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

2011: Killed Behind Bars: Matthew Johnson Convicted of Murdering Gangland Assassin Carl Williams

Carl Williams had already been convicted of multiple murders during Melbourne’s gangland war when he was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike in a high-security unit at Victoria’s Barwon Prison in 2010, an inmate supposedly protected by round-the-clock surveillance.

Matthew Charles Johnson, a fellow prisoner sharing the unit, was charged with the killing. On this day in 2011 a jury found him guilty of murdering the man once considered one of the country’s most feared underworld figures, in an attack that exposed how little safety the prison’s most secure wing actually offered its most notorious inmate.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Prison Trial VIC

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1829: The Five-Pound Threshold: Two Men Hanged at Sydney for Burglary

Daniel Grier and Charles Penson were hanged at Sydney in 1829 for nothing more than burglary: stealing from a dwelling house goods valued at just over five pounds, a sum that under the law of the day was enough to turn a break-in into a hanging offence.

They died on the same gallows as a young murderer, though their own execution became its own grim spectacle. As the drop fell, the rope twisted at the nape of Grier’s neck and his limbs quivered horribly for several minutes, while Penson spun briefly and died with barely a struggle. Before the ropes were adjusted, all three men on the scaffold had joined in singing a hymn together.

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Australia Burglary Capital Punishment Execution NSW Sydney Trial

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1898: Executed as Reform Martyrs, But Were They Assassins? The Beheading of Six Gentlemen in Beijing

When Empress Dowager Cixi crushed the Hundred Days’ Reform with a palace coup in September 1898, she moved fast. Six officials and intellectuals who had championed the Guangxu Emperor’s modernisation drive, among them Tan Sitong and Kang Youwei’s younger brother Kang Guangren, were arrested, denied any trial, and beheaded the same day at the Caishikou execution ground in Beijing. For decades they were remembered simply as reform martyrs cut down by a reactionary court.

That story only cracked in the 1980s, when testimony surfaced in Japanese archives from a man who had been ordered to assassinate Cixi and fled before he could act. His account implicated four of the six in a genuine plot to kill the Empress Dowager, suggesting at least one of the condemned, Yang Rui, may have been entirely innocent, executed alongside men who really had been plotting murder.

Historic photo of beheaded bodies after execution: Laneway of Caishikou crossroad, Beijing, China.

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Asia Assassination Beijing China Execution Political Crime Trial

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1808: The Bushranger Who Apologised Mid-Robbery, Then Hanged at Sydney

Hugh Dowling and his accomplices broke into William Styles’s house near the Nepean River in 1808, beat a sleeping servant unconscious, bound Styles’s wife as she nursed an infant, and ransacked the home at gunpoint. When Styles’s wife protested handing over her husband’s watch, Dowling reportedly replied, “I ask your pardon madam,” before taking a pipe instead and settling in to smoke tobacco with his companions before leaving.

He wore a crude crape mask, but it slipped while he examined stolen banknotes by candlelight, and Styles’s wife later swore in court that she had seen his bare face clearly enough to identify him without doubt. Convicted despite an alibi the court found riddled with contradictions, Dowling was sentenced to death and hanged the following Thursday.

Dowling maintained his innocence through trial, but the alibi he offered collapsed under questioning and was judged a fabrication by the court.

Antique pocket watch resting on old books.

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Australia Burglary Execution Nepean NSW Robbery Sydney Trial

2011: Killed Behind Bars: Matthew Johnson Convicted of Murdering Gangland Assassin Carl Williams

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1829: The Five-Pound Threshold: Two Men Hanged at Sydney for Burglary

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1898: Executed as Reform Martyrs, But Were They Assassins? The Beheading of Six Gentlemen in Beijing

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1808: The Bushranger Who Apologised Mid-Robbery, Then Hanged at Sydney

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