1999: The Shooting at Gladstone Park That Lit the Fuse on the Melbourne Gangland War

Carl Williams was 29 and already dealing drugs when Jason Moran shot him in the stomach on this day at Gladstone Park, in Melbourne, over an $80,000 debt tied to a failed amphetamine batch. Jason and his brother Mark Moran were both present. Williams survived.

He did not forget it. The shooting became the spark for a bloody tit-for-tat campaign that grew into the Melbourne gangland war, a decade of killings across the city’s underworld that would eventually claim both Moran brothers among dozens of others, and send Williams himself to prison before his own murder behind bars.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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1988: The Melbourne Police Killings: Acquitted, Then Named Guilty by His Own Wife

In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights
Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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1891: The Bushranger Who Taught Ned Kelly His Trade Drowned in the Murray River

Harry Power was already a seasoned escaper and highway robber when, in 1869, he took on a teenage recruit: Ned Kelly, son of a sympathetic Irish family who sheltered him in the Ovens district. For a few months the pair stuck up coaches and squatters together, Power later boasting of hundreds of robberies, until Kelly broke away and Power carried on alone, eventually suspecting his young protege of helping police track him down.

Captured in 1870 after being betrayed by a relative of the Kelly family, Power served another fifteen years at Pentridge before his release in 1885. He spent his last years as a guide aboard the old prison hulk Success, now a museum ship, before drowning in the Murray River near Swan Hill in October 1891, his body found days later at Tyntynder. One newspaper suggested suicide, but the drowning of a man who had survived two prison escapes and a life of robbery without ever killing anyone was most likely a simple accident.

Bushranger Harry Power 1870s
Bushranger Harry Power 1870s

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1891: The Mace, the Madam, and a Melbourne Scandal That Never Died

In the early hours of 9 October 1891, the ceremonial mace vanished from Parliament House in Melbourne, the silver-plated symbol of the speaker’s authority gone from a locked case. A parliamentary engineer was seen that same day running from the building with a parcel the right size and shape to be the mace; he told police it was firewood, and with no proof against him the investigation stalled.

Thirteen months later newspapers claimed the mace had turned up in the parlour of a notorious madam who catered to visiting members of parliament, a story so delicious it triggered a formal Board of Inquiry. The board cleared the brothel but settled nothing else, and popular rumour simply shifted the blame onto the new Speaker, Thomas Bent, despite his having taken office only after the theft. The mace was never seen again, and whether it was a burglary or a parliamentary prank gone wrong remains Melbourne’s favourite unsolved mystery.

Parliamentry Mace Stolen: Credit: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 14517/P0001/39, O884.
Parliamentry Mace Stolen: Credit: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 14517/P0001/39, O884.

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On This Day in True Crime History

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