Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 13
Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot President William McKinley at point-blank range during a public reception at the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York, on 6 September 1901. McKinley initially seemed to be recovering from his wounds, giving doctors and the public hope, but he died eight days later.
Czolgosz was swiftly tried and convicted of the killing. He was electrocuted on this day in 1901, one of the clearest and most public reckonings in the history of presidential assassinations in the United States.
Joseph Theodore Leslie “Squizzy” Taylor, Melbourne‘s most notorious gunman, had died days earlier in a shootout with rival criminal Cutmore. He was buried in a polished oak coffin with gold mountings at Brighton Cemetery on this day in 1927, while hundreds of onlookers, mostly women, crowded outside his Richmond home to watch the coffin leave.
What followed was described in the press as a disgraceful exhibition of morbid curiosity. Traffic was blocked for half an hour, and just before the funeral began a crowd surged at the gateway, forcing police to be called to clear a path. At the graveside few of Taylor’s former associates could be seen among the throng of sightseers. Cutmore, the other man killed in the same gun battle, had been buried the previous day at Coburg.
The Squiz: Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 – 31927 (1907-1909)]
Nicholas Baxter had been night watchman at the biscuit factory next to Mary Macnamara’s home in Sydney for six and a half years, and the elderly widow trusted him completely. By his own account he knew where she kept her money, had fetched change for her dozens of times, and could have taken it without her ever knowing. He never did, not until he resigned from the job in June 1907 and returned a month later.
On the morning of 8 July 1907 Macnamara was found bludgeoned in her ransacked bedroom. Police found Baxter that same day wandering in circles near Strathfield, drunk, wearing a hat taken from her hall stand and carrying her jewellery. When he tried to bolt after being re-arrested, he gave up with the words, “It’s all up, you’ve got me now.”
At trial his defence was that years of overwork as a night watchman, ninety-hour weeks with no night off, had left him unfit to know right from wrong. The jury was not persuaded, and Baxter was hanged in Sydney on this day in 1907.
He had earlier confessed to police, “I don’t know what possessed me to do it. I must have been mad. I didn’t intend to hurt the poor old body, but she would not keep quiet.”
Nicholas Baxter gaol inmate photo index Darlinghurst Gaol 1907 Colorised: State Archives NSW Collection Record INDEX2056662.
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.
![The Squiz: Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 - 31927 (1907-1909)]](https://darkstories.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/leslie-squizzy-taylor-prisoner-sheet.jpg "The Squiz: Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 - 31927 (1907-1909)]")
