death, his head was carried to Hobart to claim the reward on his life.

The reign of terror by the king of the ranges newspaper article 1954

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Australia Bushranger Colonial Crime Gang Manhunt Murder Tasmania

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1841: The Scaffold Confession That Exposed a Wrongful Transportation by a Bushranger

Patrick Curran was a notorious bushranger who terrorised the colony’s roads and outstations, once storming a property with a loaded gun levelled at the overseer before he was overpowered, wounding one of his captors with the stock of his musket in the struggle. Sentenced to death, he escaped from his escort between Picton and Sydney that April, prompting a thirty pound reward before he was run down and returned to custody.

On the morning of 21 October 1841, Curran was hanged at Berrima. His final days swung between violent despair, so bad the attending clergymen were twice ordered from his cell, and sudden, sincere penitence that lasted through the night before his death.

On the scaffold, Curran confessed to the murder of a man named Fuller, a crime for which another man, Bright, had already been tried and transported for life in his place.

The Cat Walk inside Berrima Gaol prison yard Australia circa 1914 1941

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Australia Berrima Bushranging Crime Escape Execution Murder NSW Wrongful Conviction

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1858: He Swallowed Her Earrings to Hide the Evidence: Hanged at Geelong for the Green Tent Murder

Owen McQueeny was a wandering Irish robber with one sightless eye who spent weeks haunting the proprietress of the Green Tent, a grocery and tavern serving gold diggers on a track near Geelong, Victoria. Elizabeth Lowe, a young widow raising two small children alone, had already told a passing carrier she feared the man and his talk of pistols. That July in 1858, McQueeny shot her dead and vanished with her jewellery.

Travellers soon reported a dead-eyed swagman heading for Geelong loaded with the dead woman’s distinctive earrings, and police closed in fast. Awaiting trial, McQueeny was caught hiding the earrings by swallowing them, retrieving them from the gaol’s waste tub and passing them to a departing cellmate to smuggle out for safekeeping. He was convicted of her murder and hanged at Geelong on 20 October 1858, freely confessing to a string of other robberies while insisting to the last that he had not killed her.

As the death warrant was read to him he only shrugged, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” convinced to the very end that public dislike of hanging would see him reprieved.

Sly grog shanty on Victorian goldfields tavern scene

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Australia Execution Geelong Murder Robbery Trial VIC

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