Nineteen-year-old Yolanda Washington was last seen getting into a car near a Los Angeles intersection one October evening in 1977. The next morning her body was found on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway, the first known victim of the killers soon dubbed the Hillside Stranglers.

Her killers were cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who had lured her with the promise of a ride before attacking and strangling her. Washington, who worked as a waitress and sometimes turned to sex work, was the opening victim in a killing spree that would terrorise the city for months before the cousins were finally caught.

Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway
Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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Richard Bibby was a hutkeeper at a station in the Victoria district when he decided to kill Billamarra, an Aboriginal man camped near his own hut, so near that he was said to be under Bibby’s protection. He announced his intention the night before, loaded his pistol, and before dawn woke his sleeping victim only to shoot him dead. Bibby claimed Billamarra had stolen lambs, but witnesses showed the missing lambs had simply been mauled by native dogs; another man watching in secret saw the whole killing.

Tried and condemned at the Quarter Sessions, Bibby became the first white man executed in Perth, and in the colony, for murdering an Aboriginal person. Strong appeals were made for mercy, but his cold, premeditated planning and a past conviction for robbery with violence counted against him. The hanging itself was botched, the rope poorly adjusted, and he struggled visibly on the rope before dying.

Bibby privately confessed his guilt to the prison chaplain, yet on the scaffold, asked if his sentence was just, he answered that if the truth had been told he would not have been there.

Disused shed with kiln and chimney stack in dry Australian bush
Disused shed with kiln and chimney stack in dry Australian bush

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When the men accused of killing miner James Scobie walked free, the goldfields of Ballarat erupted. Roughly ten thousand miners massed near the Eureka Hotel, the pub where Scobie had been beaten to death, convinced the verdict was a stitch-up between the publican and the authorities.

The crowd set the hotel ablaze and turned on the officials sent to calm them: Gold Commissioner Rede was pelted with eggs as police and soldiers failed to restore order. The riot was a direct spark for the unrest that would culminate weeks later in the Eureka Stockade, one of the defining clashes of Australian colonial history.

Burning of Bentleys Hotel during the Eureka Riot 1854
Burning of Bentleys Hotel during the Eureka Riot 1854

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He had survived gang wars, bribery and a carefully built image as a Robin Hood of the Chicago slums, but it was not a murder charge that finally caught Al Capone. Federal prosecutors built a case not on bootlegging or bloodshed but on unpaid taxes, a paper trail he had never bothered to hide.

When the original jury pool was found to have been tampered with, the judge swapped it out entirely on the morning of the trial, stripping away whatever quiet deals Capone’s men had arranged in advance. The replacement jurors heard days of complex financial testimony, then took just nine hours to convict. On 17 October 1931, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, the longest tax evasion sentence ever handed down to that point, ending the public myth with a ledger rather than a gun.

Al Capone, Philadelphia, 16 May 1929. U.S. National Archives, NAID 24520406. Use unrestricted.
Al Capone, Philadelphia, 16 May 1929. U.S. National Archives, NAID 24520406. Use unrestricted.

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