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

Eric Edgar Cooke terrorised Perth through the late 1950s and early 1960s, eventually confessing to eight murders and fourteen attempted murders, including five people shot during a single Australia Day rampage. He also admitted to more than 250 burglaries, recalling with uncanny precision the number and denomination of coins stolen in each one.

His confessions carried a far darker twist: they cleared two men already tried, convicted and imprisoned for murders Cooke now claimed as his own. He was ultimately convicted of killing John Lindsay Sturkey, one of his victims, after pleading not guilty on grounds of insanity.

Cooke was hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1964.

He never denied his crimes, confessing fully and in exacting detail to police before his execution.

Fremantle Prison Western Australia: the gallows where 44 people were hanged including the last: Serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke in 1964.

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Australia Execution Exoneration Fremantle Murder Perth Serial Killer Trial WA

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The feud between the Earp brothers and the Clanton-McLaury outfit had been building for months over cattle rustling, stagecoach robberies and bad blood on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It ended in a vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral on this day in 1881, when Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, backed by the gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday, walked down to disarm a group of armed men they accused of flouting the town’s gun ban.

What followed lasted less than thirty seconds. Around thirty shots were fired at close range, leaving Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton dead in the dirt. Virgil and Morgan Earp were both wounded but survived, and the shootout became the most mythologised gun battle of the American West, replayed in films and folklore ever since.

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Arizona Gang Historical Crime Murder USA

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Four policemen searching for Ned Kelly and his gang had made camp at Stringybark Creek, near Mansfield, when the outlaws struck on 26 October 1878. Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constable Michael Scanlan were away searching the bush when the gang surprised Constables Thomas Lonigan and Thomas McIntyre at the camp. Lonigan was shot dead after attempting to draw his revolver, while McIntyre surrendered and was held captive.

The gang then waited for the other two officers to return. As Kennedy and Scanlan rode into camp, they were ordered to surrender, but gunfire erupted and Scanlan was killed. McIntyre escaped on Kennedy’s horse during the confusion, while Kennedy fought his way into the bush, pursued by the outlaws. He was eventually tracked down and killed. McIntyre reached Mansfield the following day to raise the alarm, the sole survivor of an encounter that left three policemen dead and helped turn the Kelly Gang into Australia’s most notorious bushrangers.

The Capture of Ned Kelly, Julian Ashton, wood engraving, The Illustrated Australian News, 3 July 1880. State Library of Victoria. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Ambush Australia Bushranger Manhunt Murder Police VIC

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Chechen militants had held hundreds of hostages inside a Moscow theatre for three days, the audience and performers alike trapped with explosives wired around the building. Negotiations dragged on with no resolution in sight, and the gunmen threatened to start killing captives if Russian forces did not withdraw from Chechnya.

Before dawn on this day in 2002, Spetsnaz special forces pumped an unidentified narcotic gas through the ventilation system and stormed the building. The assault killed the militants, but the gas proved just as deadly to the people it was meant to save: roughly 130 hostages died, most from the effects of the chemical agent rather than gunfire, and Russian authorities refused for years to disclose exactly what it was.

Special forces operator in black uniform moving through smoke

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Counterterrorism Europe Hostage Crisis Mass Death Moscow Russia Siege Terrorism

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