In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights
Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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Peter McKean, alias William McDonald, bunked with William ‘Yorkie’ Marriott at a shepherd’s hut near Kojonup, both working for the same local farmer. Marriott was known for quietly saving his wages, and in June 1872 he vanished. His body was found slumped behind a cart more than a week later, the head so badly gnawed by dogs that he could only be identified by a missing finger on his right hand.

McKean was arrested on circumstantial evidence and convicted at the Albany Circuit Court of robbing and killing Marriott with an axe. After his arrest, McKean claimed Marriott had been killed by ‘a vicious horse’. He never offered proof, and the excuse died with him on the scaffold.

He was hanged at Albany on 12 October 1872, the rope worked by a fellow convict before a crowd that included schoolchildren.

Carpenters axe
Carpenters axe

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The U.S. Department of Justice announced the acquisition of the military facility on Alcatraz Island on this day in 1933, marking the start of its transformation into a federal maximum-security penitentiary. It would be nearly a year before the island was formally designated a federal prison and the first inmates arrived.

Alcatraz was built for one purpose: to hold prisoners who had proven too disruptive, too dangerous, or too likely to escape from every other federal institution. Surrounded by cold currents and strict discipline, it would soon house names like Al Capone and Robert Stroud, cementing its reputation as America’s most feared prison.

Coloried view of Alcatraz Island circa 1902-1905 (unknown author)
Coloried view of Alcatraz Island circa 1902-1905 (unknown author)

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Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was born in Venezuela on 12 October 1949, the son of a Marxist lawyer who named him after Lenin. Raised between a devoutly Catholic mother and a father devoted to revolutionary politics, he would grow up to become one of the most notorious political terrorists of the twentieth century.

As Carlos the Jackal, he carried out assassinations, bombings and hostage takings across Europe through the 1970s and into the 1980s, including the infamous 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. For years he evaded capture using a fake Peruvian passport bearing the alias Carlos Andres Martinez Torres, fitted with a deliberately poor photograph he later admitted was a likeness intentionally bad, designed to throw investigators off his trail. That very passport, seized by French police who did not yet know his real identity, is the reason the world came to know him only as Carlos.

Peruvian passport - real or fake?
Peruvian passport – real or fake?

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On This Day in True Crime History

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