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

Two men became the first to hang at the newly built gaol at Darlinghurst on 29 October 1841, a grim christening for a site that would host executions for decades to come.

Robert Hudson went to the gallows for murdering a fellow convict, Dean Charfry West, at the General Hospital in Sydney.

George Stroud, hanged alongside him, had murdered his wife, a crime he later blamed entirely on drink.

Both men were reported penitent on the scaffold, kneeling in prayer before the drop fell. Stroud asked the attending minister to warn the crowd of the dangers that had led him there, “since, by having been guilty of that sin, he had been induced to commit the terrible crime for which he was then about to suffer”.

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Australia Darlinghurst Execution Murder NSW Prison Sydney

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Joseph Theodore Leslie “Squizzy” Taylor, Melbourne‘s most notorious gunman, had died days earlier in a shootout with rival criminal Cutmore. He was buried in a polished oak coffin with gold mountings at Brighton Cemetery on this day in 1927, while hundreds of onlookers, mostly women, crowded outside his Richmond home to watch the coffin leave.

What followed was described in the press as a disgraceful exhibition of morbid curiosity. Traffic was blocked for half an hour, and just before the funeral began a crowd surged at the gateway, forcing police to be called to clear a path. At the graveside few of Taylor’s former associates could be seen among the throng of sightseers. Cutmore, the other man killed in the same gun battle, had been buried the previous day at Coburg.

The Squiz: Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 - 31927 (1907-1909)] — The Squiz: Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 – 31927 (1907-1909)]

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Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Scandal VIC

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John Lloyd, a ticket-of-leave convict working near Geraldton, shot his own labourer John Brown with intent to kill at Port Gregory in June 1857. Brown was himself a former convict, but only months earlier he had been granted a conditional pardon for manslaughter, finally free after years under sentence, before his own employer put a bullet in him.

Lloyd was tried and convicted that October, and hanged at Perth Gaol on this day in 1857. It was not his first brush with the gallows’ shadow: a decade earlier he had been transported for life from Wales for highway robbery, and had already served years in the colony before the shooting that finally ended his.

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Attempted Murder Australia Convict History Execution Geraldton Perth Trial WA

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Sir Walter Raleigh had already cheated the executioner once. Convicted of treason within months of Queen Elizabeth’s death, after rivals whispered that he had opposed the accession of King James, he was spared at the last moment and spent thirteen years locked in the Tower of London instead.

Released in 1616 to hunt for gold in Guiana, Raleigh promised the voyage would bring no trouble with Spain. It did: his men attacked a Spanish outpost against direct orders, the expedition found no gold, and Raleigh came home to a king eager to please Madrid and an old death sentence still on the books. It was carried out in London on 29 October 1618.

On the scaffold he asked to examine the axe himself, running a thumb along the blade before remarking, “This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician that will cure all diseases.”

Sir Walter Raleigh imprisoned in the Tower of London by Henry Wallis

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Europe Execution London Political Crime Scandal Treason UK

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