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

Crazy Horse, the celebrated Lakota war leader who had helped defeat George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn just a year earlier, was fatally stabbed with a bayonet at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, on 5 September 1877. He was 36 years old.

He had surrendered to U.S. Army forces earlier that year, ending years of armed resistance on the northern plains. Brought to the fort under the pretence of a meeting, he was seized and stabbed during a struggle, dying that night. The killing marked the end of one of the most formidable military careers in the history of the Lakota people.

Crazy Horse and his band of Indians on their way to surrender (1877)

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Assassination Military Political Crime USA War Crime

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James Yates was hanged outside Adelaide Gaol on 5 September 1850 for the murder of a shepherd at Skillagolee Creek. Around 800 spectators gathered in the rain before dawn to witness the execution, the gibbet erected within yards of the gaol’s front door, the coffin placed directly beneath the drop.

Yates ascended the ladder with a firm step, but his hollow eyes, ashen cheeks, and wasted frame betrayed the torment of his final weeks. On the drop he kicked off his boots with restless fury, then knelt reluctantly to prayer. Yates spoke no address to the crowd. His only words, repeated until the drop fell, were: ‘Lord have mercy on me, Christ have mercy on me, Lord, Jesus, have mercy on me.’

The hangman placed the noose under the wrong ear, but the drop was sufficient to break the neck, and death came quickly.

Robber woman in retro clothes praying near gallows for hanging criminals

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On 5 September 1842, a man known as Figara Alkapareet was hanged in the Port Phillip District for his alleged part in the killing of an overseer named Codd at Mount Rouse two years earlier. Witnesses placed Figara among a group of men who attacked Codd, although questions surrounded his identification and Figara maintained that it was his brother who had been at Mount Rouse while he was elsewhere washing sheep. After a jury found him guilty, Figara was sentenced to death. Contemporary accounts described him as meeting his fate with a sense of “natural resignation,” apparently accepting his approaching death without outward resistance. His execution provoked criticism in the newspapers, which questioned the justice and usefulness of the punishment amid the violent conflict and dispossession of the period. Even at the time, Figara’s death prompted debate over whether the law was being applied justly.

View from Mount Rouse summit over Southern Grampians plain

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At 9:30 pm on 5 September 1994, Labor MP John Newman was shot twice and killed instantly in the car park of his Woods Avenue home in Cabramatta, in the western suburbs of Sydney.

His fiancee, Lucy Wang, was present but saw little due to the speed of the attack; she reported a hooded man in an army-style jacket who fired four shots and fled in a waiting car. Newman had represented Cabramatta in the NSW Legislative Assembly since 1986 and had campaigned aggressively against organised crime and drug trafficking in the area. Newman was later given a state funeral. He was 47 years old.

Grey car parked in front of a garage at night

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Assassination Australia Cabramatta Gang Murder NSW Organised Crime Political Crime Sydney

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