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

Elijah Upjohn had hanged Ned Kelly at Melbourne Gaol in 1880, earning five pounds for the job. Two years later he was back in front of a City Court bench, this time as the accused: drunk in Carlton, he exposed himself in front of witnesses, to whom he tossed peppermints moments before.

Fined 10 pounds or three months, Upjohn refused to pay and was sent to Melbourne Gaol, the very institution he had served as executioner. While locked up he kept working, flogging inmates at Pentridge under sentence, and walked free at year’s end with wages still owed to him.

Elijah Upjohn: Executioner of Bushranger Ned Kelly

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Australia Carlton Execution Melbourne Prison Public Indecency Scandal VIC

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Pope John Paul I was found dead in his bed after just 33 days in office, the shortest papacy since 1605, with a religious devotional still in his hands. The Vatican initially claimed a priest had discovered the body; in truth it was a nun, Sister Vincenza, who found him, and officials lied about it out of embarrassment that a woman had entered the private papal quarters.

No autopsy was performed and the body was embalmed with unusual speed, feeding decades of speculation that he had been poisoned to stop him exposing corruption at the Vatican Bank. One theory even produced a mobster who claimed to have helped administer the poison. Later research drawing on confidential Vatican archives instead found a simpler explanation: a history of heart trouble, chest pains the night before his death, and no doctor ever called.

Castel Gandolfo Lazio Italy. Portrait of Pope John Paul I, albino luciani in the museum of the pontifical villas 11 Sep 2022 Castel Gandolfo Italy | ID 259284583 © Maudanros | Dreamstime.com — ID 259284583 © Maudanros | Dreamstime.com

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Cold Case Conspiracy Theory Death Europe Italy Scandal Vatican City

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When Empress Dowager Cixi crushed the Hundred Days’ Reform with a palace coup in September 1898, she moved fast. Six officials and intellectuals who had championed the Guangxu Emperor’s modernisation drive, among them Tan Sitong and Kang Youwei’s younger brother Kang Guangren, were arrested, denied any trial, and beheaded the same day at the Caishikou execution ground in Beijing. For decades they were remembered simply as reform martyrs cut down by a reactionary court.

That story only cracked in the 1980s, when testimony surfaced in Japanese archives from a man who had been ordered to assassinate Cixi and fled before he could act. His account implicated four of the six in a genuine plot to kill the Empress Dowager, suggesting at least one of the condemned, Yang Rui, may have been entirely innocent, executed alongside men who really had been plotting murder.

Historic photo of beheaded bodies after execution: Laneway of Caishikou crossroad, Beijing, China.

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Asia Assassination Beijing China Execution Political Crime Trial

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John Hazeldine went by the name Kangaroo Jack, and he liked to remind men what his evidence could do: he claimed it had hanged one man in England and transported two others. So when he and a young absconded convict named Parker were caught butchering a stolen bullock in the bush near Bathurst in 1828, Parker knew exactly what Hazeldine intended to do next. That evening, as Hazeldine knelt blowing a campfire alight, Parker struck him with a tomahawk.

The case against him rested almost entirely on a confession he was said to have made to two fellow convicts, men a settler who watched the trial branded liars who “contradicted each other in all other things” and may have been the real killers. It was enough. Parker, about 19, was hanged behind the gaol at Sydney on 28 September 1829, still hoping until the last for a reprieve.

He denied the murder almost to the moment the rope was placed around his neck, then confessed his guilt as the drop was prepared.

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Australia Bathurst Execution Informer Murder NSW Sydney Trial

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