Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

Aileen Wuornos killed seven men in Florida, and later claimed the first death was self defence against a convicted rapist. By the time her case reached its final stage, she had turned against the very lawyers trying to save her.

When her appeal team moved for a retrial, Wuornos went to court and had them fired, insisting she was sane and wanted no further appeals. Many who studied her, including documentary maker Nick Broomfield, came to believe otherwise, pointing to erratic, unsettling behaviour in her final interviews as a sign of serious mental illness. The courts accepted her wishes regardless, and she was executed by lethal injection in 2002, declining a final meal.

Wuornos went to her death on this date maintaining a defiant, confused mix of guilt and conspiracy claims rather than a clear confession or denial.

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Execution Florida Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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Kevin Simmonds and fellow inmate Leslie Newcombe escaped Sydney‘s Long Bay jail on 9 October 1959 by squeezing through a ventilator in an old chapel while prisoners watched a film. The next day they killed prison guard Cecil Mills at Emu Plains Prison Farm and fled with his gun, triggering what became the biggest manhunt in Australian history.

Newcombe was caught within a fortnight, but Simmonds evaded hundreds of armed police, tracker dogs and a helicopter for more than five weeks, tying up two rangers and stealing their truck along the way. Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly, nicknamed ‘Gunner’ for his record of shooting suspects, finally ran him down near Mulbring on 15 November, by which point crowds were cheering him at police stations as a folk hero.

A jury convicted both men of manslaughter rather than murder, and Simmonds was sent to the ‘intractables’ wing of Grafton gaol. Six years of brutal treatment there left him a vacant, self-harming shell of the man who had outrun the state; he was found hanged in his cell in 1966.

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Australia Escape Grafton Hunter Valley Manhunt Murder NSW Prison Suicide Sydney Trial

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Arthur Morris was the last of three children to die after his stepmother, Martha Rendell, began swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid at the family home in East Perth, Perth. His two sisters had died the previous year from the same treatment, disguised as a cure for diphtheria. Arthur, 15, suffered for months before he finally succumbed in 1908.

A doctor who had treated the boy, suspicious of the family’s string of throat deaths, requested an autopsy. The first examination found nothing to tie Rendell to the deaths, and she would remain free a while longer before the full truth of her method finally emerged.

Arthur Morris, a prize-winning essayist, was poisoned to death two years before his death.

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Australia Child Abuse Case Murder Perth Poisoning Trial WA

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Bernard Wootton, a repeat escapee from Fremantle Prison, broke out in August 1867 in a scheme so audacious it fooled the guards: a fellow convict disguised as a warder simply marched the escape party out the gate. Tracked down weeks later near Beverley, Wootton seemed calm enough under guard that Sergeant John Moye freed one of his hands so he could eat breakfast. Wootton snatched a burning iron bar from the fireplace and struck the sergeant across the head.

Only the quick action of an Aboriginal police tracker, who wrenched the bar from him, stopped the attack turning fatal. Convicted of attempted murder at Perth, Wootton was hanged at Perth Gaol.

He refused all offers of religious ministration and went to the scaffold defiant, his last words reportedly a shout for the Irish republic.

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Australia Beverley Escape Execution Fremantle Murder Perth Prison Trial WA

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