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

The Want Ad Killer,Harvey Carignan, was arrested in Minnesota on 24 September 1974, at the end of a ten-day rampage. A woman he had left for dead in a field survived and raised the alarm, two others escaped when he stopped for petrol, and an 18-year-old was found dead in a cornfield just four days before police caught up with him.

He should have been hanged in 1949. A soldier stationed in Alaska, he was sentenced to death for murdering a woman, but the conviction collapsed because an officer had promised he would not be executed if he confessed. With the confession thrown out, the murder charge was dismissed. He served time for a separate assault instead, part of it in Alcatraz, and was paroled in 1960.

By the early 1970s he was the prime suspect in two killings in Washington state, one of them a teenager who had answered his “help wanted” ad for a job at his service station. He was never charged, and moved on to Minnesota. After his arrest, his plea that God had ordered him to kill failed; he was convicted of two murders and died in prison in 2023, aged 95.

Help wanted classified ad printed in a newspaper

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Alaska Minnesota Murder Prison Serial Killer Trial USA Washington

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Larry Cummins was 20 when a Goulburn jury convicted him of armed robbery and he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour, the first in irons. His accomplice in the hold-up, both men with blackened faces, had been his 18-year-old brother. And the charge everyone was talking about had already been dropped: the murder of that same brother.

Weeks earlier, police had found the younger Cummins hiding in the loft of his mother’s hut. He fired twice at the constables before surrendering, and they saddled one of the family’s own horses to take him to the lockup. Eight miles along the track a single shot rang out from the bush. It struck the prisoner behind the ear; he “gave one groan” and died. The constables never saw the gunman, only heard a horse galloping away. The shot was assumed to have been meant for the constable, and the man behind it to be Larry, trying to set his brother free. There was not enough evidence to try him for it.

Three years later Cummins escaped from Berrima Gaol by crawling through 120 yards of sewer, only to be recaptured within months. Released in 1876, he lived out his days in Victoria under another name, as a drover and whipmaker, and died in 1909.

Sepia portrait of bushranger Larry Cummins 1843 to 1909

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Australia Berrima Bushranger Crookwell Escape Goulburn Manslaughter Mudgee NSW Prison Richlands Robbery Trial

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John Trevor “Jack” Kelly was found guilty of kidnapping on 23rd September 1937, and was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, with a recommendation that he undergo observation following concerns about lasting effects from a motor accident.

Released in November 1938, Kelly committed murder less than three months later. He stood trial before the same judge who had sentenced him for kidnapping, but this time he was sentenced to death, becoming the last prisoner executed in New South Wales.

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Armidale Australia Kidnapping Lismore Murder NSW Prison Tenterfield Trial

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In the early hours of September 23, 1986, 23-year-old penguin parade worker Beth Barnard was found stabbed to death in a house on Phillip Island, Victoria. A blanket had been placed over her body, but beneath it her throat had been cut, her nightgown pushed up, and her body slashed and stabbed repeatedly, with defensive wounds on her hands. Cigarette butts and a knife lay near the body, and bloodied paper towels were stuffed around the bathroom sink.

Carved into her chest was a knife wound resembling the letter A, leading some to dub the killing the Scarlet Letter murder. Barnard had been having an affair with her married employer, Fergus Cameron, a founding shareholder of the Phillip Island Grand Prix. The night before her body was found, his wife, 36-year-old Vivienne Cameron, learned the truth and smashed a wine glass across his head and back before driving him to hospital.

Fergus spent that night at his sister’s house while Vivienne asked friends to mind their two young sons. She then vanished and was never seen again. A coroner later found that Vivienne had contributed to Beth Barnard’s death and concluded that she had taken her own life by jumping from the nearby San Remo Bridge, although her body has never been recovered.

Seagull portrait on grass with San Remo Bridge blurred behind

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Australia Cold Case Disappearance Missing Person Murder Phillip Island Unsolved VIC

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