Paul Avery had spent months covering the unidentified killer terrorising Northern California for the San Francisco Chronicle, turning his byline into the public face of the investigation. That attention made him a target of the very man he was writing about.

On 27 October 1970, the Zodiac Killer sent a letter addressed directly to Avery, taunting the journalist for the coverage that had made his name synonymous with the case. The killer was never identified, and the letter remains one of the eeriest pieces of correspondence in a case still unsolved more than half a century later.

Symbolism
Symbolism – Zodiac Serial Killer Mystery

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Abraham Munday, a shepherd working the east coast of Tasmania near Swansea, laced a rival shepherd’s flour with arsenic, hoping to kill George White. White survived only because the dose was so large it made him vomit it back up. An old man named Hamilton, who happened to share a piece of the poisoned bread while visiting the hut, was not so fortunate: the arsenic settled in his joints and left him crippled for life.

Munday was convicted and sentenced to death. He was hanged within the gaol at Oatlands on this day in 1857, and went to the scaffold badly shaken, not only by his fate but because the clergyman who had attended him in his final days, the Reverend Mr Ison, refused to walk up to the drop with him.

Antique apothecary poison bottle
Antique apothecary poison bottle

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George Sturgeon, a settler near Oatlands in Tasmania, was found shot dead on a bush track in July 1856, killed by a gang of bushrangers after leaving home with money in his pocket. A huge reward sent police after the gang, including a notorious outlaw known as “Long Mickey”, by then the self-styled terror of the Midland Districts.

He was finally cornered in a shepherd’s hut over a year later and opened fire through the walls as police closed in. One shot passed clean through the thatch gripped in a pursuing constable’s hand; a return shot shaved off part of Long Mickey’s whisker, and he surrendered, begging not to be ill-used, as he knew he would hang for the Sturgeon killing.

Convicted after trial, he was hanged inside the gaol at Oatlands on 27 October 1857.

On the scaffold Long Mickey thanked the priest who had attended him, declared he had never committed murder, and insisted his companion had not killed anyone either, before asking those present to pray for his soul.

Abandoned farmhouse
Abandoned farmhouse

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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.

Squizzy Taylor
Squizzy Taylor

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On This Day in True Crime History

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