Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 10
James Yardsley was drinking keg beer with fellow farm servants in a hut near Deloraine on the night of 26 July 1851 when, after a separate scuffle outside, he strode back in and told Robert Hudson he would be his “butcher to night.” He stabbed Hudson three times with a pocket knife while another labourer, Bush, wrestled for the blade and begged him to stop; Hudson collapsed with wounds to his chest, arm and back.
Convicted of wounding with intent to do bodily harm, Yardsley was hanged at Launceston on this day in 1851, the same port where he had landed as a transported convict sixteen years earlier.
When his employer confronted him that night, Yardsley answered flatly, “I’ve done it, and am willing to suffer,” and later said he was ready to “die on the gallows for it.”
Margery Campbell, an Irish woman also known as Margaret Docherty, was lured into William Burke’s lodging house in Edinburgh on 31 October 1828 after Burke struck up a conversation with her on the street, claiming a shared homeland. A night of drinking followed, and before it ended Burke and his accomplice William Hare had suffocated her, the sixteenth victim in a killing spree that had run through the city for months.
Her body was found hidden under straw by fellow lodgers Ann and James Gray, who went straight to the police. The discovery ended the partnership for good: Hare turned Crown witness to save himself, and Burke went to the gallows for a murder that finally could not be concealed.
Joe Governor had been on the run for fifteen weeks when New South Wales declared him and his brother Jimmy outlaws under the Felons Apprehension Act, a law that stripped them of the right to surrender and made it lawful for any armed settler to shoot them dead. The brothers had been linked to a string of killings that winter, nine people dead across the colony, before the manhunt swept north toward Singleton.
At dawn on this day in 1900, brothers Joe and George Wilkinson found Joe asleep on their own property near Singleton and called on him to surrender. He woke, ran, and the men exchanged fire until he fell dead into a waterhole, the chase finally over after months of pursuit.
The coronial inquest that followed did more than clear the Wilkinsons of blame: it congratulated them, with the coroner thanking them for “ridding the country of so dangerous a brute” while the crowd outside broke into cheers. A rumour swept the town that Joe’s head had been removed and preserved for identification; it was false, officials denied it emphatically, but the story continued to circulate.
Joe Governor newspaper illustration Evening News Sydney 1900
Peter and Doug Morgan, identical twins born in regional Victoria on this day in 1953, grew up to pull off more than twenty armed robberies across the state as the so-called After Dark Bandit, a single figure police hunted for two years without ever suspecting he was two men. Wearing matching clothes and disguises, the brothers struck rural banks and betting shops in towns just twenty minutes apart, sending detectives chasing a suspect who seemed able to be in two places at once. Their habit of striking near closing time and escaping into the bush under cover of darkness earned them their nickname.
The ruse unravelled on 27 April 1979, when Peter robbed the Heathcote bank for a third time and shot veteran constable Ray Koch twice, leaving him fighting for his life. Fleeing into the bush as nearly two hundred officers swarmed the area, he resurfaced the next morning walking through Bendigo with a suitcase, telling a suspicious unarmed constable, Rick Hasty, that he was headed to Melbourne to watch the football. Inside the case Hasty found a sawn-off shotgun, stolen cash and an old man’s mask. When Morgan drew a pistol, he was unable to fire it, and as Hasty pinned him against a wall, he reportedly said, “You’ve got me, I just made you a hero.”
The investigation took another extraordinary turn when detectives searching Peter’s farm discovered a photograph of him sitting beside another man with the same face, moustache and sideburns. Detective Patrick Brear realised the truth and telephoned his partner: the elusive After Dark Bandit was not one man but two. Peter had an identical twin brother, Doug, and the pair had been using their matching appearances to outwit police for nearly two years.
