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

Thomas Collins had been transported from Cork on the convict ship Canada, arriving in New South Wales in 1815, and within a year was standing trial in Sydney for burglary. He and two accomplices had broken into a shop in O’Connell Street and made off with baskets of tobacco, burying part of it in the earth near Farm Cove before selling a basket on for a watch and cash. The case against him rested on the evidence of Edward Dempsey, a fellow gang member turned Crown witness, and Collins was convicted of burglary that September.

Days later he was back in the dock on an entirely separate charge: robbing a carter on the Parramatta Road the previous July, in a predawn ambush that saw three carts stopped and their drivers beaten to the ground. Dempsey gave evidence again, and Collins was convicted a second time.

He was hanged in Sydney on this day in 1816, alongside two other condemned men.

Collins confessed his guilt before his death; the record states that all three men executed that morning died penitent.

Horse-drawn omnibuses on Parramatta Road, Sydney, c. 1870–1875. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

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Australia Convict History Execution NSW Robbery Sydney Trial

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Twenty male convicts newly arrived from Ireland, along with one pregnant woman, vanished from the settlement at Rose Hill, near Parramatta, on this day in 1791, taking their tools, bedding and a week’s rations with them. Passing settlers who saw them pass asked where they were bound; the convicts answered that they were walking to China, certain that a great river lay only about a hundred miles to the north, beyond which a copper coloured people would receive and treat them kindly.

An officer and a detachment of troops were sent after them, tracing the group as far as the harbour before Sydney before losing the trail entirely. Within a week most had stumbled back starving and half naked, having survived on wild berries and shrubs, while one or two of the runaways were killed by spears from the people whose country they had wandered into.

Watkin Tench, recording the episode, could not resist a final barb: insisting he intended no “illiberal national reflection” on any people, he added that it was certain every one of the escapees was Irish.

Portrait of Watkin Tench: Narrator of the establishment of the Port Jackson colony(Sydney)

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Australia Colonial History Convict History Escape Manhunt NSW Parramatta Sydney

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Daniel Moowattin was raised from infancy by the colony’s own flogger and hangman, grew up fluent in English manners, and became a trusted bush guide to the botanist George Caley. In 1810 Caley took him to London, where society was charmed by his polished English and the latest fashions; one newspaper called him, admiringly, “a black beau.” He even sang his own songs at a London party before confessing he longed for home, telling a companion he found more pleasure under a gum tree with his own people than anywhere in England.

He returned to the colony in 1812 and drifted between farm labour and life in the bush. That August, a teenage girl named Hannah Russell was walking alone on a road near Parramatta when, she testified, Moowattin dragged her into the scrub, beat and assaulted her, robbed her of money, then beat her again before a passing stockman frightened him off.

Under the colony’s rules, Aboriginal people could not ordinarily be tried in its courts, but the men who knew Moowattin argued he no longer counted as one of them: he dressed, worked and spoke like a settler. On that reasoning he became the first Aboriginal man ever tried before a court in New South Wales, and on this day in 1816 he was hanged in Sydney alongside two men convicted of highway robbery, the first Aboriginal person legally executed in colonial Australia.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie claimed in his records that all three “confessed their crimes… and died penitent.”

Port Jackson, a Native Boy; contemporary to Moowattin, William Westall, 1802. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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Brian Wells was a pizza delivery driver in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was sent on what looked like a routine order in August 2003. He never made it back. Police found him with a metal collar locked around his neck, wired to a bomb, after he had already robbed a bank under its threat following a bizarre set of written instructions. The device detonated before anyone could free him, killing him in the street.

The case baffled investigators for years until they identified Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong as the driving force behind the plot. On this day in 2010 she was convicted of armed bank robbery, conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and using a destructive device, with prosecutors naming her the mastermind who had engineered the entire scheme that led to Wells’s death.

Pizza Delivery gone wrong

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Bombing Conspiracy Murder Pennsylvania Robbery Trial USA

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