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

John Kilbride had vanished the previous November after leaving a Lancashire market, one of several victims to disappear from the Manchester area without explanation. Nearly a year later, on 21 October 1965, police dug up his badly decomposed remains on Saddleworth Moor; so little remained that he could only be identified by his clothing.

The discovery came the same day Ian Brady and Myra Hindley appeared in court charged with the murder of another victim, Lesley Ann Downey. Kilbride’s body on the moor would soon tie the pair to a second killing, as the full scale of what became known as the Moors Murders began to emerge.

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Cold Case Murder Serial Killer Trial UK

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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

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Australia Execution Geelong Murder Robbery Trial VIC

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Gerardo Mannella, 31, tried to run when two gunmen came for him outside his brother’s home in Melbourne, but they caught him in the street and shot him dead on this day in 1999.

The ambush was no isolated act. His brother Vince Mannella had already been murdered, and police believed the same killers were also responsible for shooting Dimitrios Belias, part of the string of tit for tat killings that became known as Melbourne’s gangland war.

No one has ever been convicted over Gerardo’s death, and it remains one of the unsolved murders from that bloody era.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Australia Cold Case Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Unsolved VIC

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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

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Australia Claremont Fremantle Kidnapping Murder Perth Serial Killer WA

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