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

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

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Arizona California Confession Dismemberment Fugitive Los Angeles Murder Phoenix Trial USA

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Martha Needle had already buried her husband and both young daughters, each death blamed on a mysterious wasting illness, when she turned her attention to the family of her fiance, Otto Juncken. Months before her arrest she fed his brother Louis arsenic, and when his only surviving brother also sickened, doctors found arsenic disguised as rat poison in his vomit. Police lay in wait and caught Needle in the act, offering him a cup of tea laced with ten grains of poison.

Tried for Louis’s murder, her lawyer argued that she suffered fits of unconsciousness and should not be held responsible, but an insanity plea was dismissed. Convicted with no recommendation for mercy, Needle was hanged in Melbourne on 22 October 1894. Exhumations later found arsenic in the bodies of her husband and both daughters as well, confirming a killing spree that had gone undetected for years. She left everything she owned to Otto, the man who had stood by her to the end.

Martha Needle: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 516/P0000, Central Register of Female Prisoners, register nos. 5926–6415 (1891–1896).

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Australia Execution Melbourne Murder Poisoning Serial Killer Trial VIC

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A brutal ambush in the shadow of the gaol wall left young William Hickey beaten unconscious, his skull cut open and his jaw broken, in a robbery that netted his attackers little more than a hat, a pair of shoes and twenty shillings. The alarm was raised by a publican’s son who watched the assault from his doorway, and constables chased two fleeing men through the streets of Sydney, catching George Williams yards away still clutching a stone to hurl at his pursuer.

At trial Williams protested his innocence in a written defence, pointing out that Hickey could never identify his attacker’s face, only the stolen hat and shoes dropped mid flight. The jury convicted him regardless, and he was publicly hanged in Sydney on 22 October 1829, meeting his end, witnesses said, with calm and reverent composure.

Lower George Street Sydney street scene 1828

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Australia Execution NSW Robbery Sydney Trial

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When lookouts aboard HMS Dido spotted flames rising from a home near Auckland on 22 October 1847, sailors raced ashore to find Lieutenant Robert Snow, his wife Hannah and their young daughter Mary butchered, with flesh cut from each body and the house set alight. The staging was deliberate: ship’s carpenter Joseph Burns had mutilated the family to make the killings look like a Maori attack, hoping to steal the twelve pounds in naval pay kept in the house and spark fears of an uprising that gripped Auckland for weeks.

With Maori leaders unable to produce a culprit, suspicion only turned to Burns after he coerced his partner, Margaret Reardon, into backing a false confession blaming two innocent neighbours. Mid trial, word reached the court that Burns had cut his own throat in a failed suicide attempt, and in its aftermath he retracted the accusation. Reardon then testified against him, and Burns was convicted and hanged the following June, becoming the first European executed in New Zealand.

Burns went to the gallows having made a full confession, though it unfairly implicated Reardon, who was later convicted of perjury and transported to Tasmania.

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Arson Auckland Execution Murder New Zealand Perjury Trial

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