Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 25
Leonardo Moncado was a Chilean sailor aboard the trading schooner Sketty Belle when he killed a young cabin hand known as Bob during a voyage off Thursday Island. No trace of the victim was ever found except a mutilated portion of his body, discovered stuffed inside Moncado’s own trunk. One crewman who witnessed the victimes final moments stayed silent for months, having been threatened by Moncado, and only told police the truth once Moncado was committed for trial.
Moncado was convicted of murder and hanged in Brisbane on this day in 1892, attended on the scaffold by a Catholic priest.
Leonardo Moncado in custody: Queensland State Archives, Item ID ITM2947
Henry Bradley and Patrick O’Connor absconded from assigned service in northwestern Tasmania and broke into a settler’s homestead on the night of 14 September 1853, tying up the household room by room. When the owner escaped through a window, the pair turned on his young relation, Alfred Phillips, and shot him dead as he begged them to spare the women and children.
To vanish from the island, they forced the crew of the schooner Sophia to sea at gunpoint, keeping a hostage tied to the mast until they reached Victorian waters. There they kept robbing, wounding one man near Brighton, until a police patrol cornered them near Kilmore. In the gunfight that followed, Bradley and O’Connor shot mounted Cadet Thompson through the chest; captured the next day after a second running battle, they boasted to their captors of already having killed six people back in Van Diemen’s Land.
Convicted of shooting Thompson, both men were hanged together in Melbourne on 24 October 1853.
On the scaffold, Bradley said he was willing to die and had already dictated a letter confessing the full extent of his crimes; O’Connor remained defiant to the end, refusing to join seriously in the priest’s prayers.
Bushrangers working sketches State Library Victoria
Augustin De Kitchilan, a young drifter from Ceylon, had been living and working at Leah Fouracre’s isolated farm near Waroona, Western Australia, breaking in her horses in exchange for board. When Fouracre disappeared in mid August 1907, her farmhouse was found burnt to the ground with her charred remains inside, while De Kitchilan was soon found riding her horse and pawning her jewellery across the district.
Convicted of her murder after a trial in Perth, he was hanged at Fremantle Prison on 23 October 1907. In his final days he wrote what he titled ‘my last confession’, a rambling letter to the public that never actually admitted guilt, instead taunting readers in verse to guess who had pulled the trigger if not him.
De Kitchilan denied the murder to the end, declaring at his sentencing, ‘I absolutely deny the committal of the dirty crime with which I am charged.’
Kitchilan’s Execution for the Peppermint Farm Murder : Illustration 1907
Winnie Ruth Judd, a medical secretary in Phoenix, shot her two friends Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson after a jealous falling out in October 1931, then packed their bodies, one dismembered, into trunks and shipped them to Los Angeles by train. A foul smell leaking from the luggage tipped off a baggage handler, and police forced the locks to find the corpses inside.
Judd vanished into Los Angeles for days before she surrendered to police at a funeral home on this day in 1931. By then her fate had already been sealed by a scrawled confession letter, torn up and flushed, that a department store cleaner fished from a ladies room wash basin. Police pieced the scraps together from the plumbing and reconstructed her own words: “It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defence.” The press, already calling her the Trunk Murderess, seized on a new name: the Tiger Woman.
Winnie Ruth Judd the Velvet Tigress Arizona trunk murder case 1933
