After three days searching the moorland above Manchester, police uncovered the first grave. The discovery confirmed what detectives had feared since finding a body at Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s home: there were more victims. Eleven days later, searchers found a second grave. Another victim was never found. His mother spent the rest of her life searching for answers and returning to the moor, hoping to bring her son home.
William Henry Scott, a butcher working in Sydney, was arrested on 10 October 1866 after police traced a bloodstained axe and a scrap of twilled calico he had left in storage with his former landlady, Mrs Janet Orr. The cloth matched a fragment found wrapped around the charred, headless remains of a woman dug up weeks earlier on waste ground off Sussex Street.
The breakthrough led detectives to Scott’s former workmates, who recalled his offhand confession in the days after the killing: that he had “done away with the Kangaroo”, their nickname for the woman who used to wait outside the shop for him each evening. Tried and convicted despite his furious denials, Scott was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol in March 1867.
On the scaffold he still insisted, “I’ve never murdered man, woman or child in my life”, before forgiving the witnesses he blamed for his conviction.
In Versailles in 1789, a physician named Joseph Guillotin stood before France’s new National Assembly and argued that execution should not be a matter of rank or suffering. He proposed that every condemned prisoner, noble or commoner, die the same way: instantly, by a single blow of a blade, rather than by the axe, the sword, or the rope, methods that often took multiple strokes or slow strangulation to finish the job.
Guillotin framed it as a mercy, a way to strip cruelty and class privilege out of state killing. He did not invent the device that would later carry his name, nor did he ever operate one, but the machine built from his proposal would go on to define the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, and the word guillotine would forever be linked to the man who only meant to make dying less brutal.
Che Guevara had already helped topple one government, fighting alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba, when he slipped into Bolivia in 1966 to light the same fuse there. He spent nearly a year leading a ragged guerrilla band through the jungle, hunted by the Bolivian army with American backing, before troops cornered and captured him on 8 October 1967 in a remote ravine.
He was held overnight in a schoolhouse in a small village, then shot dead the following day on orders from the Bolivian government, which wanted him silenced rather than put on public trial. His death turned him instantly into a global revolutionary icon, his face reproduced on posters and T-shirts for decades after the jungle where he fell was forgotten.
1964·Eric Edgar Cooke Hanged in Fremantle: the Serial Killer Whose Confessions Freed Two Innocent MenTrue crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
