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.
Noelene Patterson had run out of petrol on Canning Highway near Fremantle when David and Catherine Birnie pulled over, on this day in 1986, and offered her a lift, only to force her into their car. She was held captive for three days, one of several women the couple had already taken that year in a string of killings that had gone unsolved by police.
Unlike their other victims, David Birnie seemed to grow fond of Patterson, allowing her small comforts and talk of letting her go, a softness that stirred his wife’s jealousy. According to accounts of the killings, Catherine Birnie’s resentment decided the outcome: David forced sleeping pills down Patterson’s throat and strangled her, then buried her body in bushland outside the city.
Kidnap concept word written on a blackboard background
A British backpacker named Paul Onions was hitchhiking along the Hume Highway near Sydney in January 1990 when a driver calling himself “Bill” produced a revolver and a coil of rope. Onions fled on foot and flagged down a passing motorist, reporting the attack to police before the driver vanished.
On this day in 1993, searchers combing a forest south of Sydney found two more bodies bearing the same spinal injuries as an earlier pair of backpackers unearthed the previous year, confirming Australia had a serial killer stalking the highway. The month long search that followed ended with the discovery of a German backpacker nearby, the fifth victim linked to the same killer.
Reading UK news reports of the discoveries two years later, Onions recognised the description of his own ordeal and contacted the Australian embassy. His account and photo identification of the man who had attacked him led police to Ivan Milat, whose home was searched and who was eventually convicted of the backpacker murders.
Brian Wells was a pizza delivery driver in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was sent on what looked like a routine order in August 2003. He never made it back. Police found him with a metal collar locked around his neck, wired to a bomb, after he had already robbed a bank under its threat following a bizarre set of written instructions. The device detonated before anyone could free him, killing him in the street.
The case baffled investigators for years until they identified Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong as the driving force behind the plot. On this day in 2010 she was convicted of armed bank robbery, conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and using a destructive device, with prosecutors naming her the mastermind who had engineered the entire scheme that led to Wells’s death.
