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

Noelene Patterson had run out of petrol on Canning Highway near Fremantle when David and Catherine Birnie pulled over, on this day in 1986, and offered her a lift, only to force her into their car. She was held captive for three days, one of several women the couple had already taken that year in a string of killings that had gone unsolved by police.

Unlike their other victims, David Birnie seemed to grow fond of Patterson, allowing her small comforts and talk of letting her go, a softness that stirred his wife’s jealousy. According to accounts of the killings, Catherine Birnie’s resentment decided the outcome: David forced sleeping pills down Patterson’s throat and strangled her, then buried her body in bushland outside the city.

Kidnap concept word written on a blackboard background

⬅ See all events from 1 November

Abduction Australia Fremantle Kidnapping Murder Perth Serial Killer WA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Kenneth Bianchi knew exactly what awaited him if convicted of the Hillside Strangler killings, so when police closed in he struck a deal: testify against his older cousin, Angelo Buono, and escape execution himself. The two men had spent months luring women across Los Angeles, assaulting and killing them, before Bianchi turned Crown witness against the very relative he had once called a partner.

On this day in 1983, both men were found guilty on the same day of multiple counts of assault and murder. Buono, despite his cousin’s testimony against him, also avoided death row and was sentenced to life without parole. Bianchi, for his cooperation, received a sentence of 118 years, his life spared by the words he gave up about his own family.

Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

⬅ See all events from 31 October

Betrayal Crime Informant Los Angeles Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Deep in debt and facing the loss of his home and car, Ronald Clark O’Bryan took his eight-year-old son Timothy trick-or-treating through a Pasadena, Texas neighbourhood on this day in 1974 and slipped him a Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide. To make the poisoning look like the work of a stranger, he handed identically tainted candy to four other children, including his own daughter; none of them ate it. Timothy did, and died within the hour.

Investigators soon discovered O’Bryan had taken out roughly $100,000 in new life insurance on his two children in the months before the murder, and had tried to buy cyanide from a chemical supplier weeks earlier. A jury took under an hour to convict him of capital murder in 1975, and he was sentenced to death.

After years of delayed execution dates, O’Bryan was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville on 31 March 1984, while a crowd outside shouted “Trick or treat!”

O’Bryan never confessed to the killing. In his final statement he called his own execution “wrong”, while insisting it did not mean the justice system that convicted him was at fault.

⬅ See all events from 31 October

Execution Houston Huntsville Insurance Fraud Murder Poisoning Texas Trial USA

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

A boy’s dog scratching at a rubbish heap near a flour mill uncovered a charred human head, its features burned beyond recognition. Days later a woman’s torso turned up nearby, but no one had been reported missing, and the case stalled until police found a torn scrap of calico left in a landlady’s cellar by a young butcher named William Henry Scott. It matched, thread for thread, a fragment of chemise recovered with the remains.

After nine days of police court hearings, Scott was committed for trial on 31 October 1866, accused of a murder most foul: that of a Sydney woman with whom he had been living as husband and wife. The magistrate praised the remarkable police investigation, which had traced an entire body back to a single scrap of fabric, describing the case as “unprecedented in our annals of crime”.

William Henry Scott under sentence of death 1867 for murder most foul

⬅ See all events from 31 October

Australia Dismemberment Forensic Science Murder NSW Sydney Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories