Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 45
Susan Atkins, one of the most notorious members of Charles Manson’s cult and a participant in the infamous 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, died in custody at California’s Central California Women’s Facility while serving a life sentence.
Atkins had spent nearly four decades behind bars, repeatedly denied parole despite being terminally ill with brain cancer in her final years. Her role in the killing of actress Sharon Tate and others made her one of the most infamous figures to emerge from the Manson Family’s 1969 murder spree.
Larry Cummins was 20 when a Goulburn jury convicted him of armed robbery and he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour, the first in irons. His accomplice in the hold-up, both men with blackened faces, had been his 18-year-old brother. And the charge everyone was talking about had already been dropped: the murder of that same brother.
Weeks earlier, police had found the younger Cummins hiding in the loft of his mother’s hut. He fired twice at the constables before surrendering, and they saddled one of the family’s own horses to take him to the lockup. Eight miles along the track a single shot rang out from the bush. It struck the prisoner behind the ear; he “gave one groan” and died. The constables never saw the gunman, only heard a horse galloping away. The shot was assumed to have been meant for the constable, and the man behind it to be Larry, trying to set his brother free. There was not enough evidence to try him for it.
Three years later Cummins escaped from Berrima Gaol by crawling through 120 yards of sewer, only to be recaptured within months. Released in 1876, he lived out his days in Victoria under another name, as a drover and whipmaker, and died in 1909.
Sepia portrait of bushranger Larry Cummins 1843 to 1909
The Want Ad Killer,Harvey Carignan, was arrested in Minnesota on 24 September 1974, at the end of a ten-day rampage. A woman he had left for dead in a field survived and raised the alarm, two others escaped when he stopped for petrol, and an 18-year-old was found dead in a cornfield just four days before police caught up with him.
He should have been hanged in 1949. A soldier stationed in Alaska, he was sentenced to death for murdering a woman, but the conviction collapsed because an officer had promised he would not be executed if he confessed. With the confession thrown out, the murder charge was dismissed. He served time for a separate assault instead, part of it in Alcatraz, and was paroled in 1960.
By the early 1970s he was the prime suspect in two killings in Washington state, one of them a teenager who had answered his “help wanted” ad for a job at his service station. He was never charged, and moved on to Minnesota. After his arrest, his plea that God had ordered him to kill failed; he was convicted of two murders and died in prison in 2023, aged 95.
In the early hours of September 23, 1986, 23-year-old penguin parade worker Beth Barnard was found stabbed to death in a house on Phillip Island, Victoria. A blanket had been placed over her body, but beneath it her throat had been cut, her nightgown pushed up, and her body slashed and stabbed repeatedly, with defensive wounds on her hands. Cigarette butts and a knife lay near the body, and bloodied paper towels were stuffed around the bathroom sink.
Carved into her chest was a knife wound resembling the letter A, leading some to dub the killing the Scarlet Letter murder. Barnard had been having an affair with her married employer, Fergus Cameron, a founding shareholder of the Phillip Island Grand Prix. The night before her body was found, his wife, 36-year-old Vivienne Cameron, learned the truth and smashed a wine glass across his head and back before driving him to hospital.
Fergus spent that night at his sister’s house while Vivienne asked friends to mind their two young sons. She then vanished and was never seen again. A coroner later found that Vivienne had contributed to Beth Barnard’s death and concluded that she had taken her own life by jumping from the nearby San Remo Bridge, although her body has never been recovered.
Seagull portrait on grass with San Remo Bridge blurred behind
