2000: Melbourne Gangland War: Dino Dibra Ambushed and Shot Dead Outside His Own Home

Dino Dibra, 25, was one of the early casualties of Melbourne‘s gangland war. He was gunned down on this day the moment he stepped outside his home in Sunshine West, hit multiple times in what police believed was a professional, pre-planned hit rather than a chance confrontation.

Investigators were confident a hired shooter had been waiting for him, and suspicion quickly fell on Andrew Veniamin, a figure who would go on to be linked to several more killings as the underworld conflict spread across the city. Dibra’s murder became one of the opening chapters in a decade-long cycle of tit-for-tat violence that would eventually claim more than thirty lives.

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

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1969: A Bloodstained Scrap of Shirt: the Zodiac Killer Mails Proof to a San Francisco Newsroom

Two days after shooting cabdriver Paul Stine dead in San Francisco, the Zodiac Killer sent the San Francisco Chronicle a taunting letter dated October 13, 1969. Inside was a torn piece of Stine’s bloodstained shirt, offered as proof the killer was the same man terrorising the Bay Area, not a copycat.

The letter mocked police for failing to catch him despite patrols flooding the area that night, and promised more killings to come. It remains one of several pieces of physical evidence tied to an identity that, more than fifty years on, has never been conclusively proven.

Symbolism
Symbolism

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1988: The Melbourne Police Killings: Acquitted, Then Named Guilty by His Own Wife

In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights
Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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1880: The Enduring Bermagui Mystery: Five Men Vanish Without a Trace Off New South Wales

Geological surveyor Lamont Young, his assistant and three boatmen set out from Bermagui, New South Wales by night and would be last seen on this date, searching the coast for gold. Their boat would be found drifting empty near what would become known as Mystery Bay, its sail and anchor gone, loaded with heavy rocks, and a bullet hole through the hull.

What unsettled investigators most was not what was missing but what remained. A pair of spectacles sat neatly folded on a seat, none of the cargo was wet, and the holes in the planking had been punched outward from inside the boat, not in. No bodies, no weapon, and no sign of struggle were ever found, despite rewards, government inquiries and headlines across the British Empire. The five men were never seen again, and the mystery remains unsolved to this day.

Scene of the Bermagui Mystery
Scene of the Bermagui Mystery

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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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