John Jordan, a young shoemaker, and farmhand Patrick McDonough spent months plotting to rob an elderly settler named Zimram Youram, using a pair of boots Jordan was making for him as their pretext to keep calling at his isolated hut near Launceston. When an attempt to drug the old man failed, McDonough bludgeoned him with a wrench hammer while Jordan looked on, and the pair ransacked the hut for his hidden savings, walking away with about 17 pounds in coins and notes.

The two men quickly turned on each other. Jordan's confession named McDonough as the killer, while McDonough claimed Jordan had struck the blow. A powerful defence swayed the jury and McDonough walked free of the murder charge, though he was held for the robbery; Jordan was convicted and condemned. He was hanged at Launceston on this day in 1848.

On the scaffold, Jordan insisted he had not struck the fatal blow and had tried to stop the killing, declaring that it would one day be discovered who truly committed it. His last words, delivered calmly to the crowd, were "God bless you all."

Matthew Mahide held up the property of George Stancombe with his face blackened and a weapon in hand, the kind of disguised, armed bushranging that terrorised rural Tasmanian households in the 1840s. Convicted of the offence, he was sentenced to death.

He was hanged at Launceston on 7 November 1848. On the scaffold he said nothing at all, appearing, in the words of a witness, more dead than alive as the hangman did his work. Rather than being sent for dissection, his body was carried to the Crown Inn for a wake kept after the custom of his country, before burial in the Catholic burial ground.

Weeks after the gunfight that made Tombstone, Arizona infamous, two of the men who had fired the shots found themselves behind bars instead of being hailed as lawmen. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were jailed on this day in 1881 as hearings opened into the killings outside the O.K. Corral, their claim of having acted within the law now the very question the court had to decide.

The shootout had already split the town between those who saw the Earp faction as defenders of order and those who saw cold-blooded killers in badges. With the hearing looming, that argument moved from the street into the courtroom, and the men who had walked away from the gunfight unscathed now faced the possibility of hanging for it.

Richard Ramirez had terrorised California through 1984 and 1985, breaking into homes at night to kill, and when he was finally sentenced on this day in 1989, the courtroom saw the same chilling indifference that had defined his trial. He received nineteen death sentences for his string of murders, one of the largest capital verdicts in California history.

Asked for comment afterwards, Ramirez shrugged off the sentence entirely. He told reporters, "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland." He was sent to death row to await an execution that, due to decades of appeals, never came; he died of natural causes in 2013 while still awaiting it.

A seven-man gang planned to smash into the Millennium Dome's diamond exhibition, grab a haul worth 350 million pounds, and roar off down the Thames on a speedboat. It was a bold escape plan for a bold crime, but the gang never got the chance to use it.

Police had been watching for weeks. Surveillance cameras had already filmed members of the crew casing and videoing the exhibition beforehand, and on this day in 2000, a 100-strong police operation was waiting the moment they struck, ready to close in before the gang could reach the river.

Had they somehow broken through and made it to their boat, there was one final twist waiting for them: the diamonds on display that day were fakes, the real stones having already been quietly removed for safekeeping.