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

In August 1981, 81-year-old Elizabeth Ashworth felt unwell while gardening at her home on Peel Street in Hyde, England, and asked her neighbours to call a doctor. Harold Shipman arrived, administered an injection, then told the neighbours she would not live much longer. When he returned later and asked if she was still alive, she had already died.

Investigators later identified her death as an unlawful killing, part of Shipman’s early pattern of murdering elderly patients with fatal opiate injections. Harold Shipman would go on to become one of history’s most prolific serial killers, convicted of 15 murders but suspected in the deaths of over 200 patients.

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England Hyde Murder Poisoning Serial Killer UK

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Gao Chengyong was arrested at his grocery store in Baiyin, Gansu, in August 2016 after a DNA test on his uncle flagged a close familial match to an unidentified serial killer. The breakthrough closed a case that had haunted investigators for nearly three decades. Gao confessed to all eleven murders, committed between 1988 and 2002 across Inner Mongolia.

Known in Chinese media as the ‘Chinese Jack the Ripper’, Gao had followed victims to their homes, typically striking in daylight hours. He mutilated their bodies in a pattern that drew comparisons to the 1888 Whitechapel killings. Sentenced to death and stripped of all assets, he was executed on 3 January 2019.

Chinese death character with skull texture 3D illustration

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Asia Baiyin Baotou China Cold Case Execution Gansu Inner Mongolia Murder Serial Killer

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When 76-year-old Stella Williamson died of natural causes in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania on August 25, 1980, a sealed letter was found among her belongings. Written in the early 1960s, it was a confession: ‘In the attic in an old trunk you will find babies I had… How I got away with it I don’t know but I did.’ Investigators followed the letter to the attic, where they found the mummified remains of five infants, all under one year old, wrapped in newspapers dating from 1925 to 1933.

Examination by forensic experts including Dr. Halbert Fillinger and Dr. Wilton Krogman determined that at least three of the infants had been strangled, ligature material still present on their necks. The cause of death for the other two, believed to be newborns, was never conclusively established. Williamson, remembered by neighbours as kind and churchgoing, had kept her secret for more than half a century. The case resurfaced decades later when two of the infant skulls were mysteriously discovered at a Philadelphia museum.

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Cold Case Murder Pennsylvania Unsolved USA

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On 25 August 1973, Joanne Ratcliffe, aged 11, and Kirste Gordon, aged 4, disappeared from the Adelaide Oval during an Australian rules football match between Norwood and North Adelaide. Witnesses saw the girls in the company of a man in an Akubra hat and grey checked sports jacket. One witness, a confectionery vendor, watched the man carry Kirste in one arm while Joanne kicked and screamed at him to let her go. He dropped his reading glasses in the struggle, grabbed Joanne by the arm, and dragged her toward the southern gates. Bystanders assumed he was simply a parent.

Police believe both girls were abducted, and their disappearance has never been solved. South Australia Police and media have long linked the case to the 1966 disappearance of the Beaumont children, also from South Australia. The case remains one of the most haunting unsolved crimes in the country’s history.

Football Game at the Adelaide Oval - the ground in 1973 still had the old stands and the 1911 scoreboard seen here. — Football Game at the Adelaide Oval – the ground in 1973 still had the old stands and the 1911 scoreboard seen here.

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Adelaide Australia Cold Case Kidnapping Missing Persons Murder SA Unsolved

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