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

Harold Shipman was arrested on 7 September 1998 after police investigated the death of his patient Kathleen Grundy, who had left him £386,000 in a will that turned out to be forged. The clumsy fake unravelled quickly: a Brother typewriter matching the one used to produce the document was found in Shipman’s possession, and Grundy’s own family, alarmed that their mother would never have cut them out, had already raised suspicions with a solicitor.

The arrest opened the door to a far larger inquiry. Detectives uncovered a pattern of lethal diamorphine injections administered to elderly patients under his care, alongside falsified medical records designed to make the deaths look natural.

Shipman was eventually linked to the deaths of at least 215 patients over more than two decades, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in British history.

Last will and testament typed on aged paper with vintage typewriter

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Fraud Murder Poisoning Serial Killer Trial UK

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The last known thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial, died in captivity at Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. The animal is believed to have perished from neglect, left exposed to extreme temperatures after keepers failed to provide adequate shelter.

Thylacines once ranged across mainland Australia and New Guinea before vanishing there thousands of years earlier, surviving only in Tasmania. Relentless hunting, driven by bounties paid to farmers who blamed the species for livestock losses, combined with the introduction of invasive predators, drove the population to collapse. Benjamin’s death marked the extinction of the species, a loss that went largely unnoticed at the time and was only recognised in hindsight as the end of a unique Australian predator.

Thylacine mother with joey in pouch in Australian outback

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Animal Welfare Australia Disaster Extinction Hobart TAS

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Donald Henry Gaskins Jr., known as Pee Wee Gaskins, was executed in the electric chair at Broad River Correctional Institution in South Carolina at 1:10 a.m. on 6 September 1991, aged 58. A serial killer confirmed to have murdered at least thirteen people between 1970 and 1975, including six teenagers and a two-year-old, he had originally been sentenced to death in 1976 for one of eight bodies found buried near his home in Prospect, South Carolina. That sentence was overturned, and he pleaded guilty to nine murders in exchange for life imprisonment.

His second death sentence came after he murdered a fellow death row inmate, Rudolph Tyner, using C4 explosive while incarcerated at Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. Hours before his execution, Gaskins attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. He claimed to have killed 110 people, a figure widely dismissed by law enforcement and journalists as a bid for notoriety.

His last words were: ‘I’ll let my lawyers talk for me. I’m ready to go.’

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Execution Murder Prison Serial Killer USA

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On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot twice in the abdomen while shaking hands with the public at the Temple of Music during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. His attacker, 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist who had lost his job in the Panic of 1893 and come to regard McKinley as a symbol of oppression. Despite appearing to recover initially, McKinley died on September 14 from gangrene caused by his wounds, becoming the third American president assassinated after Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield.

Czolgosz was convicted of first-degree murder within a month and executed by electric chair on October 29, 1901. McKinley was succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. In the aftermath, Congress formally charged the Secret Service with protecting the president.

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Assassination Execution Murder Political Crime Trial USA

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