Ep 56 - James Byrd Jr, and Bertha Coughlan

James Byrd Jr. was a black man who was murdered by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998. Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer, and John King dragged along the road Byrd behind a pickup truck. The sickening incident led to a change in the Texas hate-crimes law. Melbourne’s Yarra River is the deadliest inland river per metre in Australia. One of the earliest bodies dragged from its murky depths was Bertha Coughlan in 1923, a young, unmarried mother who had died at the hands of abortionist Hannah Mitchell.