Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 32
A boy named John Burtenshaw was killed in 1839 while minding sheep on the banks of the Canning River near Maddington, within sight of a farm a few miles from Perth. The accused was identified as responsible during a tense period of conflict between settlers and Aboriginal communities on the colonial frontier.
He was tried and sentenced to death, then taken from Fremantle gaol in 1841 and hanged at the very spot where the killing had occurred. Accounts recorded that on the road to the gallows he showed no fear, finding comfort in a belief that after death he would come back to life.
Curved sandy riverbank on Canning River in Perth at sunset
She had already lost one throne and spent nearly two decades a prisoner in England, but in October 1586 Mary, Queen of Scots, was brought before a tribunal of English noblemen at Fotheringhay Castle, accused of plotting to assassinate her own cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. Letters allegedly written in cipher, part of what became known as the Babington Plot, were produced as evidence that she had approved a plan to murder Elizabeth and seize the English crown for herself.
Mary denied any part in the conspiracy and refused at first to recognise the court’s authority over an anointed queen. The trial proceeded regardless, and the verdict that followed would send her to the executioner’s block the following year.
Theodore Roosevelt was climbing into his car in Milwaukee on 14 October 1912, campaigning for a third term as president, when a former saloonkeeper named John Schrank stepped from the crowd and shot him in the chest. The bullet had already been slowed by a folded steel glasses case and a fifty page speech manuscript in his breast pocket before it lodged in his chest muscle.
With the crowd turning on the gunman, Roosevelt shouted for Schrank to be left unharmed and handed to police. Then, bleeding and reasoning from his own hunting experience that he was not coughing blood and so his lung was untouched, he refused hospital treatment and walked onto the stage. He opened his address with the line that followed him ever after: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He spoke for roughly ninety minutes before finally agreeing to see a doctor. Surgeons judged the bullet too close to vital organs to remove, and Roosevelt carried it in his chest for the rest of his life.
Theodore Roosevelt speaking from a car shortly before being shot in 1912.
Henry Stock married Elizabeth Keats when she was nineteen and already raising another man’s child. The marriage soured, she took out a maintenance order against him, and when she vanished with her young son in April 1884, searchers found their badly decomposed remains in dense scrub near the Ouse district, both riddled with shot that matched Stock’s own gun. Witnesses recalled him muttering that he would “murder her yet” and would rather “swing” than live with her again.
His first trial ended in a deadlocked jury; a second, before Hobart’s Chief Justice Dobson, convicted him. On the morning of his execution at Campbell Street Gaol in Hobart, hangman Solomon Blay prepared to carry out his hundredth hanging. Before he was led to the scaffold, Stock scratched a message on his cell wall naming two sisters whose evidence had convicted him, hoping to see them “here before long,” and warning other young men to keep from woman. He walked to the gallows carrying a small bunch of flowers tied with a scripture text: “He shall speak peace unto the heathen.”
To the end he denied the killings, declaring on the drop, “I swear by Heaven that I am innocent.”
Henry Stock, c. 1883. Photograph attributed to T. J. Nevin. Tasmania Supreme Court, Death warrants and related papers, vol. 2, C 203. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
