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

Arthur Morris was the last of three children to die after his stepmother, Martha Rendell, began swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid at the family home in East Perth, Perth. His two sisters had died the previous year from the same treatment, disguised as a cure for diphtheria. Arthur, 15, suffered for months before he finally succumbed in 1908.

A doctor who had treated the boy, suspicious of the family’s string of throat deaths, requested an autopsy. The first examination found nothing to tie Rendell to the deaths, and she would remain free a while longer before the full truth of her method finally emerged.

Arthur Morris, a prize-winning essayist, was poisoned to death two years before his death.

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Australia Child Abuse Case Murder Perth Poisoning Trial WA

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Thomas Berriman, manager of the Hawthorn branch of the Commercial Bank, was shot outside Glenferrie Station in Melbourne on this date while carrying £1,851 in bank funds to the head office. He died from the wound two weeks later.

Angus Murray was hanged for the killing, convicted as a principal even though it was his companion who actually pulled the trigger. Underworld figure Squizzy Taylor, swept up as the robbery’s alleged organiser, escaped a murder charge, convicted only of occupying a house frequented by thieves and serving six months.

The actual gunman, Richard Buckley, vanished for almost seven years before detectives traced him, bearded and living quietly, to a house in Moonee Ponds. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1946, dying and in his eighties, he was released to spend his final days at home.

Commercial Bank branch where manager T R V Berriman was shot: 1923

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Australia Execution Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Robbery Trial VIC

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David Birnie and his partner Catherine abducted and murdered four women around Perth in 1986, in what became known as the Moorhouse murders. Their victims included 22-year-old Mary Neilson. Both pleaded guilty and received life sentences, with the trial judge declaring that Birnie should never be released. On 7 October 2005, nineteen years and one day after their first murder, Birnie was found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison, hours before he was due in court over an alleged assault on another inmate. An inquest later heard that his antidepressant medication had been withdrawn and his computer confiscated in the weeks before his death.

Empty prison cell corridor with a row of rooms

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Armadale Australia Death in Custody Murder Perth Prison Serial Killer Suicide WA

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Edgar Allan Poe was discovered slumped outside a Baltimore tavern being used as a polling place, barely conscious and dressed in clothes that were not his own. He could not explain where he had been for the five days since he was last seen, and he never recovered enough to try; he died four days later at a city hospital, aged 40.

On this date, his doctor recorded his last words as “Lord help my poor soul”, after a night of Poe repeatedly calling out a name, Reynolds, that no one has ever identified. Newspapers blamed drink, but Poe’s death certificate and medical records have since vanished, and the true cause was never established.

One theory, raised decades later, points to cooping: a 19th century election scam in which gangs plied captives with liquor and forced them to vote repeatedly in disguise, which would explain both his stupor and his stolen clothes. No version of events has ever been confirmed.

Photograph of Edgar Allan Poe - 1848 — Photograph of Edgar Allan Poe – 1848

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Cold Case Scandal Unsolved USA

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