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

Arthur Morris was the last of three children to die after his stepmother, Martha Rendell, began swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid at the family home in East Perth, Perth. His two sisters had died the previous year from the same treatment, disguised as a cure for diphtheria. Arthur, 15, suffered for months before he finally succumbed in 1908.

A doctor who had treated the boy, suspicious of the family’s string of throat deaths, requested an autopsy. The first examination found nothing to tie Rendell to the deaths, and she would remain free a while longer before the full truth of her method finally emerged.

Arthur Morris, a prize-winning essayist, was poisoned to death two years before his death.

⬅ See all events from 8 October

Australia Child Abuse Case Murder Perth Poisoning Trial WA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Schapelle Corby was flying from Brisbane via Sydney to Bali for a family holiday when customs officers at Denpasar airport opened her unlocked bodyboard bag and found 4.2 kilograms of cannabis sealed inside a vacuum-packed bag. The amount alone, under Indonesian law, carried the weight of a major trafficking charge rather than simple possession.

Corby insisted from the moment of her arrest that she had no idea the drugs were there, a claim she would repeat throughout a trial that drew intense media coverage back in Australia. The case became one of the most closely watched Australian legal dramas of the decade, dividing public opinion over whether she was a trafficker or a victim of baggage handlers exploiting an unlocked bag.

⬅ See all events from 8 October

Australia Bali Brisbane Drug Trafficking Indonesia QLD Smuggling Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Thomas Berriman, manager of the Hawthorn branch of the Commercial Bank, was shot outside Glenferrie Station in Melbourne on this date while carrying £1,851 in bank funds to the head office. He died from the wound two weeks later.

Angus Murray was hanged for the killing, convicted as a principal even though it was his companion who actually pulled the trigger. Underworld figure Squizzy Taylor, swept up as the robbery’s alleged organiser, escaped a murder charge, convicted only of occupying a house frequented by thieves and serving six months.

The actual gunman, Richard Buckley, vanished for almost seven years before detectives traced him, bearded and living quietly, to a house in Moonee Ponds. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1946, dying and in his eighties, he was released to spend his final days at home.

Commercial Bank branch where manager T R V Berriman was shot: 1923

⬅ See all events from 8 October

Australia Execution Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Robbery Trial VIC

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

One night in May 1803, two masked men forced their way into the Hawkesbury home of Charles Palmer and his wife, clubbing both with the handle of an axe until Palmer lay senseless for two hours. They ransacked the house for money, bound the family and a child, and warned they would throw them into the river if the cash they insisted did not exist was not handed over.

Stolen clothing later surfaced in the household of a woman who said it had been given to her to mend for Thomas McLaughlane the elder and his son. Both men were convicted and sentenced to death, but only the elder went to the gallows at Hawkesbury; of eight men condemned that session he was the third actually hanged, the rest reprieved into transportation for life.

At his trial the elder McLaughlane claimed the stolen goods had come from an informer already giving evidence in another case, a claim the informer flatly denied. On the scaffold he said nothing more, meeting his end, witnesses noted, with quiet decency.

Hand of a drowning man reaching above the sea surface

⬅ See all events from 7 October

Australia Colonial Crime Execution Hawkesbury Home Invasion NSW Robbery Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories