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

In October 1965, Ian Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at a Manchester railway station, telling him he had been invited home for a drink. At the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, Brady had Myra Hindley fetch her brother-in-law David Smith under the pretext of sharing miniature wine bottles. Smith arrived in time to witness Brady strike Evans with a hatchet and strangle him with electrical cord, screams tearing through the house as Hindley called out for help.

Smith helped move the body to a spare room before fleeing home, where he was sick and told his wife everything. He contacted police the next morning armed with a screwdriver and bread knife in case Brady came after him. Officers found Evans’ body behind a locked door, and as he dressed for arrest, Brady offered a chillingly understated explanation: he and Evans “had a row and the situation got out of hand.” The killing exposed what became known as the Moors Murders.

Shocked male witness after fatal late night accident

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England Manchester Murder Serial Killer Trial UK

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In October 1993, a local man out gathering firewood stumbled on human remains in a remote corner of Belanglo State Forest. The bones belonged to Deborah Everist and James Gibson, a Melbourne couple missing since 1989.

What unsettled investigators was that Gibson’s camera and backpack had already turned up years earlier, dumped by the roadside at Galston Gorge, more than 120 kilometres from where his body finally lay. Within weeks, a wider search of the forest uncovered four more young backpackers buried nearby, confirming Belanglo as the burial ground of a serial killer.

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Australia Belanglo State Forest Cold Case Melbourne Missing Persons Murder NSW Serial Killer Victoria

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John Jones, a hutkeeper on a station near Mount Joy in South Australia’s remote Eyre Peninsula, was found dead in his hut in May 1860, his skull broken and the hut stripped of flour, tea and clothing. The accused was convicted at the Supreme Court in Adelaide largely on the testimony of a young companion who admitted taking part in the killing himself.

Before the execution, around 400 citizens, headed by the Lord Bishop of Adelaide, signed a memorial asking the government to remit the death sentence. He had been tried and condemned under British law newly imposed on his people, with little understanding of its workings; the petition failed regardless. He was taken back across the Eyre Peninsula and hanged at Streaky Bay on 5 October 1860, near the district where the killing had occurred

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Adelaide Australia Colonial History Execution Murder Petition for Clemency SA Streaky Bay Trial

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Thursday, October 4, 1582, went to bed as normal. The next morning, by papal decree, it was Friday, October 15. Pope Gregory XIII had just deleted ten days from the lives of everyone in the lands that adopted his new calendar, not through war or plague but with a stroke of the pen.

The old Julian calendar, running since Julius Caesar set it up in 45 BCE, drifted by about a day every century, slowly dragging the spring equinox out of place. Gregory’s fix was elegant on paper and bewildering in practice: landlords demanded a full month’s rent for a fortnight no one had lived through, wages fell short, and in some towns crowds accused the Church of stealing their days outright. The new rule that century years are only leap years if divisible by 400 quietly corrected the error for good, and the dates we live by today are still Gregory’s.

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Calendar Reform Europe History Religious Decree

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