1999: Melbourne Gangland War: Gerardo Mannella Gunned Down Fleeing His Brother’s Killers

Gerardo Mannella, 31, tried to run when two gunmen came for him outside his brother’s home in Melbourne, but they caught him in the street and shot him dead on this day in 1999.

The ambush was no isolated act. His brother Vince Mannella had already been murdered, and police believed the same killers were also responsible for shooting Dimitrios Belias, part of the string of tit for tat killings that became known as Melbourne’s gangland war.

No one has ever been convicted over Gerardo’s death, and it remains one of the unsolved murders from that bloody era.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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2003: Melbourne Gangland Victim Found Executed with His Partner in Their Own Home

Istvan ‘Steve’ Gulyas ran a dating agency out of Sunbury, on the outskirts of Melbourne, that police suspected was really a front for a brothel. He was also a friend of Nik Radev, a standover figure already gunned down in the city’s escalating underworld war.

That connection made Gulyas a marked man. On 20 October 2003 he and his de facto wife were found shot dead inside their home, both killed in what police treated as a deliberate execution rather than a robbery gone wrong.

The case became one of several unsolved or unresolved killings tied to the broader Melbourne gangland conflict of the late 1990s and 2000s, with no one ever convicted over the double murder.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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1216: The Poison Toad Theory Behind the Death of King John of England

Legend has it that King John of England was not felled by illness but by a monk’s revenge. Staying at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire that October, John allegedly threatened to starve his own kingdom with crushing bread prices; a monk is said to have milked a toad for its venom, mixed it into a cup of ale, and drunk from it himself before serving the king, to prove the drink was safe. The monk reportedly died first in the abbey infirmary, and John followed him within hours.

The king, already infamous for the Magna Carta he was forced to sign and then tried to annul, died at Newark Castle on 19 October 1216 as a rebel army closed in on his crumbling kingdom. The poisoning story only surfaces in a chronicle written decades later for John’s old enemies, the barons; most contemporary accounts agree he died of dysentery, the far less dramatic verdict most historians still accept today.

Tomb of King John of England in Worcester Cathedral
Tomb of King John of England in Worcester Cathedral

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1977: The Hillside Stranglers Claim Their First Victim in Los Angeles

Nineteen-year-old Yolanda Washington was last seen getting into a car near a Los Angeles intersection one October evening in 1977. The next morning her body was found on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway, the first known victim of the killers soon dubbed the Hillside Stranglers.

Her killers were cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who had lured her with the promise of a ride before attacking and strangling her. Washington, who worked as a waitress and sometimes turned to sex work, was the opening victim in a killing spree that would terrorise the city for months before the cousins were finally caught.

Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway
Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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On This Day in True Crime History
1853·"Thank You, My Lord, I Am Very Glad of That Sentence": Bushrangers Hanged in Melbourne
1884·He Swore to Shoot Whoever Bought His Farm, and Kept His Word: Hanged in Melbourne
1892·"The Only Man on the Station That I Liked": Hanged in Brisbane for a Torres Strait Murder
1892·A Mutilated Body in a Trunk: Sailor Hanged in Brisbane for Murder at Sea
1895·George Dean, Pardoned for Poisoning His Wife, Convicted of Perjury in Sydney
More Crime On This Day →

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