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

Charles Van Doren had been one of American television’s most beloved figures, a telegenic young academic whose winning streak on the quiz show 21 made him a household name and a symbol of brains over brawn. The adoration was built on a lie: producers had been feeding him questions and answers in advance, scripting his hesitations and furrowed brows to maximise suspense.

On this day in 1959, Van Doren admitted the truth before a congressional hearing, confessing that the contest had been fixed from the start. The admission shattered public faith in the new medium of television and triggered prosecutions of the producers and network figures behind the deception, some of whom later served time in prison.

Van Doren himself was convicted of perjury for earlier denials but received a suspended sentence, his once-golden reputation left in ruins.

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Fraud Scandal Trial USA

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Ralph Entwistle was a transported labourer assigned to a farm near Bathurst when he and a fellow convict stopped to cool off in the Macquarie River after a long cart journey. Governor Ralph Darling’s touring party happened to pass by, and though Darling had not even seen the incident, the local magistrate had both men flogged for the affront. Within a year the humiliated Entwistle had turned bushranger, building a band that swelled to as many as 80 men, the largest convict uprising in New South Wales since 1804, known as the Ribbon Gang for the white streamers he wore in his hair.

The rebellion turned deadly when the gang descended on a farm seeking revenge on the magistrate who had ordered the floggings. The overseer, James Greenwood, refused to free the farm’s convict servants and bared his chest, daring the bushrangers to shoot, telling them they were not game enough. Entwistle and two others fired, killing him instantly.

Weeks of gun battles with troopers and soldiers followed before the gang was run down and captured. On 2 November 1830, ten of the bushrangers, including Entwistle, were publicly hanged at Bathurst, six for Greenwood’s murder and four for plundering farmhouses. Their bodies were left on display for a day as a warning before being buried in two mass graves of five.

Abercrombie Caves: Burrangalong Cavern, Rockbridge Creek, 1849 / oil painting by Conrad Martens

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Australia Bathurst Bushranging Convict Era Execution Murder NSW Rebellion

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John Wayne Glover, who would become known as Sydney’s Granny Killer, attacked 85-year-old Margaret Pahud with a hammer in a laneway near her home in Sydney on this day in 1989, as she walked home from grocery shopping. A schoolgirl passing by found her body within minutes, at first mistaking it for a pile of dumped clothing on the ground.

Glover had taken more than $300 from Pahud’s purse. Within hours he was gambling it away at a local RSL club, a chilling indifference that would mark the string of killings still to come.

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Australia Murder NSW Robbery Serial Killer Sydney

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Velma Barfield cared for the elderly and the infirm, and one by one they fell ill with the same wrenching symptoms: vomiting, diarrhoea, stomach pains that would not ease. She was dosing their food and drink with arsenic-laced rat poison, chasing insurance payouts and covering forged cheques. Her mother died of it in 1974, two elderly patients in 1977, and finally her boyfriend Stuart Taylor in 1978, even as Barfield nursed him through his final days. She confessed to six murders but was tried and convicted of only one.

On death row she became a devout Christian, ministering to fellow inmates, and her lawyers argued for clemency on the strength of it. A second defence claimed she suffered a split personality named “Billy,” who insisted he alone had killed her abusers; the judge was unmoved, reportedly saying, “One of them did it, I don’t care which one.” North Carolina’s governor refused clemency, and on this day in 1984 Barfield was executed by lethal injection, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first ever killed by that method.

She abandoned her final appeals, wanting to “die with dignity,” and left a statement before her death: “I am sorry, and I want to thank everybody who have been supporting me all these six years.”

Would you like sugar or rat poison in your tea?

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Execution Murder North Carolina Poisoning Serial Killer Trial USA

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