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

Bernard Wootton, a repeat escapee from Fremantle Prison, broke out in August 1867 in a scheme so audacious it fooled the guards: a fellow convict disguised as a warder simply marched the escape party out the gate. Tracked down weeks later near Beverley, Wootton seemed calm enough under guard that Sergeant John Moye freed one of his hands so he could eat breakfast. Wootton snatched a burning iron bar from the fireplace and struck the sergeant across the head.

Only the quick action of an Aboriginal police tracker, who wrenched the bar from him, stopped the attack turning fatal. Convicted of attempted murder at Perth, Wootton was hanged at Perth Gaol.

He refused all offers of religious ministration and went to the scaffold defiant, his last words reportedly a shout for the Irish republic.

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Australia Beverley Escape Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Prison Trial WA

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Arthur Morris was the last of three children to die after his stepmother, Martha Rendell, began swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid at the family home in East Perth, Perth. His two sisters had died the previous year from the same treatment, disguised as a cure for diphtheria. Arthur, 15, suffered for months before he finally succumbed in 1908.

A doctor who had treated the boy, suspicious of the family’s string of throat deaths, requested an autopsy. The first examination found nothing to tie Rendell to the deaths, and she would remain free a while longer before the full truth of her method finally emerged.

Arthur Morris, a prize-winning essayist, was poisoned to death two years before his death.

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Australia Child Abuse Case Murder Perth Poisoning Trial WA

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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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One night in May 1803, two masked men forced their way into the Hawkesbury home of Charles Palmer and his wife, clubbing both with the handle of an axe until Palmer lay senseless for two hours. They ransacked the house for money, bound the family and a child, and warned they would throw them into the river if the cash they insisted did not exist was not handed over.

Stolen clothing later surfaced in the household of a woman who said it had been given to her to mend for Thomas McLaughlane the elder and his son. Both men were convicted and sentenced to death, but only the elder went to the gallows at Hawkesbury; of eight men condemned that session he was the third actually hanged, the rest reprieved into transportation for life.

At his trial the elder McLaughlane claimed the stolen goods had come from an informer already giving evidence in another case, a claim the informer flatly denied. On the scaffold he said nothing more, meeting his end, witnesses noted, with quiet decency.

Hand of a drowning man reaching above the sea surface

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Australia Colonial Crime Execution Hawkesbury Home Invasion NSW Robbery Trial

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