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

1975: The Hunt Ends: Patty Hearst, Newspaper Heiress Turned Fugitive, Captured by the FBI

Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974 by the self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army, a small but violent radical cell. Within weeks the group released tapes in which she renounced her family and adopted the nom de guerre Tania, and in April 1974 she was photographed wielding a rifle during the SLA’s armed robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco.

For nineteen months Hearst remained with her captors turned comrades as the group moved between safe houses, evading one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. She was finally arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975, and later stood trial for bank robbery, where her defence argued she had been brainwashed and coerced.

Convicted despite that defence, Hearst was sentenced to prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco

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California Kidnapping Political Crime Robbery San Francisco Trial USA

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1811: No Reprieve: The Killers Confession Ignored as a Convicted Man Is Hanged Two Days Late

John Dunn was convicted at the Parramatta Court of Criminal Jurisdiction of murdering Mary Rowe, largely on the testimony of a sixteen year old accomplice, John Welch, whose evidence also saw Welch’s father, Thomas Welch, convicted as an accessory after the fact.

Dunn was due to hang at Parramatta two days beforehand, on Monday 16 September 1811, but as the execution was about to proceed the boy, John Welch, suddenly retracted everything he had sworn at trial. He declared Dunn innocent and claimed that he and his father were the true killers. The Acting Provost Marshal, unable to consult anyone and acting on what observers called motives of humanity, respited the hanging on the spot.

The reprieve lasted only two days. Dunn was finally executed at Parramatta on the Wednesday following, as near as possible to the site of the murder itself, amid what one witness described as far gloomier circumstances than the original sentence would have produced.

After he was cut down, Dunn’s body was delivered to the medical officer at Parramatta General Hospital, where it was dissected and anatomised before burial. The scaffold retraction left lingering public doubt over Dunn’s guilt, with contemporary accounts noting the boy’s claim that Dunn was innocent and that he and his father were the real perpetrators.

Lady Justice Themis statue on gallows with scales and sword

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Australia Execution Murder NSW Parramatta Trial Wrongful Conviction

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1826: Nine Hanged in a Single Day at Hobart, All for Sheep Stealing and Burglary

On September 18, 1826, nine convicts went to the gallows together in Hobart under Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s ruthless enforcement of Britain’s Bloody Code, the doctrine that made property crime a capital offence equal to murder. Not one of the nine had killed anyone: George Farquharson, Robert Cable, Thomas Savell, John Davis and John Cruitt were hanged for sheep stealing, John Penson, Timothy Swinscow and William Wickens for burglary, and James Rowles for theft.

The hangings were part of the largest cluster of executions recorded in Van Diemen’s Land that year, twenty three people put to death over a single fortnight in mid September 1826. Earlier hangings that month, on September 13, had targeted actual killers; those on September 15 and 18 were reserved entirely for non-violent property offenders, a deliberate signal from Arthur to a colony economically dependent on settler flocks and stores.

Sheep stealing in particular was treated by the colonial administration as an existential threat to the fledgling economy of the penal settlement, and the September 18 executions were designed as a public deterrent to convicts tempted to raid the herds and homes of free settlers.

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Australia Colonial Crime Execution Hobart Robbery TAS Theft Trial

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1889: He Gave Away His Victim’s Wedding Ring: Hanged at Melbourne Gaol for the Carlton Murder

Annie Thornton, was murdered in her home at Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, on the night of 10 July 1889. Piercing screams were heard coming from the house that night, but no neighbour intervened and nothing was reported to police until the inquest weeks later.

The man committed for trial, Filipe Castillo, showed almost total indifference to his fate. On the very night of the killing he was seen with another woman and showed her a bloodstained waistcoat, claiming it came from a cut to his arm. He then handed out jewellery stolen from the dead woman to several other women, including the wedding ring he had taken from her finger.

The murdered woman’s husband, Henry Thornton, had been living apart from his wife and was working in Ballarat at the time. On hearing of the killing he walked into the Ballarat watch-house himself, gave a detailed account of his movements and produced letters proving he had not seen his wife since parting from her on good terms months earlier; he was cleared of any involvement.

At the inquest a verdict of wilful murder was returned, and the accused was described as remarkably unconcerned throughout the proceedings. He was tried, convicted and hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 16 September 1889 for one of the most brutal and cold-blooded murders Melbourne had seen.

Bag of jewels spilled open with gems falling out

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Australia Ballarat Carlton Execution Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

1975: The Hunt Ends: Patty Hearst, Newspaper Heiress Turned Fugitive, Captured by the FBI

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1811: No Reprieve: The Killers Confession Ignored as a Convicted Man Is Hanged Two Days Late

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1826: Nine Hanged in a Single Day at Hobart, All for Sheep Stealing and Burglary

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1889: He Gave Away His Victim’s Wedding Ring: Hanged at Melbourne Gaol for the Carlton Murder

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