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

Judith Lynn Miller was a Hollywood High School student who had drifted into life as a runaway when two men claiming to be undercover police officers pulled her off the street on Halloween night in 1977. The men were Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, the so-called Hillside Stranglers, and they took her not to a police station but to Buono’s upholstery shop.

On this day in 1977, her body was found dumped on a parkway in La Crescenta, California, left by a killing team that had already claimed several other young women across Los Angeles.

Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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California Kidnapping Los Angeles Murder Serial Killer USA

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Thomas Collins had been transported from Cork on the convict ship Canada, arriving in New South Wales in 1815, and within a year was standing trial in Sydney for burglary. He and two accomplices had broken into a shop in O’Connell Street and made off with baskets of tobacco, burying part of it in the earth near Farm Cove before selling a basket on for a watch and cash. The case against him rested on the evidence of Edward Dempsey, a fellow gang member turned Crown witness, and Collins was convicted of burglary that September.

Days later he was back in the dock on an entirely separate charge: robbing a carter on the Parramatta Road the previous July, in a predawn ambush that saw three carts stopped and their drivers beaten to the ground. Dempsey gave evidence again, and Collins was convicted a second time.

He was hanged in Sydney on this day in 1816, alongside two other condemned men.

Collins confessed his guilt before his death; the record states that all three men executed that morning died penitent.

Horse-drawn omnibuses on Parramatta Road, Sydney, c. 1870–1875. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

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Australia Convict History Execution NSW Robbery Sydney Trial

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Hugh McLarie and his gang lay in wait on the Parramatta Road one morning in July 1816, ambushing a line of carts before dawn, knocking the drivers to the ground and making off with a keg of spirits, bolts of cloth and a haul of clothing from the cart of John Andrews. The robbery unravelled when Edward Dempsey, one of the raiders, turned King’s evidence and gave the court a detailed account of the ambush.

It was not the first time Dempsey’s testimony had put McLarie in the dock. Weeks earlier the same informer had helped convict him over a break in at a Sydney shop, naming him as one of the men who carried off baskets of tobacco, coin and clothing hidden in the bush beyond the town.

McLarie was hanged in Sydney on 1 November 1816 for the Parramatta Road robbery.

He confessed his crime before the scaffold and, the record states, died penitent.

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Australia Burglary Colonial Crime Execution NSW Robbery Sydney Trial

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Margery Campbell, an Irish woman also known as Margaret Docherty, was lured into William Burke’s lodging house in Edinburgh on 31 October 1828 after Burke struck up a conversation with her on the street, claiming a shared homeland. A night of drinking followed, and before it ended Burke and his accomplice William Hare had suffocated her, the sixteenth victim in a killing spree that had run through the city for months.

Her body was found hidden under straw by fellow lodgers Ann and James Gray, who went straight to the police. The discovery ended the partnership for good: Hare turned Crown witness to save himself, and Burke went to the gallows for a murder that finally could not be concealed.

Burke murdering Margery Campbell historical crime illustration

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Edinburgh Execution Murder Scotland Serial Killer Trial UK

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