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

Seven year old Olive Morris died on this day in East Perth, her throat swabbed raw, just as her older sister Annie had died months before. Both times the family doctor, Cuthbert, signed the same death certificate: diphtheria. Both times he was wrong.

What the certificate did not record was hydrochloric acid, swabbed onto the children’s throats by their father’s partner, Martha Rendell, under the guise of treating illness. The pattern would not be noticed for two more years, until a third child in the household died the same way and police finally ordered the earlier graves reopened.

The exhumations in 1909 revealed what two death certificates had missed, and set in motion the case that would end with Rendell on the gallows.

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Australia Child Abuse Cold Case East Perth Execution Exoneration Murder Perth Poisoning WA

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When civil engineer Peter Sherlock vanished in July 1889, his landlord Robert Landells claimed he had gone up country looking for work. About a month later, Sherlock’s body was discovered beneath branches near Ringwood, outside Melbourne, with a fractured skull and devastating gunshot injuries to his face.

Landells told the inquest Sherlock had been broke and depressed, a man likely to have taken his own life. Detectives found otherwise: Sherlock held 200 pounds in securities, and after his disappearance Landells had cashed his cheques and sold his gun to a grazier near Beaufort. Confronted, Landells confessed to shooting Sherlock while passing the loaded gun between them, insisting it was an accident, then panicking and burying the body. A jury did not believe him, and he was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 16 October 1889 in an execution so botched the rope nearly severed his head.

Landells kept to his story of an accident to the end, refusing calls to confess. When the sheriff asked on the scaffold whether he had anything to say, he replied only, “No, sir.”

Sketch of Ringwood mystery crime scene near Dandenong Creek 1889

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Australia Cold Case Execution Melbourne Murder Ringwood Trial VIC

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Bridget Hurford had grown to despise her older, wealthy husband John Hurford long before she decided to have him killed. She paid a ticket-of-leave man named Dodd with cash and the promise of her husband’s own horse to strangle him in his bed at Vasse, first arranging for the man who usually guarded him at night to be sent away, and had another convict quietly forge a will in her favour beforehand.

Tried and convicted alongside Dodd, Hurford was hanged first at the new Perth Gaol on 15 October 1855, attended to the last by her confessors. Witnesses who expected a dramatic collapse instead described her as quiet and subdued as she went to the gallows, even as crowds, among them women carrying infants, gathered to watch.

She fully confessed her guilt before her death, corroborating the evidence given against her at trial.

Bloody zombie woman screaming at camera on black background

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Australia Conspiracy Execution Forgery Murder Perth Trial Vasse WA

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Caroline Grills was the kind of woman neighbours trusted: she brought cups of tea and homemade treats to relatives and friends, and several of them sickened and died. On this day she was convicted of the attempted murder of Eveline Lundberg with thallium, the same insidious poison police believed had already killed members of her own family.

Her manner in the dock attracted attention. When the jury returned its guilty verdict, Grills shrugged her shoulders and smiled broadly. After the judge recorded a sentence of death, she reportedly turned to police and asked, “Is that all?” She had protested her innocence throughout the trial.

The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Grills died on 6 October 1960 never expressing remorse for the deaths linked to her name.

Caroline Grills arriving at Sydney Central Court, 9 July 1953. Unknown photographer. Originally published in the Brisbane Telegraph. Source: Trove, National Library of Australia. Public domain.

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Australia Execution Murder NSW Poisoning Sydney Trial

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