On this date in 1986, 22-year-old Mary Neilson visited a house on Moorhouse Street in Perth to buy car tyres advertised for sale. The advertisement was a trap. David and Catherine Birnie held her captive before taking her to nearby bushland, where they murdered her. Mary was the first of at least four women killed by the couple over the following weeks. Their killing spree ended when a later captive escaped and alerted police, exposing the Birnies’ crimes and leading to their arrest.
William Tyndale committed one crime: he translated the New Testament into English so ordinary readers could understand it for themselves, defying a Church that insisted scripture remain in Latin and under clerical control. Hunted across Europe by agents loyal to Henry VIII’s government, he was finally betrayed and arrested in Antwerp.
Tried for heresy, he was condemned and taken to the fortress town of Vilvorde, where in October 1536 he was strangled at the stake and his body then burned. Within a few years, an English Bible drawing heavily on his translation was being placed in every parish church in the kingdom that had killed him.
According to tradition, his final words were a prayer rather than a protest: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”
At a one-teacher school in rural Victoria, two unemployed plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, burst in with a sawn-off shotgun and forced 20-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and her six young pupils into a van, demanding a million dollar ransom. Victoria’s premier agreed to pay, and the education minister himself waited at the handover point with police hidden nearby, but the kidnappers never returned to collect it.
Left alone with the children overnight, Gibbs kicked out a door panel with her heavy platform boots and led the girls through the dark bush to safety. Eastwood and Boland were run down in a manhunt; Eastwood pleaded guilty and was jailed, while Boland was convicted after three trials.
It was not the end of the story. Eastwood escaped prison years later and staged a second mass kidnapping of a teacher and nine pupils, and while back behind bars he killed a fellow inmate in what was ruled self-defence.
In October 1965, Ian Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at a Manchester railway station, telling him he had been invited home for a drink. At the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, Brady had Myra Hindley fetch her brother-in-law David Smith under the pretext of sharing miniature wine bottles. Smith arrived in time to witness Brady strike Evans with a hatchet and strangle him with electrical cord, screams tearing through the house as Hindley called out for help.
Smith helped move the body to a spare room before fleeing home, where he was sick and told his wife everything. He contacted police the next morning armed with a screwdriver and bread knife in case Brady came after him. Officers found Evans’ body behind a locked door, and as he dressed for arrest, Brady offered a chillingly understated explanation: he and Evans “had a row and the situation got out of hand.” The killing exposed what became known as the Moors Murders.
True crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
