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

1901: Leon Czolgosz Shoots President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition

On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot twice in the abdomen while shaking hands with the public at the Temple of Music during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. His attacker, 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist who had lost his job in the Panic of 1893 and come to regard McKinley as a symbol of oppression. Despite appearing to recover initially, McKinley died on September 14 from gangrene caused by his wounds, becoming the third American president assassinated after Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield.

Czolgosz was convicted of first-degree murder within a month and executed by electric chair on October 29, 1901. McKinley was succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. In the aftermath, Congress formally charged the Secret Service with protecting the president.

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Assassination Execution Murder Political Crime Trial USA

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1792: Five Days of Mob Killing End as the September Massacres Claim Half of Paris Prisons

Over five days in September 1792, mobs stormed nine prisons across Paris and carried out mass summary executions of those held within. The killings were brutal in their indiscriminate reach: roughly half the prison population was slaughtered before the violence finally subsided.

An estimated three-quarters of the victims were not political prisoners at all, but common criminals, forgers, women, and children. The September Massacres remain one of the darkest episodes of the French Revolutionary period.

Engraving showing the massacre of Princess de Lamballe

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Europe France Mass Killing Massacre Paris Political Crime Riot

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1971: Man Commits Mass Murder: Freed Eight Years Later to Start a New Life

On the night of 6 September 1971, dairy farmer Clifford Bartholomew murdered ten members of his family at their Hope Forest property south of Adelaide, including his wife, seven children aged between four and 19, his sister-in-law and his infant nephew. When police arrived, Bartholomew was sitting calmly at the kitchen table drinking beer; one detective later described him as “cool, calm and collected.”

Bartholomew admitted the killings and was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Despite the scale of the crime, he was released on parole in 1979 after serving just eight years.

Under the new identity Clifford Palmer, he rebuilt his life, remarried and became stepfather to seven children. He lived quietly until his death in 2002. Years later, his second family learned the full extent of his past and discovered that the man they had known as “Poppy Cliff” had been responsible for one of Australia’s worst family massacres.

Abandoned farmhouse with hangmans noose under dark sky

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Adelaide Australia Family Homicide Hope Forest Massacre Murder SA Trial

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1991: Pee Wee Gaskins Executed for a Murder Committed Behind Bars

Donald Henry Gaskins Jr., known as Pee Wee Gaskins, was executed in the electric chair at Broad River Correctional Institution in South Carolina at 1:10 a.m. on 6 September 1991, aged 58. A serial killer confirmed to have murdered at least thirteen people between 1970 and 1975, including six teenagers and a two-year-old, he had originally been sentenced to death in 1976 for one of eight bodies found buried near his home in Prospect, South Carolina. That sentence was overturned, and he pleaded guilty to nine murders in exchange for life imprisonment.

His second death sentence came after he murdered a fellow death row inmate, Rudolph Tyner, using C4 explosive while incarcerated at Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. Hours before his execution, Gaskins attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. He claimed to have killed 110 people, a figure widely dismissed by law enforcement and journalists as a bid for notoriety.

His last words were: ‘I’ll let my lawyers talk for me. I’m ready to go.’

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Execution Murder Prison Serial Killer USA

1901: Leon Czolgosz Shoots President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition

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1792: Five Days of Mob Killing End as the September Massacres Claim Half of Paris Prisons

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1971: Man Commits Mass Murder: Freed Eight Years Later to Start a New Life

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1991: Pee Wee Gaskins Executed for a Murder Committed Behind Bars

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