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

John Lloyd, a ticket-of-leave convict working near Geraldton, shot his own labourer John Brown with intent to kill at Port Gregory in June 1857. Brown was himself a former convict, but only months earlier he had been granted a conditional pardon for manslaughter, finally free after years under sentence, before his own employer put a bullet in him.

Lloyd was tried and convicted that October, and hanged at Perth Gaol on this day in 1857. It was not his first brush with the gallows’ shadow: a decade earlier he had been transported for life from Wales for highway robbery, and had already served years in the colony before the shooting that finally ended his.

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Attempted Murder Australia Convict History Execution Geraldton Perth Trial WA

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Two men became the first to hang at the newly built gaol at Darlinghurst on 29 October 1841, a grim christening for a site that would host executions for decades to come.

Robert Hudson went to the gallows for murdering a fellow convict, Dean Charfry West, at the General Hospital in Sydney.

George Stroud, hanged alongside him, had murdered his wife, a crime he later blamed entirely on drink.

Both men were reported penitent on the scaffold, kneeling in prayer before the drop fell. Stroud asked the attending minister to warn the crowd of the dangers that had led him there, “since, by having been guilty of that sin, he had been induced to commit the terrible crime for which he was then about to suffer”.

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Australia Darlinghurst Execution Murder NSW Prison Sydney

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President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, warning that banning alcohol while rationing wartime grain made no sense now the war was over. Congress disagreed, and on this day in 1919 the Senate and House of Representatives overrode his veto, pushing the Volstead Act into law and setting a date to enforce the newly ratified Eighteenth Amendment.

The Act gave Prohibition its teeth: it defined any drink over 0.5 percent alcohol as illegal and handed federal agents the power to raid, seize and prosecute. Within months, that vacuum would be filled not by sobriety but by bootleggers, speakeasies and the organised crime syndicates who built fortunes smuggling what the law had just made forbidden.

New York City Deputy Police Commissioner overseeing the disposal of confiscated liquor during Prohibition, c. 1921. Source: Library of Congress.

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Legislation Organised Crime Political Crime Prohibition USA

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Jeremy Bamber told police his father had rung him at 3:30am to say his sister, Sheila Caffell, had gone berserk with his rifle, and when officers reached the family’s Georgian farmhouse in Essex that August morning in 1985, Sheila lay dead with the gun against her throat, having apparently shot her parents and her young twin sons before turning it on herself.

Detectives were sceptical that a woman recovering from schizophrenia could have fired the fatal shots twice into her own throat, and it was Bamber’s girlfriend who broke the case, telling police he had confessed the killings to her. A silencer later found hidden in a farmhouse cupboard proved decisive: it showed the rifle had been too long for Sheila’s reach when the shots were fired. Bamber was convicted on this day in 1986 and sentenced to life imprisonment, later made a whole life term with no possibility of parole.

He has always maintained his innocence, and decades on, still pursues appeals to have his conviction overturned.

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Deception Europe Family Killing Murder Trial UK

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