Two days after shooting cabdriver Paul Stine dead in San Francisco, the Zodiac Killer sent the San Francisco Chronicle a taunting letter dated October 13, 1969. Inside was a torn piece of Stine’s bloodstained shirt, offered as proof the killer was the same man terrorising the Bay Area, not a copycat.

The letter mocked police for failing to catch him despite patrols flooding the area that night, and promised more killings to come. It remains one of several pieces of physical evidence tied to an identity that, more than fifty years on, has never been conclusively proven.

Symbolism
Symbolism

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Thomas Airey had spent most of his adult life behind bars in England before he was transported to Western Australia aboard the Nile, arriving at Fremantle in December 1857 to serve a 15 year sentence for burglary. In June 1860 he was granted a ticket of leave, a conditional release that let convicts who had shown good behaviour work and live within a set district without constant supervision, a step short of full freedom but a clear sign the colony had judged him trustworthy.

That trust lasted barely four months. By October 1860 Airey stood before the Supreme Court in Perth convicted of a serious assault and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Perth Gaol on 13 October 1860, aged 29, and buried the following day at East Perth Cemetery.

Ticket of leave men historical photograph
Ticket of leave men historical photograph

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Carl Williams was 29 and already dealing drugs when Jason Moran shot him in the stomach on this day at Gladstone Park, in Melbourne, over an $80,000 debt tied to a failed amphetamine batch. Jason and his brother Mark Moran were both present. Williams survived.

He did not forget it. The shooting became the spark for a bloody tit-for-tat campaign that grew into the Melbourne gangland war, a decade of killings across the city’s underworld that would eventually claim both Moran brothers among dozens of others, and send Williams himself to prison before his own murder behind bars.

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

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William Westwood was already notorious as Jackey Jackey, a bushranger transported twice and flogged repeatedly, when he helped lead the 1846 Cooking Pot Uprising on Norfolk Island, a desperate convict revolt sparked by brutal rations and treatment. In the chaos, three constables and an overseer were killed.

He was 26 when he was hanged on 13 October 1846, one of the largest mass executions in Australian penal history.

Death mask of William Westwood known as Jackey Jackey
Death mask of William Westwood known as Jackey Jackey

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On This Day in True Crime History

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