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

Before dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, royal officers across France moved on hundreds of Knights Templar at once, arresting the warrior monks in their own preceptories under sealed orders opened simultaneously nationwide. King Philip the Fair, deeply in debt to the order he had once sworn to protect, accused its knights of heresy and secret blasphemous rites.

Under torture, many confessed to charges historians now regard as fabricated to justify seizing the order’s vast wealth. The arrests marked the beginning of the end for the Templars, who were suppressed within a few years and their leaders burned at the stake, and contributed to the enduring misfortune of the date of Friday the 13th.

Medieval illustration of the Grand Master of the Templars burning at the stake.

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Arrest Europe Execution France Political Crime Religious Persecution Torture

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On 12 October 2002, a suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Pub in Bali’s Kuta district and detonated an explosive vest on the crowded dance floor. Twenty seconds later, as survivors fled into the street to see what had happened, a second bomb hidden in a van outside the Sari Club tore through the crowd gathered there, killing many who had just escaped the first blast. The attack claimed 202 lives, including 88 Australians, the deadliest act of terrorism in Indonesia’s history. Three men were convicted of orchestrating the bombings and sentenced to death. They were executed by firing squad on Nusakambangan island in November 2008. In their final moments, the three men showed no remorse, shouting loudly, rather than any word of apology.

Kuta carnival 2010. Paddle for peace. Bali. Annual Kuta beach carnival celebration. Initially organized as a response to the Bali terrorist attack of October 2002, the event has now become a regular fixture on Bali's busy calendar of yearly events. October 2010. Among majority of events - every year all surfers padles to the mid of the ocean to make the circle, unite the hands, put flowers into the water and pray for victims of terrorist attack. The name of this part is Paddle for piece | ID 16538257 © Evgeniya Bolyukh | Dreamstime.com — ID 16538257 © Evgeniya Bolyukh | Dreamstime.com

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Asia Australia Bali Bombing Execution Indonesia Mass Casualty Attack Terrorism Trial

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In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Police South Yarra Trial Unsolved VIC

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Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was born in Venezuela on 12 October 1949, the son of a Marxist lawyer who named him after Lenin. Raised between a devoutly Catholic mother and a father devoted to revolutionary politics, he would grow up to become one of the most notorious political terrorists of the twentieth century.

As Carlos the Jackal, he carried out assassinations, bombings and hostage takings across Europe through the 1970s and into the 1980s, including the infamous 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. For years he evaded capture using a fake Peruvian passport bearing the alias Carlos Andres Martinez Torres, fitted with a deliberately poor photograph he later admitted was a likeness intentionally bad, designed to throw investigators off his trail. That very passport, seized by French police who did not yet know his real identity, is the reason the world came to know him only as Carlos.

Peruvian passport - real or fake? — Peruvian passport – real or fake?

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Assassination Europe Fraud Hostage Taking Terrorism Venezuela

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