Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 51
On this date in 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, the woman who would become Agatha Christie and the best selling novelist in history after the Bible and Shakespeare. She went on to write 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, creating enduring figures such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
Her own life carried a strange echo of her fiction: in 1926 she vanished for eleven days, sparking a nationwide manhunt, before being found registered under an assumed name at a Yorkshire hotel, an episode that remains unexplained to this day.
Bushranger James Macpherson, known as the Wild Scotchman, entered the St Helena Island penal settlement in Moreton Bay, Queensland, on 14 September 1866 to begin serving a 25 year sentence for mail robbery.
He did not serve his time quietly. On 11 April 1870, Macpherson took part in a mass escape attempt, breaking free of the stockade with six other prisoners and hiding in the scrub around the island. He was shot in the wrist during his recapture and returned to custody.
Despite the harsh sentence and the failed breakout, Macpherson was eventually released by executive clemency in 1874.
Prison guards on St. Helena, ca. 1893. State Library of Queensland, negative number 60065.
Two men were convicted of killing Margaret Ann Impett at Mount Wedge station in South Australia. Rather than being executed at the remote spot where the crime occurred, they were hanged at the Chiriroo police station near Venus Bay on Saturday, 14 September 1861, in front of a large gathering, where both men admitted their guilt.
Authorities had decided against transporting the condemned men the 20 to 30 miles to the actual murder site, citing a lack of available conveyance, a decision that left the execution taking place far from where Margaret Impett had died.
Her husband later wrote a furious public letter demanding to know why the men had not been executed on the spot, as he understood a recently passed law required. He branded the failure to enforce it a farce, asking who had dared to disregard the law of the land.
On the night of 14 September 1828, thieves broke into the Bank of Australia in Sydney. A teller arriving the next morning found the strongroom breached.
Thieves had tunnelled through a drain on the opposite side of the street, burrowed underground, and cut through a foundation wall between five and nine feet thick, work that would have taken at least three to four weeks to complete. They made off with 12,000 to 14,000 pounds in cash and property, a sum worth a small fortune today.
For two and a half years the robbers evaded capture, even as some of the stolen notes began surfacing in circulation and officials issued repeated warnings against using them. The case only broke when one of the gang was sentenced to 14 years on Norfolk Island for an unrelated highway robbery in 1829. Nearly a year into that sentence, he accepted the Governor’s offer of a pardon and confessed, naming his accomplices: one of whom had fled to Ireland, another who had since died, and three more who joined him on Norfolk Island.
Not all the stolen money was recovered. Rumour has long held that boxes of coins from the robbery remain buried near the water’s edge on Sydney’s North Shore.
