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

Alice Prestwich was just another house call for a family doctor trusted by an entire community. Harold Shipman gave the 69-year-old widow a lethal injection of morphine at her home in Hyde, Greater Manchester, on 20 October 1988, the same quiet routine he had already used on dozens of elderly patients before her. She became his 55th confirmed victim, and not one soul suspected a thing.

Shipman kept practising, and killing, for another ten years, forging wills and helping himself to his victims’ assets along the way, before a suspicious bequest finally exposed him in 1998. An official inquiry later concluded he had killed at least 215 patients, making him the most prolific serial killer in British history.

Dr Death - Harold Shipman — Dr Death – Harold Shipman

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England Greater Manchester Medical Crime Murder Poisoning Serial Killer UK

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Owen McQueeny was a wandering Irish robber with one sightless eye who spent weeks haunting the proprietress of the Green Tent, a grocery and tavern serving gold diggers on a track near Geelong, Victoria. Elizabeth Lowe, a young widow raising two small children alone, had already told a passing carrier she feared the man and his talk of pistols. That July in 1858, McQueeny shot her dead and vanished with her jewellery.

Travellers soon reported a dead-eyed swagman heading for Geelong loaded with the dead woman’s distinctive earrings, and police closed in fast. Awaiting trial, McQueeny was caught hiding the earrings by swallowing them, retrieving them from the gaol’s waste tub and passing them to a departing cellmate to smuggle out for safekeeping. He was convicted of her murder and hanged at Geelong on 20 October 1858, freely confessing to a string of other robberies while insisting to the last that he had not killed her.

As the death warrant was read to him he only shrugged, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” convinced to the very end that public dislike of hanging would see him reprieved.

Sly grog shanty on Victorian goldfields tavern scene

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Australia Execution Geelong Murder Robbery Trial VIC

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Richard Copping was jealous that his sweetheart, Susannah Stacey, had grown tired of him. On 12 May 1878 he followed her into her parents’ home near Sorell, in Tasmania’s south, and split her skull with an axe as she tried to shut a door against him. When her father ran out and accused him, Copping only clapped his hands and said, “Yes, I know I have,” before declaring, “She deceived me, and I’ll be hung for her like a man.”

He then tried to shoot himself, loading a gun with nails after finding no shot, and botched even that, surviving with a shattered jaw. His lawyer argued he was suffering from a diseased brain, but the jury convicted him, and he was hanged at Hobart’s Campbell Street Gaol on 20 October 1878, sobbing and unnerved on the gallows.

Copping never denied the killing, having confessed within minutes of the attack, and he reportedly left written confessions in the sheriff’s keeping before he died.

Portrait of prisoner Richard Copping Hobart Gaol 1878

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Australia Execution Hobart Mental Health Murder Sorell TAS Trial

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Legend has it that King John of England was not felled by illness but by a monk’s revenge. Staying at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire that October, John allegedly threatened to starve his own kingdom with crushing bread prices; a monk is said to have milked a toad for its venom, mixed it into a cup of ale, and drunk from it himself before serving the king, to prove the drink was safe. The monk reportedly died first in the abbey infirmary, and John followed him within hours.

The king, already infamous for the Magna Carta he was forced to sign and then tried to annul, died at Newark Castle on 19 October 1216 as a rebel army closed in on his crumbling kingdom. The poisoning story only surfaces in a chronicle written decades later for John’s old enemies, the barons; most contemporary accounts agree he died of dysentery, the far less dramatic verdict most historians still accept today.

Tomb of King John of England in Worcester Cathedral

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England Legend Lincolnshire Medieval History Poisoning UK Unsolved

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