On September 19, 1980, Veronica Compton attempted to strangle a 26-year-old woman at a motel in Bellingham, Washington. The attack was part of a plot to convince authorities that imprisoned Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi was innocent—and that the real killer remained at large.

Bianchi had supplied Compton with a semen-filled condom concealed in the spine of a book. She was to plant its contents at the scene of a staged rape and murder, creating false evidence to cast doubt on his guilt. But the woman survived, and the scheme unravelled.

Compton was convicted of first-degree attempted murder in March 1981. She remained imprisoned until 2003.

Close-up of worn book spine titled Modern English Drama
Close-up of worn book spine titled Modern English Drama

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In March 1932, twenty month old Charles Lindbergh Jr, son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, was taken from his nursery in Hopewell, New Jersey, via a homemade ladder left beneath the window. A ransom of 50,000 dollars in gold certificates was paid, but the child’s body was found in nearby woods weeks later.

On September 19, 1934, police arrested Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German born carpenter, after one of the marked gold certificates surfaced at a petrol station and was traced back to him. Searchers found thousands of dollars of the ransom money hidden in his garage, and timber from the ladder was matched to a board missing from his attic floor.

Hauptmann was tried at Flemington, New Jersey, convicted of murder, and executed in the electric chair at Trenton State Prison in April 1936.

Hauptmann maintained his innocence to the end, reportedly refusing an offer to commute his sentence in exchange for a confession, and went to his death still denying any role in the kidnapping.

Charles A. Lindbergh , American Aviator. Famous American Aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh and wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh at North Beach Airport ,Queens, NYC on June 8, 1931. HISTORIC PHOTO © PICTUREMAKERS LLC | ID 60332383 © Picturemakersllc | Dreamstime.com
Charles A. Lindbergh , American Aviator. Famous American Aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh and wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh at North Beach Airport ,Queens, NYC on June 8, 1931. HISTORIC PHOTO © PICTUREMAKERS LLC | ID 60332383 © Picturemakersllc | Dreamstime.com

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Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974 by the self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army, a small but violent radical cell. Within weeks the group released tapes in which she renounced her family and adopted the nom de guerre Tania, and in April 1974 she was photographed wielding a rifle during the SLA’s armed robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco.

For nineteen months Hearst remained with her captors turned comrades as the group moved between safe houses, evading one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. She was finally arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975, and later stood trial for bank robbery, where her defence argued she had been brainwashed and coerced.

Convicted despite that defence, Hearst was sentenced to prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco
Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco

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On September 18, 1826, nine convicts went to the gallows together in Hobart under Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s ruthless enforcement of Britain’s Bloody Code, the doctrine that made property crime a capital offence equal to murder. Not one of the nine had killed anyone: George Farquharson, Robert Cable, Thomas Savell, John Davis and John Cruitt were hanged for sheep stealing, John Penson, Timothy Swinscow and William Wickens for burglary, and James Rowles for theft.

The hangings were part of the largest cluster of executions recorded in Van Diemen’s Land that year, twenty three people put to death over a single fortnight in mid September 1826. Earlier hangings that month, on September 13, had targeted actual killers; those on September 15 and 18 were reserved entirely for non-violent property offenders, a deliberate signal from Arthur to a colony economically dependent on settler flocks and stores.

Sheep stealing in particular was treated by the colonial administration as an existential threat to the fledgling economy of the penal settlement, and the September 18 executions were designed as a public deterrent to convicts tempted to raid the herds and homes of free settlers.

1826 in the Hobart Colony
1826 in the Hobart Colony

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On This Day in True Crime History
1853·"Thank You, My Lord, I Am Very Glad of That Sentence": Bushrangers Hanged in Melbourne
1884·He Swore to Shoot Whoever Bought His Farm, and Kept His Word: Hanged in Melbourne
1892·"The Only Man on the Station That I Liked": Hanged in Brisbane for a Torres Strait Murder
1892·A Mutilated Body in a Trunk: Sailor Hanged in Brisbane for Murder at Sea
1895·George Dean, Pardoned for Poisoning His Wife, Convicted of Perjury in Sydney
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