Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

John Wayne Glover had killed only a day earlier, but on 3 November 1989 he struck again, this time inside the Wesley Gardens Retirement Village in Belrose, in Sydney. His victim was 81 year old Olive Cleveland, an elderly resident he overpowered and killed with brutal speed, slamming her head into the concrete before strangling her with her own pantyhose.

It was a signature he had already used on earlier victims and would use again, earning him the name the Granny Killer in the press. Before leaving, he rifled through her handbag for $60 in cash, a pitiful sum set against a life taken in moments. The short gap between this killing and the one before it exposed just how quickly his violence was escalating, and how close he was to finally being caught.

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Australia Elder Abuse Murder NSW Robbery Serial Killer Sydney

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John Riches shot Harry Webb through the stomach after a drunken argument on the road to the goldfields near the town of Macedon, over who had the right to sleep under their cart. As he fell, Webb clung to a companion and gasped, “Jack done it, Jack’s done, mind him, mind him, oh, my dear wife Charlotte,” naming his killer with his last breath.

Riches ran but was chased down and beaten with his own gun by Webb’s widow. Tried in Melbourne, he was convicted of murder, and the jury added a recommendation of mercy, then refused to explain why when the judge pressed them. The recommendation went unanswered, and Riches was hanged in Melbourne on 3 November 1852.

Sleeping under the bullock rights mattered on the Victorian Goldfields

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Australia Execution Macedon Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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Soviet authorities refused to admit serial killers existed, so the public had no idea a predator was stalking the region’s railway stations, gouging out his victims’ eyes before vanishing back into the crowds. Andrei Chikatilo had been doing this for years by the time investigators finally grasped his pattern and threw everything they had at stopping him: roughly 350 officers in uniform and plain clothes, stationed on platforms and lurking among commuters at stations across the region.

It made no difference. On this day in 1990, a man named Viktor Tishchenko simply went to collect some train tickets and crossed paths with Chikatilo, becoming his latest victim despite the massive police presence meant to prevent exactly this. The killer’s capture was still weeks away.

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Europe Manhunt Murder Russia Serial Killer Unsolved

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Lewis Caine was shot dead amid the underworld bloodletting that tore through Melbourne through the late 1990s and 2000s, a conflict that would eventually claim dozens of lives across the city’s criminal networks. Keith Faure and Evangelos Goussis stood trial for his killing, two men drawn into a war where old scores were settled with bullets rather than courts.

On this day in 2005, a jury found both men guilty of Caine’s murder, making them the first people convicted over any of the gangland killings that had gripped the city for years. The verdict was a rare moment of legal reckoning in a saga otherwise marked by unsolved shootings and whispered reprisals. Faure and Goussis both lodged appeals against their convictions.

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

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Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Trial VIC

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