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

Winnie Ruth Judd, a medical secretary in Phoenix, shot her two friends Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson after a jealous falling out in October 1931, then packed their bodies, one dismembered, into trunks and shipped them to Los Angeles by train. A foul smell leaking from the luggage tipped off a baggage handler, and police forced the locks to find the corpses inside.

Judd vanished into Los Angeles for days before she surrendered to police at a funeral home on this day in 1931. By then her fate had already been sealed by a scrawled confession letter, torn up and flushed, that a department store cleaner fished from a ladies room wash basin. Police pieced the scraps together from the plumbing and reconstructed her own words: “It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defence.” The press, already calling her the Trunk Murderess, seized on a new name: the Tiger Woman.

Winnie Ruth Judd the Velvet Tigress Arizona trunk murder case 1933

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Arizona California Confession Dismemberment Fugitive Los Angeles Murder Phoenix Trial USA

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Augustin De Kitchilan, a young drifter from Ceylon, had been living and working at Leah Fouracre’s isolated farm near Waroona, Western Australia, breaking in her horses in exchange for board. When Fouracre disappeared in mid August 1907, her farmhouse was found burnt to the ground with her charred remains inside, while De Kitchilan was soon found riding her horse and pawning her jewellery across the district. Convicted of her murder after a trial in Perth, he was hanged at Fremantle Prison on 23 October 1907. In his final days he wrote what he titled ‘my last confession’, a rambling letter to the public that never actually admitted guilt, instead taunting readers in verse to guess who had pulled the trigger if not him. De Kitchilan denied the murder to the end, declaring at his sentencing, ‘I absolutely deny the committal of the dirty crime with which I am charged.’

Kitchilan's Execution for the Peppermint Farm Murder : Illustration 1907 — Kitchilan’s Execution for the Peppermint Farm Murder : Illustration 1907

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Arson Australia Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Trial WA Waroona

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Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan were sitting in a parked car near Bowne Park in Flushing, Queens, on this day in 1976 when the windows suddenly exploded around them. Denaro was bleeding from a bullet wound to the head, Keenan was only cut by flying glass, and in her panic she sped off for help without either of them realising anyone had actually fired at them.

Police dug .44 calibre bullets out of the wrecked car, the same calibre already blamed for a string of near-identical attacks on young couples across New York, but the slugs were so deformed detectives doubted they could ever be traced to one weapon. The press had already given the unknown gunman a name before anyone had heard of “Son of Sam”: the .44 Calibre Killer. Because Denaro wore his hair shoulder length, investigators later decided he had simply been mistaken for a woman.

Jurisdiction kept the dots unjoined for months: this shooting sat with one Queens precinct, a near-identical attack on another couple three months earlier in the Bronx sat with another, and the bullets went unmatched until more victims fell. David Berkowitz was arrested the following year and later confessed to shooting Denaro and Keenan himself.

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Attempted Murder Murder New York Queens Serial Killer Shooting USA

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Thomas Carbury and an accomplice, Andrew Miller, were arrested for drunkenness in a small Western Australian town, and Constable Patrick Hackett refused to return the new clothing found in their swag, worth about £20, until they explained how they had got it. Released that evening, the pair bludgeoned and stabbed him to death on 12 September 1884; the hammers used on him turned up cleaned but still blood-stained, quietly returned to the local blacksmith’s shop.

Police hunted the two men for a week. Cornered in a shootout, Miller was fatally wounded and confessed with his dying breath that “both Carbury and myself killed him.” Carbury fled but was soon tracked down and arrested, reportedly carrying a bottle of strychnine, as if hoping to cheat the gallows.

Awaiting execution in Perth, Carbury made a will leaving his savings, horses and stock of cut sandalwood entirely to Hackett’s widow. He never once spoke his victim’s name, calling him only “that man,” and said he wanted everything he owned “to go to the benefit of the child of that man.” He was hanged in Perth on this day in 1884, so overcome with terror that two constables had to carry him to the scaffold.

He had earlier acknowledged his guilt to the prison chaplain, though he never explained why he and Miller had killed Hackett.

Portrait of police Corporal Evan Williams Western Australia

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Australia Execution Manhunt Murder Perth Police WA

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