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

John Rheuben had lived with Fanny Hardwick for two years, supporting her mother and child, until he turned her out and she took up with another man. Furious at her refusal to return, he beat his rival twice, threatened to “do for him”, and quietly sharpened a sheath knife at the local gasworks. On a Sunday evening in Rockhampton he forced his way into the house where she was staying, dragged her into a back bedroom, and stabbed her five or six times, one wound reaching her heart.

Tried before Mr Justice Power, Rheuben was convicted despite a defence of temporary insanity, and a petition for mercy signed across Rockhampton failed to move the Executive. He was hanged in Brisbane on 30 September 1901, praying loudly on the drop and thanking the warders for their kindness before the trap fell.

He never admitted the killing outright. To his priest he said only that he had been “mad drunk” and remembered striking at someone, but nothing more.

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Australia Brisbane Execution Jealousy Murder QLD Rockhampton Trial

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Martin Rice was a former steeplechase jockey with a reputation for violence when he picked a fight with Anthony Green, a well-known horse trainer, over the shoeing of a horse at Kirk’s Bazaar off Bourke Street in Melbourne. Green struck him once, told him to leave, and Rice wept and walked away, muttering that he would have his revenge.

Half an hour later, as Green stooped to check a horse’s foot with his back turned, Rice crept up behind him and drove a blacksmith’s hammer into his skull. Green lingered barely a day before dying, telling a friend he had heard his own bones crack. A coroner’s jury found the gap between the insult and the blow proved deliberate malice, not sudden provocation, and Rice was convicted of wilful murder at the Supreme Court and hanged at Melbourne Gaol.

On the scaffold Rice asked to speak, insisting he had borne no malice toward Green and had never meant to kill him.

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Australia Execution Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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In the early hours, the killer known as Jack the Ripper struck twice within the same hour. His third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut and still bleeding, her killer likely interrupted before he could mutilate her further. Denied his ritual, he found a fourth victim within the hour: Catherine Eddowes, whose body was left with her intestines arranged over her shoulder and part of her womb removed.

Weeks later, a Londoner opened a parcel addressed simply “From Hell” to find half a preserved kidney inside, accompanied by a taunting letter. Tests suggested it may have belonged to Eddowes herself, though the claim was never proven and the killer was never caught.

Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes

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Europe London Murder Mutilation Serial Killer UK Unsolved

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Carl Williams had already been convicted of multiple murders during Melbourne’s gangland war when he was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike in a high-security unit at Victoria’s Barwon Prison in 2010, an inmate supposedly protected by round-the-clock surveillance.

Matthew Charles Johnson, a fellow prisoner sharing the unit, was charged with the killing. On this day in 2011 a jury found him guilty of murdering the man once considered one of the country’s most feared underworld figures, in an attack that exposed how little safety the prison’s most secure wing actually offered its most notorious inmate.

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

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Prison Trial VIC

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