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

John Hill, a butcher, had spent the day drinking with Simon Burn at Parramatta on 5 October 1794 when he turned on the woman he lived with, beating her until Burn stepped in to stop him. Hill stabbed Burn through the heart; dying within the hour, Burn had just enough strength left to name his killer before witnesses, declaring that the butcher had done it. Burn, a First Fleet convict who had earned his freedom and settled his own farm, was reportedly the first free man in the colony to be murdered by another colonist.

Hill tried to set up an alibi at his trial, but the wound and Burn’s own dying words undid him. He was hanged at Sydney on 16 October 1794, his body handed over for dissection as his sentence required.

Bloody Halloween killer dressed as butcher on dark blue background

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Australia Colonial Crime Execution Murder NSW Parramatta Sydney Trial

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At a settler’s hut near Burwood, outside Sydney, bushranger Thomas Mustin levelled a loaded musket point-blank at a visiting neighbour, and pulled the trigger. It merely flashed in the pan; he drew a pistol, and that misfired too, and in the scuffle that followed Mustin and his companions escaped briefly into the bush.

Mustin, Daniel Watkins and John Brown were convicted over this attack and a string of armed robberies around Burwood and the Liverpool Road, including one household where the terrified wife recognised Brown as a former constable but was too afraid to say so.

On 16 October 1826 the three were marched from Sydney Gaol under military escort. All three acknowledged the justice of their sentence on the scaffold and prayed for mercy, offering no claim of innocence. They hanged together on a temporary gallows at Burwood, and their bodies were left on display throughout the day.

Bushrangers holding up coach passengers illustrated scene

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Australia Bushranging Execution NSW Robbery Sydney Trial

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She was born Margaretha Zelle in the Netherlands and reinvented herself in Paris as Mata Hari, an exotic dancer whose stage act and string of wealthy, often military, lovers made her a sensation across Europe. When war came, French intelligence suspected she was selling pillow talk to Germany.

The evidence against her was thin and largely circumstantial, built on intercepted telegrams and a reputation for scandal rather than proof. A French military tribunal convicted her of espionage anyway, and she was executed by firing squad outside Paris on 15 October 1917.

She refused a blindfold and reportedly blew a kiss to the soldiers before they fired, going to her death still insisting she had never betrayed France.

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Espionage Europe Execution France Scandal Trial

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James Gardiner, a 19-year-old cabman, lived off the earnings of a woman known as German Ada in a Rockhampton brothel. On the night of 21 August 1883 a drunken quarrel turned fatal: he kicked and stamped her to death. Police tried to suppress the story, closing the inquest to reporters, but a neighbour who had heard her screams and been waved off by a constable made sure it got out anyway.

Gardiner was sentenced to death by Justice Pring and hanged at Brisbane Gaol alongside two other condemned men. Among those at the gate stood Charles Muller, an elderly German man and father of the dead woman, whose real name was Matilda. He had asked to watch his daughter’s killer die, stood opposite the scaffold through the execution, then pushed forward to view the body and walked away looking, witnesses said, satisfied.

Gardiner never denied killing her, pleading only that he had been drunk, and spent his last days exhorting the two men hanged beside him to repent.

Elderly man with long beard isolated on white background

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Australia Brisbane Domestic Violence Execution Murder QLD Rockhampton Trial

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