VIC - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1894: Caught Serving Poisoned Tea: Martha Needle Hanged in Melbourne for a Family Poisoning Spree

Martha Needle had already buried her husband and both young daughters, each death blamed on a mysterious wasting illness, when she turned her attention to the family of her fiance, Otto Juncken. Months before her arrest she fed his brother Louis arsenic, and when his only surviving brother also sickened, doctors found arsenic disguised as rat poison in his vomit. Police lay in wait and caught Needle in the act, offering him a cup of tea laced with ten grains of poison.

Tried for Louis’s murder, her lawyer argued that she suffered fits of unconsciousness and should not be held responsible, but an insanity plea was dismissed. Convicted with no recommendation for mercy, Needle was hanged in Melbourne on 22 October 1894. Exhumations later found arsenic in the bodies of her husband and both daughters as well, confirming a killing spree that had gone undetected for years. She left everything she owned to Otto, the man who had stood by her to the end.

Martha Needle: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 516/P0000, Central Register of Female Prisoners, register nos. 5926–6415 (1891–1896).

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1858: He Swallowed Her Earrings to Hide the Evidence: Hanged at Geelong for the Green Tent Murder

Owen McQueeny was a wandering Irish robber with one sightless eye who spent weeks haunting the proprietress of the Green Tent, a grocery and tavern serving gold diggers on a track near Geelong, Victoria. Elizabeth Lowe, a young widow raising two small children alone, had already told a passing carrier she feared the man and his talk of pistols. That July in 1858, McQueeny shot her dead and vanished with her jewellery.

Travellers soon reported a dead-eyed swagman heading for Geelong loaded with the dead woman’s distinctive earrings, and police closed in fast. Awaiting trial, McQueeny was caught hiding the earrings by swallowing them, retrieving them from the gaol’s waste tub and passing them to a departing cellmate to smuggle out for safekeeping. He was convicted of her murder and hanged at Geelong on 20 October 1858, freely confessing to a string of other robberies while insisting to the last that he had not killed her.

As the death warrant was read to him he only shrugged, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” convinced to the very end that public dislike of hanging would see him reprieved.

Sly grog shanty on Victorian goldfields tavern scene

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1902: The Light in the Window: Hanged in Melbourne for a Plot Hatched with His Married Lover

August Tisler worked for market gardener Edward Sangal, and became his employer’s wife’s lover long before Sangal’s body was pulled from the family well outside Melbourne, his throat cut. Tisler’s written confession described how the wife lifted a blind to show him a lit window, the signal that it was safe to come in and kill her husband, and how she then calmly staged the death as a suicide, leaving his slippers by the well so police would believe he had drowned himself.

At trial, Tisler repeated that confession almost word for word, while Selina Sangal denied any part in the plan, insisting she had been paralysed with fear as she heard her husband call her name during the struggle. A jury convicted them both and sentenced them to death, but Selina’s execution was deferred because she was close to giving birth. Tisler alone was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on this day in 1902, the drop breaking his neck instantly.

He showed remorse for the killing itself, telling the sheriff on the scaffold, “Whatever I have done in this world I am prepared to suffer for now.”

August Tisler: Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), Central Register for Male Prisoners, 29937–30336 (1902–1903), VPRS 515/P0000.

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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.

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