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

1981: Harold Shipman Kills Elderly Patient With a Fatal Injection After She Fell Ill in Her Garden

In August 1981, 81-year-old Elizabeth Ashworth felt unwell while gardening at her home on Peel Street in Hyde, England, and asked her neighbours to call a doctor. Harold Shipman arrived, administered an injection, then told the neighbours she would not live much longer. When he returned later and asked if she was still alive, she had already died.

Investigators later identified her death as an unlawful killing, part of Shipman’s early pattern of murdering elderly patients with fatal opiate injections. Harold Shipman would go on to become one of history’s most prolific serial killers, convicted of 15 murders but suspected in the deaths of over 200 patients.

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England Hyde Murder Poisoning Serial Killer UK

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2016: The Chinese Jack The Ripper Serial Killer Caught After 28 Years Through a Relative’s DNA

Gao Chengyong was arrested at his grocery store in Baiyin, Gansu, in August 2016 after a DNA test on his uncle flagged a close familial match to an unidentified serial killer. The breakthrough closed a case that had haunted investigators for nearly three decades. Gao confessed to all eleven murders, committed between 1988 and 2002 across Inner Mongolia.

Known in Chinese media as the ‘Chinese Jack the Ripper’, Gao had followed victims to their homes, typically striking in daylight hours. He mutilated their bodies in a pattern that drew comparisons to the 1888 Whitechapel killings. Sentenced to death and stripped of all assets, he was executed on 3 January 2019.

Chinese death character with skull texture 3D illustration

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Asia Baiyin Baotou China Cold Case Execution Gansu Inner Mongolia Murder Serial Killer

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1973: Two Girls Vanish from Adelaide Oval in One of South Australia’s Most Infamous Cold Cases

On 25 August 1973, Joanne Ratcliffe, aged 11, and Kirste Gordon, aged 4, disappeared from the Adelaide Oval during an Australian rules football match between Norwood and North Adelaide. Witnesses saw the girls in the company of a man in an Akubra hat and grey checked sports jacket. One witness, a confectionery vendor, watched the man carry Kirste in one arm while Joanne kicked and screamed at him to let her go. He dropped his reading glasses in the struggle, grabbed Joanne by the arm, and dragged her toward the southern gates. Bystanders assumed he was simply a parent.

Police believe both girls were abducted, and their disappearance has never been solved. South Australia Police and media have long linked the case to the 1966 disappearance of the Beaumont children, also from South Australia. The case remains one of the most haunting unsolved crimes in the country’s history.

Football Game at the Adelaide Oval - the ground in 1973 still had the old stands and the 1911 scoreboard seen here. — Football Game at the Adelaide Oval – the ground in 1973 still had the old stands and the 1911 scoreboard seen here.

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Adelaide Australia Cold Case Kidnapping Missing Persons Murder SA Unsolved

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1909: Long Bay Gaol Opens on the Shores of Botany Bay

Sydney‘s Long Bay Gaol opened in 1909 on the shores of Botany Bay, and over the following century it would become one of the most storied prisons in the country. Its walls held razor gang queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, escape artist Darcy Dugan, and gangsters Chow Hayes and Neddy Smith.

Long Bay also housed some of the darkest figures in modern Australian criminal history, including corrupt former detective Roger Rogerson and serial killer Ivan Milat, who died there in 2019. Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox staged a daring breakout from the prison’s maximum-security unit, cementing the gaol’s reputation as a place where Australia’s most dangerous and notorious converged.

Historic prison buildings at Long Bay Gaol in Australia

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Australia Corruption Escape Gang Murder NSW Organised Crime Prison Serial Killer Sydney

1981: Harold Shipman Kills Elderly Patient With a Fatal Injection After She Fell Ill in Her Garden

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2016: The Chinese Jack The Ripper Serial Killer Caught After 28 Years Through a Relative’s DNA

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1973: Two Girls Vanish from Adelaide Oval in One of South Australia’s Most Infamous Cold Cases

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1909: Long Bay Gaol Opens on the Shores of Botany Bay

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