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

1890: The Birth of the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie, 1890

On this date in 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, the woman who would become Agatha Christie and the best selling novelist in history after the Bible and Shakespeare. She went on to write 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, creating enduring figures such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Her own life carried a strange echo of her fiction: in 1926 she vanished for eleven days, sparking a nationwide manhunt, before being found registered under an assumed name at a Yorkshire hotel, an episode that remains unexplained to this day.

London, Great Britain -May 25, 2016: Agatha Christie Memorial, memorial to author and playwright Agatha Christie, designed by sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies | ID 153687923 © Swetlana Mehlfeld | Dreamstime.com — ID 153687923 © Swetlana Mehlfeld | Dreamstime.com

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Author Europe Mystery True Crime Literature UK

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1826: Property Crimes, Not Murder: Seven Men Hanged in Hobart in a Single Morning

On 15 September 1826, seven convicts, George Brace, John McFarlane, James Edwards, Thomas Balfour, John Dadd, John Clark and Patrick Brown, were hanged together in Hobart, the second of three mass executions carried out that month under Chief Justice John Pedder.

Unlike the seven hanged just two days earlier for murder, not one of this group had killed anyone. Balfour, McFarlane and Edwards went to the gallows for absconding into the bush and robbing settler William Holdship; Brace was hanged for robbery, Dadd and Clark for burglary in Ross, and Brown for stealing sheep, a crime that under Britain’s Bloody Code carried the same legal weight as taking a human life.

The scale of the executions reflected both the severity of imported English law and Governor George Arthur’s determined push to impose discipline on the penal colony. Rather than hang prisoners as they were convicted, the Supreme Court held sentences over and carried them out in batches: seven men on 13 September, seven more on the 15th, and a further nine on the 18th, accounting for nearly half of the 53 executions recorded in Van Diemen’s Land that year.

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Australia Burglary Bushranging Colonial Crime Execution Hobart Robbery TAS Theft Trial

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1866: The Sussex Street Mystery: A Dog Walk Leads to a Severed Head in Sydney

Eleven-year-old James Kirkpatrick was walking his dog behind Sussex Street in Sydney in September 1866 when he stumbled on a woman’s severed head half buried in a rubbish heap near Ebsworth’s tweed factory and Barker’s flour mills. Nearby lay her torso, its chest cavity completely emptied and the lower ribs charred. Despite police turning the rubbish heap over three times and combing the neighbourhood, no other body parts were ever recovered.

The case became known as the Sussex Street Mystery and gripped the colony as police pieced together the killing. It ended with the conviction and execution of a butcher, William Henry Scott, for the murder, making it one of colonial Australia’s most sensational and gruesome murder cases.

William Henry Scott under sentence of death 1867

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Australia Cold Case Execution Murder NSW Sydney Trial

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1861: Two Men Executed in the Wrong Place? A Widower Demands Answers

Two men were convicted of killing Margaret Ann Impett at Mount Wedge station in South Australia. Rather than being executed at the remote spot where the crime occurred, they were hanged at the Chiriroo police station near Venus Bay on Saturday, 14 September 1861, in front of a large gathering, where both men admitted their guilt.

Authorities had decided against transporting the condemned men the 20 to 30 miles to the actual murder site, citing a lack of available conveyance, a decision that left the execution taking place far from where Margaret Impett had died.

Her husband later wrote a furious public letter demanding to know why the men had not been executed on the spot, as he understood a recently passed law required. He branded the failure to enforce it a farce, asking who had dared to disregard the law of the land.

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Australia Colonial Crime Execution Mount Wedge Murder SA Trial Venus Bay

1890: The Birth of the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie, 1890

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1826: Property Crimes, Not Murder: Seven Men Hanged in Hobart in a Single Morning

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1866: The Sussex Street Mystery: A Dog Walk Leads to a Severed Head in Sydney

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1861: Two Men Executed in the Wrong Place? A Widower Demands Answers

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