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

Susannah Candy was walking home along Stirling Highway in Perth when she accepted a lift from David and Catherine Birnie, unaware of the danger awaiting her. She was taken to the couple’s home, held captive and forced to write letters to her family claiming she had run away to Queensland with friends.

On 20 October 1986, Susannah was murdered by the couple, who subsequently buried her body in a shallow grave in a State Forest. The letters, posted from Perth and Fremantle, led her family to believe she was safe for weeks, concealing the terrible truth of what had happened to her.

Girl writing a letter on white paper with a black pen

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Australia Claremont Fremantle Kidnapping Murder Perth Serial Killer WA

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Istvan ‘Steve’ Gulyas ran a dating agency out of Sunbury, on the outskirts of Melbourne, that police suspected was really a front for a brothel. He was also a friend of Nik Radev, a standover figure already gunned down in the city’s escalating underworld war.

That connection made Gulyas a marked man. On 20 October 2003 he and his de facto wife were found shot dead inside their home, both killed in what police treated as a deliberate execution rather than a robbery gone wrong.

The case became one of several unsolved or unresolved killings tied to the broader Melbourne gangland conflict of the late 1990s and 2000s, with no one ever convicted over the double murder.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

⬅ See all events from 19 October

Australia Cold Case Execution Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Sunbury Unsolved VIC

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Legend has it that King John of England was not felled by illness but by a monk’s revenge. Staying at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire that October, John allegedly threatened to starve his own kingdom with crushing bread prices; a monk is said to have milked a toad for its venom, mixed it into a cup of ale, and drunk from it himself before serving the king, to prove the drink was safe. The monk reportedly died first in the abbey infirmary, and John followed him within hours.

The king, already infamous for the Magna Carta he was forced to sign and then tried to annul, died at Newark Castle on 19 October 1216 as a rebel army closed in on his crumbling kingdom. The poisoning story only surfaces in a chronicle written decades later for John’s old enemies, the barons; most contemporary accounts agree he died of dysentery, the far less dramatic verdict most historians still accept today.

Tomb of King John of England in Worcester Cathedral

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England Legend Lincolnshire Medieval History Poisoning UK Unsolved

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The Guildford Four were four young people wrongly convicted over a pub bombing campaign carried out by the IRA in Guildford, England, in 1974, and sentenced to life in prison after detectives extracted confessions during lengthy, uncharged interrogations. Three of the convicted were in their early twenties; the youngest was still a teenager.

Within a few years an IRA unit known as the Balcombe Street Gang admitted in custody that they, not the four, had carried out the attack, but the confession was dismissed and the convictions stood. It took more than a decade, and the discovery that police had secretly rewritten interview notes to match the statements used at trial, before the case collapsed. On 19 October 1989, after 15 years behind bars, the Guildford Four walked free.

Gerry Conlon, One of the Guildford Four, wrongly jailed for the Guildford pub bombings in Surrey, England, at a book launch in London on June 11, 1990. | ID 11134005 © David Fowler | Dreamstime.com — ID 11134005 © David Fowler | Dreamstime.com

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England Europe Exoneration Police Corruption Terrorism Trial UK Wrongful Conviction

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