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

John Caldwell was a former British soldier, court martialled at Bangalore in India for stealing his own equipment and sentenced to seven years transportation. He arrived in Western Australia aboard the General Godwin, landing at Fremantle in 1854, and was granted a ticket of leave the following year. His sentence finally expired in July 1860, a free man again after years of convict servitude.

Within months he was convicted of assualt of a local person at Champion Bay. He was tried at the Supreme Court in Perth, sentenced to death, and hanged at the old Perth Gaol just nine days later on 13th Oct 1860, being buried at East Perth Cemetery.

Panter Tomb at East Perth Cemetery burial place of John Caldwell 1860

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Australia Colonial Crime Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Trial WA

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William Westwood was already notorious as Jackey Jackey, a bushranger transported twice and flogged repeatedly, when he helped lead the 1846 Cooking Pot Uprising on Norfolk Island, a desperate convict revolt sparked by brutal rations and treatment. In the chaos, three constables and an overseer were killed.

He was 26 when he was hanged on 13 October 1846, one of the largest mass executions in Australian penal history.

Death mask of William Westwood known as Jackey Jackey

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Australia Bushranging Execution Murder Norfolk Island Prison Riot

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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.

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Australia Drug Crime Gang Melbourne Organised Crime Shooting VIC

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Before dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, royal officers across France moved on hundreds of Knights Templar at once, arresting the warrior monks in their own preceptories under sealed orders opened simultaneously nationwide. King Philip the Fair, deeply in debt to the order he had once sworn to protect, accused its knights of heresy and secret blasphemous rites.

Under torture, many confessed to charges historians now regard as fabricated to justify seizing the order’s vast wealth. The arrests marked the beginning of the end for the Templars, who were suppressed within a few years and their leaders burned at the stake, and contributed to the enduring misfortune of the date of Friday the 13th.

Medieval illustration of the Grand Master of the Templars burning at the stake.

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Arrest Europe Execution France Political Crime Religious Persecution Torture

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