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

Elijah Upjohn had hanged Ned Kelly at Melbourne Gaol in 1880, earning five pounds for the job. Two years later he was back in front of a City Court bench, this time as the accused: drunk in Carlton, he exposed himself in front of witnesses, to whom he tossed peppermints moments before.

Fined 10 pounds or three months, Upjohn refused to pay and was sent to Melbourne Gaol, the very institution he had served as executioner. While locked up he kept working, flogging inmates at Pentridge under sentence, and walked free at year’s end with wages still owed to him.

Elijah Upjohn: Executioner of Bushranger Ned Kelly

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Australia Carlton Execution Melbourne Prison Public Indecency Scandal VIC

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Carl Williams had already been convicted of multiple murders during Melbourne’s gangland war when he was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike in a high-security unit at Victoria’s Barwon Prison in 2010, an inmate supposedly protected by round-the-clock surveillance.

Matthew Charles Johnson, a fellow prisoner sharing the unit, was charged with the killing. On this day in 2011 a jury found him guilty of murdering the man once considered one of the country’s most feared underworld figures, in an attack that exposed how little safety the prison’s most secure wing actually offered its most notorious inmate.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Prison Trial VIC

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Neighbours near Lydney Park on the Hunter River heard Mary Walsh begging “to spare her life” as the blows fell, then heard her husband Christopher Walsh order her to leave the house. She said she could not. By morning she lay dead on the floor, covered in bruises, a gun and blood-stained trousers found nearby.

At his trial, his own counsel argued that jealousy and drink should reduce the killing to manslaughter. The jury was not persuaded, convicting him of wilful murder after less than two hours. He was hanged at Maitland gaol before a crowd of some four hundred, including women and children.

On the scaffold he had a message read out: he claimed he had come home sober, only for suspicion of his wife’s infidelity to work him into a rage that drink then inflamed. He said he now believed her faithful, regretted his violence, and held no animosity.

Empty bottle on wooden background symbolizing alcoholism

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Australia Domestic Violence Execution Hunter Valley Maitland Murder NSW Trial

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When Empress Dowager Cixi crushed the Hundred Days’ Reform with a palace coup in September 1898, she moved fast. Six officials and intellectuals who had championed the Guangxu Emperor’s modernisation drive, among them Tan Sitong and Kang Youwei’s younger brother Kang Guangren, were arrested, denied any trial, and beheaded the same day at the Caishikou execution ground in Beijing. For decades they were remembered simply as reform martyrs cut down by a reactionary court.

That story only cracked in the 1980s, when testimony surfaced in Japanese archives from a man who had been ordered to assassinate Cixi and fled before he could act. His account implicated four of the six in a genuine plot to kill the Empress Dowager, suggesting at least one of the condemned, Yang Rui, may have been entirely innocent, executed alongside men who really had been plotting murder.

Historic photo of beheaded bodies after execution: Laneway of Caishikou crossroad, Beijing, China.

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Asia Assassination Beijing China Execution Political Crime Trial

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