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

Nine months after her husband Louis XVI went to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette followed him, tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal for treason against the new French Republic. Her hair had been cropped and her wrists bound behind her back; she rode to the Place de la Revolution in an open cart, not the closed carriage that had carried the king. Witnesses recorded that climbing the scaffold she stepped on her executioner’s foot and murmured an apology, a small, almost absurd courtesy moments before the blade fell on 16 October 1793. The crowd that had once cheered a queen watched in silence.

Marie Antoinette's execution in 1793 — Marie Antoinette’s execution in 1793

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Europe Execution France Political Crime Trial

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Matthew Craven and Thomas Cavanagh rode with a bushranging gang led by Patrick Sullivan that terrorised stations around Bathurst for half a year, robbing homesteads, stealing horses and holding settlers at gunpoint. Captured after a shootout at a bark hut, the pair pleaded guilty at trial to burglary and theft and were sentenced to hang.

On 16 October 1826 they left Sydney Gaol with three other condemned men bound for Burwood, where they were hanged before a large crowd that morning. Straight afterwards, the two men, Craven and Cavanagh travelled further on on to the Western Road near Parramatta, arriving about noon to face their own gallows.

Witnesses said their contrition was conspicuous; Craven, described as barely twenty, reportedly hung his head and sobbed bitterly as the ropes were fitted.

Bushrangers in action: Water colour drawing created by George Lacy 1867

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Australia Bathurst Burwood Bushranging Execution Gang NSW Parramatta Robbery Sydney Trial

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Paul Kallipolitis, 31, became another name on the ledger of Melbourne‘s gangland war when he was found shot dead in his bed at Sunshine West in 2002, a single bullet to the head. Police believed the killer was someone close to him: his friend Andrew Veniamin, a gunman already linked to several of the war’s other killings.

Veniamin was never charged over the murder before he himself was shot dead in 2004, one more casualty in a conflict that would eventually claim dozens of lives across the city. It was not until 2008 that Angelo Mario Venditti was finally arrested and charged with Kallipolitis’s killing.

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

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Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Trial VIC

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She was born Margaretha Zelle in the Netherlands and reinvented herself in Paris as Mata Hari, an exotic dancer whose stage act and string of wealthy, often military, lovers made her a sensation across Europe. When war came, French intelligence suspected she was selling pillow talk to Germany.

The evidence against her was thin and largely circumstantial, built on intercepted telegrams and a reputation for scandal rather than proof. A French military tribunal convicted her of espionage anyway, and she was executed by firing squad outside Paris on 15 October 1917.

She refused a blindfold and reportedly blew a kiss to the soldiers before they fired, going to her death still insisting she had never betrayed France.

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Espionage Europe Execution France Scandal Trial

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