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

1986: Carved with a Scarlet Letter: The Unsolved Murder of Beth Barnard on Phillip Island

In the early hours of September 23, 1986, 23-year-old penguin parade worker Beth Barnard was found stabbed to death in a house on Phillip Island, Victoria. A blanket had been placed over her body, but beneath it her throat had been cut, her nightgown pushed up, and her body slashed and stabbed repeatedly, with defensive wounds on her hands. Cigarette butts and a knife lay near the body, and bloodied paper towels were stuffed around the bathroom sink.

Carved into her chest was a knife wound resembling the letter A, leading some to dub the killing the Scarlet Letter murder. Barnard had been having an affair with her married employer, Fergus Cameron, a founding shareholder of the Phillip Island Grand Prix. The night before her body was found, his wife, 36-year-old Vivienne Cameron, learned the truth and smashed a wine glass across his head and back before driving him to hospital.

Fergus spent that night at his sister’s house while Vivienne asked friends to mind their two young sons. She then vanished and was never seen again. A coroner later found that Vivienne had contributed to Beth Barnard’s death and concluded that she had taken her own life by jumping from the nearby San Remo Bridge, although her body has never been recovered.

Seagull portrait on grass with San Remo Bridge blurred behind

⬅ See all events from 23 September

Australia Cold Case Disappearance Missing Person Murder Phillip Island Unsolved VIC

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1952: Australia’s First Thallium Poisoning Murder Conviction: Yvonne Fletcher Sentenced to Death in Sydney

At the Central Criminal Court in Sydney, 30-year-old Yvonne Gladys Fletcher of Newtown was sentenced to death after a seven-day trial for the 1948 murder of her first husband, Desmond George Butler, who died after months of wasting illness caused by thallium poisoning. Asked if she had anything to say before sentence was passed, she replied simply, “No, your Honor,” but moments later a prayer book she had carried through every day of the trial crashed to the floor and she collapsed in the dock, sobbing, as police lifted her out.

Mr Justice Kinsella told the court the crime was “horrible” because the poison had been “secretly administered within the family circle” to an unsuspecting victim, destroying him “mentally and physically while permitting him to linger for months in wretched agony.” Fletcher was the first person in Australian criminal history convicted of murder by thallium poisoning, and the jury recommended that the sale of the poison to the public be banned outright.

What the sentencing did not reveal to onlookers was already known to the court: Fletcher had also been committed for trial over the death of her second husband, who had died from the same poison at Newtown only months earlier. The Crown Prosecutor noted the chilling parallel between the two cases, telling the jury, “There is no question that both Butler and Fletcher died from thallium poisoning… the same matrimonial discord, the same hatred towards each man, the same sudden illness, and the same dreadful symptoms.” The judge himself observed that had this conviction concerned her second husband, evidence of his cruelty toward her might have offered some mitigation, but no such excuse existed for the killing of her first.

Yvonne Fletcher and Second Husband: Photograph by Robert Haswell. Gift, 2006. Justice & Police Museum Collection, Museums of History New South Wales, JP2006/1.

⬅ See all events from 23 September

Australia Execution Murder Newtown NSW Poisoning Sydney Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1937: Convicted of Kidnapping: Two Years Before Becoming the Last Prisoner Executed in NSW

John Trevor “Jack” Kelly was found guilty of kidnapping on 23rd September 1937, and was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, with a recommendation that he undergo observation following concerns about lasting effects from a motor accident.

Released in November 1938, Kelly committed murder less than three months later. He stood trial before the same judge who had sentenced him for kidnapping, but this time he was sentenced to death, becoming the last prisoner executed in New South Wales.

⬅ See all events from 23 September

Armidale Australia Kidnapping Lismore Murder NSW Prison Tenterfield Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1656: Never Pregnant, Never Guilty: Colonial America’s First All-Female Jury Acquits an Accused Child-Killer

In September 1656 the General Provincial Court at Patuxent, Maryland impanelled the first all-woman jury in the American colonies to try Judith Catchpole, an indentured maidservant accused of murdering her newborn child. The accusation came from a fellow passenger on the voyage from England, who also claimed she had cut a sleeping woman’s throat and stabbed a seaman in the back, then, in the same breath, that she had stitched the throat wound closed before the victim woke and rubbed grease on the seaman’s wound to bring him back to life.

The jury of seven married and four single women was chosen specifically because the case turned on medical evidence only women could assess: whether Catchpole’s body showed any sign of having recently given birth. Their physical examination found no such evidence, and witnesses testified that her accuser, who had died before the trial, was not of sound mind.

Catchpole’s defence rested on a simple claim: she had never been pregnant at all. With no proof of childbirth and the accuser’s own tales dismissed as delusional talk of witchcraft, the jury acquitted her of every charge.

⬅ See all events from 22 September

Acquittal Infanticide Maryland Trial USA Witchcraft Womens History

1986: Carved with a Scarlet Letter: The Unsolved Murder of Beth Barnard on Phillip Island

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1952: Australia’s First Thallium Poisoning Murder Conviction: Yvonne Fletcher Sentenced to Death in Sydney

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1937: Convicted of Kidnapping: Two Years Before Becoming the Last Prisoner Executed in NSW

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1656: Never Pregnant, Never Guilty: Colonial America’s First All-Female Jury Acquits an Accused Child-Killer

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories