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

Patrick Mahon had faced the gallows before. In 1827, convicted of a highway robbery on the road from Manchester to Sheffield after borrowing a fellow traveller’s own knife to rob him, he was sentenced to death at Derby Assizes, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land the following year and spent decades drifting through minor convict offences: insolence, drunkenness, breaches of his pass, a stint in chains.

In September 1852 he was convicted again, this time of a capital crime, and sentenced to death a second time. On this day in 1852, with no reprieve coming this time, Mahon was hanged at Oatlands, the clemency that had saved him twenty five years earlier nowhere to be found.

On being sentenced, Mahon protested his innocence, but told the court he was perfectly satisfied with his trial.

Interior of the Oatlands gaol Tasmania convict era prison cells

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Australia Convict History Execution Oatlands Prison Robbery TAS UK

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Danny Rolling earned the name the Gainesville Ripper after a four day rampage through student housing near the University of Florida in August 1990 left five young people dead. He mutilated and deliberately posed his victims, severing one woman’s head and placing it to face anyone who walked into the room. Police initially chased the wrong man, a troubled student named Edward Humphrey, whose grandmother collapsed and died on her own doorstep while fending off a reporter during the hunt.

Rolling later claimed an alter personality called Gemini had driven him to kill, a story investigators quickly dismissed after learning he had watched a film featuring a killer of that exact name days earlier. He pleaded guilty before trial and was sentenced to death. On this day in 2006 he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, having eaten a last meal of lobster tail and sung a gospel hymn.

Shortly before his execution Rolling handed authorities a written confession admitting to an earlier unsolved triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana, but made no final statement on the gurney itself.

Gainesville, FL, USA - May 11, 2016: An entrance to the University of Florida. The University of Florida is a public research university located in Gainesville, Florida. | ID 76208519 © Wellesenterprises | Dreamstime.com — ID 76208519 © Wellesenterprises | Dreamstime.com

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Execution Florida Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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Albert Anastasia had spent two decades building a reputation as the most feared man in organised crime, running Murder, Inc., the Mafia’s contract-killing squad blamed for thousands of unsolved deaths, which earned him the nickname the Lord High Executioner. By the mid-1950s he had clawed his way to boss of his own crime family, but his brutal, unpredictable style had made him more enemies than allies.

On 25 October 1957, Anastasia settled into the barber’s chair at a Manhattan hotel for a shave. His driver had parked the car and stepped outside, leaving him unguarded. Two gunmen with scarves hiding their faces burst in, shoved the barber aside and opened fire, chasing Anastasia as he staggered into the mirror before he fell dead. No one was ever charged, though a rival mobster later boasted to an associate, “You can just call the five of us the barbershop quintet.”

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Assassination Gang Murder New York Organised Crime USA

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Captain Henry Townley Wright refused to hand command of the gunboat Gayundah to his second officer, Lieutenant Francis Taylor, and had him arrested instead, declaring the vessel under Royal Navy authority rather than the Queensland government. He threatened to train the ship’s guns on the Parliament building overlooking the Brisbane River while loading coal and three months of supplies, apparently preparing to sail for Sydney rather than be dismissed over a long running dispute about unauthorised spending of public funds.

On this day in 1888, the Colonial Secretary sent the Police Commissioner and twenty armed constables to retake the ship, drawing a crowd of two thousand onlookers to the riverbank. After a tense standoff, Wright accepted defeat. He wrote a formal letter of protest, read it aloud on deck, released Taylor from arrest, then calmly borrowed a light for a cigarette from a bystander before stepping ashore under police escort.

HMQS Gayundah Queensland Navy flagship in 1890

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Australia Brisbane Corruption Mutiny Naval History QLD Scandal

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