On this date in 1986, 22-year-old Mary Neilson visited a house on Moorhouse Street in Perth to buy car tyres advertised for sale. The advertisement was a trap. David and Catherine Birnie held her captive before taking her to nearby bushland, where they murdered her. Mary was the first of at least four women killed by the couple over the following weeks. Their killing spree ended when a later captive escaped and alerted police, exposing the Birnies’ crimes and leading to their arrest.
In Perth, Martha Rendell told neighbours her stepchildren suffered from chronic sore throats that she treated herself at home. In truth she was swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid, a slow and agonising poisoning disguised as nursing. Her stepson Arthur Morris, 14, died of it on 8 October 1908; two of his siblings had already died the same way, but only Arthur’s death went to trial.
Convicted of his murder, Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison on 6 October 1909, the only woman ever executed in Western Australia.
She denied killing the children to the end, insisting she had only ever tried to cure them.
At a one-teacher school in rural Victoria, two unemployed plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, burst in with a sawn-off shotgun and forced 20-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and her six young pupils into a van, demanding a million dollar ransom. Victoria’s premier agreed to pay, and the education minister himself waited at the handover point with police hidden nearby, but the kidnappers never returned to collect it.
Left alone with the children overnight, Gibbs kicked out a door panel with her heavy platform boots and led the girls through the dark bush to safety. Eastwood and Boland were run down in a manhunt; Eastwood pleaded guilty and was jailed, while Boland was convicted after three trials.
It was not the end of the story. Eastwood escaped prison years later and staged a second mass kidnapping of a teacher and nine pupils, and while back behind bars he killed a fellow inmate in what was ruled self-defence.
On the night of October 6, 1866, three members of the Reno Gang boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train as it pulled out of Seymour, Indiana, overpowered the express guard and cracked open a safe holding roughly 16,000 dollars. They then shoved a second, heavier safe off the moving train for the rest of the gang to finish the job, but could not break it open before a posse closed in and they fled. It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first train robbery in American history.
The job, pulled off by brothers Frank, John, Simeon and William Reno, became the blueprint for a wave of copycat train robberies across the Midwest. Within two years the brothers paid for it dearly: dragged from jail cells by masked vigilantes and hanged, most of the gang’s stolen fortune never recovered.
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