Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 17
2025: Mushroom Murderer Erin Patterson Sentenced to Life, Could Walk Free at 82
Supreme Court Justice Christopher Beale handed Erin Patterson three life sentences for murder and 25 years for attempted murder, setting a non-parole period of 33 years. That means Patterson, who poisoned relatives with a beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms, cannot be considered for release until 2056, when she would be 82 years old.
The judge described the crime as an ‘enormous betrayal’ marked by substantial premeditation, and noted that Patterson had shown no remorse for the deaths she caused.
1904: “She Was Always Kind and Good to Me”: Employee Hanged at Melbourne Gaol for Murdering His Employer’s Wife
On the morning of 10 July 1904, Mrs Veitch, wife of baker A. C. T. Veitch, was found dead in the passage of the family’s bakery on O’Grady Street, Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne. She still clutched a buggy whip in her hand, and a deep gash on one hand suggested she had fought desperately for her life. Whoever attacked her had locked the back doors, the front gate and the shop door beforehand, and had even tried to silence the family’s terrier tied up in the yard, evidence of careful planning rather than a chance intrusion.
The body was discovered by James Coleman Augustus Williams, an employee of the bakery who had been out on his delivery round. He raised the alarm after a boy came to buy bread and got no answer. Williams was soon charged with the murder, and at trial evidence pointed to a robbery gone wrong at the nearby office, though nothing suggested any personal grievance against the victim.
Williams was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 8 September 1904.
The night before his execution, Williams wrote out a formal confession, insisting the killing was not for gain or lust but committed “in a fit of passion”, and that Mrs Veitch “was always kind and good to me”. He asked that the public not judge his family for what he had done and thanked the gaol’s governor and chaplains for their kindness to him in his final days.
1888: Jack the Ripper Claims His Second Victim: the Mutilation of Annie Chapman
Annie Chapman was a heavy drinker who had turned to prostitution in London’s Whitechapel after her marriage collapsed and her daughter died, using the earnings to pay for drink and a bed for the night. On the night of her death she had no money for lodgings and went out to earn her rent; her body was found in the early hours in a backyard, her throat cut and her abdomen slashed open.
The killer had arranged her intestines over her shoulder and removed her uterus, taking it with him. An autopsy determined she had been sober at the time of her death, ruling out the drunkenness that had shaped so much of her life.
Her murder, following that of Mary Ann Nichols just over a week earlier, confirmed for police that a single killer, soon dubbed Jack the Ripper, was stalking the women of Whitechapel.
Portrait of Annie Chapman with her husband in 1869
1792: Sydney’s First Grave: The Convict Buried Beneath What Is Now the Town Hall
When Governor Phillip and the Reverend Richard Johnson chose a quiet spot on the outskirts of town for a burial ground in September 1792, the first person laid to rest there is believed to have been a convict named Michael Dunn. The site, later known as the Old Sydney Burial Ground or the George Street Burial Ground, now lies beneath Sydney Town Hall.
For 27 years the cemetery operated with almost no formal oversight: it was never gazetted, no trustees were appointed and no burial register or plan was kept. The Reverend William Cowper later admitted that “the dead of all communions were interred indiscriminately”, though social distinctions persisted among the military, with non-commissioned officers of different regiments buried in separate corners of the ground.
Once the cemetery closed in 1820 and burials moved to Brickfield Hill, now the site of Central railway station, the old ground fell into grim disrepair. Headstones were vandalised, pigs, goats and horses wandered among open graves, and grave robbers were blamed for prising up leaden coffins. A committee report even noted men using the abandoned cemetery to relieve themselves, and in hot weather the stench became unbearable.
Despite public opposition to disturbing the dead, the City of Sydney eventually cleared the site to build its Town Hall, ending nearly a century of neglect over the city’s first burial ground.
Old Sydney burial ground historic cemetery illustration
