Burigon, a widely respected leader among the Aboriginal people near Newcastle, had helped track down an escaped convict named John Kirby and was escorting him back to the settlement when Kirby turned on him with a knife, driving the blade into his abdomen.
The wound proved fatal. Burigon lingered for eleven days before dying on 27 October 1820, a loss felt deeply in a district where relations between Aboriginal people and the colony had been better than elsewhere in NSW districts.
Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker, confessed to starting the Great Fire of London, claiming he had thrown a fireball through a bakery window to set the blaze alight. Records showed he had not even set foot in England until two days after the fire began, and neither the judges nor the jury who tried him believed he was guilty.
He was hanged at Tyburn on this day in 1666 anyway. Afterwards, a crowd of Londoners tore his body apart before it could be handed over to the Company of Barber-Surgeons for dissection.
Hubert never withdrew his confession, insisting to the end that he had set the fire, even as the evidence against his own story mounted.
James Henry Shaw took a Japanese fisherman named Oki Iwakichi into partnership at a riverside camp near Pinjarra, letting him manage the household finances and sleep inside the family home while Shaw worked away for months at a time. When Shaw decided to abandon the failing venture and take a job in Fremantle, Oki begged him to stay, warned he would rather die than be left penniless, and took to sleeping with a loaded rifle. On 23 August 1908, as Mrs Shaw stepped outside for rope to tie him down and calm him, Oki shot Shaw through the neck, then fled into the bush, cutting loose every boat moored on the river to slow the alarm.
At his trial, love letters from Oki to his cousin surfaced, claiming he and Mrs Shaw had lived ‘like man and wife’ for over a year; she denied it outright from the stand. The jury convicted him of wilful murder, and when led away to the condemned cell he said he was resigned to his fate, ‘if they let me see Mrs Shaw first.’ He was hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1908.
Oki had denied the charge at trial, but when asked on the gallows if he wished to say anything, he only shook his head; his last words, muttered after the chaplain’s prayer, were ‘Jesus, mercy.’
Squizzy Taylor, Melbourne’s most infamous gang leader, walked into a Carlton sickroom on 27 October 1927 to settle an old score with his bedridden rival, John “Snowy” Cutmore. Within minutes, gunfire tore through the small house and both men were mortally wounded.
Taylor was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital in nearby Fitzroy, where he died that evening, aged 39, without ever naming who had fired the fatal shot.
The inquest returned an open verdict. One enduring theory holds that it was not Cutmore but his mother, standing over her dying son, who pulled the trigger that finally brought down Melbourne’s most feared gangster.
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