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

1888: The Double Event: Jack the Ripper Kills Twice in One Night in London

In the early hours, the killer known as Jack the Ripper struck twice within the same hour. His third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut and still bleeding, her killer likely interrupted before he could mutilate her further. Denied his ritual, he found a fourth victim within the hour: Catherine Eddowes, whose body was left with her intestines arranged over her shoulder and part of her womb removed.

Weeks later, a Londoner opened a parcel addressed simply “From Hell” to find half a preserved kidney inside, accompanied by a taunting letter. Tests suggested it may have belonged to Eddowes herself, though the claim was never proven and the killer was never caught.

Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes

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Europe London Murder Mutilation Serial Killer UK Unsolved

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1982: Seven Dead, No One Ever Charged: the Chicago Tylenol Poisonings

On September 29, 1982, 12 year old Mary Kellerman took a Tylenol capsule for a cold and died within hours. Within two days six more people in the Chicago area died the same way, including three members of a single family, the Januses, who had unknowingly shared capsules from the same tainted batch.

Someone had opened bottles on store shelves, replaced the medicine inside with potassium cyanide, and resealed them for unsuspecting buyers to find. No poisoner was ever caught. A man named James W. Lewis was convicted of extortion after writing to the manufacturer claiming responsibility and demanding a million dollars to stop the deaths, but he later insisted the letter was a bluff, and investigators could never tie him to the actual killings.

The case remains unsolved to this day, but it changed how medicine is sold worldwide, ending loose powder capsules and ushering in the tamper proof seals now standard on every bottle.

Capsules of Tylenol Pain Killer. A container of Tylenol tablets pain killer. | ID 207734574 © Arne Beruldsen | Dreamstime.com — ID 207734574 © Arne Beruldsen | Dreamstime.com

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Chicago Cold Case Murder Poisoning Product Tampering Unsolved USA

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2011: Killed Behind Bars: Matthew Johnson Convicted of Murdering Gangland Assassin Carl Williams

Carl Williams had already been convicted of multiple murders during Melbourne’s gangland war when he was bashed to death with the stem of an exercise bike in a high-security unit at Victoria’s Barwon Prison in 2010, an inmate supposedly protected by round-the-clock surveillance.

Matthew Charles Johnson, a fellow prisoner sharing the unit, was charged with the killing. On this day in 2011 a jury found him guilty of murdering the man once considered one of the country’s most feared underworld figures, in an attack that exposed how little safety the prison’s most secure wing actually offered its most notorious inmate.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Prison Trial VIC

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1866: Moondyne Joe Caught 322 Kilometres From Perth While Trying to Walk to Adelaide

By 1866 Joseph Bolitho Johns, known as Moondyne Joe, was already the most persistent escapee Fremantle Prison had ever held. Free again in August after breaking out once more, he teamed up with two other escaped convicts and raided Everett’s store at Toodyay, a shopkeeper who had arrived on the very same convict transport as Joe, stripping it of boots, blankets, guns and ammunition to equip an overland trek all the way to Adelaide.

They made it 322 kilometres east of Perth before running out of luck at Bodallin Soak, recaptured on 29 September 1866, the escapade that first put the name Moondyne Joe into print. Back at Fremantle Prison, he was handed a further five years, two for the escape and three for the robbery, in a saga that would run for another three decades.

Moondyne Joe - Perennial Escapee — Moondyne Joe – Perennial Escapee

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Adelaide Australia Escape Fremantle Historical Crime Perth Prison Robbery Toodyay WA

1888: The Double Event: Jack the Ripper Kills Twice in One Night in London

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1982: Seven Dead, No One Ever Charged: the Chicago Tylenol Poisonings

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2011: Killed Behind Bars: Matthew Johnson Convicted of Murdering Gangland Assassin Carl Williams

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1866: Moondyne Joe Caught 322 Kilometres From Perth While Trying to Walk to Adelaide

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