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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Patrick Mahon had faced the gallows before. In 1827, convicted of a highway robbery on the road from Manchester to Sheffield after borrowing a fellow traveller’s own knife to rob him, he was sentenced to death at Derby Assizes, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land the following year and spent decades drifting through minor convict offences: insolence, drunkenness, breaches of his pass, a stint in chains.

In September 1852 he was convicted again, this time of a capital crime, and sentenced to death a second time. On this day in 1852, with no reprieve coming this time, Mahon was hanged at Oatlands, the clemency that had saved him twenty five years earlier nowhere to be found.

On being sentenced, Mahon protested his innocence, but told the court he was perfectly satisfied with his trial.

Interior of the Oatlands gaol Tasmania convict era prison cells

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Australia Convict History Execution Oatlands Prison Robbery TAS UK

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Chechen militants had held hundreds of hostages inside a Moscow theatre for three days, the audience and performers alike trapped with explosives wired around the building. Negotiations dragged on with no resolution in sight, and the gunmen threatened to start killing captives if Russian forces did not withdraw from Chechnya.

Before dawn on this day in 2002, Spetsnaz special forces pumped an unidentified narcotic gas through the ventilation system and stormed the building. The assault killed the militants, but the gas proved just as deadly to the people it was meant to save: roughly 130 hostages died, most from the effects of the chemical agent rather than gunfire, and Russian authorities refused for years to disclose exactly what it was.

Special forces operator in black uniform moving through smoke

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Counterterrorism Europe Hostage Crisis Mass Death Moscow Russia Siege Terrorism

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Four policemen searching for Ned Kelly and his gang had made camp at Stringybark Creek, near Mansfield, when the outlaws struck on 26 October 1878. Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constable Michael Scanlan were away searching the bush when the gang surprised Constables Thomas Lonigan and Thomas McIntyre at the camp. Lonigan was shot dead after attempting to draw his revolver, while McIntyre surrendered and was held captive.

The gang then waited for the other two officers to return. As Kennedy and Scanlan rode into camp, they were ordered to surrender, but gunfire erupted and Scanlan was killed. McIntyre escaped on Kennedy’s horse during the confusion, while Kennedy fought his way into the bush, pursued by the outlaws. He was eventually tracked down and killed. McIntyre reached Mansfield the following day to raise the alarm, the sole survivor of an encounter that left three policemen dead and helped turn the Kelly Gang into Australia’s most notorious bushrangers.

The Capture of Ned Kelly, Julian Ashton, wood engraving, The Illustrated Australian News, 3 July 1880. State Library of Victoria. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Ambush Australia Bushranger Manhunt Murder Police VIC

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