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

James Yardsley was drinking keg beer with fellow farm servants in a hut near Deloraine on the night of 26 July 1851 when, after a separate scuffle outside, he strode back in and told Robert Hudson he would be his “butcher to night.” He stabbed Hudson three times with a pocket knife while another labourer, Bush, wrestled for the blade and begged him to stop; Hudson collapsed with wounds to his chest, arm and back.

Convicted of wounding with intent to do bodily harm, Yardsley was hanged at Launceston on this day in 1851, the same port where he had landed as a transported convict sixteen years earlier.

When his employer confronted him that night, Yardsley answered flatly, “I’ve done it, and am willing to suffer,” and later said he was ready to “die on the gallows for it.”

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Attempted Murder Australia Convict History Deloraine Execution Launceston TAS Trial

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Wilma McCann, a mother of four, left a Leeds nightclub to walk home on the night of 30 October 1975 and never made it back. She was found the next morning on a playing field, stabbed and beaten, the first of thirteen women Peter Sutcliffe would kill over the next five years as the Yorkshire Ripper evaded capture despite one of the largest manhunts in British police history.

The damage did not end with her death. In 2007, more than three decades later, her eldest daughter Sonia took her own life, never having recovered from losing her mother as a child. It meant the Ripper’s toll outlived his capture and his sentencing, reaching into a generation he never touched directly.

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England Leeds Murder Serial Killer Trial UK

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James “Whitey” Bulger ran Boston’s underworld for decades while secretly informing for the FBI, a betrayal that let his gang operate almost untouched. He vanished in 1994 after a tip-off from his own handler, spent sixteen years as a fugitive second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s most wanted list, and was finally captured in California in 2011. Convicted in 2013 of racketeering and involvement in eleven murders, he was handed two life sentences.

Five years later, the 89 year old and wheelchair bound Bulger was abruptly transferred to a high security prison in West Virginia, his medical status quietly downgraded just weeks earlier. He arrived on 29 October 2018. Within hours, on this day in 2018, he was found beaten to death in his cell, attacked with a sock wrapped padlock and a shiv so savagely a law enforcement official called him unrecognisable.

Mafia hitman Fotios Geas was later identified as the man behind the killing and in 2024 was sentenced to 25 years for voluntary manslaughter. A relative of one of Bulger’s own victims summed up the reaction of many: “He died the way I hoped he always was going to die.”

James Joseph Bulger Jr portrait photograph 1953

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Gang Murder Organised Crime Prison USA

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Ralph Entwistle was an escaped convict who had been publicly flogged on the orders of Bathurst magistrate Thomas Evernden after being spotted bathing in the Macquarie River by the Governor’s travelling party. Within a year he had turned bushranger, gathering escaped convicts into a band that grew to as many as eighty men, the largest convict uprising since Castle Hill, known as the Ribbon Gang for the white streamers Entwistle wore in his hair.

The gang’s campaign turned deadly when overseer James Greenwood refused to let them recruit his master’s men, baring his chest and daring them to shoot. They did. Troopers and armed volunteers, guided by two Aboriginal trackers, finally cornered the remaining bushrangers at the Abercrombie Caves, where a gunfight lasting hours forced the survivors onto a nearby hilltop before reinforcements ran the exhausted gang down.

On 30 October 1830, ten captured bushrangers faced trial at Bathurst before a jury of military officers. The court convicted six, including Entwistle, of Greenwood’s murder, and four others of plundering farmhouses, sentencing all ten to death.

Suspension bridge over underground lake at Abercrombie Caves

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Australia Bathurst Bushranging Murder NSW Rebellion Robbery Trial

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