Trial - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1861: They Dined on Stolen Ham While the Family Lay Bound: Thomas Sanders Hanged in Melbourne for a Farmhouse Attack

Thomas Sanders and his accomplice, John Johnson, burst into a farmhouse at Keilor, outside Melbourne, and held the farmer, his pregnant wife and their teenage servant girl at gunpoint for six hours. They nailed the windows shut, hung the family’s double-barrelled gun out of reach, then settled by the fire to fry a stolen ham and drink the household’s wine and brandy while their captives sat bound and silent in the kitchen.

At trial, Sanders admitted his involvement in the robbery but disputed the evidence against him on the more serious charge. Both men were convicted, and Sanders was hanged on 31 October 1861. The rope had been improperly adjusted, leaving him struggling on the gallows for three minutes. He maintained his innocence of the capital offence to the end, declaring before the execution crowd, “I stand before you innocent of the offence for which I am about to die… I swear I am innocent.”

Cast-iron pan with pork belly cooking over a forest campfire

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1830: Cornered at Abercrombie Caves: Ten Ribbon Gang Bushrangers Sentenced to Death at Bathurst

Ralph Entwistle was an escaped convict who had been publicly flogged on the orders of Bathurst magistrate Thomas Evernden after being spotted bathing in the Macquarie River by the Governor’s travelling party. Within a year he had turned bushranger, gathering escaped convicts into a band that grew to as many as eighty men, the largest convict uprising since Castle Hill, known as the Ribbon Gang for the white streamers Entwistle wore in his hair.

The gang’s campaign turned deadly when overseer James Greenwood refused to let them recruit his master’s men, baring his chest and daring them to shoot. They did. Troopers and armed volunteers, guided by two Aboriginal trackers, finally cornered the remaining bushrangers at the Abercrombie Caves, where a gunfight lasting hours forced the survivors onto a nearby hilltop before reinforcements ran the exhausted gang down.

On 30 October 1830, ten captured bushrangers faced trial at Bathurst before a jury of military officers. The court convicted six, including Entwistle, of Greenwood’s murder, and four others of plundering farmhouses, sentencing all ten to death.

Suspension bridge over underground lake at Abercrombie Caves

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Australia Bathurst Bushranging Murder NSW Rebellion Robbery Trial

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1968: Ben-Hur Star Ramon Novarro Tortured to Death Over a Fortune That Never Existed

Ramon Novarro had been one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the silent era, hailed as the screen’s first Latin American leading man after his role in Ben-Hur made him a household name. By 1968 his career had faded, but two brothers, Paul and Tom Ferguson, had heard a rumour that he kept a fortune hidden somewhere in his Laurel Canyon home. The younger of the two got Novarro’s phone number from a former guest, called offering sexual services, and the pair talked their way inside.

When Novarro could not produce the money, because none existed, the brothers beat him for hours trying to force him to reveal where it was hidden. He died on 30 October 1968, choking on his own blood after the prolonged assault; the men left with just $20 taken from his bathrobe pocket. Both were convicted and served only a few years before being paroled in the mid-1970s.

Paul Ferguson denied responsibility for decades, but in a 1998 interview he finally admitted to killing Novarro.

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1975: The Yorkshire Ripper Claims His First Victim

Wilma McCann, a mother of four, left a Leeds nightclub to walk home on the night of 30 October 1975 and never made it back. She was found the next morning on a playing field, stabbed and beaten, the first of thirteen women Peter Sutcliffe would kill over the next five years as the Yorkshire Ripper evaded capture despite one of the largest manhunts in British police history.

The damage did not end with her death. In 2007, more than three decades later, her eldest daughter Sonia took her own life, never having recovered from losing her mother as a child. It meant the Ripper’s toll outlived his capture and his sentencing, reaching into a generation he never touched directly.

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