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

Snowy Cutmore had spent months hiding in Sydney after the gangland killing of an ally, but by late October 1927 he was back in Melbourne, lodging with his mother in Carlton. At the races he ran into his old rival Squizzy Taylor and the two traded threats in public; within days Cutmore came down with influenza and took to his sickbed.

On 27 October 1927, Taylor and an accomplice hired a car, drove to the house and walked straight into Cutmore’s bedroom. Gunfire erupted between the bedridden man and his visitors: Cutmore was hit five times, his mother was wounded by a stray bullet as she rushed in, and Taylor himself staggered out mortally wounded, dying in hospital within the hour.

Snowy Cutmore dual portrait image from 1920

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Squizzy Taylor, Melbourne’s most infamous gang leader, walked into a Carlton sickroom on 27 October 1927 to settle an old score with his bedridden rival, John “Snowy” Cutmore. Within minutes, gunfire tore through the small house and both men were mortally wounded.

Taylor was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital in nearby Fitzroy, where he died that evening, aged 39, without ever naming who had fired the fatal shot.

The inquest returned an open verdict. One enduring theory holds that it was not Cutmore but his mother, standing over her dying son, who pulled the trigger that finally brought down Melbourne’s most feared gangster.

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James Henry Shaw took a Japanese fisherman named Oki Iwakichi into partnership at a riverside camp near Pinjarra, letting him manage the household finances and sleep inside the family home while Shaw worked away for months at a time. When Shaw decided to abandon the failing venture and take a job in Fremantle, Oki begged him to stay, warned he would rather die than be left penniless, and took to sleeping with a loaded rifle. On 23 August 1908, as Mrs Shaw stepped outside for rope to tie him down and calm him, Oki shot Shaw through the neck, then fled into the bush, cutting loose every boat moored on the river to slow the alarm.

At his trial, love letters from Oki to his cousin surfaced, claiming he and Mrs Shaw had lived ‘like man and wife’ for over a year; she denied it outright from the stand. The jury convicted him of wilful murder, and when led away to the condemned cell he said he was resigned to his fate, ‘if they let me see Mrs Shaw first.’ He was hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1908.

Oki had denied the charge at trial, but when asked on the gallows if he wished to say anything, he only shook his head; his last words, muttered after the chaplain’s prayer, were ‘Jesus, mercy.’

Oki Iwakichi: West Murray Tragedy murder case 1908

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Henry Sherry had formed an attachment to Catherine Waldock, the wife of a neighbouring farmer near the Williams, and proposed they elope together; when she refused, he borrowed a gun and strychnine from a neighbour under the pretence of shooting a hawk. On 16 September 1885 he intercepted her and her two young sons as they walked home from an opossum hunt, led her a short distance away, raised the gun and said “Here goes” before shooting her dead in front of the boys.

The horror deepened once he was found the next morning. Sherry told a neighbour it had all been agreed between them, a pact in which he would kill Catherine and then himself. He claimed to have already swallowed the strychnine and tried to drown himself in a nearby pool, but both attempts failed, “I floated on the top like a corpse.” Resigned to his fate, he said plainly, “I am not going to build up any false hopes; I expect the rope for it.”

Tried and convicted of murder, he was hanged in Perth on this day in 1885. Witnesses described him walking to the scaffold erect and composed, showing almost no sign of fear as the trapdoor fell.

In a letter written to his wife before his death, Sherry acknowledged the “great sin” he had committed and admitted the justice of his sentence.

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