Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 25
1890: The Birth of the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie, 1890
On this date in 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, the woman who would become Agatha Christie and the best selling novelist in history after the Bible and Shakespeare. She went on to write 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, creating enduring figures such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
Her own life carried a strange echo of her fiction: in 1926 she vanished for eleven days, sparking a nationwide manhunt, before being found registered under an assumed name at a Yorkshire hotel, an episode that remains unexplained to this day.
1828: The Tunnel Under Sydney: Australia’s First Great Bank Robbery
On the night of 14 September 1828, thieves broke into the Bank of Australia in Sydney. A teller arriving the next morning found the strongroom breached.
Thieves had tunnelled through a drain on the opposite side of the street, burrowed underground, and cut through a foundation wall between five and nine feet thick, work that would have taken at least three to four weeks to complete. They made off with 12,000 to 14,000 pounds in cash and property, a sum worth a small fortune today.
For two and a half years the robbers evaded capture, even as some of the stolen notes began surfacing in circulation and officials issued repeated warnings against using them. The case only broke when one of the gang was sentenced to 14 years on Norfolk Island for an unrelated highway robbery in 1829. Nearly a year into that sentence, he accepted the Governor’s offer of a pardon and confessed, naming his accomplices: one of whom had fled to Ireland, another who had since died, and three more who joined him on Norfolk Island.
Not all the stolen money was recovered. Rumour has long held that boxes of coins from the robbery remain buried near the water’s edge on Sydney’s North Shore.
On 14 September 1862, two bushrangers robbed a mailman near Mudgee in New South Wales. They let him keep his sixpence and his pipe. His horse and the mail went with them.
But one robber gave himself away when his crepe mask slipped. The mailman caught a glimpse of his face and believed he could identify him as the infamous bushranger Fred Lowry.
The mail run offered little chance of real profit. Some suspected the hold-up was a decoy to draw police away from a bigger job. News of an armed horse robbery nearby fed the theory, though the report established no connection.
Less than a year later, Lowry died after being shot by police. He reportedly asked that his brother-in-law be told “Tell ’em I died game”.
1909: Convicted Alone: Martha Rendell Sentenced to Death in Perth as Her Partner Walks Free
Martha Rendell, de facto wife of Thomas Nicholls Morris, was convicted in the Supreme Court of Western Australia at Perth of the wilful murder of her partner’s son, Arthur Joseph Morris, and sentenced to death by hanging. The court accepted that Thomas Morris had been unaware of what Rendell was doing until after the deaths of the children, and he was acquitted.
Acting Chief Justice Robert McMillan told the jury it was probably the most anxious case he had ever presided over, and voiced concern that newspaper coverage, might have prejudiced their judgement. Rendell maintained her innocence throughout, insisting she had only been treating the children for diphtheria.
