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

Aileen Wuornos killed seven men in Florida, and later claimed the first death was self defence against a convicted rapist. By the time her case reached its final stage, she had turned against the very lawyers trying to save her.

When her appeal team moved for a retrial, Wuornos went to court and had them fired, insisting she was sane and wanted no further appeals. Many who studied her, including documentary maker Nick Broomfield, came to believe otherwise, pointing to erratic, unsettling behaviour in her final interviews as a sign of serious mental illness. The courts accepted her wishes regardless, and she was executed by lethal injection in 2002, declining a final meal.

Wuornos went to her death on this date maintaining a defiant, confused mix of guilt and conspiracy claims rather than a clear confession or denial.

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Execution Florida Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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Che Guevara had already helped topple one government, fighting alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba, when he slipped into Bolivia in 1966 to light the same fuse there. He spent nearly a year leading a ragged guerrilla band through the jungle, hunted by the Bolivian army with American backing, before troops cornered and captured him on 8 October 1967 in a remote ravine.

He was held overnight in a schoolhouse in a small village, then shot dead the following day on orders from the Bolivian government, which wanted him silenced rather than put on public trial. His death turned him instantly into a global revolutionary icon, his face reproduced on posters and T-shirts for decades after the jungle where he fell was forgotten.

Bust of Che Guevara in La Higuera. LA HIGUERA, BOLIVIA - AUGUST 6: Monument to Che Guevara in La Higuera, Bolivia seen on August 6, 2014. Guevara was executed in La Higuera in 1967 | ID 54527187 © Jesse Kraft | Dreamstime.com — ID 54527187 © Jesse Kraft | Dreamstime.com

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Bolivia Execution Guerrilla Warfare Latin America Political Crime Revolution South America

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In the early hours of 9 October 1891, the ceremonial mace vanished from Parliament House in Melbourne, the silver-plated symbol of the speaker’s authority gone from a locked case. A parliamentary engineer was seen that same day running from the building with a parcel the right size and shape to be the mace; he told police it was firewood, and with no proof against him the investigation stalled.

Thirteen months later newspapers claimed the mace had turned up in the parlour of a notorious madam who catered to visiting members of parliament, a story so delicious it triggered a formal Board of Inquiry. The board cleared the brothel but settled nothing else, and popular rumour simply shifted the blame onto the new Speaker, Thomas Bent, despite his having taken office only after the theft. The mace was never seen again, and whether it was a burglary or a parliamentary prank gone wrong remains Melbourne’s favourite unsolved mystery.

Parliamentry Mace Stolen: Credit: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 14517/P0001/39, O884.

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Australia Melbourne Political Crime Scandal Theft Unsolved VIC

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Schapelle Corby was flying from Brisbane via Sydney to Bali for a family holiday when customs officers at Denpasar airport opened her unlocked bodyboard bag and found 4.2 kilograms of cannabis sealed inside a vacuum-packed bag. The amount alone, under Indonesian law, carried the weight of a major trafficking charge rather than simple possession.

Corby insisted from the moment of her arrest that she had no idea the drugs were there, a claim she would repeat throughout a trial that drew intense media coverage back in Australia. The case became one of the most closely watched Australian legal dramas of the decade, dividing public opinion over whether she was a trafficker or a victim of baggage handlers exploiting an unlocked bag.

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Australia Bali Brisbane Drug Trafficking Indonesia QLD Smuggling Trial

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