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

On August 18, 1572, Protestant Henry of Navarre married Catholic Margaret of Valois in Paris, a union designed to end the bloody civil war between France’s Catholics and Huguenots. The peace did not hold. Just days later, on August 24, King Charles IX, acting under the influence of Catherine de’ Medici, authorised a wave of targeted killings against Protestant leaders in Paris.

What began as a series of assassinations spread into mass mob violence across France. Estimates of the death toll range from thousands to as many as 50,000, as Catholic mobs hunted down Huguenots in city after city. The wedding that was meant to unite a fractured nation had become the prelude to one of the worst religious massacres in European history.

Blood-soaked bride in lingerie holding knife lying on floor

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Assassination Europe France Massacre Paris Political Crime Religious Persecution

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Peter Kurten, known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf, murdered two young foster sisters at a fairground on 23 August 1929, in one of a string of attacks that terrorised the city throughout that year. Born in Cologne in 1883, the eldest of 13 children, Kurten endured a childhood of brutal poverty and domestic terror, and had already demonstrated violent and sadistic tendencies from boyhood, including drowning two playmates on the Rhine at the age of nine.

His killing spree in 1929 left Dusseldorf gripped by fear. He was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted of nine murders, though police suspected him in as many as 68 attacks. His victims were overwhelmingly women and girls. He was executed by guillotine in July 1931. Shortly before his death, he asked the prison psychiatrist whether he would still be able to hear his own blood gushing from his neck after the blade fell. When told his brain might function for a few seconds, Kurten replied: ‘That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.’

Peter Kürten police mugshot, 1931. Photographer unknown; Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Cologne Dusseldorf Europe Execution Germany Murder Serial Killer Trial

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James Alpin Macpherson, known as the Wild Scotchman, was one of Queensland’s most notorious bushrangers before his capture and imprisonment. Released from prison in 1874, he lived out the remainder of his days quietly, working as a stockman and station overseer far from his outlaw past.

Macpherson died on 23 August 1895 at Burketown, Queensland, aged 53, after falling from a horse. The man who had once terrorised the bush met his end not in a blaze of gunfire, but in an ordinary accident on the land he had spent his later years working.

Portrait of bushranger James MacPherson 1866: The Wild Scotchman

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Accident Australia Burketown Bushranger Death QLD

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At Melbourne Gaol on 23 August 1853, Henry Turner and his accomplice John Smith were hanged for the murder of John Warren at Fryer’s Creek. The two men had entered Warren’s hut demanding gold, and when he could not produce it, they shot him in the eye with a revolver at close range. Warren was found blind and bleeding in the bush, groping through the scrub; he died shortly after from a bone splinter that had penetrated his brain.

Turner was attended in his final days by the Reverend Mr Studdert of St. James’ Church, while Smith received the Catholic priests Fathers Shiel, Cunningham, and Hayes. Both men were executed before a considerable crowd, and neither had entertained any hope of reprieve.

Turner acknowledged the justice of his sentence before his death, as did Smith, who was brought to admit that the punishment he was about to suffer was just and merited.

View from below of historical gallows in Tombstone Arizona

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Australia Execution Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Robbery VIC

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