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

Winnie Ruth Judd earned the tabloid name the Trunk Murderess after she shot two friends in Phoenix, Arizona, then packed their bodies into steamer trunks and shipped them by rail to Los Angeles in 1931. When the trunks began to leak, she walked into a Los Angeles police station and gave herself up.

Convicted of murder in 1932, she was declared insane and spent much of the next four decades confined to an Arizona mental institution, escaping it several times before finally being paroled in 1971. She died in Phoenix on this day in 1998, aged 93, exactly 67 years to the day after she had first surrendered to police.

Portrait of Winnie Ruth Judd convicted of murdering two nurses 1932

⬅ See all events from 23 October

Arizona California Los Angeles Mental Illness Murder Phoenix Prison Trial USA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

George Blantern asked the young domestic servant Flora Macdonald to marry him. When she refused, he crept into her room at Marlborough Station near Rockhampton on 7 May 1893 and struck her repeatedly with an axe as she slept, then set her bed alight in a failed attempt to hide the crime. Within hours he confessed to the arresting constable: “I killed her. I don’t know what possessed me to do it. I must not have been in my right senses when I did.”

Convicted of murder, Blantern read a lengthy statement to the court blaming drink, jealousy and an old head injury for his “awful crime” before sentence was passed. He was hanged in Brisbane on this day in 1893, walking to the gallows steadily and showing no emotion until the cap was placed over his head.

He went to his death expressing penitence, ending his final words with “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”

George Blantern: Queensland State Archives, Item ID ITM2947

⬅ See all events from 23 October

Arson Australia Brisbane Execution Murder QLD Rockhampton Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Winnie Ruth Judd, a medical secretary in Phoenix, shot her two friends Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson after a jealous falling out in October 1931, then packed their bodies, one dismembered, into trunks and shipped them to Los Angeles by train. A foul smell leaking from the luggage tipped off a baggage handler, and police forced the locks to find the corpses inside.

Judd vanished into Los Angeles for days before she surrendered to police at a funeral home on this day in 1931. By then her fate had already been sealed by a scrawled confession letter, torn up and flushed, that a department store cleaner fished from a ladies room wash basin. Police pieced the scraps together from the plumbing and reconstructed her own words: “It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defence.” The press, already calling her the Trunk Murderess, seized on a new name: the Tiger Woman.

Winnie Ruth Judd the Velvet Tigress Arizona trunk murder case 1933

⬅ See all events from 23 October

Arizona California Confession Dismemberment Fugitive Los Angeles Murder Phoenix Trial USA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Kenneth Bianchi confessed to being the Hillside Strangler, but he did not go down alone. To save himself, he named his older cousin, Angelo Buono, as his accomplice, and on this day in 1979 Buono was arrested in Los Angeles.

The betrayal inverted everything investigators assumed about the case. It was Buono, not Bianchi, who turned out to be the predatory sexual sadist and driving force behind their partnership, having first drawn his younger cousin into crime years earlier by suggesting they go into business together as pimps. That shared criminal history curdled into a killing spree, and when the pressure of capture came, it was Bianchi who broke family loyalty to shift the blame onto the man who had led him there.

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

⬅ See all events from 22 October

Arrest Los Angeles Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories