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

1865: He Meant No Harm, Said the Man He Stabbed: Thomas Bushell Hanged at Fremantle

Thomas Bushell, an Imperial convict working in the bake-house at the Convict Establishment in Fremantle, took a 12-inch dough-knife from the bake-house on Sunday 9 July 1865. During the muster of prisoners for church service on C and D landing, he struck warder George Hollis on the head, then stabbed him in the back as Hollis passed, prompting Hollis to cry out, “Secure Bushell, for he has stabbed me.”

At his trial before Chief Justice Burt on 6 September 1865, the wounded warder himself testified that he did not believe Bushell had meant to kill him. The jury convicted him anyway of maliciously wounding with intent to murder, and he was sentenced to death and hanged just days after the verdict.

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Australia Execution Fremantle Murder Prison Trial WA

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1982: A Death Row Killer for Hire: Bomb in the Radio Speaker

Serial killer Donald Gaskins, already condemned to die at Central Correctional Institution, murdered fellow death row inmate Rudolph Tyner using a homemade bomb built from C4 plastic explosive concealed inside a device disguised as a portable radio speaker. The device was passed to Tyner and detonated, killing him instantly.

Gaskins carried out the killing as a paid hit, hired for 2,000 dollars by Tony Cimo, the son of a couple Tyner had murdered years earlier. Cimo wanted revenge on his parents’ killer and used Gaskins, already notorious as one of South Carolina’s most prolific murderers, to get it from inside the prison itself.

Mobster planting a time bomb in a car engine compartment

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Murder Organised Crime Prison Serial Killer South Carolina USA

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1863: The Escape-Proof Prison That Wasn’t: Captain Thunderbolt Breaks Out of Cockatoo Island

Frederick Wordsworth Ward, the bushranger known as Captain Thunderbolt, was serving time on Sydney‘s Cockatoo Island, a prison ringed by harbour currents and sheer sandstone cliffs and widely declared impossible to escape. On the night of 11 September 1863, Ward slipped his cell and plunged into the water, swimming through the cold, shark infested harbour to the mainland shore.

The breakout humiliated colonial authorities and turned Ward into a folk figure almost overnight. He spent the next seven years roaming the bush of northern New South Wales, robbing coaches, inns and travellers as one of the colony’s most enduring and elusive bushrangers before he was finally shot dead by police near Uralla in 1870.

Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 1951. Photograph by Frank Hurley. National Library of Australia, PIC FH/7951. Out of copyright.

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Australia Bushranging Escape NSW Prison Robbery Sydney

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1721: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away: Hanged at Tyburn for Returning from Transportation

John Meff was a housebreaker who had already cheated the gallows once, having been convicted and then transported to the colonies rather than executed. But transportation was meant to be permanent exile, and Meff broke its terms by making his way back to England, a crime that under the law of the day carried the same penalty as the original offence: death.

He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang for illegally returning from transportation. On 11 September 1721 he was taken to Tyburn and executed at the age of forty, going to the gallows alongside James Redding, who had been condemned separately for robbery.

For Meff the return to Tyburn marked the end of a second chance he could not keep: having once escaped the noose through transportation, the simple act of coming home proved fatal.

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Crime and Punishment Execution London Robbery Transportation UK

1865: He Meant No Harm, Said the Man He Stabbed: Thomas Bushell Hanged at Fremantle

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1982: A Death Row Killer for Hire: Bomb in the Radio Speaker

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1863: The Escape-Proof Prison That Wasn’t: Captain Thunderbolt Breaks Out of Cockatoo Island

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1721: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away: Hanged at Tyburn for Returning from Transportation

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