1877: Crazy Horse Fatally Bayoneted at Fort Robinson

Crazy Horse, the celebrated Lakota war leader who had helped defeat George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn just a year earlier, was fatally stabbed with a bayonet at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, on 5 September 1877. He was 36 years old.

He had surrendered to U.S. Army forces earlier that year, ending years of armed resistance on the northern plains. Brought to the fort under the pretence of a meeting, he was seized and stabbed during a struggle, dying that night. The killing marked the end of one of the most formidable military careers in the history of the Lakota people.

Crazy Horse and his band of Indians on their way to surrender (1877)

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1842: Man Hanged at Melbourne for the Killing of an Overseer at Mount Rouse

On 5 September 1842, a man known as Figara Alkapareet was hanged in the Port Phillip District for his alleged part in the killing of an overseer named Codd at Mount Rouse two years earlier. Witnesses placed Figara among a group of men who attacked Codd, although questions surrounded his identification and Figara maintained that it was his brother who had been at Mount Rouse while he was elsewhere washing sheep.    After a jury found him guilty, Figara was sentenced to death. Contemporary accounts described him as meeting his fate with a sense of “natural resignation,” apparently accepting his approaching death without outward resistance.    His execution provoked criticism in the newspapers, which questioned the justice and usefulness of the punishment amid the violent conflict and dispossession of the period. Even at the time, Figara’s death prompted debate over whether the law was being applied justly.

View from Mount Rouse summit over Southern Grampians plain

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1975: Gerald Ford Survives Assassination Attempt in Sacramento

On 5 September 1975, President Gerald Ford was leaving a meeting at the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, California, when Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, pointed a loaded .45-calibre pistol at him from close range. A Secret Service agent grabbed the weapon before it could be fired, and Ford was unharmed.

Fromme was arrested on the spot. She was later tried and convicted of attempted assassination of the President, receiving a life sentence. It was the first of two attempts on Ford’s life within a single month, the second coming just 17 days later in San Francisco.

Gerald Ford portrait in the Michigan State Capitol at 100 N Capitol Avenue in Lansing, Michigan | ID 103716497 © Glenn Nagel | Dreamstime.com

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1994: NSW Politician John Newman Shot Dead Outside His Cabramatta Home

At 9:30 pm on 5 September 1994, Labor MP John Newman was shot twice and killed instantly in the car park of his Woods Avenue home in Cabramatta, in the western suburbs of Sydney.

His fiancee, Lucy Wang, was present but saw little due to the speed of the attack; she reported a hooded man in an army-style jacket who fired four shots and fled in a waiting car. Newman had represented Cabramatta in the NSW Legislative Assembly since 1986 and had campaigned aggressively against organised crime and drug trafficking in the area. Newman was later given a state funeral. He was 47 years old.

Grey car parked in front of a garage at night

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On This Day in True Crime History

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