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

Caroline Grills was the kind of woman neighbours trusted: she brought cups of tea and homemade treats to relatives and friends, and several of them sickened and died. On this day she was convicted of the attempted murder of Eveline Lundberg with thallium, the same insidious poison police believed had already killed members of her own family.

Her manner in the dock attracted attention. When the jury returned its guilty verdict, Grills shrugged her shoulders and smiled broadly. After the judge recorded a sentence of death, she reportedly turned to police and asked, “Is that all?” She had protested her innocence throughout the trial.

The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Grills died on 6 October 1960 never expressing remorse for the deaths linked to her name.

Caroline Grills arriving at Sydney Central Court, 9 July 1953. Unknown photographer. Originally published in the Brisbane Telegraph. Source: Trove, National Library of Australia. Public domain.

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Australia Execution Murder NSW Poisoning Sydney Trial

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Dino Dibra, 25, was one of the early casualties of Melbourne‘s gangland war. He was gunned down on this day the moment he stepped outside his home in Sunshine West, hit multiple times in what police believed was a professional, pre-planned hit rather than a chance confrontation.

Investigators were confident a hired shooter had been waiting for him, and suspicion quickly fell on Andrew Veniamin, a figure who would go on to be linked to several more killings as the underworld conflict spread across the city. Dibra’s murder became one of the opening chapters in a decade-long cycle of tit-for-tat violence that would eventually claim more than thirty lives.

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

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Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Sunshine West Unsolved VIC

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Theodore Roosevelt was climbing into his car in Milwaukee on 14 October 1912, campaigning for a third term as president, when a former saloonkeeper named John Schrank stepped from the crowd and shot him in the chest. The bullet had already been slowed by a folded steel glasses case and a fifty page speech manuscript in his breast pocket before it lodged in his chest muscle.

With the crowd turning on the gunman, Roosevelt shouted for Schrank to be left unharmed and handed to police. Then, bleeding and reasoning from his own hunting experience that he was not coughing blood and so his lung was untouched, he refused hospital treatment and walked onto the stage. He opened his address with the line that followed him ever after: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He spoke for roughly ninety minutes before finally agreeing to see a doctor. Surgeons judged the bullet too close to vital organs to remove, and Roosevelt carried it in his chest for the rest of his life.

Theodore Roosevelt speaking from a car shortly before being shot in 1912.

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Assassination Attempt Milwaukee Political Crime Shooting USA Wisconsin

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A boy named John Burtenshaw was killed in 1839 while minding sheep on the banks of the Canning River near Maddington, within sight of a farm a few miles from Perth. The accused was identified as responsible during a tense period of conflict between settlers and Aboriginal communities on the colonial frontier.

He was tried and sentenced to death, then taken from Fremantle gaol in 1841 and hanged at the very spot where the killing had occurred. Accounts recorded that on the road to the gallows he showed no fear, finding comfort in a belief that after death he would come back to life.

Curved sandy riverbank on Canning River in Perth at sunset

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Australia Canning River Colonial Era Execution Fremantle Frontier Conflict Maddington Murder Perth Trial WA

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