← Back to the front page

History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

34. The Land Down Under’s Most Notorious Serial Killer

Bushrangers holding up travelers in the mid-nineteenth century. Wikimedia

John Lynch (1813 – 1842) was trouble from early on. Born in Cavan, Ireland, he was convicted at age fifteen of obtaining property by false pretenses. Two years later, in 1830, he was sentenced to penal transportation to Australia. In 1832, Lynch’s ship reached Australia, and he was sent to the village of Berrima in New South Wales, about 75 miles from Sydney.

Assigned to toil as a convict laborer on farms, Lynch soon tired of that. So he fled and joined a gang of bushrangers – Australian bandits who hid from authorities in the bush and the Outback. In 1835, Lynch and two others were tried for murdering a man who had given evidence against their gang. Although Lynch had confessed to the murder, the jury inexplicably acquitted him, while convicting and sentencing his comrades to hang. That was unfortunate: Lynch went on to become Australia’s most notorious serial killer.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.