On this date in 1986, 22-year-old Mary Neilson visited a house on Moorhouse Street in Perth to buy car tyres advertised for sale. The advertisement was a trap. David and Catherine Birnie held her captive before taking her to nearby bushland, where they murdered her. Mary was the first of at least four women killed by the couple over the following weeks. Their killing spree ended when a later captive escaped and alerted police, exposing the Birnies’ crimes and leading to their arrest.
In Perth, Martha Rendell told neighbours her stepchildren suffered from chronic sore throats that she treated herself at home. In truth she was swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid, a slow and agonising poisoning disguised as nursing. Her stepson Arthur Morris, 14, died of it on 8 October 1908; two of his siblings had already died the same way, but only Arthur’s death went to trial.
Convicted of his murder, Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison on 6 October 1909, the only woman ever executed in Western Australia.
She denied killing the children to the end, insisting she had only ever tried to cure them.
John Bevan arrived in Sydney aboard the Pitt in February 1792, after a gruelling eight-month voyage during which 29 convicts died, and many others arrived sick.
By 1794, Bevan had built a reputation for trouble in the colony and was caught in the act of breaking into the Sydney home of William Fielder. The case against him was considered overwhelming, and little time was lost: Bevan was convicted of burglary, sentenced to death and hanged on 6 October 1794.
He was buried at the old Sydney burial ground, little more than two and a half years after surviving the voyage that had brought him to New South Wales.
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.
1923·Squizzy Taylor Walked Free While a Man Who Never Fired a Shot Hanged for a Melbourne Bank MurderTrue crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
