Singapore made drug dealing a capital offence in 1975 and that law has been widely publicised ever since. The first man to die under it was Teh Sin Tong, 28, a Malaysian labourer, who was hanged at dawn on Friday, April 28th, 1978, at Changi Prison. In the next decade 20 drug-dealers were hanged in
Two Frenchmen who served as mercenaries in the old Rhodesian army turned to crime after the 1980 war that created Zimbabwe. In 1981 they shot dead a caf? owner, Erhard Kraft. For this Gervaise Boutanquoi and Simon Chemouth were sentenced to death and despite appeals for clemency from France they were hanged at dawn on
A bizarre religious group was the centre of degraded sex and murder in a suburb of Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad. Run by black power activist Michael de Freitas, calling himself Michael X, and his assistant, Stanley Abbott, it was also home to Gale Benson, 27, daughter of an English Tory MP. On January
When his brother and companion in crime was shot dead by a posse in 1899, Thomas Ketchum, known as Black Jack, decided to make one final heist on his own. His target was a mail train; his plan was to disconnect the mail section from the rest of the train. He forced the driver, Frank
The Great Depression was biting into Canada when three unemployed men hatched a plot to hold up a small grocery store in Philip Street, a poorly lit cul-de-sac in London, Ontario, run by 65-year-old Samuel Weinstein. Walter Ramesbottom, 18, was the hold-up man, Henry Quinn, 36, the look-out, and Henry Traxler waited in the comfort
I need that money back that I lent you, Nils Anderson, a Swedish immigrant, told his friend Henry Lorenz. My sisters family cant pay their mortgage and if I dont help them out theyll be out on the street. This was the era of the Great Depression, when everyone was strapped for cash. Andersons request
Indias Revolutionary Party branch in the Bengal region, dedicated to liberating India from British rule, was so impressed with the zeal of its new recruit, 18-year-old Khudiram Bose, that he was given a special mission to assassinate the local chief police magistrate, Mr. Kingsford. On April 30th, 1908, in the best tradition of assassins
An aboriginal tracker known as Jimmie was called in by South Australian police to hunt down the man who raped and strangled 12-year-old Elizabeth Nielson just 300 yards from her home in Monash in the outback. Jimmies tracking skills led him to the home of James Watherston, a 27-year-old labourer, who confessed to the crime
I have neither the desire to marry you nor the temperament to tolerate further your repeated importuning, declared 41-year-old Elizabeth Dowsette when Joseph Bergeron came knocking at her door for the umpteenth time. Small wonder she was cross. She knew Bergeron, a tinsmith, had abandoned his wife and five children to pursue her, and several
Forty-three-year-old Hattie Decker, a farmers daughter of Montville, New Jersey, had two suitors for her hand in marriage Samuel Monich, 45, a Hungarian immigrant, and John Bolk, a local grain and feed retailer, in whose store Hattie used to buy provisions for her fathers farm. Monich became so jealous of Bolk that he bought