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

For about two decades, Eugenia Falleni lived as a man named Harry Crawford, working ordinary jobs and marrying a woman named Annie Birkett in 1913 without her ever suspecting the truth. The marriage held until Eight-Hour Day in 1917, when Birkett disappeared; her charred remains were later found in bushland near Lane Cove.

It took police years to connect Crawford to the body and to discover the deeper deception underneath. Tried at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney, Falleni was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.

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Australia Disguise Execution Murder NSW Scandal Sydney Trial

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At a one-teacher school in rural Victoria, two unemployed plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, burst in with a sawn-off shotgun and forced 20-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and her six young pupils into a van, demanding a million dollar ransom. Victoria’s premier agreed to pay, and the education minister himself waited at the handover point with police hidden nearby, but the kidnappers never returned to collect it.

Left alone with the children overnight, Gibbs kicked out a door panel with her heavy platform boots and led the girls through the dark bush to safety. Eastwood and Boland were run down in a manhunt; Eastwood pleaded guilty and was jailed, while Boland was convicted after three trials.

It was not the end of the story. Eastwood escaped prison years later and staged a second mass kidnapping of a teacher and nine pupils, and while back behind bars he killed a fellow inmate in what was ruled self-defence.

White camper van parked on dirt pull-off overlooking rural hills

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Australia Escape Kidnapping Prison Ransom Trial VIC

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On the night of October 6, 1866, three members of the Reno Gang boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train as it pulled out of Seymour, Indiana, overpowered the express guard and cracked open a safe holding roughly 16,000 dollars. They then shoved a second, heavier safe off the moving train for the rest of the gang to finish the job, but could not break it open before a posse closed in and they fled. It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first train robbery in American history.

The job, pulled off by brothers Frank, John, Simeon and William Reno, became the blueprint for a wave of copycat train robberies across the Midwest. Within two years the brothers paid for it dearly: dragged from jail cells by masked vigilantes and hanged, most of the gang’s stolen fortune never recovered.

Portrait of the Reno Brothers members of the Reno Gang train robbers

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Gang Indiana Organised Crime Robbery Train Robbery USA

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In 1878, Constable Fitzpatrick arrived alone and drunk at the Kelly family homestead and assaulted fourteen-year-old Kate Kelly, the spark that turned her brothers Ned and Dan into outlaws. With her mother jailed as an accomplice, teenage Kate raised her younger siblings, campaigned for Ned’s clemency, and later toured with relics of the gang after his hanging at Melbourne Gaol in 1880.

Eighteen years on, now married and living near Forbes in New South Wales, Kate vanished from her home. She was found drowned in a nearby waterhole, aged 35. Her death was officially ruled an accident, but questions about what drove her there have never fully gone away.

Portrait of Kate Kelly sister of Ned Kelly

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Australia Bushranger Cold Case Forbes Melbourne Missing Person NSW Police Corruption VIC

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