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

Squizzy Taylor, Melbourne’s most infamous gang leader, walked into a Carlton sickroom on 27 October 1927 to settle an old score with his bedridden rival, John “Snowy” Cutmore. Within minutes, gunfire tore through the small house and both men were mortally wounded.

Taylor was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital in nearby Fitzroy, where he died that evening, aged 39, without ever naming who had fired the fatal shot.

The inquest returned an open verdict. One enduring theory holds that it was not Cutmore but his mother, standing over her dying son, who pulled the trigger that finally brought down Melbourne’s most feared gangster.

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Australia Carlton Fitzroy Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Shooting VIC

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Abraham Munday, a shepherd working the east coast of Tasmania near Swansea, laced a rival shepherd’s flour with arsenic, hoping to kill George White. White survived only because the dose was so large it made him vomit it back up. An old man named Hamilton, who happened to share a piece of the poisoned bread while visiting the hut, was not so fortunate: the arsenic settled in his joints and left him crippled for life.

Munday was convicted and sentenced to death. He was hanged within the gaol at Oatlands on this day in 1857, and went to the scaffold badly shaken, not only by his fate but because the clergyman who had attended him in his final days, the Reverend Mr Ison, refused to walk up to the drop with him.

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Attempted Murder Australia Execution Poisoning TAS Trial

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George Sturgeon, a settler near Oatlands in Tasmania, was found shot dead on a bush track in July 1856, killed by a gang of bushrangers after leaving home with money in his pocket. A huge reward sent police after the gang, including a notorious outlaw known as “Long Mickey”, by then the self-styled terror of the Midland Districts.

He was finally cornered in a shepherd’s hut over a year later and opened fire through the walls as police closed in. One shot passed clean through the thatch gripped in a pursuing constable’s hand; a return shot shaved off part of Long Mickey’s whisker, and he surrendered, begging not to be ill-used, as he knew he would hang for the Sturgeon killing.

Convicted after trial, he was hanged inside the gaol at Oatlands on 27 October 1857.

On the scaffold Long Mickey thanked the priest who had attended him, declared he had never committed murder, and insisted his companion had not killed anyone either, before asking those present to pray for his soul.

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Australia Bushranging Execution Manhunt Murder Oatlands Tasmania Trial

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William Page, a groom at Hedley Park near Mount Gambier, had courted a young woman named Mary Buchan for months, though she confessed to her family that she loved him but feared him. On the night of 11 July 1875 she left to walk with him after church and was never seen alive again.

Weeks of fruitless searching followed, until two people who had never met, Buchan’s own father and the wife of the investigating police inspector, each separately dreamed that the dead girl led them to a ploughed field marked by three trees. Acting on the strange coincidence, police searched the spot and found her body buried about eighteen inches down, her hands bound with her own handkerchief.

Page was arrested, tried, and hanged at Mount Gambier on this day in 1875.

In a signed confession he admitted striking Buchan with a stockwhip handle after she tried to end their relationship, then strangling her when he believed the blow had been fatal. He insisted the killing was done only ‘in a fit of passion’ and expressed deep remorse before his death.

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Australia Confession Execution Mount Gambier Murder SA Trial

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