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

In Perth, Martha Rendell told neighbours her stepchildren suffered from chronic sore throats that she treated herself at home. In truth she was swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid, a slow and agonising poisoning disguised as nursing. Her stepson Arthur Morris, 14, died of it on 8 October 1908; two of his siblings had already died the same way, but only Arthur’s death went to trial.

Convicted of his murder, Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison on 6 October 1909, the only woman ever executed in Western Australia.

She denied killing the children to the end, insisting she had only ever tried to cure them.

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Australia Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Poisoning Trial WA

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Caroline Grills earned the nickname Aunt Thally for the thallium she slipped into the tea and food of relatives and neighbours, a slow, trusted poisoner convicted in Sydney in 1953 after several deaths in her circle were finally traced back to her cheerful hospitality.

Sentenced to life, she was sent to the State Reformatory for Women, where she settled into prison life with the same warm, motherly manner that had once made her so welcome at other people’s tables. She kept making tea for fellow inmates right up until her death on 6 October 1960.

She never publicly expressed remorse for her crimes, dying as she had lived behind bars: smiling, sociable, and giving no hint of guilt.

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Australia Murder NSW Poisoning Prison Serial Killer Sydney Trial

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At a one-teacher school in rural Victoria, two unemployed plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, burst in with a sawn-off shotgun and forced 20-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and her six young pupils into a van, demanding a million dollar ransom. Victoria’s premier agreed to pay, and the education minister himself waited at the handover point with police hidden nearby, but the kidnappers never returned to collect it.

Left alone with the children overnight, Gibbs kicked out a door panel with her heavy platform boots and led the girls through the dark bush to safety. Eastwood and Boland were run down in a manhunt; Eastwood pleaded guilty and was jailed, while Boland was convicted after three trials.

It was not the end of the story. Eastwood escaped prison years later and staged a second mass kidnapping of a teacher and nine pupils, and while back behind bars he killed a fellow inmate in what was ruled self-defence.

White camper van parked on dirt pull-off overlooking rural hills

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Australia Escape Kidnapping Prison Ransom Trial VIC

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For about two decades, Eugenia Falleni lived as a man named Harry Crawford, working ordinary jobs and marrying a woman named Annie Birkett in 1913 without her ever suspecting the truth. The marriage held until Eight-Hour Day in 1917, when Birkett disappeared; her charred remains were later found in bushland near Lane Cove.

It took police years to connect Crawford to the body and to discover the deeper deception underneath. Tried at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney, Falleni was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.

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Australia Disguise Execution Murder NSW Scandal Sydney Trial

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