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

A drunken brawl at a Launceston public house turned deadly when William Brown, also known as Stockton, drew a knife and stabbed a man named James Stephens. The wounds were serious enough that a doctor testified to their severity at trial, and Brown was convicted of stabbing with intent to kill and sentenced to death, with no hope of mercy.

While he lay under sentence in Launceston gaol, word reached him that a relative back in England had left him a sum of money. Rather than let the inheritance go to waste, Brown arranged to bequeath it to a servant who had once worked alongside him as a splitter and sawyer on a property near the East Tamar. He was hanged on this day in 1853, his strange act of generosity settled just before the sentence was carried out.

Signing a last will and testament document with quill pen

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Assault Attempted Murder Australia Execution Launceston Prison TAS Trial

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James Watson, a pig dealer known locally as ‘Jimmy the pigman’, met two sandalwood cutters, John Maroney and William Watkins, on a bush track near Kojonup, Western Australia, on 1 May 1883. Within minutes Watkins shot him and crushed his skull with the gun’s stock, then piled the body onto a woodcutters’ fire that burned for days, the bones later raked from the ashes and reburied in the scrub.

At trial, Maroney’s own signed statement, in which he claimed he had only helped burn the corpse after watching Watkins shoot Watson, became the chief evidence against them both. Watkins’s counsel argued the case rested on circumstance alone, but the jury found both men guilty of wilful murder.

The pair were hanged in Perth on this day in 1883, neither accepting blame for the killing itself. Moments before the bolt was drawn, asked whether he still believed Maroney had lied in saying he fired the shot, Watkins answered firmly, “I do, sir”; Maroney, for his part, went to his death insisting, “I am innocent of this murder.”

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Australia Execution Kojonup Murder Perth Trial WA

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Kitty Hennessy lived in a tent at Prahran, outside Melbourne, with Alexander Ram, and her young son shared their bed. One night in August 1853, the boy witnessed a violent attack on his mother and was threatened with death if he revealed what had happened.

At trial, the boy gave his evidence through tears, telling the court his mother called his name once and then fell silent for good. The jury found Ram guilty of murder but recommended mercy, a plea the presiding judge said he could see no grounds for. Ram was hanged in Melbourne on 25 October 1853, as local newspapers noted was the seventh execution in twenty three days.

Ram never confessed to being conscious of what he was doing when he killed her, though his gaol chaplain believed him truly penitent before he went to the scaffold.

Canvas town tents and huts in South Melbourne 1850s

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Australia Domestic Violence Execution Melbourne Murder Prahran Trial VIC

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Michael Finnessy spent the afternoon of 26 September 1853 swinging between tenderness and menace, handing a neighbour his pistol and knife and then asking for them back, as he tried to win over Elizabeth Finnessy, the woman he lived with in a house off Little Bourke Street near the Queen’s Theatre in Melbourne. By evening, with the room lit only by candlelight, he asked her to speak to him, then shot her at point blank range in front of a shocked household.

As Elizabeth lay dying on the floor, Finnessy tried to finish what he had started, raising the pistol by its butt to strike her skull. A neighbour wrestled it from him, but not before Finnessy snarled, “You wretch, if I thought you was not settled, I would finish you now.” She died minutes later, begging only to see a priest.

The cruellest twist came at his execution. Finnessy already had a wife, whom he had deserted for Elizabeth, and she stood outside the gaol gates that October morning, asking strangers to let her see his body. He was hanged in Melbourne on 25 October 1853, one of seven men executed there within just twenty three days.

Little Bourke Street, Melbourne: Street Scene 1863

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Australia Domestic Violence Execution Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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