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

Andrei Chikatilo cut the eyes from his victims, believing the dead retained an image of their killer burned into their retinas. He could only reach climax while torturing or murdering, and prosecutors said he ate parts of his victims, including their sexual organs, over a killing spree across the Rostov region that claimed at least 52 lives, mostly women and children lured into forests and fields.

On this day a Russian court convicted him on all counts. He was executed by a single shot to the back of the head, a death far quicker than any he gave the people he killed.

⬅ See all events from 15 October

Cannibalism Europe Execution Murder Russia Serial Killer Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

She was born Margaretha Zelle in the Netherlands and reinvented herself in Paris as Mata Hari, an exotic dancer whose stage act and string of wealthy, often military, lovers made her a sensation across Europe. When war came, French intelligence suspected she was selling pillow talk to Germany.

The evidence against her was thin and largely circumstantial, built on intercepted telegrams and a reputation for scandal rather than proof. A French military tribunal convicted her of espionage anyway, and she was executed by firing squad outside Paris on 15 October 1917.

She refused a blindfold and reportedly blew a kiss to the soldiers before they fired, going to her death still insisting she had never betrayed France.

⬅ See all events from 15 October

Espionage Europe Execution France Scandal Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

James Gardiner, a 19-year-old cabman, lived off the earnings of a woman known as German Ada in a Rockhampton brothel. On the night of 21 August 1883 a drunken quarrel turned fatal: he kicked and stamped her to death. Police tried to suppress the story, closing the inquest to reporters, but a neighbour who had heard her screams and been waved off by a constable made sure it got out anyway.

Gardiner was sentenced to death by Justice Pring and hanged at Brisbane Gaol alongside two other condemned men. Among those at the gate stood Charles Muller, an elderly German man and father of the dead woman, whose real name was Matilda. He had asked to watch his daughter’s killer die, stood opposite the scaffold through the execution, then pushed forward to view the body and walked away looking, witnesses said, satisfied.

Gardiner never denied killing her, pleading only that he had been drunk, and spent his last days exhorting the two men hanged beside him to repent.

Elderly man with long beard isolated on white background

⬅ See all events from 15 October

Australia Brisbane Domestic Violence Execution Murder QLD Rockhampton Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

On 15 October 1769, during his first voyage along the coast of New Zealand, Lieutenant James Cook watched a group of Maori men attempt to seize a servant from his landing party and haul him away in a canoe. The attempt failed and the servant was recovered, but Cook marked the spot on his chart with a name that stuck: Kidnappers Bay.

According to the Maori version of events recorded at the time, the men believed they were not abducting a stranger at all, but rescuing a Maori boy they thought was being held captive aboard the English ship. The misunderstanding, born of two cultures reading the same scene in entirely different ways, turned a rescue attempt into what the English recorded as a kidnapping.

⬅ See all events from 15 October

Colonial History Exploration Kidnapping New Zealand

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories