1721: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away: Hanged at Tyburn for Returning from Transportation
John Meff was a housebreaker who had already cheated the gallows once, having been convicted and then transported to the colonies rather than executed. Read more →
1721: Executed at Twenty: The Soldier Who Claimed He Was Defending His Honour
William Casey, a young Guardsman only about twenty years old, was hanged in London on 11 September 1721 after being convicted of robbing a man named John Stone in a city park. Read more →
1863: The Escape-Proof Prison That Wasn’t: Captain Thunderbolt Breaks Out of Cockatoo Island
Frederick Wordsworth Ward, the bushranger known as Captain Thunderbolt, was serving time on Sydney‘s Cockatoo Island, a prison ringed by harbour currents and sheer sandstone cliffs and widely declared impossible to escape. Read more →
1978: The Umbrella That Killed: Assassinated with a Ricin Pellet
Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his leg. Read more →
