Eleven-year-old James Kirkpatrick was walking his dog behind Sussex Street in Sydney in September 1866 when he stumbled on a woman’s severed head half buried in a rubbish heap near Ebsworth’s tweed factory and Barker’s flour mills. Nearby lay her torso, its chest cavity completely emptied and the lower ribs charred. Despite police turning the rubbish heap over three times and combing the neighbourhood, no other body parts were ever recovered.
The case became known as the Sussex Street Mystery and gripped the colony as police pieced together the killing. It ended with the conviction and execution of a butcher, William Henry Scott, for the murder, making it one of colonial Australia’s most sensational and gruesome murder cases.
Nine week old Azaria Chamberlain vanished from her family’s tent at a campsite near Ayers Rock on the night of 17 August 1980. Her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, said she had seen a dingo leaving the tent, and the baby’s blood stained jumpsuit was found nearby days later, but her body was never recovered. A first inquest in 1981 accepted the dingo account and found no evidence of foul play.
That finding was overturned on appeal, and a second inquest opened on 13 September 1982, reopening a case that had already divided the country. This inquest went the other way, committing Lindy Chamberlain for trial on a charge of murder, a reversal that would send her to prison and make her one of the most publicly vilified women in Australian history.
Lindy Chamberlain was convicted later that year and sentenced to life imprisonment, but the case unravelled in 1986 when a piece of Azaria’s matinee jacket was found near a dingo lair, corroborating the original account. She was released and eventually exonerated, and a fourth inquest in 2012 formally confirmed that a dingo had taken and killed the child.
Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his leg. He turned to see a man pick up a dropped umbrella and hurry away, offering a mumbled apology. Markov thought little of it until a small red mark and fever set in over the following days.
The umbrella had been rigged to fire a tiny pellet packed with ricin, a poison for which there was and is no antidote. Markov died four days later, on 11 September 1978, from the resulting blood poisoning, becoming one of the most infamous casualties of Cold War espionage.
His killer would not be identified for almost three decades. It was not until 2005 that leaked files named the assassin as Francesco Gullino, an agent working for the Bulgarian secret service, though he was never extradited or tried for the murder.
The case began in the most macabre way imaginable: on April 25, 1935, a captured shark on display at an Aquarium in Sydney vomited up a human arm. Tattoos identified the limb as belonging to James Smith, who had vanished after leaving home on April 8 with the stated intention of going on a fishing trip.
Police investigations focused on Patrick Brady, an associate of Smith who had been with him around the time of his disappearance. Another central figure was businessman Reginald Holmes, who was in a position to give direct evidence about Smith’s killing and Brady’s alleged involvement.
But before Holmes could give that evidence, the case took another extraordinary turn. In the early hours of June 12, just hours before he was due to appear at the inquest, Holmes was found shot dead in his car at Dawes Point. With the Crown’s key witness gone, the murder case against Brady was left largely dependent on circumstantial evidence.
Despite what Chief Justice Sir Frederick Jordan acknowledged was plenty of cause for suspicion, the prosecution now faced two fundamental problems: its key witness was dead, and there was no body to prove that Smith himself was dead. A person could, after all, survive the loss of an arm. On September 10, 1935, Jordan ruled that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction and directed the jury to acquit Brady, bringing to an abrupt end what was described at the time as a case “without parallel in the annals of Australian criminal history.”
Brady’s freedom was short-lived. As soon as he stepped outside the court, detectives arrested him on an unrelated Tasmanian forgery charge. No one was ever convicted over Smith’s death or Holmes’s killing, and the infamous Shark Arm case remains unsolved.
