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1861: Hanged Where They Killed: Two Men Executed for the Murder of a Shepherd in Colonial South Australia

In September 1861, two men were tried and executed for the murder of a shepherd, Theodore Gustavus Burggoist, near Fowler’s Bay in South Australia.

Before their execution, the two men acknowledged their guilt. Officials erected the gallows on the exact spot where the killing had taken place, guided there by the two men themselves, who calmly pointed out the bush where the shepherd had been sitting, the place where he was attacked as he tried to flee, and the spot where he later died of his wound.

Members of the community gathered to witness the execution, alongside the local station owner, the ship’s captain who had carried the official party, and several station hands. When it came time to take the bodies down, onlookers fled in evident terror, refusing to help remove them. The two men were buried at the site of the execution, laid to rest beneath the very ground where the shepherd had died.

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1876: A Cashier’s Refusal Dooms the Jesse James-Younger Gang at Northfield, Minnesota

On September 7, 1876, the Jesse James-Younger Gang rode into Northfield, Minnesota, intending to rob the First National Bank. Inside, cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the safe even as a revolver was pressed to his head and he was pistol-whipped; he was shot dead at his desk for his defiance, having falsely claimed the safe was on a time lock.

Outside, armed townspeople grabbed rifles and shotguns and opened fire from doorways and windows along the main street. Two of the raiders, Clell Miller and William Stiles, were killed in the street, and several others were wounded before the surviving gang members fled empty-handed.

A massive manhunt followed through the Minnesota countryside. Jesse and Frank James eventually broke away and escaped, but Cole, Jim and Bob Younger were tracked down two weeks later, badly wounded, and captured. The disastrous raid effectively destroyed the gang as a fighting unit and ended its run of successful robberies.

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1998: The Forged Will That Exposed Britain’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, Doctor Harold Shipman

Harold Shipman was arrested on 7 September 1998 after police investigated the death of his patient Kathleen Grundy, who had left him £386,000 in a will that turned out to be forged. The clumsy fake unravelled quickly: a Brother typewriter matching the one used to produce the document was found in Shipman’s possession, and Grundy’s own family, alarmed that their mother would never have cut them out, had already raised suspicions with a solicitor.

The arrest opened the door to a far larger inquiry. Detectives uncovered a pattern of lethal diamorphine injections administered to elderly patients under his care, alongside falsified medical records designed to make the deaths look natural.

Shipman was eventually linked to the deaths of at least 215 patients over more than two decades, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in British history.

Last will and testament typed on aged paper with vintage typewriter

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1974: An Extra Femur Bone: the Discovery That Revealed a Third Victim of Ted Bundy

Hunters searching brush near Interstate 90 in Issaquah, Washington, about one mile from Lake Sammamish State Park, stumbled on fragmented human remains scattered across the ground. Forensic examination identified them as Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, two young women who had vanished from the park on the same afternoon in July 1974 after a man with his arm in a sling, calling himself Ted, asked each separately for help loading a boat onto his car.

Among the bones was one extra femur that did not belong to either woman. It was later attributed to Georgeann Hawkins, a University of Washington student who had disappeared weeks earlier while walking a short alley between her boyfriend’s dormitory and her sorority house, her body never otherwise found.

The discovery helped investigators connect a string of disappearances across Washington and Utah to the same killer, Ted Bundy, whose calm, disarming manner and use of a fake injury to lure victims would become one of the most chilling signatures in American criminal history.

Sammamish Lake and Mount Rainier in background near Seattle

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1861: Hanged Where They Killed: Two Men Executed for the Murder of a Shepherd in Colonial South Australia

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1876: A Cashier’s Refusal Dooms the Jesse James-Younger Gang at Northfield, Minnesota

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1998: The Forged Will That Exposed Britain’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, Doctor Harold Shipman

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1974: An Extra Femur Bone: the Discovery That Revealed a Third Victim of Ted Bundy

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