Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 4
Paul Avery had spent months covering the unidentified killer terrorising Northern California for the San Francisco Chronicle, turning his byline into the public face of the investigation. That attention made him a target of the very man he was writing about.
On 27 October 1970, the Zodiac Killer sent a letter addressed directly to Avery, taunting the journalist for the coverage that had made his name synonymous with the case. The killer was never identified, and the letter remains one of the eeriest pieces of correspondence in a case still unsolved more than half a century later.
Snowy Cutmore had spent months hiding in Sydney after the gangland killing of an ally, but by late October 1927 he was back in Melbourne, lodging with his mother in Carlton. At the races he ran into his old rival Squizzy Taylor and the two traded threats in public; within days Cutmore came down with influenza and took to his sickbed.
On 27 October 1927, Taylor and an accomplice hired a car, drove to the house and walked straight into Cutmore’s bedroom. Gunfire erupted between the bedridden man and his visitors: Cutmore was hit five times, his mother was wounded by a stray bullet as she rushed in, and Taylor himself staggered out mortally wounded, dying in hospital within the hour.
James Henry Shaw took a Japanese fisherman named Oki Iwakichi into partnership at a riverside camp near Pinjarra, letting him manage the household finances and sleep inside the family home while Shaw worked away for months at a time. When Shaw decided to abandon the failing venture and take a job in Fremantle, Oki begged him to stay, warned he would rather die than be left penniless, and took to sleeping with a loaded rifle. On 23 August 1908, as Mrs Shaw stepped outside for rope to tie him down and calm him, Oki shot Shaw through the neck, then fled into the bush, cutting loose every boat moored on the river to slow the alarm.
At his trial, love letters from Oki to his cousin surfaced, claiming he and Mrs Shaw had lived ‘like man and wife’ for over a year; she denied it outright from the stand. The jury convicted him of wilful murder, and when led away to the condemned cell he said he was resigned to his fate, ‘if they let me see Mrs Shaw first.’ He was hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1908.
Oki had denied the charge at trial, but when asked on the gallows if he wished to say anything, he only shook his head; his last words, muttered after the chaplain’s prayer, were ‘Jesus, mercy.’
Oki Iwakichi: West Murray Tragedy murder case 1908
Squizzy Taylor, Melbourne’s most infamous gang leader, walked into a Carlton sickroom on 27 October 1927 to settle an old score with his bedridden rival, John “Snowy” Cutmore. Within minutes, gunfire tore through the small house and both men were mortally wounded.
Taylor was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital in nearby Fitzroy, where he died that evening, aged 39, without ever naming who had fired the fatal shot.
The inquest returned an open verdict. One enduring theory holds that it was not Cutmore but his mother, standing over her dying son, who pulled the trigger that finally brought down Melbourne’s most feared gangster.
