In the early hours, the killer known as Jack the Ripper struck twice within the same hour. His third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut and still bleeding, her killer likely interrupted before he could mutilate her further. Denied his ritual, he found a fourth victim within the hour: Catherine Eddowes, whose body was left with her intestines arranged over her shoulder and part of her womb removed.

Weeks later, a Londoner opened a parcel addressed simply “From Hell” to find half a preserved kidney inside, accompanied by a taunting letter. Tests suggested it may have belonged to Eddowes herself, though the claim was never proven and the killer was never caught.

Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes
Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes

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John Rheuben had lived with Fanny Hardwick for two years, supporting her mother and child, until he turned her out and she took up with another man. Furious at her refusal to return, he beat his rival twice, threatened to “do for him”, and quietly sharpened a sheath knife at the local gasworks. On a Sunday evening in Rockhampton he forced his way into the house where she was staying, dragged her into a back bedroom, and stabbed her five or six times, one wound reaching her heart.

Tried before Mr Justice Power, Rheuben was convicted despite a defence of temporary insanity, and a petition for mercy signed across Rockhampton failed to move the Executive. He was hanged in Brisbane on 30 September 1901, praying loudly on the drop and thanking the warders for their kindness before the trap fell.

He never admitted the killing outright. To his priest he said only that he had been “mad drunk” and remembered striking at someone, but nothing more.

John Rheuben Criminal Record
John Rheuben Criminal Record

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William Miller, a labourer at Hawkesbury near Sydney, attacked Bridget Horan (also recorded as Kean) with a hoe on the afternoon of 18 September 1805. Minutes later he ran to a neighbour and blurted out the truth: “Yes: I have killed Biddy, and am going to deliver myself up.” He then led the chief constable straight to her body himself, the hoe still lying beside it.

At his trial before the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction in Sydney, Miller pleaded not guilty to acting with malice, insisting the killing had come from unbridled momentary rage rather than intent. The court was unconvinced. He was convicted and hanged on 30 September 1805, his body afterwards handed over for dissection.

Witnesses said Miller never wavered from his confession, going to the gallows with what observers called sincere repentance, seemingly resigned that only his own death could answer for hers.

Rustic garden hoe in dirt.
Rustic garden hoe in dirt.

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Martin Rice was a former steeplechase jockey with a reputation for violence when he picked a fight with Anthony Green, a well-known horse trainer, over the shoeing of a horse at Kirk’s Bazaar off Bourke Street in Melbourne. Green struck him once, told him to leave, and Rice wept and walked away, muttering that he would have his revenge.

Half an hour later, as Green stooped to check a horse’s foot with his back turned, Rice crept up behind him and drove a blacksmith’s hammer into his skull. Green lingered barely a day before dying, telling a friend he had heard his own bones crack. A coroner’s jury found the gap between the insult and the blow proved deliberate malice, not sudden provocation, and Rice was convicted of wilful murder at the Supreme Court and hanged at Melbourne Gaol.

On the scaffold Rice asked to speak, insisting he had borne no malice toward Green and had never meant to kill him.

From shoeing a horse to murder
From shoeing a horse to murder

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On This Day in True Crime History

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