Europe - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1792: Five Days of Mob Killing End as the September Massacres Claim Half of Paris Prisons

Over five days in September 1792, mobs stormed nine prisons across Paris and carried out mass summary executions of those held within. The killings were brutal in their indiscriminate reach: roughly half the prison population was slaughtered before the violence finally subsided.

An estimated three-quarters of the victims were not political prisoners at all, but common criminals, forgers, women, and children. The September Massacres remain one of the darkest episodes of the French Revolutionary period.

Engraving showing the massacre of Princess de Lamballe

⬅ See all events from 6 September

Europe France Mass Killing Massacre Paris Political Crime Riot

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1981: Andrei Chikatilo Resumes Killing After a Three-Year Pause

Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had committed his first murder in 1978, preying on young victims lured from rail stations and bus depots around Rostov-na-Donu. By 1981, after a three-year hiatus that investigators could scarcely explain, he resumed killing. Poverty and the decay of Soviet society made his victims easy to isolate: young people drifting toward cities with no contacts, no money, and no one to report them missing.

Chikatilo would not be caught for nearly another decade. In 1984, police briefly detained him but a botched blood typing test cleared him. He was convicted of theft and served three months. By 1990, when he was finally arrested, he had murdered at least 50 people. Soviet authorities had actively suppressed public warnings during the investigation, maintaining that serial murder was ideologically incompatible with communist society.

⬅ See all events from 3 September

Europe Execution Murder Rostov-na-Donu Russia Serial Killer Soviet Union Trial

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1792: The September Massacres begin in Paris

During the September Massacres of 1792, revolutionary crowds swept through Paris prisons and religious institutions, killing prisoners and others regarded as enemies of the Revolution.

At the Carmelite Convent, Roman Catholic clergy imprisoned for refusing to swear allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy were brought out and killed, among them several bishops.

The violence formed part of a broader wave of extrajudicial executions that engulfed Paris over several days, as fears of counter-revolution and foreign invasion fed a climate of panic and vengeance.

Those killed at the convent were later recognised by the Catholic Church as the Martyrs of September and were beatified in 1926.

⬅ See all events from 2 September

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1666: The Great Fire of London Begins on Pudding Lane

In the early hours of 2 September 1666, a fire broke out at the Pudding Lane bakery of Thomas Farriner in the City of London. Driven by strong winds, the blaze consumed around 80 percent of the old city before it was brought under control on 6 September. Though attributed to an accident at the bakery, the disaster ignited a desperate search for culprits.

Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker from Rouen, confessed to starting the fire. His confession was riddled with impossibilities: he had not arrived in England until two days after the fire broke out, and he described throwing a fire grenade through a window at the Farriner bakery, which had no windows. With nationalism inflamed by the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a scapegoat was needed, and Hubert, a foreigner in a hostile city, was hanged for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

⬅ See all events from 2 September

Arson Disaster Europe Execution London Political Crime UK Wrongful Conviction

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