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.
1978: The Umbrella That Killed: Assassinated with a Ricin Pellet
Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his leg. He turned to see a man pick up a dropped umbrella and hurry away, offering a mumbled apology. Markov thought little of it until a small red mark and fever set in over the following days.
The umbrella had been rigged to fire a tiny pellet packed with ricin, a poison for which there was and is no antidote. Markov died four days later, on 11 September 1978, from the resulting blood poisoning, becoming one of the most infamous casualties of Cold War espionage.
His killer would not be identified for almost three decades. It was not until 2005 that leaked files named the assassin as Francesco Gullino, an agent working for the Bulgarian secret service, though he was never extradited or tried for the murder.
1897: The World’s First Drink-Driving Conviction, London 1897
Just before one in the morning on September 10, 1897, a taxi driver named George Smith lost control of his cab on New Bond Street, swerving across the road and crashing, smashing a water pipe and a front window. No one was hurt, cars of the era topped out at about 8mph, but Smith admitted to police that he had been drinking, and that confession was enough to convict him in what is recognised as the world’s first drink-driving case.
He was fined 20 shillings. There was no specific drunk-driving law to charge him under; the conviction rested entirely on his own admission, since officers otherwise had only their own snap judgement of a driver’s sobriety to go on. It would be almost a decade before any jurisdiction, enacted a dedicated drunk-driving law, and more than half a century before the breathalyser existed to test drivers objectively.
1935: The Sydney Shark Arm Murder Case Collapses on Judge Orders
The case began in the most macabre way imaginable: on April 25, 1935, a captured shark on display at an Aquarium in Sydney vomited up a human arm. Tattoos identified the limb as belonging to James Smith, who had vanished after leaving home on April 8 with the stated intention of going on a fishing trip.
Police investigations focused on Patrick Brady, an associate of Smith who had been with him around the time of his disappearance. Another central figure was businessman Reginald Holmes, who was in a position to give direct evidence about Smith’s killing and Brady’s alleged involvement.
But before Holmes could give that evidence, the case took another extraordinary turn. In the early hours of June 12, just hours before he was due to appear at the inquest, Holmes was found shot dead in his car at Dawes Point. With the Crown’s key witness gone, the murder case against Brady was left largely dependent on circumstantial evidence.
Despite what Chief Justice Sir Frederick Jordan acknowledged was plenty of cause for suspicion, the prosecution now faced two fundamental problems: its key witness was dead, and there was no body to prove that Smith himself was dead. A person could, after all, survive the loss of an arm. On September 10, 1935, Jordan ruled that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction and directed the jury to acquit Brady, bringing to an abrupt end what was described at the time as a case “without parallel in the annals of Australian criminal history.”
Brady’s freedom was short-lived. As soon as he stepped outside the court, detectives arrested him on an unrelated Tasmanian forgery charge. No one was ever convicted over Smith’s death or Holmes’s killing, and the infamous Shark Arm case remains unsolved.
