In San Francisco in February 1897 a trio of Australian police officers await the arrival of Frank Butler, wanted for the murder of three men in the Blue Mountains and beyond. While they’ll capture the fugitive, their problems are only starting as Butle...

With the alarm raised about three missing miners, Sydney police begin a massive search of the Blue Mountains. It’s a hunt that draws large crowds of ghoulish spectators, who get more than they bargained for as gruesome discoveries are made. Yet by then...

In 1896 a cold-blooded serial killer calling himself Frank Butler advertised for mining partners in Sydney newspapers. Those who went west with him to the Blue Mountains were never seen alive again. Yet one man who escaped Butler’s clutches was to beco...

Jack Brown — murderer of three people, supposedly inspired by reading Deadwood Dick pulp novels — went to trial in October 1906. But could a boy who reckoned he’d slaughtered his best friends in the name of a genocidal revolution for White Australia ac...

Following the supposedly Deadwood Dick-inspired murders committed by Jimmy and Joe Governor, Jack Underwood and Thomas Quinlan, in July 1906 Australia was rocked by a new outrage attributed to “pernicious literature”: the brutal killing and mutilation ...

Deadwood Dick was the first pop culture superhero – 50 years before Batman — and he was the first such character to spark widespread moral condemnation as a "cause" of crime. In Australia from the 1890s, Deadwood Dick was blamed for everythin...

75 years ago this week, the Japanese surrendered and WWII was over. After these celebrations came horror at what POWs had suffered. Of the many accounts of surviving atrocities, one stood out: Changi prisoner AIF private Colin Fleming Brien had lived t...

By mid-autumn 1900, dozens of people in Sydney had died from Bubonic Plague – many within a day of showing symptoms. Yet the CMO’s rat-killing recommendations were initially ignored and it’d be up to a future PM to stand up for poor people on the front...

It's New Year's Day 1900 and Sydney is celebrating on this sunny day. But Dr Ashburton Thompson, NSW's chief medical officer, knows that darkness is coming over the horizon in the form of Bubonic Plague. Once the Black Death strikes, he...

In winter 1950 a dark old house in Melbourne — owned by an elderly dying widow — was terrorised by nightly visitations from a fiend who was nicknamed "Jack The Rapper". Like something of out a classic horror movie, the sensational story inclu...