Kidnapping - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1986: Forced to Write Home That She Had Gone Away: a Perth Murder by the Birnies

Susannah Candy was walking home along Stirling Highway in Perth when she accepted a lift from David and Catherine Birnie, unaware of the danger awaiting her. She was taken to the couple's home, held captive and forced to write letters to her family claiming she had run away to Queensland with friends.

On 20 October 1986, Susannah was murdered by the couple, who subsequently buried her body in a shallow grave in a State Forest. The letters, posted from Perth and Fremantle, led her family to believe she was safe for weeks, concealing the terrible truth of what had happened to her.

Girl writing a letter on white paper with a black pen

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Australia Claremont Fremantle Kidnapping Murder Perth Serial Killer WA

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1769: Kidnappers Bay: Captain Cook Names a New Zealand Inlet After a Botched Abduction

On 15 October 1769, during his first voyage along the coast of New Zealand, Lieutenant James Cook watched a group of Maori men attempt to seize a servant from his landing party and haul him away in a canoe. The attempt failed and the servant was recovered, but Cook marked the spot on his chart with a name that stuck: Kidnappers Bay.

According to the Maori version of events recorded at the time, the men believed they were not abducting a stranger at all, but rescuing a Maori boy they thought was being held captive aboard the English ship. The misunderstanding, born of two cultures reading the same scene in entirely different ways, turned a rescue attempt into what the English recorded as a kidnapping.

⬅ See all events from 15 October

Colonial History Exploration Kidnapping New Zealand

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1960: Caught by a Picnic Blanket: Australia's First Kidnap-for-Ransom Killer Arrested at Colombo

Eight-year-old Graeme Thorne was snatched walking to school in Sydney in 1960, just a day after his family’s lottery win made headlines. Six weeks later his body was found wrapped in a tartan picnic blanket on vacant land at Seaforth, still in his school uniform, gagged and bound with string.

Forensic scientists traced the blanket to one of only 3,000 ever woven at an Onkaparinga mill, then matched rare tree pollen and pink mortar scraped from the body to a single property at Clontarf, once home to a blue Ford, a Pekingese dog and a blonde-haired wife. By the time police reached the house, its occupant, Hungarian migrant Stephen Bradley, had already sailed for London with his family aboard the SS Himalaya. Two Sydney detectives were waiting for him when the ship docked at Colombo, and he was brought back to face extradition and trial.

Forensic hair evidence collected at crime scene

⬅ See all events from 10 October

Australia Colombo Extradition Forensic Science Kidnapping Manhunt Murder NSW Sri Lanka Sydney

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1972: The Teacher Who Kicked a Hole in the Kidnappers' Van and Saved Six Children

At a one-teacher school in rural Victoria, two unemployed plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, burst in with a sawn-off shotgun and forced 20-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and her six young pupils into a van, demanding a million dollar ransom. Victoria's premier agreed to pay, and the education minister himself waited at the handover point with police hidden nearby, but the kidnappers never returned to collect it.

Left alone with the children overnight, Gibbs kicked out a door panel with her heavy platform boots and led the girls through the dark bush to safety. Eastwood and Boland were run down in a manhunt; Eastwood pleaded guilty and was jailed, while Boland was convicted after three trials.

It was not the end of the story. Eastwood escaped prison years later and staged a second mass kidnapping of a teacher and nine pupils, and while back behind bars he killed a fellow inmate in what was ruled self-defence.

White camper van parked on dirt pull-off overlooking rural hills

⬅ See all events from 6 October

Australia Escape Kidnapping Prison Ransom Trial VIC

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