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

Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764 in Cumberland, England, decades before he would become one of history’s most infamous mutineers. In April 1789, as master’s mate aboard HMS Bounty, he led a revolt against Captain William Bligh, seizing the ship in the South Pacific after months of tension during the vessel’s breadfruit-collecting voyage.

Rather than kill Bligh, Christian set him adrift in a small open boat with eighteen loyal crew members and minimal supplies. Bligh went on to complete an extraordinary 3,618-mile voyage to safety in Timor, a feat of navigation still studied today.

Christian and his fellow mutineers eventually settled on remote Pitcairn Island with a group of Tahitian men and women, burning the Bounty to avoid detection. The fate of the settlement descended into violence within years, and the exact circumstances of Christian’s own death remain disputed, with some accounts claiming he was killed by fellow settlers and others suggesting he secretly returned to England.

Portrait of Friday Fletcher October Christian son of Bounty mutineer Christian Fletcher 1814 by John Shillibeer

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Historical Crime Mutiny Naval Crime Pacific Pitcairn Island UK

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The Want Ad Killer,Harvey Carignan, was arrested in Minnesota on 24 September 1974, at the end of a ten-day rampage. A woman he had left for dead in a field survived and raised the alarm, two others escaped when he stopped for petrol, and an 18-year-old was found dead in a cornfield just four days before police caught up with him.

He should have been hanged in 1949. A soldier stationed in Alaska, he was sentenced to death for murdering a woman, but the conviction collapsed because an officer had promised he would not be executed if he confessed. With the confession thrown out, the murder charge was dismissed. He served time for a separate assault instead, part of it in Alcatraz, and was paroled in 1960.

By the early 1970s he was the prime suspect in two killings in Washington state, one of them a teenager who had answered his “help wanted” ad for a job at his service station. He was never charged, and moved on to Minnesota. After his arrest, his plea that God had ordered him to kill failed; he was convicted of two murders and died in prison in 2023, aged 95.

Help wanted classified ad printed in a newspaper

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Alaska Minnesota Murder Prison Serial Killer Trial USA Washington

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Larry Cummins was 20 when a Goulburn jury convicted him of armed robbery and he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour, the first in irons. His accomplice in the hold-up, both men with blackened faces, had been his 18-year-old brother. And the charge everyone was talking about had already been dropped: the murder of that same brother.

Weeks earlier, police had found the younger Cummins hiding in the loft of his mother’s hut. He fired twice at the constables before surrendering, and they saddled one of the family’s own horses to take him to the lockup. Eight miles along the track a single shot rang out from the bush. It struck the prisoner behind the ear; he “gave one groan” and died. The constables never saw the gunman, only heard a horse galloping away. The shot was assumed to have been meant for the constable, and the man behind it to be Larry, trying to set his brother free. There was not enough evidence to try him for it.

Three years later Cummins escaped from Berrima Gaol by crawling through 120 yards of sewer, only to be recaptured within months. Released in 1876, he lived out his days in Victoria under another name, as a drover and whipmaker, and died in 1909.

Sepia portrait of bushranger Larry Cummins 1843 to 1909

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Australia Berrima Bushranger Crookwell Escape Goulburn Manslaughter Mudgee NSW Prison Richlands Robbery Trial

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Susan Atkins, one of the most notorious members of Charles Manson’s cult and a participant in the infamous 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, died in custody at California’s Central California Women’s Facility while serving a life sentence.

Atkins had spent nearly four decades behind bars, repeatedly denied parole despite being terminally ill with brain cancer in her final years. Her role in the killing of actress Sharon Tate and others made her one of the most infamous figures to emerge from the Manson Family’s 1969 murder spree.

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California Cult Murder Prison Serial Killer USA

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