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

John Caldwell was a former British soldier, court martialled at Bangalore in India for stealing his own equipment and sentenced to seven years transportation. He arrived in Western Australia aboard the General Godwin, landing at Fremantle in 1854, and was granted a ticket of leave the following year. His sentence finally expired in July 1860, a free man again after years of convict servitude.

Within months he was convicted of assualt of a local person at Champion Bay. He was tried at the Supreme Court in Perth, sentenced to death, and hanged at the old Perth Gaol just nine days later on 13th Oct 1860, being buried at East Perth Cemetery.

Panter Tomb at East Perth Cemetery burial place of John Caldwell 1860

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Australia Colonial Crime Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Trial WA

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William Westwood was already notorious as Jackey Jackey, a bushranger transported twice and flogged repeatedly, when he helped lead the 1846 Cooking Pot Uprising on Norfolk Island, a desperate convict revolt sparked by brutal rations and treatment. In the chaos, three constables and an overseer were killed.

He was 26 when he was hanged on 13 October 1846, one of the largest mass executions in Australian penal history.

Death mask of William Westwood known as Jackey Jackey

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Australia Bushranging Execution Murder Norfolk Island Prison Riot

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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”.

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Australia Convict History Execution Miscarriage of Justice Murder Perth Trial WA Wrongful Conviction York

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In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Police South Yarra Trial Unsolved VIC

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