In the early hours, the killer known as Jack the Ripper struck twice within the same hour. His third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut and still bleeding, her killer likely interrupted before he could mutilate her further. Denied his ritual, he found a fourth victim within the hour: Catherine Eddowes, whose body was left with her intestines arranged over her shoulder and part of her womb removed.

Weeks later, a Londoner opened a parcel addressed simply “From Hell” to find half a preserved kidney inside, accompanied by a taunting letter. Tests suggested it may have belonged to Eddowes herself, though the claim was never proven and the killer was never caught.

Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes
Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes

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John Rheuben had lived with Fanny Hardwick for two years, supporting her mother and child, until he turned her out and she took up with another man. Furious at her refusal to return, he beat his rival twice, threatened to “do for him”, and quietly sharpened a sheath knife at the local gasworks. On a Sunday evening in Rockhampton he forced his way into the house where she was staying, dragged her into a back bedroom, and stabbed her five or six times, one wound reaching her heart.

Tried before Mr Justice Power, Rheuben was convicted despite a defence of temporary insanity, and a petition for mercy signed across Rockhampton failed to move the Executive. He was hanged in Brisbane on 30 September 1901, praying loudly on the drop and thanking the warders for their kindness before the trap fell.

He never admitted the killing outright. To his priest he said only that he had been “mad drunk” and remembered striking at someone, but nothing more.

John Rheuben Criminal Record
John Rheuben Criminal Record

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Carl Williams had already been convicted of multiple murders during Melbourne’s gangland war when he was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike in a high-security unit at Victoria’s Barwon Prison in 2010, an inmate supposedly protected by round-the-clock surveillance.

Matthew Charles Johnson, a fellow prisoner sharing the unit, was charged with the killing. On this day in 2011 a jury found him guilty of murdering the man once considered one of the country’s most feared underworld figures, in an attack that exposed how little safety the prison’s most secure wing actually offered its most notorious inmate.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Elijah Upjohn had hanged Ned Kelly at Melbourne Gaol in 1880, earning five pounds for the job. Two years later he was back in front of a City Court bench, this time as the accused: drunk in Carlton, he exposed himself in front of witnesses, to whom he tossed peppermints moments before.

Fined 10 pounds or three months, Upjohn refused to pay and was sent to Melbourne Gaol, the very institution he had served as executioner. While locked up he kept working, flogging inmates at Pentridge under sentence, and walked free at year’s end with wages still owed to him.

Elijah Upjohn: Executioner of Bushranger Ned Kelly
Elijah Upjohn: Executioner of Bushranger Ned Kelly

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On This Day in True Crime History

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