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

Ten convicts, under armed marine escort, set out from Sydney Cove on this day in 1788, bound for a patch of ground at Rose Hill that would later grow into Parramatta. The fledgling colony was starving, its soil poor and its supply ships overdue, and this small, closely guarded party of prisoners carried the desperate hope that convict labour could turn the land self-sufficient before famine finished what the sea voyage had not.

There was no trial, no sentence, no scaffold in this story, only a gamble: that men transported for crimes in Britain could be made into the farmers who would keep an entire penal settlement alive. The ground they broke at Rose Hill became the first successful crops grown on the continent under British rule, and the settlement they built outgrew the colony that sent them there.

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Australia Colonisation Convict History NSW Parramatta Prison Labour Sydney

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Thomas Ansell was transported from London for petty larceny, but Van Diemen’s Land turned him into one of its most punished prisoners. In barely two years on road gangs he was flogged with 375 lashes for absconding, insolence and neglect, his sentence stretched again and again, and his body became so densely marked with tattoos, a sun, a moon, a mermaid, hearts and darts, that authorities used the ink to identify him on runaway notices circulated as far as London.

None of it stopped him. Ansell fell in with a bushranging gang operating near New Norfolk, breaking into the home of Robert and Mary Hatch and stealing what he could carry. Caught and convicted of burglary, he was hanged in front of the gaol at Hobart on 1 November 1833, aged twenty-four.

Convict flogging punishment scene in Tasmania

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Australia Burglary Execution Hobart Prison TAS Theft

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Jack Graham wanted his mother dead and her life insurance money in his pocket, and he did not much care who else was on the plane. He packed a dynamite time bomb into his mother Daisie King’s checked luggage before she boarded United Airlines Flight 629 out of Denver on the evening of 1 November 1955, bound for Alaska. Minutes after takeoff the Douglas DC-6B exploded over farmland near Longmont, Colorado, killing all 44 people aboard.

Investigators who pieced together the wreckage traced the blast to luggage in the cargo hold, and found Graham had form: he had collected an insurance payout earlier that year after his mother’s restaurant was destroyed in a suspicious gas explosion. He confessed, then recanted at trial, claiming he had only admitted guilt to stop the FBI pressuring his wife. Since no federal law at the time made it a crime to destroy an aircraft, prosecutors charged him simply with his mother’s murder. Convicted in 1956, he was executed in the gas chamber at Colorado State Penitentiary on 11 January 1957.

Graham showed no remorse to the end, telling a reporter: “Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”

Jack Gilbert Graham during his trial, c. 1957. Prelinger Archives. Digitally colourised.

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Aviation Disaster Bombing Colorado Denver Execution Insurance Fraud Mass Murder Murder Trial USA

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Daniel Moowattin was raised from infancy by the colony’s own flogger and hangman, grew up fluent in English manners, and became a trusted bush guide to the botanist George Caley. In 1810 Caley took him to London, where society was charmed by his polished English and the latest fashions; one newspaper called him, admiringly, “a black beau.” He even sang his own songs at a London party before confessing he longed for home, telling a companion he found more pleasure under a gum tree with his own people than anywhere in England.

He returned to the colony in 1812 and drifted between farm labour and life in the bush. That August, a teenage girl named Hannah Russell was walking alone on a road near Parramatta when, she testified, Moowattin dragged her into the scrub, beat and assaulted her, robbed her of money, then beat her again before a passing stockman frightened him off.

Under the colony’s rules, Aboriginal people could not ordinarily be tried in its courts, but the men who knew Moowattin argued he no longer counted as one of them: he dressed, worked and spoke like a settler. On that reasoning he became the first Aboriginal man ever tried before a court in New South Wales, and on this day in 1816 he was hanged in Sydney alongside two men convicted of highway robbery, the first Aboriginal person legally executed in colonial Australia.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie claimed in his records that all three “confessed their crimes… and died penitent.”

Port Jackson, a Native Boy; contemporary to Moowattin, William Westall, 1802. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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Assault Australia Colonial Justice Execution NSW Parramatta Robbery Sydney Trial

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