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

Serial killer Donald Gaskins, already condemned to die at Central Correctional Institution, murdered fellow death row inmate Rudolph Tyner using a homemade bomb built from C4 plastic explosive concealed inside a device disguised as a portable radio speaker. The device was passed to Tyner and detonated, killing him instantly.

Gaskins carried out the killing as a paid hit, hired for 2,000 dollars by Tony Cimo, the son of a couple Tyner had murdered years earlier. Cimo wanted revenge on his parents’ killer and used Gaskins, already notorious as one of South Carolina’s most prolific murderers, to get it from inside the prison itself.

Mobster planting a time bomb in a car engine compartment

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Murder Organised Crime Prison Serial Killer South Carolina USA

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Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his leg. He turned to see a man pick up a dropped umbrella and hurry away, offering a mumbled apology. Markov thought little of it until a small red mark and fever set in over the following days.

The umbrella had been rigged to fire a tiny pellet packed with ricin, a poison for which there was and is no antidote. Markov died four days later, on 11 September 1978, from the resulting blood poisoning, becoming one of the most infamous casualties of Cold War espionage.

His killer would not be identified for almost three decades. It was not until 2005 that leaked files named the assassin as Francesco Gullino, an agent working for the Bulgarian secret service, though he was never extradited or tried for the murder.

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Assassination Cold Case Espionage Europe Poisoning Political Crime UK

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Frederick Wordsworth Ward, the bushranger known as Captain Thunderbolt, was serving time on Sydney‘s Cockatoo Island, a prison ringed by harbour currents and sheer sandstone cliffs and widely declared impossible to escape. On the night of 11 September 1863, Ward slipped his cell and plunged into the water, swimming through the cold, shark infested harbour to the mainland shore.

The breakout humiliated colonial authorities and turned Ward into a folk figure almost overnight. He spent the next seven years roaming the bush of northern New South Wales, robbing coaches, inns and travellers as one of the colony’s most enduring and elusive bushrangers before he was finally shot dead by police near Uralla in 1870.

Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 1951. Photograph by Frank Hurley. National Library of Australia, PIC FH/7951. Out of copyright.

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Australia Bushranging Escape NSW Prison Robbery Sydney

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William Casey, a young Guardsman only about twenty years old, was hanged in London on 11 September 1721 after being convicted of robbing a man named John Stone in a city park. Casey never accepted the charge; he insisted the confrontation had nothing to do with theft and everything to do with Stone making indecent advances toward him, a claim that, if true, cast the entire prosecution in a very different light.

At the gallows Casey did not simply protest verbally. He left behind a written statement formally proclaiming his innocence of the robbery, a deliberate act by a condemned soldier determined that his version of events would outlive him.

“He maintained until death that the confrontation arose because Stone had made indecent advances toward him” and went to his execution still denying the crime for which he was hanged.

William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park

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Execution Robbery Trial

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