1965: The Situation Got Out of Hand: A Moors Murder Committed Before a Horrified Witness

In October 1965, Ian Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at a Manchester railway station, telling him he had been invited home for a drink. At the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, Brady had Myra Hindley fetch her brother-in-law David Smith under the pretext of sharing miniature wine bottles. Smith arrived in time to witness Brady strike Evans with a hatchet and strangle him with electrical cord, screams tearing through the house as Hindley called out for help.

Smith helped move the body to a spare room before fleeing home, where he was sick and told his wife everything. He contacted police the next morning armed with a screwdriver and bread knife in case Brady came after him. Officers found Evans’ body behind a locked door, and as he dressed for arrest, Brady offered a chillingly understated explanation: he and Evans “had a row and the situation got out of hand.” The killing exposed what became known as the Moors Murders.

Shocked male witness after fatal late night accident
Shocked male witness after fatal late night accident

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

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1983: The Body Was in the Backyard the Whole Time: a Melbourne Wife Murder Hidden in a Barrel for Two Decades

When Edwina Boyle vanished from her home on this day in Carrum Downs, in Melbourne‘s southeast, in 1983, her husband Frederick Boyle produced a note saying she had run off with a truck driver. His mistress moved in two days later, and neighbours pitied him for raising two daughters alone. All the while Edwina’s body sat metres away, sealed in a green metal barrel in the backyard where the family held parties and guests leaned against it without ever knowing.

The secret held for 23 years, until Boyle’s future son-in-law grew suspicious of his odd anxiety about the drum and cut it open, finding clothing, then later a hessian bag of human bones including a skull. Boyle was convicted of murder in 2008 and sentenced to 21 years, having shot his wife in the head.

He initially claimed he found her dead and panicked, but later admitted he strangled and shot her, telling the court, “my wife died in a terrible way and I was not going to let her remains be thrown down the tip like garbage”.

Hidden in plain sight for 20 years.
Hidden in plain sight for 20 years.

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1860: A Mercy Petition Backed by the Bishop of Adelaide Could Not Save a Man From the Gallows

John Jones, a hutkeeper on a station near Mount Joy in South Australia’s remote Eyre Peninsula, was found dead in his hut in May 1860, his skull broken and the hut stripped of flour, tea and clothing. The accused was convicted at the Supreme Court in Adelaide largely on the testimony of a young companion who admitted taking part in the killing himself.

Before the execution, around 400 citizens, headed by the Lord Bishop of Adelaide, signed a memorial asking the government to remit the death sentence. He had been tried and condemned under British law newly imposed on his people, with little understanding of its workings; the petition failed regardless. He was taken back across the Eyre Peninsula and hanged at Streaky Bay on 5 October 1860, near the district where the killing had occurred

Portrait of Augustus Short
Portrait of Augustus Short

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On This Day in True Crime History

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