Carl Williams was 29 and already dealing drugs when Jason Moran shot him in the stomach on this day at Gladstone Park, in Melbourne, over an $80,000 debt tied to a failed amphetamine batch. Jason and his brother Mark Moran were both present. Williams survived.

He did not forget it. The shooting became the spark for a bloody tit-for-tat campaign that grew into the Melbourne gangland war, a decade of killings across the city’s underworld that would eventually claim both Moran brothers among dozens of others, and send Williams himself to prison before his own murder behind bars.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Before dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, royal officers across France moved on hundreds of Knights Templar at once, arresting the warrior monks in their own preceptories under sealed orders opened simultaneously nationwide. King Philip the Fair, deeply in debt to the order he had once sworn to protect, accused its knights of heresy and secret blasphemous rites.

Under torture, many confessed to charges historians now regard as fabricated to justify seizing the order’s vast wealth. The arrests marked the beginning of the end for the Templars, who were suppressed within a few years and their leaders burned at the stake, and contributed to the enduring misfortune of the date of Friday the 13th.

Medieval illustration of the Grand Master of the Templars burning at the stake.
Medieval illustration of the Grand Master of the Templars burning at the stake.

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On 12 October 1950, at Collie, near Perth, milk carter Raymond Armanasco murdered several members of his family. His own defence counsel told the jury it was possibly the most gruesome case ever unfolded in a Western Australian court, and argued Armanasco had been temporarily insane.

Through two days of evidence at his trial, Armanasco spoke only two words: “not guilty.” The jury took just forty minutes to convict him of murder, but attached to its verdict the “strongest recommendation for mercy.” He was sentenced to hang, yet in April 1951 the Executive Council accepted that plea and commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment with hard labour.

Raymond Armanasco arrives at court Perth 1950
Raymond Armanasco arrives at court Perth 1950

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Edward Bishop was a ticket-of-leave convict working at York, east of Perth, when he fell into a bitter feud with a Chinese cook named Ah Chong. When the man turned up bludgeoned and dumped in the Avon River in 1854, a bloodied axe was found hidden in Bishop’s room, his clothes had been freshly washed, and his own drunken threats against Ah Chong were repeated back to him in court.

The evidence was entirely circumstantial, but the jury took twenty minutes to convict him, and he was hanged near the causeway at Perth. Bishop never wavered. Nobody believed him then, but three years later his own hut-mate, William Voss, confessed to the murder, admitting he had planted the axe among Bishop’s belongings. Voss himself was hanged in 1862 for killing his wife.

On the scaffold, Bishop raised his hand and declared, “I assert in the presence of God that I did not commit the murder. I am dying innocent of crime, and I do not fear death”.

Innocent Edward Bishop betrayed.
Innocent Edward Bishop betrayed.

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On This Day in True Crime History
1853·"I Would Finish You Now": Hanged in Melbourne for the Murder of His Mistress
1853·The Young Witness Testifies: Alexander Ram Hanged in Melbourne for Murdering Kitty Hennessy
1883·Hanged in Perth, Each Still Blaming the Other to the End
1885·Hanged in Brisbane After a Feverish Stockman Shot the Manager Who Denied Him Hospital
1888·Mutiny on the Brisbane River: the Captain Who Threatened to Turn His Guns on Parliament
1926·The Gold He Took to His Grave: Two Men Hanged in Fremantle for Killing Two Police Officers
More Crime On This Day →

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