Carl Williams had already been convicted of multiple murders during Melbourne’s gangland war when he was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike in a high-security unit at Victoria’s Barwon Prison in 2010, an inmate supposedly protected by round-the-clock surveillance.

Matthew Charles Johnson, a fellow prisoner sharing the unit, was charged with the killing. On this day in 2011 a jury found him guilty of murdering the man once considered one of the country’s most feared underworld figures, in an attack that exposed how little safety the prison’s most secure wing actually offered its most notorious inmate.

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

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On September 29, 1982, 12 year old Mary Kellerman took a Tylenol capsule for a cold and died within hours. Within two days six more people in the Chicago area died the same way, including three members of a single family, the Januses, who had unknowingly shared capsules from the same tainted batch.

Someone had opened bottles on store shelves, replaced the medicine inside with potassium cyanide, and resealed them for unsuspecting buyers to find. No poisoner was ever caught. A man named James W. Lewis was convicted of extortion after writing to the manufacturer claiming responsibility and demanding a million dollars to stop the deaths, but he later insisted the letter was a bluff, and investigators could never tie him to the actual killings.

The case remains unsolved to this day, but it changed how medicine is sold worldwide, ending loose powder capsules and ushering in the tamper proof seals now standard on every bottle.

Capsules of Tylenol Pain Killer. A container of Tylenol tablets pain killer. | ID 207734574 © Arne Beruldsen | Dreamstime.com
ID 207734574 © Arne Beruldsen | Dreamstime.com

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Elijah Upjohn had hanged Ned Kelly at Melbourne Gaol in 1880, earning five pounds for the job. Two years later he was back in front of a City Court bench, this time as the accused: drunk in Carlton, he exposed himself in front of witnesses, to whom he tossed peppermints moments before.

Fined 10 pounds or three months, Upjohn refused to pay and was sent to Melbourne Gaol, the very institution he had served as executioner. While locked up he kept working, flogging inmates at Pentridge under sentence, and walked free at year’s end with wages still owed to him.

Elijah Upjohn: Executioner of Bushranger Ned Kelly
Elijah Upjohn: Executioner of Bushranger Ned Kelly

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By 1866 Joseph Bolitho Johns, known as Moondyne Joe, was already the most persistent escapee Fremantle Prison had ever held. Free again in August after breaking out once more, he teamed up with two other escaped convicts and raided Everett’s store at Toodyay, a shopkeeper who had arrived on the very same convict transport as Joe, stripping it of boots, blankets, guns and ammunition to equip an overland trek all the way to Adelaide.

They made it 322 kilometres east of Perth before running out of luck at Bodallin Soak, recaptured on 29 September 1866, the escapade that first put the name Moondyne Joe into print. Back at Fremantle Prison, he was handed a further five years, two for the escape and three for the robbery, in a saga that would run for another three decades.

Moondyne Joe - Perennial Escapee
Moondyne Joe – Perennial Escapee

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On This Day in True Crime History
1853·"Thank You, My Lord, I Am Very Glad of That Sentence": Bushrangers Hanged in Melbourne
1884·He Swore to Shoot Whoever Bought His Farm, and Kept His Word: Hanged in Melbourne
1892·"The Only Man on the Station That I Liked": Hanged in Brisbane for a Torres Strait Murder
1892·A Mutilated Body in a Trunk: Sailor Hanged in Brisbane for Murder at Sea
1895·George Dean, Pardoned for Poisoning His Wife, Convicted of Perjury in Sydney
More Crime On This Day →

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