Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 3
John Wayne Glover, who would become known as Sydney’s Granny Killer, attacked 85-year-old Margaret Pahud with a hammer in a laneway near her home in Sydney on this day in 1989, as she walked home from grocery shopping. A schoolgirl passing by found her body within minutes, at first mistaking it for a pile of dumped clothing on the ground.
Glover had taken more than $300 from Pahud’s purse. Within hours he was gambling it away at a local RSL club, a chilling indifference that would mark the string of killings still to come.
Half the police force in Melbourne walked off the job over a secret supervisory system that monitored beat officers using men drawn from their own ranks, derisively nicknamed “spooks”. Hundreds of constables, many of them returned servicemen, refused duty rather than work under informants planted among their colleagues, and the government offered no guarantee against victimisation.
With the city effectively unpoliced, crowds poured out of Flinders Street station on the nights of 2 and 3 November 1923 and surged up Elizabeth and Swanston streets. Shop windows were smashed, stores stripped of merchandise, a tram overturned, and three people died in the chaos. The few police still on point duty were jeered and harassed until they retreated to the safety of the Town Hall.
Melbourne’s papers rushed to blame the city’s criminal underworld, but court records later told a different story: most of those arrested were ordinary young men and boys with no prior offences. Order was only restored when five thousand volunteer special constables, sworn in under the direction of Sir John Monash, took to the streets in armbands and badges to do the job the regular police had abandoned.
Melbourne Special Constables Volunteer during Police Strike: Herald and Weekly Times Ltd., 1923. State Library Vic, H2015.111/1
Charles Van Doren had been one of American television’s most beloved figures, a telegenic young academic whose winning streak on the quiz show 21 made him a household name and a symbol of brains over brawn. The adoration was built on a lie: producers had been feeding him questions and answers in advance, scripting his hesitations and furrowed brows to maximise suspense.
On this day in 1959, Van Doren admitted the truth before a congressional hearing, confessing that the contest had been fixed from the start. The admission shattered public faith in the new medium of television and triggered prosecutions of the producers and network figures behind the deception, some of whom later served time in prison.
Van Doren himself was convicted of perjury for earlier denials but received a suspended sentence, his once-golden reputation left in ruins.
Daylight ocean bathing was a punishable offence on Sydney’s beaches at the turn of the century, with Manly Council enforcing strict hours on when the public could enter the surf. The rule existed to police modesty rather than safety: women’s swimming costumes covering neck to knee were already considered scandalous in mixed company, while men swam nude in some spots without issue.
The council finally abandoned the restriction on this day in 1903, quietly ending decades of fining and shaming bathers for swimming under the sun. It was a small bureaucratic reversal that opened the way for the beach culture that would come to define the city.
