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.

Belanglo State Forest
Dark History of Belanglo Forest

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George Dean had already escaped the gallows once, pardoned after a Royal Commission cast doubt on the poisoning case against his wife, Mary. Then a North Shore chemist named Smith came forward, admitting he had sold Dean arsenic and strychnine after Dean claimed he needed a double dose and two poisons to deal with rats on his property.

On 5 October 1895 detectives approached Dean just as he stepped off his ferry at Sydney‘s Circular Quay, still dressed in his captain’s uniform, and arrested him again. “I wonder how many more times I shall be arrested over this affair,” he remarked, before going with the detectives.

Dean subsequently confessed in writing to poisoning his wife. He was convicted of perjury committed to procure his own acquittal and sentenced to fourteen years, while his former lawyer and others faced charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

George Dean lemon syrup case. Prison photograph. Credit: Museums of History NSW, State Archives Collection.
George Dean lemon syrup case. Prison photograph. Credit: Museums of History NSW, State Archives Collection.

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Five months after his brother Jesse James was gunned down in 1882, Frank James boarded a train to the Missouri state capital and laid his revolver in the hands of Governor Crittenden. “I have been hunted for twenty-one years,” he said, “have literally lived in the saddle… It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil.” He added that he had never let another man touch his gun since 1861.

Tried for only two of the gang’s robberies and killings, in Missouri and Alabama, James was acquitted both times, helped by testimony from a former Confederate general. He was never extradited over the infamous Northfield raid and never spent a day in prison. He spent his remaining three decades as a shoe salesman, a racetrack official and a tour guide on the old family farm, where he died in 1915 at the age of 72.

Frank James outlaw and criminal figure
Frank James outlaw and criminal figure

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Thursday, October 4, 1582, went to bed as normal. The next morning, by papal decree, it was Friday, October 15. Pope Gregory XIII had just deleted ten days from the lives of everyone in the lands that adopted his new calendar, not through war or plague but with a stroke of the pen.

The old Julian calendar, running since Julius Caesar set it up in 45 BCE, drifted by about a day every century, slowly dragging the spring equinox out of place. Gregory’s fix was elegant on paper and bewildering in practice: landlords demanded a full month’s rent for a fortnight no one had lived through, wages fell short, and in some towns crowds accused the Church of stealing their days outright. The new rule that century years are only leap years if divisible by 400 quietly corrected the error for good, and the dates we live by today are still Gregory’s.

The Time Thief
The Time Thief

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On This Day in True Crime History
1841·First Blood on the Gallows: Two Men Hanged at the New Darlinghurst Gaol
1857·Newly Freed, Then Shot by His Employer: A Convict Hanged in Perth for Attempted Murder
1880·Ned Kelly Sentenced to Hang in Melbourne
1907·He Knew Where She Kept Her Money, But Killed Her Instead: Hanged in Sydney for the Murder of a Widow
1927·Squizzy Taylor Buried in Melbourne as a Morbid Crowd Forces Police to Intervene
More Crime On This Day →

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