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.

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Cannibalism Europe Execution Murder Russia Serial Killer Trial

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William Dodd, a ticket-of-leave man, struck the bargain that would hang him: ten pounds and a horse named Turk, promised by the wealthy settler’s own wife in exchange for her husband’s death. At the Vasse, Dodd lost his nerve at the bedroom door and had to be plied with more drink before he went back in, seized John Hurford by the throat, and strangled him as the old man cried out.

Convicted at Perth on circumstantial evidence and a damning account from a fellow ticket-of-leave man he had bragged to, Dodd was hanged within the walls of the new gaol on 15 October 1855, alongside the wife who had hired him.

On the scaffold, Dodd tried to shift the blame, insisting that another man had actually struck the fatal blow while he merely stood by, a story that flatly contradicted the confession he himself had made days after the murder.

Angry muscular man pointing at camera in confrontation

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Australia Conspiracy Execution Murder Perth Trial Vasse WA

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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.

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Assassination Attempt Milwaukee Political Crime Shooting USA Wisconsin

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Dino Dibra, 25, was one of the early casualties of Melbourne‘s gangland war. He was gunned down on this day the moment he stepped outside his home in Sunshine West, hit multiple times in what police believed was a professional, pre-planned hit rather than a chance confrontation.

Investigators were confident a hired shooter had been waiting for him, and suspicion quickly fell on Andrew Veniamin, a figure who would go on to be linked to several more killings as the underworld conflict spread across the city. Dibra’s murder became one of the opening chapters in a decade-long cycle of tit-for-tat violence that would eventually claim more than thirty lives.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Sunshine West Unsolved VIC

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