On this date in 1986, 22-year-old Mary Neilson visited a house on Moorhouse Street in Perth to buy car tyres advertised for sale. The advertisement was a trap. David and Catherine Birnie held her captive before taking her to nearby bushland, where they murdered her. Mary was the first of at least four women killed by the couple over the following weeks. Their killing spree ended when a later captive escaped and alerted police, exposing the Birnies’ crimes and leading to their arrest.
In Montreal in October 1970, armed members of the Front de Liberation du Quebec forced their way into the home of British trade commissioner James Cross and seized him at gunpoint, demanding the release of jailed militants in exchange for his life.
The kidnapping tipped Quebec into what became known as the October Crisis. Days later a second cell abducted and killed a provincial cabinet minister, and the federal government responded by invoking the War Measures Act, suspending civil liberties and deploying troops onto Canadian streets for the first time in peacetime history. Cross himself was held for weeks before his captors negotiated safe passage to Cuba in return for his release.
In July 1960, nine-year-old Graeme Thorne was snatched from a street in Sydney's Bondi, Australia's first known kidnap for ransom case, and murdered within a day. His body turned up six weeks later at Seaforth, wrapped in a picnic blanket that would ultimately betray his killer.
Forensic scientists traced the rare blanket through its manufacturer, dyed Pekingese hairs, two uncommon tree species and flecks of pink mortar to a house at Clontarf owned by Hungarian immigrant Stephen Bradley. By the time police called on 3 October, Bradley had already sailed for England; he was arrested when his ship reached Ceylon and extradited to stand trial. He claimed the boy had simply suffocated in his car boot, a story investigators demolished by rigging a breathing mask to the same boot and drawing air from it for seven hours straight.
Bradley pleaded not guilty to murder but admitted the kidnapping and had earlier signed a confession he later retracted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in custody seven years later.
Carol DaRonch had already escaped once. In 1974 a man posing as a police officer lured her to his car, snapped a handcuff on her wrist and tried to force her into it; she fought free, leapt from the moving vehicle and ran.
Months later she stood in a police lineup with two other women and picked out the same face: Ted Bundy. He was arrested and charged with her attempted kidnapping, denied any wrongdoing, and waived his right to a jury trial, gambling that a judge alone would be less swayed by the growing suspicion linking him to a string of disappearances across several states.
DaRonch's escape and her identification became one of the threads that eventually unravelled Bundy's double life, feeding directly into the case that first put him behind bars.
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