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

In the early hours of 12 October 1988, two young constables, Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, stopped to check an abandoned car on Walsh Street in South Yarra, Melbourne. Within minutes both were dead, gunned down in what police believed was a professional ambush by an armed robbery gang taking revenge for a suspect shot dead by detectives hours earlier.

Four men, among them Victor Peirce, stood trial in 1991 after one of the largest investigations Victoria Police had ever run. All were acquitted, and the case has never been officially solved.

In 2005, Peirce’s own wife Wendy, who had once given him a false alibi and was later convicted of perjury for it, broke her silence and told the press that her husband had planned and carried out the killings himself.

Melbourne laneway after rain with wet paving and blurred lights

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Australia Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Police South Yarra Trial Unsolved VIC

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Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, was mid speech at a political debate in Tokyo on 12 October 1960 when a seventeen year old ultranationalist named Otoya Yamaguchi sprinted across the stage and drove a short samurai sword into his chest, twice. Cameras were rolling for a live broadcast, and the killing was captured in full, shown and reshown to a horrified nation.

Yamaguchi was no stranger to the far right; he had trained with militant nationalist groups and viewed Asanuma, who had made friendly overtures toward Communist China, as a traitor to Japan. Arrested at the scene, he spent weeks in juvenile detention before hanging himself in his cell with a bedsheet, leaving behind a message of loyalty to the emperor.

His death meant he was never tried, and the killing remains one of the most notorious political murders of postwar Japan, preserved on film as it happened.

Inejiro Asanuma founds a new political party in 1945

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Asia Assassination Japan Murder Political Crime

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On 12 October 2002, a suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Pub in Bali’s Kuta district and detonated an explosive vest on the crowded dance floor. Twenty seconds later, as survivors fled into the street to see what had happened, a second bomb hidden in a van outside the Sari Club tore through the crowd gathered there, killing many who had just escaped the first blast. The attack claimed 202 lives, including 88 Australians, the deadliest act of terrorism in Indonesia’s history. Three men were convicted of orchestrating the bombings and sentenced to death. They were executed by firing squad on Nusakambangan island in November 2008. In their final moments, the three men showed no remorse, shouting loudly, rather than any word of apology.

Kuta carnival 2010. Paddle for peace. Bali. Annual Kuta beach carnival celebration. Initially organized as a response to the Bali terrorist attack of October 2002, the event has now become a regular fixture on Bali's busy calendar of yearly events. October 2010. Among majority of events - every year all surfers padles to the mid of the ocean to make the circle, unite the hands, put flowers into the water and pray for victims of terrorist attack. The name of this part is Paddle for piece | ID 16538257 © Evgeniya Bolyukh | Dreamstime.com — ID 16538257 © Evgeniya Bolyukh | Dreamstime.com

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Asia Australia Bali Bombing Execution Indonesia Mass Casualty Attack Terrorism Trial

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The Grand Hotel in Brighton was packed with Britain’s Conservative leadership for their annual conference when a long-delay bomb, planted by the Provisional IRA weeks earlier in a guest room, tore through the building in the early hours. Margaret Thatcher was still awake working on her conference speech in the room next door and escaped with only cuts, but five people died in the rubble and 31 more were injured, some permanently maimed.

The bomber, Patrick Magee, had checked into the hotel under a false name and set the timer so far in advance that he was long gone before it detonated. The IRA’s chilling statement afterward noted that Thatcher had been lucky that day, but they would only need to be lucky once. Magee was later caught through forensic evidence left on the bomb casing and convicted for the attack.

Grand Hotel, Brighton, after the bombing, 1984. Photo: D4444n / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

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Assassination Bombing Brighton Europe Political Crime Terrorism UK

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