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

1306: The Murder That Ended the Premysl Dynasty

On 4 August 1306, Bohemian King Wenceslas III was stabbed to death in Olomouc, cutting short the reign of a young ruler who had held the crowns of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. He was just 16 years old. His death extinguished the male line of the Premysl dynasty, a royal house that had shaped Central Europe since the ninth century.

With no male heir, the dynasty that had produced kings across three kingdoms collapsed in a single moment of violence. The Luxembourg clan seized Bohemia; the Piasts took Poland. The age of Premyslid rule was over.

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Assassination Czech Republic Europe Medieval History Olomouc Poland Political Crime Royalty

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1265: The Murder of Evesham: Simon de Montfort Crushed at the Height of His Power

On 4 August 1265, the Battle of Evesham ended the Second Barons’ War in one of medieval England’s most decisive and brutal engagements. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, had dominated royal government since his victory at Lewes the previous year, holding King Henry III and Prince Edward in captivity. But the defection of key allies and the escape of Prince Edward unravelled his position. Trapped in a loop of the River Avon near Evesham, Worcestershire, outnumbered two to one and deceived by captured banners flown to disguise the approaching royalist army, de Montfort knew his fate. His reported final words: ‘Our bodies are theirs, our souls are God’s.’

The battle was short and merciless. De Montfort was killed and his body mutilated. The contemporary chronicler Robert of Gloucester called it ‘the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none.’ Royal authority was restored, though pockets of resistance persisted until the Dictum of Kenilworth in 1267.

Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, dies in the Battle of Evesham.

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England Europe Evesham Massacre Political Crime Rebellion UK War Worcestershire

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1892: The Axe Murders That Made Lizzie Borden Infamous

On the morning of 4 August 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were found hacked to death in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew, a self-made millionaire with an estate valued at $300,000, had built his fortune through furniture, property, and banking, yet kept a famously frugal household. Suspicion fell almost immediately on his younger daughter, Lizzie, a churchgoing Sunday school teacher and temperance advocate.

Lizzie Borden was tried for the axe murders of her father and stepmother and acquitted, with no one else ever charged. She spent the rest of her life in Fall River, dying of pneumonia in 1927 at age 66. The case never left the public imagination, inspiring films, plays, literary works, and one of the most enduring folk rhymes in American criminal history.

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Cold Case Murder Trial Unsolved USA

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1916: Knighted Diplomat Hanged for Treason After Failed Easter Rising Mission

Sir Roger Casement, the British consul who had been honoured for exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and Peru, was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916. Once celebrated as the ‘father of twentieth-century human rights investigations’, he had spent the war years seeking German military support for the Easter Rising before being arrested on the Kerry coast just days before the uprising began.

Stripped of his knighthood, he was tried and convicted of high treason. During and after the trial, British intelligence circulated typescripts of private journals, said to be in Casement’s hand, that detailed homosexual activity. The material, illegal under the laws of the time, was used to undermine calls for clemency. He was executed at 49, and the authenticity of those diaries has been disputed by scholars ever since.

Portrait of Sir Roger Casement in formal attire

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Espionage Europe Execution Ireland Political Crime Treason UK

1306: The Murder That Ended the Premysl Dynasty

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1265: The Murder of Evesham: Simon de Montfort Crushed at the Height of His Power

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1892: The Axe Murders That Made Lizzie Borden Infamous

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1916: Knighted Diplomat Hanged for Treason After Failed Easter Rising Mission

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