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

Lesley Ann Downey had been missing since Boxing Day 1964, taken from a Manchester fairground and killed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who recorded her final minutes on tape. In October 1965 police digging on Saddleworth Moor spotted a bone protruding from the peat.

The body recovered was still visually identifiable. It was formally confirmed the next day as Lesley Ann, and her mother identified her by the clothing recovered with her, bringing a grim end to months of searching in one of Britain’s most notorious crime cases.

Grim Murder Discoveries on Saddleworth Moors

⬅ See all events from 16 October

Cold Case England Manchester Murder Serial Killer UK

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Nine months after her husband Louis XVI went to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette followed him, tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal for treason against the new French Republic. Her hair had been cropped and her wrists bound behind her back; she rode to the Place de la Revolution in an open cart, not the closed carriage that had carried the king. Witnesses recorded that climbing the scaffold she stepped on her executioner’s foot and murmured an apology, a small, almost absurd courtesy moments before the blade fell on 16 October 1793. The crowd that had once cheered a queen watched in silence.

Marie Antoinette's execution in 1793 — Marie Antoinette’s execution in 1793

⬅ See all events from 16 October

Europe Execution France Political Crime Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Seven year old Olive Morris died on this day in East Perth, her throat swabbed raw, just as her older sister Annie had died months before. Both times the family doctor, Cuthbert, signed the same death certificate: diphtheria. Both times he was wrong.

What the certificate did not record was hydrochloric acid, swabbed onto the children’s throats by their father’s partner, Martha Rendell, under the guise of treating illness. The pattern would not be noticed for two more years, until a third child in the household died the same way and police finally ordered the earlier graves reopened.

The exhumations in 1909 revealed what two death certificates had missed, and set in motion the case that would end with Rendell on the gallows.

⬅ See all events from 16 October

Australia Child Abuse Cold Case East Perth Execution Exoneration Murder Perth Poisoning WA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

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!

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