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

John Bevan arrived in Sydney aboard the Pitt in February 1792, after a gruelling eight-month voyage during which 29 convicts died, and many others arrived sick.

By 1794, Bevan had built a reputation for trouble in the colony and was caught in the act of breaking into the Sydney home of William Fielder. The case against him was considered overwhelming, and little time was lost: Bevan was convicted of burglary, sentenced to death and hanged on 6 October 1794.

He was buried at the old Sydney burial ground, little more than two and a half years after surviving the voyage that had brought him to New South Wales.

Painting of the East Indiaman Pitt and other sailing ships

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Australia Burglary Colonial Crime Convict Crime Execution NSW Sydney

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When Edwina Boyle vanished from her home on this day in Carrum Downs, in Melbourne‘s southeast, in 1983, her husband Frederick Boyle produced a note saying she had run off with a truck driver. His mistress moved in two days later, and neighbours pitied him for raising two daughters alone. All the while Edwina’s body sat metres away, sealed in a green metal barrel in the backyard where the family held parties and guests leaned against it without ever knowing.

The secret held for 23 years, until Boyle’s future son-in-law grew suspicious of his odd anxiety about the drum and cut it open, finding clothing, then later a hessian bag of human bones including a skull. Boyle was convicted of murder in 2008 and sentenced to 21 years, having shot his wife in the head.

He initially claimed he found her dead and panicked, but later admitted he strangled and shot her, telling the court, “my wife died in a terrible way and I was not going to let her remains be thrown down the tip like garbage”.

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Australia Carrum Downs Cold Case Domestic Violence Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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John Jones, a hutkeeper on a station near Mount Joy in South Australia’s remote Eyre Peninsula, was found dead in his hut in May 1860, his skull broken and the hut stripped of flour, tea and clothing. The accused was convicted at the Supreme Court in Adelaide largely on the testimony of a young companion who admitted taking part in the killing himself.

Before the execution, around 400 citizens, headed by the Lord Bishop of Adelaide, signed a memorial asking the government to remit the death sentence. He had been tried and condemned under British law newly imposed on his people, with little understanding of its workings; the petition failed regardless. He was taken back across the Eyre Peninsula and hanged at Streaky Bay on 5 October 1860, near the district where the killing had occurred

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Adelaide Australia Colonial History Execution Murder Petition for Clemency SA Streaky Bay Trial

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Harold Shipman was a trusted family doctor in Hyde, England, who killed his patients with lethal injections of diamorphine and then falsified their medical records to make the deaths look natural. He often urged grieving families toward cremation, quietly destroying the evidence a post-mortem might have found.

What he did not understand was his own surgery computer. The practice software secretly time stamped every entry, and when investigators compared those hidden timestamps to the dates on his altered files, the lie was obvious: he had been rewriting patient histories after his victims were already dead. He went on trial in 1999 charged with just 15 murders, though he is believed to have killed close to 250 patients over more than two decades, making him Britain’s most prolific serial killer.

Shipman never confessed and maintained his innocence throughout the trial. He was convicted on all counts and later took his own life in prison.

A Serial Killers Computer Log tracked everything.

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England Fraud Medical Crime Murder Serial Killer Trial UK

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