Dark Stories Tours and Theatre productions often touch on the crime of murder. Dark Stories blog articles will contain stories of murder from all around the world.
In August 1963, Perth police discovered a rifle hidden in bushes, linked to the murder of Shirley McLeod. Rather than remove it, they set a trap: replacing the weapon with an inoperable replica tied with fishing line, then waited.
On 1 September 1963, Eric Edgar Cooke returned to retrieve the rifle and was arrested on the spot. Under questioning, he confessed to 22 violent crimes, including eight murders, making him one of the deadliest serial killers in Australian history.
Thomas Peacock, transported from Macquarie Harbour to stand trial, was convicted in the Supreme Court of the murder of Constable Craggs. Craggs had apprehended Peacock in the bush; Peacock stabbed him deliberately in the left side, declaring at the time that he would die happy having caused the constable’s death.
Peacock was hanged on the new drop at Hobart Gaol on 31 August 1825. His loud sobbing on the scaffold suggested the happiness he had claimed was nowhere to be found in his final moments.
Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was 43 years old, a divorced mother of five, and homeless on the night she died. In the early hours of 31 August 1888, she went to the streets of Whitechapel, London, to earn money for a bed. Her body was found before 4 a.m., her throat slashed with a long-bladed knife and her abdomen deeply cut. There were no witnesses.
Nichols became the first of at least five women murdered in and around Whitechapel between late August and early November 1888 by the killer who would become known as Jack the Ripper. Her death ignited intense press and public interest in both the murders and the desperate living conditions of London’s East End.
Despite countless theories, the killer Jack The Ripper, has never been identified.
For months in 1985, Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, terrorised California, breaking into homes while families slept to assault, mutilate, and murder. His reign of terror ended not with a police operation but with a newspaper front page: once his mugshot was published across California media, his anonymity was gone.
On 31 August 1985, Ramirez attempted to carjack vehicles in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of East Los Angeles. Residents recognised him, chased him down the sreet, and beat him to the ground before police arrived to take him into custody. Facing the mob, Ramirez reportedly confessed to officers, preferring arrest to the alternative.
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