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

For about two decades, Eugenia Falleni lived as a man named Harry Crawford, working ordinary jobs and marrying a woman named Annie Birkett in 1913 without her ever suspecting the truth. The marriage held until Eight-Hour Day in 1917, when Birkett disappeared; her charred remains were later found in bushland near Lane Cove.

It took police years to connect Crawford to the body and to discover the deeper deception underneath. Tried at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney, Falleni was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.

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Australia Disguise Execution Murder NSW Scandal Sydney Trial

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In Perth, Martha Rendell told neighbours her stepchildren suffered from chronic sore throats that she treated herself at home. In truth she was swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid, a slow and agonising poisoning disguised as nursing. Her stepson Arthur Morris, 14, died of it on 8 October 1908; two of his siblings had already died the same way, but only Arthur’s death went to trial.

Convicted of his murder, Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison on 6 October 1909, the only woman ever executed in Western Australia.

She denied killing the children to the end, insisting she had only ever tried to cure them.

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Australia Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Poisoning Trial WA

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On the night of October 6, 1866, three members of the Reno Gang boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train as it pulled out of Seymour, Indiana, overpowered the express guard and cracked open a safe holding roughly 16,000 dollars. They then shoved a second, heavier safe off the moving train for the rest of the gang to finish the job, but could not break it open before a posse closed in and they fled. It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first train robbery in American history.

The job, pulled off by brothers Frank, John, Simeon and William Reno, became the blueprint for a wave of copycat train robberies across the Midwest. Within two years the brothers paid for it dearly: dragged from jail cells by masked vigilantes and hanged, most of the gang’s stolen fortune never recovered.

Portrait of the Reno Brothers members of the Reno Gang train robbers

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Gang Indiana Organised Crime Robbery Train Robbery USA

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In October 1965, Ian Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at a Manchester railway station, telling him he had been invited home for a drink. At the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, Brady had Myra Hindley fetch her brother-in-law David Smith under the pretext of sharing miniature wine bottles. Smith arrived in time to witness Brady strike Evans with a hatchet and strangle him with electrical cord, screams tearing through the house as Hindley called out for help.

Smith helped move the body to a spare room before fleeing home, where he was sick and told his wife everything. He contacted police the next morning armed with a screwdriver and bread knife in case Brady came after him. Officers found Evans’ body behind a locked door, and as he dressed for arrest, Brady offered a chillingly understated explanation: he and Evans “had a row and the situation got out of hand.” The killing exposed what became known as the Moors Murders.

Shocked male witness after fatal late night accident

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England Manchester Murder Serial Killer Trial UK

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