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

By the early hours of 21 September 1952, more than 400 police had been drawn into the hunt for Betty Shanks’s killer in Brisbane. Patrol cars criss-crossed the suburbs and officers searched streets and parks through the night. Police leave was cancelled, at least 100 investigators went without sleep, and residents near the Wilston murder scene were warned to lock doors and windows amid fears of another attack.

An early lead came to nought, and after roughly 20 hours of investigation police were still searching without a breakthrough. A description was issued of a man wanted in connection with the killing, following reports of someone leaping a fence near where Betty’s body was found. Despite the massive manhunt, her murder would become one of Brisbane’s most famous cold cases, still unsolved today.

Crime scene street where Betty Shanks was killed near her home Brisbane

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Australia Brisbane Cold Case Goodna Manhunt Murder Police QLD Toowoomba Unsolved Wilston

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Angelo Buono Jr., one half of the killing partnership known as the Hillside Stranglers, died of a heart attack at age 67 while serving a life sentence without parole at Calipatria State Prison in California. He had been convicted of nine murders committed with his cousin Kenneth Bianchi in Los Angeles between 1977 and 1978, victims who were kidnapped, tortured and strangled before their bodies were dumped on hillsides around the city.

Buono ran an upholstery shop that served as a base for the pair, luring young women into his van before the killings. Bianchi, who was arrested first in Washington State, struck a deal and testified against Buono in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, a betrayal that helped seal his cousin’s conviction after one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in California history.

Buono spent the rest of his life in prison showing no remorse for the killings, dying quietly behind bars rather than facing execution.

Empty desert prison yard with guard tower in background

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California Los Angeles Murder Prison Serial Killer Trial USA

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Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker who terrorised California in 1984 and 1985, was found guilty on every one of the 43 charges brought against him: thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries.

The trial itself became a spectacle of its own, dragging on for years and costing an estimated 1.8 million dollars, making it one of the most expensive criminal trials in California history at the time.

Ramirez showed no remorse throughout proceedings, at one point flashing a pentagram drawn on his palm to reporters and declaring his admiration for Satan.

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Burglary California Murder Serial Killer Sexual Assault Trial USA

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Oskar Speck left Hamburg on May 13, 1932, paddling an 18 foot Faltboot, a folding kayak made of rubber and canvas, carrying five gallons of water, a small movie camera and a Mauser pistol. His route ran down the Danube, across the Mediterranean, overland to the Euphrates, down the Persian Gulf and on through Baluchistan and India, surviving on water mixed with condensed milk, cheese and chocolate, and once covering 90 miles in a single 65 hour stretch without leaving the boat.

In 1933, while at Alexandretta, he received a telegram from the Nazi government ordering him home now that “the Fuehrer is here”; he ignored it and kept paddling. He was reported dead more than once along the way, including after a close call with a shark in the Persian Gulf: “They thought the sharks had got me,” he later said, “but I am still here.”

After roughly seven years at sea, Speck finally reached Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, only to be arrested on arrival and interned as an enemy alien, World War II having begun just three weeks earlier. He spent the next six years locked up in prisoner-of-war camps across Australia.

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Adventure Australia Germany Immigration Internment QLD Torres Strait World War II

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