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

Takahiro Shiraishi trawled Twitter for young people who had posted about wanting to die, then invited them to his apartment in the Japanese city of Zama with promises to help them end their lives, or to die together. Between August and October 2017, he murdered eight young women and one man, the latter killed because he threatened to expose the crimes.

When one of the women disappeared, her brother searched her Twitter messages and helped police trace her movements to Shiraishi. Investigators arrived at his apartment on 30 October 2017 and discovered human remains concealed in cooler boxes and storage containers. The remains belonged to nine victims, aged between fifteen and twenty-six, whose disappearances had gone largely unconnected until the discovery.

Shiraishi admitted all nine killings and acknowledged that his victims had not consented to their deaths, despite his lawyers arguing otherwise. Sentenced to death in December 2020, he withdrew an appeal lodged by his lawyers and was executed by hanging on 27 June 2025, Japan’s first execution in nearly three years.

Zama death pact slayings murder scene photo: released into the public domain.

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Asia Dismemberment Execution Japan Kanagawa Prefecture Murder Online Crime Serial Killer Tokyo Trial Zama City

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James “Whitey” Bulger ran Boston’s underworld for decades while secretly informing for the FBI, a betrayal that let his gang operate almost untouched. He vanished in 1994 after a tip-off from his own handler, spent sixteen years as a fugitive second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s most wanted list, and was finally captured in California in 2011. Convicted in 2013 of racketeering and involvement in eleven murders, he was handed two life sentences.

Five years later, the 89 year old and wheelchair bound Bulger was abruptly transferred to a high security prison in West Virginia, his medical status quietly downgraded just weeks earlier. He arrived on 29 October 2018. Within hours, on this day in 2018, he was found beaten to death in his cell, attacked with a sock wrapped padlock and a shiv so savagely a law enforcement official called him unrecognisable.

Mafia hitman Fotios Geas was later identified as the man behind the killing and in 2024 was sentenced to 25 years for voluntary manslaughter. A relative of one of Bulger’s own victims summed up the reaction of many: “He died the way I hoped he always was going to die.”

James Joseph Bulger Jr portrait photograph 1953

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Gang Murder Organised Crime Prison USA

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Joe Governor had been on the run for fifteen weeks when New South Wales declared him and his brother Jimmy outlaws under the Felons Apprehension Act, a law that stripped them of the right to surrender and made it lawful for any armed settler to shoot them dead. The brothers had been linked to a string of killings that winter, nine people dead across the colony, before the manhunt swept north toward Singleton.

At dawn on this day in 1900, brothers Joe and George Wilkinson found Joe asleep on their own property near Singleton and called on him to surrender. He woke, ran, and the men exchanged fire until he fell dead into a waterhole, the chase finally over after months of pursuit.

The coronial inquest that followed did more than clear the Wilkinsons of blame: it congratulated them, with the coroner thanking them for “ridding the country of so dangerous a brute” while the crowd outside broke into cheers. A rumour swept the town that Joe’s head had been removed and preserved for identification; it was false, officials denied it emphatically, but the story continued to circulate.

Joe Governor newspaper illustration Evening News Sydney 1900

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Australia Colonial Era Crime Hunter Valley Inquest Manhunt Murder NSW Singleton Vigilante Killing

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Ralph Entwistle was an escaped convict who had been publicly flogged on the orders of Bathurst magistrate Thomas Evernden after being spotted bathing in the Macquarie River by the Governor’s travelling party. Within a year he had turned bushranger, gathering escaped convicts into a band that grew to as many as eighty men, the largest convict uprising since Castle Hill, known as the Ribbon Gang for the white streamers Entwistle wore in his hair.

The gang’s campaign turned deadly when overseer James Greenwood refused to let them recruit his master’s men, baring his chest and daring them to shoot. They did. Troopers and armed volunteers, guided by two Aboriginal trackers, finally cornered the remaining bushrangers at the Abercrombie Caves, where a gunfight lasting hours forced the survivors onto a nearby hilltop before reinforcements ran the exhausted gang down.

On 30 October 1830, ten captured bushrangers faced trial at Bathurst before a jury of military officers. The court convicted six, including Entwistle, of Greenwood’s murder, and four others of plundering farmhouses, sentencing all ten to death.

Suspension bridge over underground lake at Abercrombie Caves

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Australia Bathurst Bushranging Murder NSW Rebellion Robbery Trial

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