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

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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Danny Rolling earned the name the Gainesville Ripper after a four day rampage through student housing near the University of Florida in August 1990 left five young people dead. He mutilated and deliberately posed his victims, severing one woman’s head and placing it to face anyone who walked into the room. Police initially chased the wrong man, a troubled student named Edward Humphrey, whose grandmother collapsed and died on her own doorstep while fending off a reporter during the hunt.

Rolling later claimed an alter personality called Gemini had driven him to kill, a story investigators quickly dismissed after learning he had watched a film featuring a killer of that exact name days earlier. He pleaded guilty before trial and was sentenced to death. On this day in 2006 he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, having eaten a last meal of lobster tail and sung a gospel hymn.

Shortly before his execution Rolling handed authorities a written confession admitting to an earlier unsolved triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana, but made no final statement on the gurney itself.

Gainesville, FL, USA - May 11, 2016: An entrance to the University of Florida. The University of Florida is a public research university located in Gainesville, Florida. | ID 76208519 © Wellesenterprises | Dreamstime.com — ID 76208519 © Wellesenterprises | Dreamstime.com

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Execution Florida Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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Michael Finnessy spent the afternoon of 26 September 1853 swinging between tenderness and menace, handing a neighbour his pistol and knife and then asking for them back, as he tried to win over Elizabeth Finnessy, the woman he lived with in a house off Little Bourke Street near the Queen’s Theatre in Melbourne. By evening, with the room lit only by candlelight, he asked her to speak to him, then shot her at point blank range in front of a shocked household.

As Elizabeth lay dying on the floor, Finnessy tried to finish what he had started, raising the pistol by its butt to strike her skull. A neighbour wrestled it from him, but not before Finnessy snarled, “You wretch, if I thought you was not settled, I would finish you now.” She died minutes later, begging only to see a priest.

The cruellest twist came at his execution. Finnessy already had a wife, whom he had deserted for Elizabeth, and she stood outside the gaol gates that October morning, asking strangers to let her see his body. He was hanged in Melbourne on 25 October 1853, one of seven men executed there within just twenty three days.

Little Bourke Street, Melbourne: Street Scene 1863

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Australia Domestic Violence Execution Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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Kitty Hennessy lived in a tent at Prahran, outside Melbourne, with Alexander Ram, and her young son shared their bed. One night in August 1853, the boy witnessed a violent attack on his mother and was threatened with death if he revealed what had happened.

At trial, the boy gave his evidence through tears, telling the court his mother called his name once and then fell silent for good. The jury found Ram guilty of murder but recommended mercy, a plea the presiding judge said he could see no grounds for. Ram was hanged in Melbourne on 25 October 1853, as local newspapers noted was the seventh execution in twenty three days.

Ram never confessed to being conscious of what he was doing when he killed her, though his gaol chaplain believed him truly penitent before he went to the scaffold.

Canvas town tents and huts in South Melbourne 1850s

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Australia Domestic Violence Execution Melbourne Murder Prahran Trial VIC

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