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

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Two days after shooting cabdriver Paul Stine dead in San Francisco, the Zodiac Killer sent the San Francisco Chronicle a taunting letter dated October 13, 1969. Inside was a torn piece of Stine’s bloodstained shirt, offered as proof the killer was the same man terrorising the Bay Area, not a copycat.

The letter mocked police for failing to catch him despite patrols flooding the area that night, and promised more killings to come. It remains one of several pieces of physical evidence tied to an identity that, more than fifty years on, has never been conclusively proven.

Symbolism
Symbolism

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

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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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On This Day in True Crime History

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