1975: The Yorkshire Ripper Claims His First Victim

Wilma McCann, a mother of four, left a Leeds nightclub to walk home on the night of 30 October 1975 and never made it back. She was found the next morning on a playing field, stabbed and beaten, the first of thirteen women Peter Sutcliffe would kill over the next five years as the Yorkshire Ripper evaded capture despite one of the largest manhunts in British police history.

The damage did not end with her death. In 2007, more than three decades later, her eldest daughter Sonia took her own life, never having recovered from losing her mother as a child. It meant the Ripper's toll outlived his capture and his sentencing, reaching into a generation he never touched directly.

Leeds Town Hall, Leeds.
Leeds Town Hall, Leeds.

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2017: The Twitter Killer: Nine Dismembered Bodies Found in a Freezer Near Tokyo

Takahiro Shiraishi trawled Twitter for young people who had posted about wanting to die, then invited them to his apartment in the Japanese city of Zama with promises to help them end their lives, or to die together. Between August and October 2017, he murdered eight young women and one man, the latter killed because he threatened to expose the crimes.

When one of the women disappeared, her brother searched her Twitter messages and helped police trace her movements to Shiraishi. Investigators arrived at his apartment on 30 October 2017 and discovered human remains concealed in cooler boxes and storage containers. The remains belonged to nine victims, aged between fifteen and twenty-six, whose disappearances had gone largely unconnected until the discovery.

Shiraishi admitted all nine killings and acknowledged that his victims had not consented to their deaths, despite his lawyers arguing otherwise. Sentenced to death in December 2020, he withdrew an appeal lodged by his lawyers and was executed by hanging on 27 June 2025, Japan's first execution in nearly three years.

Zama death pact slayings murder scene photo: released into the public domain.
Zama death pact slayings murder scene photo: released into the public domain.

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2018: Whitey Bulger: Boston's Most Wanted Mob Boss Beaten to Death Within Hours of a New Prison Transfer

James "Whitey" Bulger ran Boston's underworld for decades while secretly informing for the FBI, a betrayal that let his gang operate almost untouched. He vanished in 1994 after a tip-off from his own handler, spent sixteen years as a fugitive second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI's most wanted list, and was finally captured in California in 2011. Convicted in 2013 of racketeering and involvement in eleven murders, he was handed two life sentences.

Five years later, the 89 year old and wheelchair bound Bulger was abruptly transferred to a high security prison in West Virginia, his medical status quietly downgraded just weeks earlier. He arrived on 29 October 2018. Within hours, on this day in 2018, he was found beaten to death in his cell, attacked with a sock wrapped padlock and a shiv so savagely a law enforcement official called him unrecognisable.

Mafia hitman Fotios Geas was later identified as the man behind the killing and in 2024 was sentenced to 25 years for voluntary manslaughter. A relative of one of Bulger's own victims summed up the reaction of many: "He died the way I hoped he always was going to die."

James Joseph Bulger Jr portrait photograph 1953
James Joseph Bulger Jr portrait photograph 1953

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1880: Ned Kelly Sentenced to Hang in Melbourne

Ned Kelly, the leader of the Kelly Gang, had spent years outrunning the law across the Victorian bush, his armour and audacity turning him into both outlaw and folk hero. That ended after the siege at Glenrowan, where he was captured wounded and alone while the rest of his gang died in the shootout or the fire that followed.

He was tried in Melbourne for the murder of a police constable, and on this day in 1880 he was sentenced to death. Within weeks the man who had defied colonial police for years would be hanged, his legend only growing in the telling long after the rope did its work.

Ned Kelly in the dock courtroom illustration: colorised.
Ned Kelly in the dock courtroom illustration: colorised.

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On This Day in True Crime History

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