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

1953: Serial Killer John Balaban Hanged at Adelaide Gaol for a String of Murders

John Balaban, a 29-year-old Rumanian industrial chemist living in Adelaide, admitted in the Criminal Court in July 1953 to murdering at least five people. His victims included Zora Kusic, a 29-year-old Yugoslav woman whose throat he cut at her tin-shed home in Torrensville; a French girl named Riva Kwas; his wife Thelma Joyce Balaban; his mother-in-law Susan Jane Ackland; and his young stepson.

He claimed a divine vision had told him to do whatever his conscience dictated. Balaban pleaded insanity, but the jury rejected the defence. He was convicted of the murder of Kusic and sentenced to death. On 26 August 1953, he was hanged at Adelaide Gaol, walking to the gallows with blackened eyes and a bruised nose after being subdued following a sudden outburst in his cell.

1953 Daily Telegraph article Alleged killer dead wife Trove image

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Adelaide Australia Execution Murder SA Serial Killer Torrensville Trial

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2016: The Chinese Jack The Ripper Serial Killer Caught After 28 Years Through a Relative’s DNA

Gao Chengyong was arrested at his grocery store in Baiyin, Gansu, in August 2016 after a DNA test on his uncle flagged a close familial match to an unidentified serial killer. The breakthrough closed a case that had haunted investigators for nearly three decades. Gao confessed to all eleven murders, committed between 1988 and 2002 across Inner Mongolia.

Known in Chinese media as the ‘Chinese Jack the Ripper’, Gao had followed victims to their homes, typically striking in daylight hours. He mutilated their bodies in a pattern that drew comparisons to the 1888 Whitechapel killings. Sentenced to death and stripped of all assets, he was executed on 3 January 2019.

Chinese death character with skull texture 3D illustration

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Asia Baiyin Baotou China Cold Case Execution Gansu Inner Mongolia Murder Serial Killer

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1981: Harold Shipman Kills Elderly Patient With a Fatal Injection After She Fell Ill in Her Garden

In August 1981, 81-year-old Elizabeth Ashworth felt unwell while gardening at her home on Peel Street in Hyde, England, and asked her neighbours to call a doctor. Harold Shipman arrived, administered an injection, then told the neighbours she would not live much longer. When he returned later and asked if she was still alive, she had already died.

Investigators later identified her death as an unlawful killing, part of Shipman’s early pattern of murdering elderly patients with fatal opiate injections. Harold Shipman would go on to become one of history’s most prolific serial killers, convicted of 15 murders but suspected in the deaths of over 200 patients.

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England Hyde Murder Poisoning Serial Killer UK

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1980: Five Infant Bodies Found Hidden in a Gallitzin Attic for Over 50 Years

When 76-year-old Stella Williamson died of natural causes in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania on August 25, 1980, a sealed letter was found among her belongings. Written in the early 1960s, it was a confession: ‘In the attic in an old trunk you will find babies I had… How I got away with it I don’t know but I did.’ Investigators followed the letter to the attic, where they found the mummified remains of five infants, all under one year old, wrapped in newspapers dating from 1925 to 1933.

Examination by forensic experts including Dr. Halbert Fillinger and Dr. Wilton Krogman determined that at least three of the infants had been strangled, ligature material still present on their necks. The cause of death for the other two, believed to be newborns, was never conclusively established. Williamson, remembered by neighbours as kind and churchgoing, had kept her secret for more than half a century. The case resurfaced decades later when two of the infant skulls were mysteriously discovered at a Philadelphia museum.

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Cold Case Murder Pennsylvania Unsolved USA

1953: Serial Killer John Balaban Hanged at Adelaide Gaol for a String of Murders

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2016: The Chinese Jack The Ripper Serial Killer Caught After 28 Years Through a Relative’s DNA

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1981: Harold Shipman Kills Elderly Patient With a Fatal Injection After She Fell Ill in Her Garden

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1980: Five Infant Bodies Found Hidden in a Gallitzin Attic for Over 50 Years

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