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

Ned Kelly, the leader of the Kelly Gang, had spent years outrunning the law across the Victorian bush, his armour and audacity turning him into both outlaw and folk hero. That ended after the siege at Glenrowan, where he was captured wounded and alone while the rest of his gang died in the shootout or the fire that followed.

He was tried in Melbourne for the murder of a police constable, and on this day in 1880 he was sentenced to death. Within weeks the man who had defied colonial police for years would be hanged, his legend only growing in the telling long after the rope did its work.

Ned Kelly in the dock courtroom illustration: colorised.

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Australia Bushranger Execution Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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Two men became the first to hang at the newly built gaol at Darlinghurst on 29 October 1841, a grim christening for a site that would host executions for decades to come.

Robert Hudson went to the gallows for murdering a fellow convict, Dean Charfry West, at the General Hospital in Sydney.

George Stroud, hanged alongside him, had murdered his wife, a crime he later blamed entirely on drink.

Both men were reported penitent on the scaffold, kneeling in prayer before the drop fell. Stroud asked the attending minister to warn the crowd of the dangers that had led him there, “since, by having been guilty of that sin, he had been induced to commit the terrible crime for which he was then about to suffer”.

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Australia Darlinghurst Execution Murder NSW Prison Sydney

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John Lloyd, a ticket-of-leave convict working near Geraldton, shot his own labourer John Brown with intent to kill at Port Gregory in June 1857. Brown was himself a former convict, but only months earlier he had been granted a conditional pardon for manslaughter, finally free after years under sentence, before his own employer put a bullet in him.

Lloyd was tried and convicted that October, and hanged at Perth Gaol on this day in 1857. It was not his first brush with the gallows’ shadow: a decade earlier he had been transported for life from Wales for highway robbery, and had already served years in the colony before the shooting that finally ended his.

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Attempted Murder Australia Convict History Execution Geraldton Perth Trial WA

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President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, warning that banning alcohol while rationing wartime grain made no sense now the war was over. Congress disagreed, and on this day in 1919 the Senate and House of Representatives overrode his veto, pushing the Volstead Act into law and setting a date to enforce the newly ratified Eighteenth Amendment.

The Act gave Prohibition its teeth: it defined any drink over 0.5 percent alcohol as illegal and handed federal agents the power to raid, seize and prosecute. Within months, that vacuum would be filled not by sobriety but by bootleggers, speakeasies and the organised crime syndicates who built fortunes smuggling what the law had just made forbidden.

New York City Deputy Police Commissioner overseeing the disposal of confiscated liquor during Prohibition, c. 1921. Source: Library of Congress.

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Legislation Organised Crime Political Crime Prohibition USA

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