Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 20
1952: Steps From Home: the Unsolved Murder of Betty Shanks in Brisbane
On the night of 19 September 1952, 22 year old Betty Shanks stepped off a tram at the Grange terminus in Brisbane and set off on the short walk home. She never made it and her body was found the next morning, in the front garden of a house just metres from her parents’ own home.
Despite an extensive police investigation and decades of renewed interest, no one was ever charged over her death. The case has become one of Queensland’s most haunting cold cases. A young woman killed almost within sight of her own front door, with her killer never identified.
1980: Smuggled in a Book Spine: the Hillside Strangler Plot to Fake a Copycat Killing
On September 19, 1980, Veronica Compton attempted to strangle a 26-year-old woman at a motel in Bellingham, Washington. The attack was part of a plot to convince authorities that imprisoned Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi was innocent—and that the real killer remained at large.
Bianchi had supplied Compton with a semen-filled condom concealed in the spine of a book. She was to plant its contents at the scene of a staged rape and murder, creating false evidence to cast doubt on his guilt. But the woman survived, and the scheme unravelled.
Compton was convicted of first-degree attempted murder in March 1981. She remained imprisoned until 2003.
Close-up of worn book spine titled Modern English Drama
1975: The Hunt Ends: Patty Hearst, Newspaper Heiress Turned Fugitive, Captured by the FBI
Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974 by the self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army, a small but violent radical cell. Within weeks the group released tapes in which she renounced her family and adopted the nom de guerre Tania, and in April 1974 she was photographed wielding a rifle during the SLA’s armed robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco.
For nineteen months Hearst remained with her captors turned comrades as the group moved between safe houses, evading one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. She was finally arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975, and later stood trial for bank robbery, where her defence argued she had been brainwashed and coerced.
Convicted despite that defence, Hearst was sentenced to prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton in 2001.
Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco
1811: No Reprieve: The Killers Confession Ignored as a Convicted Man Is Hanged Two Days Late
John Dunn was convicted at the Parramatta Court of Criminal Jurisdiction of murdering Mary Rowe, largely on the testimony of a sixteen year old accomplice, John Welch, whose evidence also saw Welch’s father, Thomas Welch, convicted as an accessory after the fact.
Dunn was due to hang at Parramatta two days beforehand, on Monday 16 September 1811, but as the execution was about to proceed the boy, John Welch, suddenly retracted everything he had sworn at trial. He declared Dunn innocent and claimed that he and his father were the true killers. The Acting Provost Marshal, unable to consult anyone and acting on what observers called motives of humanity, respited the hanging on the spot.
The reprieve lasted only two days. Dunn was finally executed at Parramatta on the Wednesday following, as near as possible to the site of the murder itself, amid what one witness described as far gloomier circumstances than the original sentence would have produced.
After he was cut down, Dunn’s body was delivered to the medical officer at Parramatta General Hospital, where it was dissected and anatomised before burial. The scaffold retraction left lingering public doubt over Dunn’s guilt, with contemporary accounts noting the boy’s claim that Dunn was innocent and that he and his father were the real perpetrators.
Lady Justice Themis statue on gallows with scales and sword
