True Crime On This Day April 25th

Last Updated on September 23, 2022 by Ben Oakley

April 25th

On April 25th in true crime, The Beast escapes, robbery murder, double murder in California, University bombing, Alaska serial killer.

1978

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Thomas Brian King was ending his shift in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

He was then ambushed, overpowered, tortured and shot to death by local high school students; Darrell Crook and Gregory Fischer.

They had impulsively decided to kill a police officer from any agency after an inland revenue form had angered them. Shortly after the murder they were arrested while still covered in King’s blood.

On the same day

In Australia, a couple who were picking mushrooms in the town of Truro thought they had found a bone from the leg of a cow.

Upon rethinking what they had discovered, they went back for a closer inspection. The bone had a shoe attached and inside the shoe was human skin and painted toenails.

Clothes, blood stains, and more bones were found nearby. The remains were later identified as Veronica Knight, an 18-year-old girl who had vanished at Christmas in 1976.

After an investigation uncovered six more bodies it became clear that all the victims had been killed in a two month period between 1976 and 1977.

A gay couple were suspected; Christopher Worrell and James Miller. Worrell was killed in a car crash in 1977 and Miller was arrested and charged with seven murders.

He died in prison in 2008. The crime became known as the Truro Murders.

1979

In Poland, child abuser, rapist and murderer Andrzej Kunowski, AKA: The Beast, somehow escaped from a Polish prison.

It was one of a series of failures in the Polish justice system that allowed Kunowski to attack multiple women and girls over a 20-year period. Just six weeks later, he raped a 13-year-old girl on her way home from school.

In 1996 after having attacked at least 27 women and girls, and serving a short prison sentence, he illegally entered the United Kingdom. In 1997, he killed 12-year-old Katerina Koneva, at her family’s flat in Hammersmith.

He was arrested shortly after and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. In 2009, he died of natural causes in Franklin Prison in Durham.

1980

In Harris County, Texas, Bobby James Moore shot dead 73-year-old grocery store owner Jim McCarble, during a robbery.

Moore, along with two accomplices, Willie Koonce and Everett Anthony Pradia, had entered the Birdsall Super Market in Houston with the intention of robbing it.

Due to the amount of witnesses in the store and a feeling that the robbery was going wrong, Moore shot McCarble at point blank range, killing him instantly.

Pradia and Koonce were sentenced from 20 years to life in prison. Moore was sentenced to death, and despite numerous appeals, remains on death row.

1981

In California, 23-year-old Patty Geddling and 19-year-old Stacey Benjamin were brutally murdered by Donald Jay Beardslee.

Back in 1969, in Missouri, Beardslee had killed a 52-year-old by cutting her throat and leaving her to bleed to death in a bathtub.

He was convicted of that murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He was released on parole just seven years later and moved to California.

Earlier in 1981, Beardslee had picked up a hitchhiking prostitute and drug addict, Rickie Soria. She moved in with him and started bringing her friends over.

One of those friends was Bill Forrester who instantly claimed he had been ripped off in a drug deal involving Geddling and Benjamin. He devised a plan involving another drug dealer called Frank Rutherford.

Together, they lured the two girls to Beardslee’s apartment to get their money back but Rutherford accidentally wounded Geddling in a fight.

Realising there was no turning back, they drove Geddling to a remote location where Beardslee shot her twice in the head with a sawn-off-shotgun.

The next day, they all drove Benjamin to a different location where Beardslee cut her throat and staged the scene to look like a rape. All were arrested shortly after. Forrester was acquitted.

Rutherford was sentenced to life in prison and died in 2003. Soria was sentenced from 25-years to life. Beardslee was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on January 19^th 2005.

1982

At Vanderbilt University, Nashville, computer science secretary Janet Smith was injured in an explosion when she opened a package addressed to a professor.

The package had been forwarded from Pennsylvania and was addressed to department chair Patrick C. Fischer. Smith suffered injuries to her face, chest and arms.

Some databases list the date of the bombing as May 5^th. The bomb had been sent by the Theodore John Kaczynski, AKA: The Unabomber.

Kaczynski’s investigation was the longest and most costly in the FBI’s history. He went on to kill three people and injure another 23. He was arrested in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison where he remains to this day.

1983

In Anchorage, Alaska, 17-year-old Paula Goulding was abducted and murdered by Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen.

Her body was found in a shallow grace on the banks of the Knik River on September 2^nd 1983.

She had been stripped nude and ordered to run into the wild so Hansen could hunt her. She was shot in the back and redressed before he buried her.

Hansen raped and murdered at least 17 women in Alaska between 1971 and 1983 and is known to have killed over 30.

Most of his crimes took place in Anchorage and he preferred to hunt them in the wilderness with a gun and a knife. He would generally abduct them before killing them.

In 1983, the FBI were called in to assist with the investigation, as Alaska State Troopers were unsure what they were dealing with.

It led to Hansen’s arrest in October 1983 and he was subsequently sentenced to life in prison where he died in 2014.

His killings were the subject of the film ‘The Frozen Ground’ with Nicholas Cage and John Cusack.

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