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

1981: Harold Shipman Kills Elderly Patient With a Fatal Injection After She Fell Ill in Her Garden

In August 1981, 81-year-old Elizabeth Ashworth felt unwell while gardening at her home on Peel Street in Hyde, England, and asked her neighbours to call a doctor. Harold Shipman arrived, administered an injection, then told the neighbours she would not live much longer. When he returned later and asked if she was still alive, she had already died.

Investigators later identified her death as an unlawful killing, part of Shipman’s early pattern of murdering elderly patients with fatal opiate injections. Harold Shipman would go on to become one of history’s most prolific serial killers, convicted of 15 murders but suspected in the deaths of over 200 patients.

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England Hyde Murder Poisoning Serial Killer UK

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2016: The Chinese Jack The Ripper Serial Killer Caught After 28 Years Through a Relative’s DNA

Gao Chengyong was arrested at his grocery store in Baiyin, Gansu, in August 2016 after a DNA test on his uncle flagged a close familial match to an unidentified serial killer. The breakthrough closed a case that had haunted investigators for nearly three decades. Gao confessed to all eleven murders, committed between 1988 and 2002 across Inner Mongolia.

Known in Chinese media as the ‘Chinese Jack the Ripper’, Gao had followed victims to their homes, typically striking in daylight hours. He mutilated their bodies in a pattern that drew comparisons to the 1888 Whitechapel killings. Sentenced to death and stripped of all assets, he was executed on 3 January 2019.

Chinese death character with skull texture 3D illustration

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Asia Baiyin Baotou China Cold Case Execution Gansu Inner Mongolia Murder Serial Killer

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1877: Martin Cash, the Bushranger Who Cheated the Gallows, Dies at His Farm

Martin Cash, Irish-born convict and bushranger, died on 26 August 1877 at his farm cottage in Glenorchy, Tasmania, aged 68. Twice he escaped from the supposedly escape-proof Port Arthur penal colony, the second time by swimming the shark-infested waters. On Boxing Day 1842, Cash and two companions absconded from a work party and launched an eight-month bushranging spree across Van Diemen’s Land, robbing mail coaches and homesteads before his eventual recapture. His 1870 autobiography, The Adventures of Martin Cash, ghostwritten by a fellow former convict, became a bestseller. He was one of the few bushrangers of his era to die of natural causes, cheating the gallows.

Martin Cash Author: The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land in 1843 — Martin Cash Author: The Bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land in 1843

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Australia Bushranger Convict History Death TAS

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1953: Serial Killer John Balaban Hanged at Adelaide Gaol for a String of Murders

John Balaban, a 29-year-old Rumanian industrial chemist living in Adelaide, admitted in the Criminal Court in July 1953 to murdering at least five people. His victims included Zora Kusic, a 29-year-old Yugoslav woman whose throat he cut at her tin-shed home in Torrensville; a French girl named Riva Kwas; his wife Thelma Joyce Balaban; his mother-in-law Susan Jane Ackland; and his young stepson.

He claimed a divine vision had told him to do whatever his conscience dictated. Balaban pleaded insanity, but the jury rejected the defence. He was convicted of the murder of Kusic and sentenced to death. On 26 August 1953, he was hanged at Adelaide Gaol, walking to the gallows with blackened eyes and a bruised nose after being subdued following a sudden outburst in his cell.

1953 Daily Telegraph article Alleged killer dead wife Trove image

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Adelaide Australia Execution Murder SA Serial Killer Torrensville Trial

1981: Harold Shipman Kills Elderly Patient With a Fatal Injection After She Fell Ill in Her Garden

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2016: The Chinese Jack The Ripper Serial Killer Caught After 28 Years Through a Relative’s DNA

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1877: Martin Cash, the Bushranger Who Cheated the Gallows, Dies at His Farm

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1953: Serial Killer John Balaban Hanged at Adelaide Gaol for a String of Murders

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