On this date in 1986, 22-year-old Mary Neilson visited a house on Moorhouse Street in Perth to buy car tyres advertised for sale. The advertisement was a trap. David and Catherine Birnie held her captive before taking her to nearby bushland, where they murdered her. Mary was the first of at least four women killed by the couple over the following weeks. Their killing spree ended when a later captive escaped and alerted police, exposing the Birnies’ crimes and leading to their arrest.
When Edwina Boyle vanished from her home on this day in Carrum Downs, in Melbourne‘s southeast, in 1983, her husband Frederick Boyle produced a note saying she had run off with a truck driver. His mistress moved in two days later, and neighbours pitied him for raising two daughters alone. All the while Edwina’s body sat metres away, sealed in a green metal barrel in the backyard where the family held parties and guests leaned against it without ever knowing.
The secret held for 23 years, until Boyle’s future son-in-law grew suspicious of his odd anxiety about the drum and cut it open, finding clothing, then later a hessian bag of human bones including a skull. Boyle was convicted of murder in 2008 and sentenced to 21 years, having shot his wife in the head.
He initially claimed he found her dead and panicked, but later admitted he strangled and shot her, telling the court, “my wife died in a terrible way and I was not going to let her remains be thrown down the tip like garbage”.
In October 1965, Ian Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at a Manchester railway station, telling him he had been invited home for a drink. At the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, Brady had Myra Hindley fetch her brother-in-law David Smith under the pretext of sharing miniature wine bottles. Smith arrived in time to witness Brady strike Evans with a hatchet and strangle him with electrical cord, screams tearing through the house as Hindley called out for help.
Smith helped move the body to a spare room before fleeing home, where he was sick and told his wife everything. He contacted police the next morning armed with a screwdriver and bread knife in case Brady came after him. Officers found Evans’ body behind a locked door, and as he dressed for arrest, Brady offered a chillingly understated explanation: he and Evans “had a row and the situation got out of hand.” The killing exposed what became known as the Moors Murders.
In October 1993, a local man out gathering firewood stumbled on human remains in a remote corner of Belanglo State Forest. The bones belonged to Deborah Everist and James Gibson, a Melbourne couple missing since 1989.
What unsettled investigators was that Gibson’s camera and backpack had already turned up years earlier, dumped by the roadside at Galston Gorge, more than 120 kilometres from where his body finally lay. Within weeks, a wider search of the forest uncovered four more young backpackers buried nearby, confirming Belanglo as the burial ground of a serial killer.
1907·He Knew Where She Kept Her Money, But Killed Her Instead: Hanged in Sydney for the Murder of a WidowTrue crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
