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

1960: Francis Gary Powers Pleads Guilty at Moscow Spy Trial

On 17 August 1960, American pilot Francis Gary Powers stood trial in Moscow after his U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Soviet airspace on 1 May 1960. Powers, flying a CIA surveillance mission, had been captured alive when his high-altitude spy plane was struck by a Soviet surface-to-air missile near Sverdlovsk.

Powers pleaded guilty to espionage charges before a Soviet military tribunal, in a trial that became a Cold War spectacle broadcast to the world. He was sentenced to ten years, serving nearly two before being exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin in February 1962.

Spy aerial view

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Cold War Espionage Europe Moscow Political Crime Russia Trial USA

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1932: William Cyril Moxley Hanged at Long Bay for a Double Murder in Moorebank

On 5 April 1932, Dorothy Ruth Denzel and Frank Barnby Wilkinson, a young couple soon to be engaged, were attacked and killed while resting on a rug in a darkened lane near Liverpool, NSW. Their killer, William Cyril Moxley, a police informer with a criminal record, fled the scene in Wilkinson’s red Alvis sports car, later found abandoned in Ashfield. Moxley was identified in part by a distinctive detail: a clean bullet hole through his left ear, a souvenir from criminals he had once informed on.

A massive manhunt followed, with more than a hundred police deployed and families in surrounding suburbs locking their homes at night. Moxley was eventually tracked to bushland at Frenchs Forest in Sydney. He tried to escape, but after a chase and struggle involving three police officers, he was overpowered and arrested. He was hanged at Long Bay Gaol on 17 August 1932.

William Cyril Moxley condemned murderer at Long Bay gallows 1932

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1992: The First Victim of the Snowtown Bodies in Barrels Killers

In August 1992, John Justin Bunting bashed the first of what would become twelve murder victims to death with a hammer at his home in Salisbury North, north of Adelaide. Bunting, a former abattoir worker filled with deep hatred, led a cell of killers that included Robert Joe Wagner and James Vlassakis, operating across South Australia between 1992 and 1999.

The murders became known as the Snowtown or Bodies in Barrels case after eight of the twelve victims were found sealed in acid-filled barrels inside an abandoned bank vault in Snowtown, 140 kilometres north of Adelaide. The trial was among the longest and most publicised in Australian legal history, ending with Bunting and Wagner convicted of multiple murders and Vlassakis, who confessed to four killings and testified for the Crown, receiving a lesser sentence.

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1820: Rebecca Worlock Hanged at Gloucester Prison for Poisoning Her Husband

Rebecca Worlock, a 37-year-old mother of three from Oldland and Bitton in Gloucestershire, poisoned her husband Thomas with arsenic in April 1820. She had purchased the poison from a pharmacy at Kingswood Hill, telling a stranger she had enlisted to accompany her that it was not for rats but for her husband. Thomas died on 21 April after falling ill following a beer laced with the substance; a post-mortem confirmed poisoning and Rebecca was arrested.

Tried at Gloucester Assizes on 14 August 1820, the jury convicted her in just seven minutes. She was hanged at Gloucester Prison two days later, on 16 August, before a large crowd that had travelled from her home villages. Her body hung for an hour before being handed over to surgeons for dissection.

Worlock confessed to the murder before her execution.

Poison