In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights
Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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Edward Bishop was a ticket-of-leave convict working at York, east of Perth, when he fell into a bitter feud with a Chinese cook named Ah Chong. When the man turned up bludgeoned and dumped in the Avon River in 1854, a bloodied axe was found hidden in Bishop’s room, his clothes had been freshly washed, and his own drunken threats against Ah Chong were repeated back to him in court.

The evidence was entirely circumstantial, but the jury took twenty minutes to convict him, and he was hanged near the causeway at Perth. Bishop never wavered. Nobody believed him then, but three years later his own hut-mate, William Voss, confessed to the murder, admitting he had planted the axe among Bishop’s belongings. Voss himself was hanged in 1862 for killing his wife.

On the scaffold, Bishop raised his hand and declared, “I assert in the presence of God that I did not commit the murder. I am dying innocent of crime, and I do not fear death”.

Innocent Edward Bishop betrayed.
Innocent Edward Bishop betrayed.

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Peter McKean, alias William McDonald, bunked with William ‘Yorkie’ Marriott at a shepherd’s hut near Kojonup, both working for the same local farmer. Marriott was known for quietly saving his wages, and in June 1872 he vanished. His body was found slumped behind a cart more than a week later, the head so badly gnawed by dogs that he could only be identified by a missing finger on his right hand.

McKean was arrested on circumstantial evidence and convicted at the Albany Circuit Court of robbing and killing Marriott with an axe. After his arrest, McKean claimed Marriott had been killed by ‘a vicious horse’. He never offered proof, and the excuse died with him on the scaffold.

He was hanged at Albany on 12 October 1872, the rope worked by a fellow convict before a crowd that included schoolchildren.

Carpenters axe
Carpenters axe

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The U.S. Department of Justice announced the acquisition of the military facility on Alcatraz Island on this day in 1933, marking the start of its transformation into a federal maximum-security penitentiary. It would be nearly a year before the island was formally designated a federal prison and the first inmates arrived.

Alcatraz was built for one purpose: to hold prisoners who had proven too disruptive, too dangerous, or too likely to escape from every other federal institution. Surrounded by cold currents and strict discipline, it would soon house names like Al Capone and Robert Stroud, cementing its reputation as America’s most feared prison.

Coloried view of Alcatraz Island circa 1902-1905 (unknown author)
Coloried view of Alcatraz Island circa 1902-1905 (unknown author)

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On This Day in True Crime History
1852·Mercy Recommended, Mercy Denied: John Riches Hanged in Melbourne Over a Deadly Camp Quarrel
1989·Twice in 24 Hours: the Granny Killer Claims Another Victim in Sydney
2005·The First Murder Convictions of the Melbourne Gangland War: Keith Faure and Evangelos Goussis Convicted
More Crime On This Day →

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