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

1721: Executed at Twenty: The Soldier Who Claimed He Was Defending His Honour

William Casey, a young Guardsman only about twenty years old, was hanged in London on 11 September 1721 after being convicted of robbing a man named John Stone in a city park. Casey never accepted the charge; he insisted the confrontation had nothing to do with theft and everything to do with Stone making indecent advances toward him, a claim that, if true, cast the entire prosecution in a very different light.

At the gallows Casey did not simply protest verbally. He left behind a written statement formally proclaiming his innocence of the robbery, a deliberate act by a condemned soldier determined that his version of events would outlive him.

“He maintained until death that the confrontation arose because Stone had made indecent advances toward him” and went to his execution still denying the crime for which he was hanged.

William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park

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Execution Robbery Trial

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1863: The Escape-Proof Prison That Wasn’t: Captain Thunderbolt Breaks Out of Cockatoo Island

Frederick Wordsworth Ward, the bushranger known as Captain Thunderbolt, was serving time on Sydney‘s Cockatoo Island, a prison ringed by harbour currents and sheer sandstone cliffs and widely declared impossible to escape. On the night of 11 September 1863, Ward slipped his cell and plunged into the water, swimming through the cold, shark infested harbour to the mainland shore.

The breakout humiliated colonial authorities and turned Ward into a folk figure almost overnight. He spent the next seven years roaming the bush of northern New South Wales, robbing coaches, inns and travellers as one of the colony’s most enduring and elusive bushrangers before he was finally shot dead by police near Uralla in 1870.

Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 1951. Photograph by Frank Hurley. National Library of Australia, PIC FH/7951. Out of copyright.

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Australia Bushranging Escape NSW Prison Robbery Sydney

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1897: The World’s First Drink-Driving Conviction, London 1897

Just before one in the morning on September 10, 1897, a taxi driver named George Smith lost control of his cab on New Bond Street, swerving across the road and crashing, smashing a water pipe and a front window. No one was hurt, cars of the era topped out at about 8mph, but Smith admitted to police that he had been drinking, and that confession was enough to convict him in what is recognised as the world’s first drink-driving case.

He was fined 20 shillings. There was no specific drunk-driving law to charge him under; the conviction rested entirely on his own admission, since officers otherwise had only their own snap judgement of a driver’s sobriety to go on. It would be almost a decade before any jurisdiction, enacted a dedicated drunk-driving law, and more than half a century before the breathalyser existed to test drivers objectively.

Humorous Vintage New Year Postcard: Policeman Discovers Man Asleep in Snow (circa 1900. A delightfully humorous and classic vintage postcard illustration from the early 20th century (circa 1900-1910s), perfectly capturing the aftermath of a lively New Year’s Eve celebration... The scene depicts a gentleman, dressed in a formal black suit with a white shirt, bow tie, and suspenders, comically sprawled out in a pristine snowdrift. His top hat is discarded nearby, his umbrella askew | ID 404164454 © Svetlana Gavrilyuk | Dreamstime.com — ID 404164454 © Svetlana Gavrilyuk | Dreamstime.com

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First of its Kind Legal History London Traffic Offence UK

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1931: Stabbed Like His Hero Julius Caesar: the Assassination of a Mafia Boss

Salvatore Maranzano, nicknamed Little Caesar for his fascination with Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire, had built a criminal empire in Brooklyn behind the front of a real estate brokerage, running bootlegging, prostitution and narcotics rackets. Born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, and married to Elisabetta Minore, he was sent to New York to seize control of Mafia operations for his Sicilian backers.

In 1930, he went to war with rival boss Joe Masseria, sparking the Castellammarese War. Maranzano secretly convinced Masseria’s own lieutenant, Lucky Luciano, to betray him, and after a lunch at a Coney Island restaurant on April 15, 1931, Masseria was gunned down.

Maranzano emerged as capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses, and reorganised New York’s underworld into the Five Families. His triumph lasted only five months. After plotting to have Luciano killed, Maranzano discovered too late that Luciano had moved first. On September 10, 1931, four gunmen posing as government agents entered Maranzano’s Manhattan office and shot and stabbed him to death, dying in a manner fittingly similar to the fate of his idol, Julius Caesar.

Angry mobsters firing a submachine gun near an antique car

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Assassination Mafia Murder New York Organised Crime USA

1721: Executed at Twenty: The Soldier Who Claimed He Was Defending His Honour

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1863: The Escape-Proof Prison That Wasn’t: Captain Thunderbolt Breaks Out of Cockatoo Island

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1897: The World’s First Drink-Driving Conviction, London 1897

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1931: Stabbed Like His Hero Julius Caesar: the Assassination of a Mafia Boss

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