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

Brian Wells was a pizza delivery driver in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was sent on what looked like a routine order in August 2003. He never made it back. Police found him with a metal collar locked around his neck, wired to a bomb, after he had already robbed a bank under its threat following a bizarre set of written instructions. The device detonated before anyone could free him, killing him in the street.

The case baffled investigators for years until they identified Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong as the driving force behind the plot. On this day in 2010 she was convicted of armed bank robbery, conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and using a destructive device, with prosecutors naming her the mastermind who had engineered the entire scheme that led to Wells’s death.

Pizza Delivery gone wrong

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Bombing Conspiracy Murder Pennsylvania Robbery Trial USA

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Bill Tilghman had survived three decades of gunfights with the likes of the Doolin gang, becoming one of the most celebrated marshals of the American frontier. At 70, long past his famous years, he took one more job: cleaning up Cromwell, Oklahoma, a lawless oil boomtown soaked in bootleg whisky and corruption.

On 1 November 1924, a federal Prohibition agent named Wiley Lynn, drunk and firing his pistol wildly in the street, drew Tilghman’s attention. The old marshal moved in to disarm him as he had disarmed countless outlaws before. Lynn shot him dead instead. The killer, himself notorious for corruption, stood trial but was acquitted, walking free from the death of the man sent to clean up the very town he had helped poison.

Portrait of lawman William Bill Tilghman

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Corruption Murder Oklahoma Police Prohibition USA

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A British backpacker named Paul Onions was hitchhiking along the Hume Highway near Sydney in January 1990 when a driver calling himself “Bill” produced a revolver and a coil of rope. Onions fled on foot and flagged down a passing motorist, reporting the attack to police before the driver vanished.

On this day in 1993, searchers combing a forest south of Sydney found two more bodies bearing the same spinal injuries as an earlier pair of backpackers unearthed the previous year, confirming Australia had a serial killer stalking the highway. The month long search that followed ended with the discovery of a German backpacker nearby, the fifth victim linked to the same killer.

Reading UK news reports of the discoveries two years later, Onions recognised the description of his own ordeal and contacted the Australian embassy. His account and photo identification of the man who had attacked him led police to Ivan Milat, whose home was searched and who was eventually convicted of the backpacker murders.

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Australia Kidnapping Murder NSW Police Serial Killer Sydney Trial

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Jack Graham wanted his mother dead and her life insurance money in his pocket, and he did not much care who else was on the plane. He packed a dynamite time bomb into his mother Daisie King’s checked luggage before she boarded United Airlines Flight 629 out of Denver on the evening of 1 November 1955, bound for Alaska. Minutes after takeoff the Douglas DC-6B exploded over farmland near Longmont, Colorado, killing all 44 people aboard.

Investigators who pieced together the wreckage traced the blast to luggage in the cargo hold, and found Graham had form: he had collected an insurance payout earlier that year after his mother’s restaurant was destroyed in a suspicious gas explosion. He confessed, then recanted at trial, claiming he had only admitted guilt to stop the FBI pressuring his wife. Since no federal law at the time made it a crime to destroy an aircraft, prosecutors charged him simply with his mother’s murder. Convicted in 1956, he was executed in the gas chamber at Colorado State Penitentiary on 11 January 1957.

Graham showed no remorse to the end, telling a reporter: “Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”

Jack Gilbert Graham during his trial, c. 1957. Prelinger Archives. Digitally colourised.

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Aviation Disaster Bombing Colorado Denver Execution Insurance Fraud Mass Murder Murder Trial USA

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