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

1982: A Death Row Killer for Hire: Bomb in the Radio Speaker

Serial killer Donald Gaskins, already condemned to die at Central Correctional Institution, murdered fellow death row inmate Rudolph Tyner using a homemade bomb built from C4 plastic explosive concealed inside a device disguised as a portable radio speaker. The device was passed to Tyner and detonated, killing him instantly.

Gaskins carried out the killing as a paid hit, hired for 2,000 dollars by Tony Cimo, the son of a couple Tyner had murdered years earlier. Cimo wanted revenge on his parents’ killer and used Gaskins, already notorious as one of South Carolina’s most prolific murderers, to get it from inside the prison itself.

Mobster planting a time bomb in a car engine compartment

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Murder Organised Crime Prison Serial Killer South Carolina USA

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1940: Screaming in Terror: Murder Inc. Gunman Arrested Hiding in a Manhattan Church

Vito ‘Socko’ Gurino, a trigger man for the Brooklyn-based crime syndicate Murder Inc., was finally cornered on September 12, 1940, not in some underworld hideout but inside the Church of the Guardian Angel in Manhattan, where he had been hiding out from New Jersey. Detectives found him screaming hysterically, convinced his own associates were coming to silence him for good.

The fear was not unfounded. Gurino had spent weeks in fear of his life, aware that Murder Inc. dealt with liabilities by killing them before they could talk to police.

Once in custody, Gurino broke quickly, confessing to three murders carried out on the syndicate’s orders and implicating himself in four more killings, opening a window into the machine-like efficiency of contract killing that had terrorised the New York underworld for years.

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Arrest Confession Gang Murder New Jersey New York Organised Crime USA

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1721: Executed at Twenty: The Soldier Who Claimed He Was Defending His Honour

William Casey, a young Guardsman only about twenty years old, was hanged in London on 11 September 1721 after being convicted of robbing a man named John Stone in a city park. Casey never accepted the charge; he insisted the confrontation had nothing to do with theft and everything to do with Stone making indecent advances toward him, a claim that, if true, cast the entire prosecution in a very different light.

At the gallows Casey did not simply protest verbally. He left behind a written statement formally proclaiming his innocence of the robbery, a deliberate act by a condemned soldier determined that his version of events would outlive him.

“He maintained until death that the confrontation arose because Stone had made indecent advances toward him” and went to his execution still denying the crime for which he was hanged.

William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park

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Execution Robbery Trial

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1721: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away: Hanged at Tyburn for Returning from Transportation

John Meff was a housebreaker who had already cheated the gallows once, having been convicted and then transported to the colonies rather than executed. But transportation was meant to be permanent exile, and Meff broke its terms by making his way back to England, a crime that under the law of the day carried the same penalty as the original offence: death.

He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang for illegally returning from transportation. On 11 September 1721 he was taken to Tyburn and executed at the age of forty, going to the gallows alongside James Redding, who had been condemned separately for robbery.

For Meff the return to Tyburn marked the end of a second chance he could not keep: having once escaped the noose through transportation, the simple act of coming home proved fatal.

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Crime and Punishment Execution London Robbery Transportation UK

1982: A Death Row Killer for Hire: Bomb in the Radio Speaker

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1940: Screaming in Terror: Murder Inc. Gunman Arrested Hiding in a Manhattan Church

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1721: Executed at Twenty: The Soldier Who Claimed He Was Defending His Honour

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1721: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away: Hanged at Tyburn for Returning from Transportation

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