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

Captain Henry Townley Wright refused to hand command of the gunboat Gayundah to his second officer, Lieutenant Francis Taylor, and had him arrested instead, declaring the vessel under Royal Navy authority rather than the Queensland government. He threatened to train the ship’s guns on the Parliament building overlooking the Brisbane River while loading coal and three months of supplies, apparently preparing to sail for Sydney rather than be dismissed over a long running dispute about unauthorised spending of public funds.

On this day in 1888, the Colonial Secretary sent the Police Commissioner and twenty armed constables to retake the ship, drawing a crowd of two thousand onlookers to the riverbank. After a tense standoff, Wright accepted defeat. He wrote a formal letter of protest, read it aloud on deck, released Taylor from arrest, then calmly borrowed a light for a cigarette from a bystander before stepping ashore under police escort.

HMQS Gayundah Queensland Navy flagship in 1890

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Australia Brisbane Corruption Mutiny Naval History QLD Scandal

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Danny Rolling earned the name the Gainesville Ripper after a four day rampage through student housing near the University of Florida in August 1990 left five young people dead. He mutilated and deliberately posed his victims, severing one woman’s head and placing it to face anyone who walked into the room. Police initially chased the wrong man, a troubled student named Edward Humphrey, whose grandmother collapsed and died on her own doorstep while fending off a reporter during the hunt.

Rolling later claimed an alter personality called Gemini had driven him to kill, a story investigators quickly dismissed after learning he had watched a film featuring a killer of that exact name days earlier. He pleaded guilty before trial and was sentenced to death. On this day in 2006 he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, having eaten a last meal of lobster tail and sung a gospel hymn.

Shortly before his execution Rolling handed authorities a written confession admitting to an earlier unsolved triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana, but made no final statement on the gurney itself.

Gainesville, FL, USA - May 11, 2016: An entrance to the University of Florida. The University of Florida is a public research university located in Gainesville, Florida. | ID 76208519 © Wellesenterprises | Dreamstime.com — ID 76208519 © Wellesenterprises | Dreamstime.com

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Execution Florida Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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James Watson, a pig dealer known locally as ‘Jimmy the pigman’, met two sandalwood cutters, John Maroney and William Watkins, on a bush track near Kojonup, Western Australia, on 1 May 1883. Within minutes Watkins shot him and crushed his skull with the gun’s stock, then piled the body onto a woodcutters’ fire that burned for days, the bones later raked from the ashes and reburied in the scrub.

At trial, Maroney’s own signed statement, in which he claimed he had only helped burn the corpse after watching Watkins shoot Watson, became the chief evidence against them both. Watkins’s counsel argued the case rested on circumstance alone, but the jury found both men guilty of wilful murder.

The pair were hanged in Perth on this day in 1883, neither accepting blame for the killing itself. Moments before the bolt was drawn, asked whether he still believed Maroney had lied in saying he fired the shot, Watkins answered firmly, “I do, sir”; Maroney, for his part, went to his death insisting, “I am innocent of this murder.”

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Australia Execution Kojonup Murder Perth Trial WA

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Walter Edward Gordon was a woolshed hand on Darr River Downs station near Muttaburra when fever took hold of him in 1885. He begged station manager Walter Dunning to send him to hospital, but Dunning refused, warning that if he took one sick man in he would have fifty more lining up behind him. The night before the killing, Gordon was overheard muttering that he would shoot him.

On 2 May he walked into the station office, placed a revolver to Dunning’s back as he sat writing, and fired. Dunning died within minutes, saying only “Good-bye George” to his brother before blood filled his throat. At trial Gordon’s counsel argued the fever had left him delirious and not responsible for his actions, but a doctor testified he had acted with full awareness, and the jury convicted him, though they recommended mercy given his poor health. He was hanged in Brisbane on this day in 1885.

On the scaffold Gordon struggled against the hood, insisting he wanted to speak. “I am innocent of the murder of that gentleman. I conscientiously,” he began, before his voice failed him entirely.

Portrait of Walter Gordon: Queensland State Archives, Item ID ITM2947

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Australia Brisbane Execution Murder QLD Rockhampton Trial

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