Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 15
Susannah Candy was walking home along Stirling Highway in Perth when she accepted a lift from David and Catherine Birnie, unaware of the danger awaiting her. She was taken to the couple’s home, held captive and forced to write letters to her family claiming she had run away to Queensland with friends.
On 20 October 1986, Susannah was murdered by the couple, who subsequently buried her body in a shallow grave in a State Forest. The letters, posted from Perth and Fremantle, led her family to believe she was safe for weeks, concealing the terrible truth of what had happened to her.
Girl writing a letter on white paper with a black pen
Owen McQueeny was a wandering Irish robber with one sightless eye who spent weeks haunting the proprietress of the Green Tent, a grocery and tavern serving gold diggers on a track near Geelong, Victoria. Elizabeth Lowe, a young widow raising two small children alone, had already told a passing carrier she feared the man and his talk of pistols. That July in 1858, McQueeny shot her dead and vanished with her jewellery.
Travellers soon reported a dead-eyed swagman heading for Geelong loaded with the dead woman’s distinctive earrings, and police closed in fast. Awaiting trial, McQueeny was caught hiding the earrings by swallowing them, retrieving them from the gaol’s waste tub and passing them to a departing cellmate to smuggle out for safekeeping. He was convicted of her murder and hanged at Geelong on 20 October 1858, freely confessing to a string of other robberies while insisting to the last that he had not killed her.
As the death warrant was read to him he only shrugged, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” convinced to the very end that public dislike of hanging would see him reprieved.
Sly grog shanty on Victorian goldfields tavern scene
Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on this day in 1960 alongside dozens of students and local activists after refusing to leave his seat at a segregated department store lunch counter in Atlanta. The protest was part of a sit-in movement that had spread across the South since four students staged the first one at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, earlier that year.
Most of the group had their charges dismissed, but King alone was held over a probation violation tied to an earlier case and sentenced to months of hard labour. The arrest drew national attention when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy personally intervened to help secure his release, a move credited with swinging crucial Black support behind Kennedy weeks before he won the presidency.
Istvan ‘Steve’ Gulyas ran a dating agency out of Sunbury, on the outskirts of Melbourne, that police suspected was really a front for a brothel. He was also a friend of Nik Radev, a standover figure already gunned down in the city’s escalating underworld war.
That connection made Gulyas a marked man. On 20 October 2003 he and his de facto wife were found shot dead inside their home, both killed in what police treated as a deliberate execution rather than a robbery gone wrong.
The case became one of several unsolved or unresolved killings tied to the broader Melbourne gangland conflict of the late 1990s and 2000s, with no one ever convicted over the double murder.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
