Execution - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1964: Eric Edgar Cooke Hanged in Fremantle: the Serial Killer Whose Confessions Freed Two Innocent Men

Eric Edgar Cooke terrorised Perth through the late 1950s and early 1960s, eventually confessing to eight murders and fourteen attempted murders, including five people shot during a single Australia Day rampage. He also admitted to more than 250 burglaries, recalling with uncanny precision the number and denomination of coins stolen in each one.

His confessions carried a far darker twist: they cleared two men already tried, convicted and imprisoned for murders Cooke now claimed as his own. He was ultimately convicted of killing John Lindsay Sturkey, one of his victims, after pleading not guilty on grounds of insanity.

Cooke was hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1964.

He never denied his crimes, confessing fully and in exacting detail to police before his execution.

Fremantle Prison Western Australia: the gallows where 44 people were hanged including the last: Serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke in 1964.

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Australia Execution Exoneration Fremantle Murder Perth Serial Killer Trial WA

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1979: The Spy Chief Who Shot His Own President at a Blue House Dinner

Kim Jae-kyu was no outsider. As head of South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency, he had spent years enforcing President Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule, even as protests against it grew and corruption allegations mounted. On this day in 1979, during a private dinner at a KCIA safe house near the Blue House, South Korea’s equivalent of the American White House, Kim turned on the man he served and shot him dead at the table.

The killing sent shockwaves through the nation and exposed the deep fractures within Park’s own inner circle. Kim and several others implicated in the assassination were tried and executed in 1982, closing a case that marked the violent end of nearly two decades of authoritarian rule.

Park Chung Hee in earlier dates as military officer with classmates group photo

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Asia Assassination Execution Political Crime South Korea Trial

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1852: He Escaped the Gallows Once: Patrick Mahon Finally Hanged at Oatlands

Patrick Mahon had faced the gallows before. In 1827, convicted of a highway robbery on the road from Manchester to Sheffield after borrowing a fellow traveller’s own knife to rob him, he was sentenced to death at Derby Assizes, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land the following year and spent decades drifting through minor convict offences: insolence, drunkenness, breaches of his pass, a stint in chains.

In September 1852 he was convicted again, this time of a capital crime, and sentenced to death a second time. On this day in 1852, with no reprieve coming this time, Mahon was hanged at Oatlands, the clemency that had saved him twenty five years earlier nowhere to be found.

On being sentenced, Mahon protested his innocence, but told the court he was perfectly satisfied with his trial.

Interior of the Oatlands gaol Tasmania convict era prison cells

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Australia Convict History Execution Oatlands Prison Robbery TAS UK

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1853: Sentenced to Hang in Launceston, a Convicted Stabber Learned He Had Inherited a Fortune

A drunken brawl at a Launceston public house turned deadly when William Brown, also known as Stockton, drew a knife and stabbed a man named James Stephens. The wounds were serious enough that a doctor testified to their severity at trial, and Brown was convicted of stabbing with intent to kill and sentenced to death, with no hope of mercy.

While he lay under sentence in Launceston gaol, word reached him that a relative back in England had left him a sum of money. Rather than let the inheritance go to waste, Brown arranged to bequeath it to a servant who had once worked alongside him as a splitter and sawyer on a property near the East Tamar. He was hanged on this day in 1853, his strange act of generosity settled just before the sentence was carried out.

Signing a last will and testament document with quill pen

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Assault Attempted Murder Australia Execution Launceston Prison TAS Trial

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