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

1866: The Sussex Street Mystery: A Dog Walk Leads to a Severed Head in Sydney

Eleven-year-old James Kirkpatrick was walking his dog behind Sussex Street in Sydney in September 1866 when he stumbled on a woman’s severed head half buried in a rubbish heap near Ebsworth’s tweed factory and Barker’s flour mills. Nearby lay her torso, its chest cavity completely emptied and the lower ribs charred. Despite police turning the rubbish heap over three times and combing the neighbourhood, no other body parts were ever recovered.

The case became known as the Sussex Street Mystery and gripped the colony as police pieced together the killing. It ended with the conviction and execution of a butcher, William Henry Scott, for the murder, making it one of colonial Australia’s most sensational and gruesome murder cases.

William Henry Scott under sentence of death 1867

⬅ See all events from 15 September

Australia Cold Case Execution Murder NSW Sydney Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1890: The Birth of the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie, 1890

On this date in 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, the woman who would become Agatha Christie and the best selling novelist in history after the Bible and Shakespeare. She went on to write 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, creating enduring figures such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Her own life carried a strange echo of her fiction: in 1926 she vanished for eleven days, sparking a nationwide manhunt, before being found registered under an assumed name at a Yorkshire hotel, an episode that remains unexplained to this day.

London, Great Britain -May 25, 2016: Agatha Christie Memorial, memorial to author and playwright Agatha Christie, designed by sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies | ID 153687923 © Swetlana Mehlfeld | Dreamstime.com — ID 153687923 © Swetlana Mehlfeld | Dreamstime.com

⬅ See all events from 15 September

Author Europe Mystery True Crime Literature UK

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1826: Property Crimes, Not Murder: Seven Men Hanged in Hobart in a Single Morning

On 15 September 1826, seven convicts, George Brace, John McFarlane, James Edwards, Thomas Balfour, John Dadd, John Clark and Patrick Brown, were hanged together in Hobart, the second of three mass executions carried out that month under Chief Justice John Pedder.

Unlike the seven hanged just two days earlier for murder, not one of this group had killed anyone. Balfour, McFarlane and Edwards went to the gallows for absconding into the bush and robbing settler William Holdship; Brace was hanged for robbery, Dadd and Clark for burglary in Ross, and Brown for stealing sheep, a crime that under Britain’s Bloody Code carried the same legal weight as taking a human life.

The scale of the executions reflected both the severity of imported English law and Governor George Arthur’s determined push to impose discipline on the penal colony. Rather than hang prisoners as they were convicted, the Supreme Court held sentences over and carried them out in batches: seven men on 13 September, seven more on the 15th, and a further nine on the 18th, accounting for nearly half of the 53 executions recorded in Van Diemen’s Land that year.

⬅ See all events from 15 September

Australia Burglary Bushranging Colonial Crime Execution Hobart Robbery TAS Theft Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1862: A Slipped Mask Gives Away a Bushranger

On 14 September 1862, two bushrangers robbed a mailman near Mudgee in New South Wales. They let him keep his sixpence and his pipe. His horse and the mail went with them.

But one robber gave himself away when his crepe mask slipped. The mailman caught a glimpse of his face and believed he could identify him as the infamous bushranger Fred Lowry.

The mail run offered little chance of real profit. Some suspected the hold-up was a decoy to draw police away from a bigger job. News of an armed horse robbery nearby fed the theory, though the report established no connection.

Less than a year later, Lowry died after being shot by police. He reportedly asked that his brother-in-law be told “Tell ’em I died game”.

⬅ See all events from 14 September

Australia Bushranging Cassilis Crime Mudgee NSW Robbery

1866: The Sussex Street Mystery: A Dog Walk Leads to a Severed Head in Sydney

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1890: The Birth of the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie, 1890

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1826: Property Crimes, Not Murder: Seven Men Hanged in Hobart in a Single Morning

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1862: A Slipped Mask Gives Away a Bushranger

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories