Australian

Monsters



24 Terrifying Tales
of Australia’s Most
Horrific Serial Killers




Robert Keller



PUBLISHED BY:
Robert Keller
Copyright © 2015



All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced in any format, electronic or otherwise, without the prior, written consent of the
copyright holder and publisher. This book is for informational and entertainment purposes only and the author and publisher will not
be held responsible for the misuse of information contain herein, whether deliberate or incidental.

Much research, from a variety of sources, has gone into the compilation of this material. To the best knowledge of the author and
publisher, the material contained herein is factually correct. Neither the publisher, nor author will be held responsible for any
inaccuracies.



 24 Australian Monsters

The lives and deadly deeds of 24 of Australia’s most depraved serial killers,
including:

William MacDonald: Serial slasher who terrorized Sydney and was at the
center of the bizarre “Case of the Walking Corpse.”

Paul Denyer: Sexually obsessed young man who hacked three women to death
in Frankston, Victoria.

Caroline Grills: “Aunty Thally” routinely killed members of her family, adding
rat poison to the cakes and cookies she baked for them.

David and Catherine Birnie: Depraved couple who kidnapped, sexually
tortured and murdered four young women in and around Perth, Western
Australia.

Matthew James Harris: Hulking killer who took out his frustrations on three
innocent victims, all of them elderly or disabled.

John Lynch: An ex-convict and sometime bushranger, Lynch killed anyone who
got in his way, using his trusty axe for the purpose.

John Justin Bunting: Australia’s most prolific serial killer. Bunting
recruited a band of willing accomplices to help him commit a series of
horrific torture slayings.

Francis Knorr: One of only four women to be hanged in Victoria, Francis
Knorr was a baby farmer believed to have killed upwards of 18 infants.

Eric Edgar Cooke: The “Night Caller” terrorized Perth, Western Australia
during the sixties, claiming eight victims.

John Coombes: He was described as having a “frightening predilection for
homicide,” and yet two separate parole boards set him free to kill again.

Leonard John Fraser: Serial killer who raped and strangled at least four female
victims, including a nine-year-old girl.

Paul Steven Haigh: People who crossed Haigh’s path were invariably consigned
to a horrific death.

John Wayne Glover: A repulsive sex fiend who preyed on elderly women in
Sydney’s Mosman suburb, battering at least 6 victims to death.

Kathleen Folbigg: Murderous mother who sent four of her infant children to an
early grave.

Archibald McCafferty: A psychotic killer who believed that the voice of his
dead baby son was instructing him to kill.

Edward Leonski: American G.I. who used the nightly “Brown-outs” during
WWII to prowl the streets of Melbourne hunting for lone women.

Bevan von Einem: Gay torture slayer convicted of one murder and suspected of
at least four more. But was he part of a sinister paedophile murder gang?

John and Sarah Makin:This vile baby farming couple left a trail of tiny
corpses in their wake.

Peter Dupas: Vicious killer who was convicted of slashing and stabbing three
women to death. Suspected of at least three more murders.

Arnold Sodeman: The “Schoolgirl Killer” murdered four adolescent victims,
raping and then strangling them to death.

Martha Needle: A prolific poisoner who claimed five victims, including her
husband and infant children.

Christopher Worrell and James Miller: Gay lovers Worrell and Miller
abducted and murdered seven women in and around Adelaide.

James Ryan O'Neill: Convicted on only one charge but believed by police to be
Australia’s most prolific child killer.

Ivan Milat: Arguably Australia’s most notorious serial killer, Milat was
convicted of the rape, torture and murder of seven backpackers.
 William MacDonald
The Mutilator

During the early 1960s a terrifying serial killer was loose on the streets of
Sydney, Australia. The fiend lured his victims into public parks and toilets, then
stabbed them to death in a series of frenzied attacks. He’d then carve up the
corpse in such horrific fashion that it earned him the epithet, “The Mutilator.”

The killer who would eventually hold Sydney in a grip of terror was not the
raving monster that most imagined but a deeply insecure young man named
William MacDonald. MacDonald (birth name Allan Ginsberg) had been born in
Liverpool, England in 1926, the middle of three children. He grew up to be a
shy, friendless boy who was prone to disappear for long walks in the middle of
the night. On more than one occasion his mother had to call the local
constabulary to search for him. Concerned by his behavior, she took him to a
psychiatrist who diagnosed the boy as schizophrenic.

Despite this diagnosis, Ginsburg was accepted for military service in 1943, when
he was 17. He was posted to the Lancashire Fusiliers and initially seemed to
adapt well to military discipline. Then an incident occurred that would throw his
life into turmoil. While taking cover in an air-raid shelter during a bombardment,
he was raped by one of his corporals.

Ginsburg was disgusted by what had happened to him. But as he looked back on
the incident, he was astonished to find that he had actually enjoyed the sexual
experience. He concluded that he must be gay, but that realization left him in
even greater turmoil, resulting in him being confined to an asylum after his
discharge from the military.

Released after six months, Ginsberg decided that the best way to end his torment
was to accept his homosexuality. He began soliciting men in bars and public
toilets. That, of course, opened him up to other problems. He was beaten up on a
number of occasions, suffered taunts from workmates and was dismissed from
several jobs. He also found no relief from the psychiatric professionals he
consulted.

Eventually, in 1949, he resolved to make a fresh start and immigrated to Canada.
He spent six apparently unremarkable years there before moving to Australia in
1955. Shortly after his arrival, he changed his name by deed poll to William
MacDonald.

William McDonald’s new life did not get off to the best start, when he was
arrested for soliciting an undercover detective in a public toilet. And his old
problems continued to haunt him. He lost several jobs when he was outed as a
homosexual; his workmates taunted him as a “poofter”; on at least one occasion
they beat him up. It led to him becoming increasingly paranoid. Increasingly, he
also began to entertain revenge fantasies.

The rage that had been building inside William MacDonald eventually exploded
in 1960, while he was living in Brisbane. MacDonald had befriended 55-year-old
Amos Hurst and the two had spent the day visiting several bars before ending up
back at Hurst’s apartment. They continued drinking until Hurst eventually
passed out. Then, for no apparent reason, MacDonald placed his hands on
Hurst’s throat and began squeezing. He didn’t let up until Hurst was dead.

Over the days that followed, MacDonald lived in terror of the police knocking
on his door. He scanned the papers for news of the murder for five days,
eventually finding an obituary that stated Amos Hurst had died of a heart attack.

MacDonald was stunned at the realization he’d gotten away with murder. He
was also surprised that recalling the incident filled him with excitement rather
than revulsion. After years of enduring taunts and beatings he’d finally struck
back and it felt good. Not long after, he bought himself a hunting knife and
began cruising the bars and low-rent hotels of Brisbane’s underbelly, searching
for another victim. However, on each occasion that he had a potential victim in
his grasp, he found he couldn’t go through with it.

In January 1961, MacDonald moved to Sydney and found work with the Postal
Department under the assumed name of Alan Edward Brennan. He was soon
fully immersed in the city’s clandestine gay scene, a regular at the parks and
public toilets where Sydney’s homosexuals were known to meet. And it wasn’t
long before the urge to kill began nagging at him.

On Saturday, June 4, 1961, MacDonald was in the Sydney suburb of
Darlinghurst when he struck up a conversation with a 41-year-old vagrant named
Alfred Greenfield. He offered Greenfield a sip from his bottle, then lured the
man to the nearby Domain Baths (a public swimming pool) with the promise of
more booze. Once there he retrieved a bag containing several bottles of beer.

He and Greenfield found a secluded spot and began drinking, MacDonald
ensuring that his partner consumed most of the alcohol. Then, after Greenfield
passed out, MacDonald rummaged in his bag and produced a plastic raincoat,
which he slipped on. He then sat astride Greenfield and withdrew a knife from
his sheath, bringing it swiftly down into the man’s throat, then burying the blade
again and again in Greenfield’s head and neck. The ferocity of the attack was
such that Greenfield died without regaining consciousness.

But MacDonald wasn’t done yet. He pulled down Greenfield’s trousers and
sliced off his genitals, carrying them away from the scene. Later he’d dispose of
them in Sydney harbor.

MacDonald was covered in blood after the brutal attack, but the raincoat had
done its job. He simply slipped it off, stuffed it in his bag and walked home.

The Sydney press carried blanket coverage of the murder the following day,
although some of the more gruesome details were withheld. Already the papers
had coined a name for the killer. They called him, “The Mutilator.”

Six months passed and despite the brutality of the Greenfield murder “The
Mutilator” had been all but forgotten by the public. Then, on Saturday,
November 21, 1961, he offered a rude reminder of his existence.

That evening, MacDonald was walking along South Dowling Street, East
Sydney when he encountered 41-year-old Ernest William Cobbin. Cobbin
appeared drunk but Macdonald struck up a conversation with him and lured him
to the public toilets at Moore Park where they sat for a while drinking beer.
Cobbin made no comment when his new friend pulled a raincoat from his bag
and put it on. Then, as Cobbin sat on the toilet seat, MacDonald brought up his
knife in an uppercut motion, severing his victim’s jugular vein. With blood
spurting from his throat, Cobbin tried to get up, but MacDonald kept hacking at
him, continuing the attack even after Cobbin lay motionless on the floor. He then
carried out his signature mutilation, severing the man’s penis and scrotum and
carrying them away with him.

The following day the Sydney newspapers carried the blaring headline:
MUTILATOR STRIKES AGAIN.

The sheer brutality of the murders caused panic in the city. People stayed off the
streets at night, barricading themselves in their homes. The police meanwhile
staked out parks and public toilets, many of them disguised as tramps, in the
hope of luring the killer into the open. It didn’t work.

As the months passed, the police had to concede that they had no leads. All they
could do was wait and hope. Wait for a break and hope that it came before The
Mutilator struck again. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

On the drizzly night of Saturday, March 31, 1962, MacDonald sat at the bar of
the Oxford Hotel in Darlinghurst. Not just drinking, but watching. Another
patron had caught his eye, and when Frank McLean staggered from the bar at
around 10 p.m., MacDonald followed.

He caught up with McLean on Bourke Street, struck up a conversation and
suggested they go for a drink. McLean agreed, but as they rounded the corner
into darkness, MacDonald attacked, thrusting a knife into McLean’s throat.

McLean was much bigger than MacDonald and he tried to fight back. But in his
inebriated state he was no match for the frenzied Mutilator. Blow after blow
rained down, eventually dropping McLean to the ground. Then MacDonald was
on him, slashing and stabbing. With McLean subdued, he dragged him further
into the shadows, pulled down his pants and severed his genitals.

Frank McLean was still alive when he was found minutes later, but succumbed
soon after. By then, the Mutilator was long gone.

The latest murder threw the city into a virtual sense of siege and placed the
police department under immense pressure. They worked every avenue, setting
up a dedicated Mutilator task force, exploring the possibility that the killer might
be a deranged surgeon, raiding homeless shelters, even consulting with
clairvoyants and a self-proclaimed witch. It got them nowhere.

In the meanwhile, William MacDonald was dealing with a raft of personal
problems. First, he had an argument with his landlord and was told to vacate his
apartment. Just days later, he was fired from his postal job.

He solved both problems by buying a small business (a combined sandwich shop
and general dealer) in the suburb of Burwood, and moving into the apartment
above the store. This new arrangement suited MacDonald down to the ground,
giving him privacy and independence. Given his newfound freedom, it wasn’t
long before the urge to kill returned.

On Saturday June 6, 1962, MacDonald was at a bar called the Wine Palace when
he met 42-year-old James Hackett. Hackett was a petty criminal, recently
released from prison and down on his luck, so he was happy to accept
MacDonald’s offer of free drinks and a bed for the night.

Back at McDonald’s apartment, the two continued drinking until Hackett passed
out on the floor. The Mutilator then fetched a knife and plunged it into the
sleeping man’s throat. But the blow did not kill Hackett. He fought back,
deflecting the next strike, causing the knife to slice through McDonald’s free
hand. Enraged, the Mutilator unleashed the full fury of his homicidal rage. The
next blow plunged through Hackett’s heart, killing him instantly.

Yet even with his victim dead, MacDonald continued his frenzied attack, until
eventually he fell exhausted to the floor. He then attempted to slice off Hackett’s
genitals but lacked the strength to do so. Incredibly, he fell asleep next to the
corpse, with a pool of blood welling around him.

MacDonald awoke the next morning in a state of panic. He’d never had to deal
with the disposal of a corpse before and didn’t know what to do. Forcing himself
to calm down, he washed and then went to a local hospital to have his hand
attended to. He claimed that he’d cut it in an accident at his store.

When he returned to his apartment later, he cleaned up the blood. However, he
was unable to get some of the stains off. Some of the blood had even seeped
through the floorboards and spattered to the shop floor below. And he still had to
deal with the body. Eventually, he decided to hide Hackett in the basement,
concealed in a darkened alcove.

The cleaning up took MacDonald the best part of the day. When it was done, he
began panicking again. He was sure that the police would come looking for
Hackett. They’d taken a taxi from the bar to his shop. Would the cabbie have
remembered them? He wasn’t about to wait around to find out. That same night
he shut up shop and boarded a train for Brisbane.

MacDonald laid low in Brisbane over the next weeks. Back in Sydney
meanwhile, his neighbors began to notice a putrefying stench coming from his
shop and reported it to the Health Department. They in turn called the police,
who broke into the store and found the badly decomposed corpse.

Hackett had been of about the same age and build as MacDonald, and it was
therefore assumed that the unidentifiable corpse was that of the shop owner.
Despite strong evidence to the contrary, the death was ruled an accident and the
corpse was buried under the name Alan Edward Brennan. Some of “Brennan’s”
former workmates at the Post Office even clubbed together for a wreath and a
few of them attended the funeral.

MacDonald, meanwhile, had moved from Brisbane to New Zealand. He was
unaware of the events in Sydney and of the lifeline that had been thrown to him.
Had he known, he’d have been able to keep his head down and would have
gotten away with five brutal murders.

But MacDonald didn’t keep his head down. While in New Zealand his homicidal
urges again began to stir. However, for some reason, he felt that he had to be
back in Sydney to kill again and he therefore made the fateful decision to return.

A short while after his arrival back in Australia, he was walking along George
Street in central Sydney when he bumped into John McCarthy, one of his former
workmates. McCarthy was stunned.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” he told MacDonald.

“What do you mean?” a perplexed MacDonald asked.

“They found your body under the shop in Burwood,” McCarthy replied. “I was
at your funeral.”

In that moment, it dawned on MacDonald what had happened. Before McCarthy
could say another word, he turned and ran down the street. A few hours later, he
was on the train to Melbourne.

John McCarthy, meanwhile, had gone to the police to report the strange
encounter. He was sent away with a warning not to waste police time. When he
returned the following day the police again refused to believe him. Frustrated,
McCarthy took the story to a reporter at the Daily Mirror, who ran it the next day
under the headline, “THE CASE OF THE WALKING CORPSE.”

The publicity created by the newspaper article was immense, placing pressure on
the Sydney police to re-open the case. The body of “Alan Edward Brennan” was
exhumed and this time correctly identified as Patrick Joseph Hackett. Now the
hunt was on for his killer.

MacDonald was eventually traced to Melbourne, where he’d dyed his hair,
grown a moustache and was working under an assumed name as a railway
porter. Yet the police still didn’t know who they’d captured until he confessed to
being the “Sydney Mutilator,” providing graphic details of his horrendous
crimes.

William MacDonald went on trial in September 1963. Charged with four counts
of murder, he pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity. The jury disagreed,
finding him sane and guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to life in prison.

At the time of writing, William MacDonald, now in his late 80’s is still an
inmate at the Long Bay Correctional Centre. He is one of Australia’s longest
serving prisoners, but insists that he has no desire to be released.
 Paul Denyer
The Frankston Serial Killer

Paul Charles Denyer was born in Sydney, New South Wales on April 14, 1972.
His parents, Anthony and Maureen, had emigrated from England in 1965, and
Paul was the third of their six children, five boys and a girl. The family
eventually settled in Campbelltown near Sydney.

There was nothing unusual about Paul’s childhood, save for the fact that he once
rolled off a bench as an infant and banged his head. The incident would become
a bit of an in-joke in the Denyer family. Whenever Paul did something odd, one
of the family would usually comment, “that’s because you fell on your head as a
baby.”

Denyer was an introverted child who found it difficult to mix with his peers.
However, by the time he reached primary school, he appeared to have overcome
his social awkwardness and was just a normal, happy kid, secure in his
surroundings. Then an event occurred that would disrupt his settled life. His
father accepted a job in Frankston, Victoria and the family had to move. None of
the Denyer children was particularly happy about the upheaval, but Paul took it
particularly hard. He retreated back into his shell and became a loner. To make
matters worse, the hulking boy had begun to put on weight, making him a target
for schoolyard taunts.

It was around this time that Denyer started showing signs of his abnormal
psychology. First he started mutilating his sisters’ teddy bears with one of his
homemade knives. Then he turned his attention to living creatures and killed and
mutilated the family kitten, hanging its slaughtered corpse in a tree.

Just before his thirteenth birthday, Denyer was charged with stealing a car and
was released with a warning. Two months later he was charged with making a
false report to the fire brigade. At age 15, he was arrested for assault, after
forcing another boy to masturbate in front of a group of children.

By 1992, Denyer had sprouted to a height of over 6-foot and was so obese that
his colleagues at the Safeway’s Supermarket where he worked called him John
Candy, after the rotund comedic actor. Despite this, he managed to attract the
attention of a co-worker, Sharon Johnson, and the two moved in together. A short
while later, Denyer was fired from Safeway after he deliberately knocked down
a woman and a child with a shopping trolley. He next applied to the Victoria
Police Force but was rejected due to his massive bulk. A subsequent job was also
short-lived due to his workplace behavior.

With Sharon now working two jobs to foot the bills, Denyer was left to his own
devices. He filled the time by breaking into apartments, shredding clothes and
trashing mementos. The worst of these crimes was exacted against a couple
named Les and Donna, who Sharon had befriended. After breaking into their
apartment, Denyer slaughtered their cat and her kittens, leaving the poor
creature’s blood and entrails scattered around the apartment. He also ransacked
every drawer, shredding clothes and photographs. The message “Donna You’re
Dead” was written in blood on the walls, furniture was gorged and splintered.
The couple was so traumatized by the ordeal that they moved out of the
apartment that same night, never to return.

As horrific as that crime was, Paul Denyer was about to take things to a new
level. On Saturday, June 12, 1993, the partially clothed body of 18-year-old
Elizabeth Stevens was found in a park in Langwarrin, just a short drive from
Frankston. Her throat had been cut, and there were six deep knife wounds to her
chest. In addition, four vertical cuts ran from her breast to her navel and four
horizontal cuts had been inflicted forming a macabre crisscross pattern on her
abdomen. The victim had also suffered a beating, resulting in a broken nose. Her
bra was pulled up around her neck, but there was no evidence of sexual assault,
leaving the police baffled as to the motive for the crime.

A massive manhunt was launched, but the police had not yet made any progress
when, on July 8, 1993, Denyer struck again, attacking two women in a single
night. The first victim was 41-year-old bank clerk Roszsa Toth, who put up such
a fight that Denyer eventually broke off the attack and fled. But Toth’s bravery
spelled disaster for another woman. Frustrated at the failed attack, Denyer went
looking for another victim.

The one he found was 22-year-old Debbie Fream, who had given birth to her
first child just 12 days earlier. Debbie went out to buy milk for the baby and
never returned. Her body was found in a field in nearby Carrum Downs four
days later. She had suffered 24 stab wounds to her neck, head and chest. She had
also been strangled, but as in the Elizabeth Stevens murder, there was no sign of
sexual assault.

This latest murder sent shock waves through Frankston and its surrounding
communities. It was now clear that there was a madman on the streets, attacking
and killing women at random. The police meanwhile, upped their patrols and set
up a dedicated line to process tips from the public. Every lead, no matter how
trivial was followed up. It did no good.

On the afternoon of July 30, 17-year-old Natalie Russell went missing while
riding her bike home from school. Eight hours later, her body was found in
bushes near the Peninsula and Long Island Golf clubs. She had been stabbed
repeatedly in the face and neck, the attack carried out with even more ferocity
than the previous two. This time, however, the killer had left a clue. A sliver of
skin found on the victim’s throat was believed to have come from the killer.
Police believed he had accidently sliced it from his own finger while carrying
out the frenzied attack.

That, of course, would help the police to nail the perpetrator once they had him
in custody. But they still had to catch him. Then an even more promising lead
emerged. A yellow Toyota Corona had been spotted by a police officer in the
vicinity of the crime scene at the time the murder was believed to have occurred.
The car had no plates, so the officer jotted down the number from its license
disc. Running that number through the system, delivered a name. The car was
registered to Paul Charles Denyer.

The first thing detectives noticed when they called at Denyer’s home, was that
his hands were cut in several places. Denyer cheerily answered their questions,
admitting to being in the vicinity of the crime scene, but denying any
involvement in the murder. His explanation for the cuts on his hands, however,
was so weak that the detectives asked him to come down to the station for
further questioning. There he continued to proclaim his innocence until
investigators asked him to submit blood and hair samples for DNA analysis.
Probably realizing by now that the game was up, Denyer then said, “Okay, I
killed them. I killed all three of them.”

Over the hours that followed, Denyer gave a detailed confession to the murders,
describing the gory details so matter-of-factly that even the most seasoned of
investigators was shocked. Asked why he’d killed the women, Denyer said. “I
just hate them.” Asked if he was referring to just the woman he’d killed or to
women in general, he responded, “General.”

Paul Charles Denyer went on trial at the Victoria Supreme Court on December
15, 1993. After entering guilty pleas to all of the charges against him, he was
sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. A
subsequent appeal saw that sentence adjusted to include parole eligibility after
30 years. It means that the Frankston Serial Killer, one of the most vicious
murderers in Australian history, could walk free from prison in 2023.
 Caroline Grills
Aunty Thally

Caroline Grills makes a most unlikely serial killer. For starters, she was 63 years
old at the time of her arrest. Secondly, she was everyone’s favorite aunt, always
visiting with home baked cakes and cookies, always ready to put the kettle on
for a nice cup of tea. Still, people did have a nasty habit of dying when “Aunty
Carrie” was around and a relative eventually got suspicious. After spotting her
slipping some or other substance into his tea, he furtively poured some of the
liquid into a bottle, which he later handed over to the police. It was tested and
found to contain copious amounts of thallium, a substance commonly found in
rat poison during that era.

Caroline Mickelson was born in 1888 at Balmain, Sydney, the daughter of a
laborer named George Mickelson and his wife Mary. At age 20, she married
Richard William Grills who, like her father, was a laborer. The couple would
have five sons and a daughter, although two of the boys died in adolescence.

The Grills lived in a succession of rented houses in the Randwick area until
1948, when Caroline’s father died and she inherited his house in Gladesville. By
then, Carolyn was a short, dumpy woman who wore thick glasses. She was also
closer to her in-laws than to her own family, visiting them often and seldom
arriving without some of her baked goodies.

The first suspicious death occurred in November 1947. Christina Mickelson,
Caroline’s stepmother, was by all accounts a healthy, robust woman, but in the
months leading up to her death, she began displaying some strange symptoms.
First she started losing her hair. Then she developed a nervous tick and started to
complain of loss of vision. Eventually, she lost the power of speech. When death
eventually came it must have felt like a mercy.

Although nobody knew it at the time, Christina Mickelson had displayed the
classic signs of thallium poisoning. In January 1948, Angelina Thomas, an aunt
of Caroline’s husband, displayed similar symptoms and died. Then, in late 1948,
it was the turn of her husband’s brother-in-law, John Lundberg. He was followed
to the grave by a friend of Caroline’s stepmother, another who had consumed
one of Caroline’s confections.

Throughout 1951 and 1952 several family members became ill, all with the now
familiar symptoms. Eveline Lundberg, widow of John, was particularly afflicted,
but it was another relative, John Downey, who first suspected that something
was amiss. It was he who gathered the incriminating evidence and took it to the
police. Investigators then arranged to have the bodies of suspected victims
exhumed and found traces of thallium in two of them. Caroline Grills was
arrested soon after.

At the coroner’s inquest, several family members testified as to how Caroline
always arrived with baked goods and how she always insisted on making the tea.
John Downey described how he’d seen Grills slipping something into the tea and
how he’d saved the liquid and taken it to the police. Eveline Lundberg got up
from her sickbed to testify as to her horrific symptoms.

Given the testimony, it was always likely that Grills would be indicted and so it
proved. She was charged with the murders of Mary Anne Mickelson, 60,
Christina Louisa Adelaide Mickelson, 87, and Angelina Thomas, 84, as well as
the attempted murders of several of her relatives, including Eveline Lundberg.

By the time Caroline Grills went on trial, all of the charges, bar that of attempted
murder against Mrs. Lundberg, had been dropped.

Grills appeared at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney in October 1953,
vigorously protesting her innocence and insisting that the police had pressured
her family into testifying against her. But her behavior in court, particularly her
disconcerting habit of laughing whenever there was a particularly macabre
revelation, suggested otherwise. Perhaps she really was what Senior Crown
Prosecutor Mick Rooney described her as – “a killer who poisoned for sport, for
fun, for the kicks she got out of it, for the hell of it, for the thrill that she and she
alone in the world knew the cause of the victims’ suffering.”

The jury seemed to agree with Rooney’s assessment. They took just 12 minutes
to convict. On 15 October 1953, Grills was found guilty of attempted murder
and sentenced to death.

A subsequent plea to the Court of Criminal Appeal was dismissed, but in April
1954, Grills’ sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the
State Reformatory for Women, where she would spend the last six-and-a-half
years of her life.

Grills was a popular inmate, known affectionately to other inmates as “Aunty
Thally.” There was genuine sadness at the prison when she died on October 6,
1960, as the result of a ruptured ulcer. She remains an enigma in the annals of
Australian crime, her motives unknown. Her crimes did, however, have one
positive effect. Soon after her conviction, the sale of thallium was banned in
Australia.

 David & Catherine Birnie

On the afternoon of November 10, 1986, a half-naked teenaged girl stumbled
into a supermarket in Willagee, Western Australia, sobbing that she had been
abducted and raped. The police were called and immediately rushed to the scene,
where they found a hysterical 16-year-old, clearly traumatized by her ordeal. She
was taken to Palmyra police station, and after being attended by a doctor settled
down enough to tell her extraordinary tale.

She said that she’d been walking near her home in Nedlands the previous
evening, when a man and woman stopped to ask for directions. While she was
talking to them, the man got out of the car holding a large knife. He forced her
into the vehicle and she was then driven to a dilapidated house in Willagee.
There, the couple tore off her clothes and chained her to a bed. The man then
raped her, an action he’d repeat several more times over the course of the night,
each time with the woman watching on impassively.

The following morning, the man left the house and the woman unchained her
and took her to a phone. She was instructed to call her parents, to tell them that
she was okay and was staying with friends. After the call was completed, the
woman left her unattended in order to answer a knock at the front door. Sensing
her chance at freedom, the girl jumped from a bedroom window and escaped.

The police were very interested in the teenager’s story. Over the previous few
weeks they had been investigating the disappearances of four young women
from the streets of Perth. They’d begun to suspect that a serial killer might be at
work. Could this case possibly be connected to the others?

Despite her ordeal, the girl clearly remembered the location of her abductors’
house. She led the police to a rundown bungalow at number 3 Moorhouse Street,
Willagee. No one was home, so detectives staked out the dwelling from a van
parked across the road. They were soon rewarded for their efforts when a slim
woman with long, dark hair approached and slotted a key into the front door. She
was arrested at the scene and later identified as Catherine Margaret Birnie. Her
common law husband, David John Birnie, was picked up at his place of work a
short while later.

At first, the Birnies vigorously denied the girl’s allegations, insisting that she’d
been smoking marijuana with them and that the sex was consensual. However,
under sustained questioning, David Birnie eventually cracked, admitting to
abducting and raping the girl. Then he stunned detectives by also confessing to
four murders.

Catherine Birnie, meanwhile, was hanging tough, sticking to her original story.
However, when she heard of David’s confession, she too began speaking,
eventually agreeing to take detectives to the burial sites of their victims.

That same evening the despicable couple led the Perth police to four unmarked
graves, three of them in Gleneagles National Park near Armadale, a fourth in
Gnangara pine plantation, north of the city. Three of the victims had been
strangled, the other had been brutally stabbed and hacked to death with an axe.

David John Birnie was born in Perth, Australia on February 16, 1951, the eldest
of six children. His family was highly dysfunctional, their living conditions
squalid, the parents both alcoholics, and the children placed in state care on
numerous occasions. Left mainly unsupervised as a child, David attracted
trouble early in life. Convicted on a catalog of felonies and misdemeanors, he
was in and out of reform schools.

The opportunity to change all that came in 1966 when the 15-year-old David was
recommended to Eric Parnham’s stables as an apprentice jockey. The boy
showed early promise, even if his cruel treatment of the horses raised alarm. He
also could not seem to stay out of trouble and after his third arrest for robbery,
Parnham Stables decided to cut their losses. David’s apprenticeship was
terminated and his dream of becoming a jockey was over.

But by now, David had developed a new hobby. He was addicted to
pornography, an obsession that led him to commit his first rape, breaking into a
home and forcing himself on an elderly woman. He was just 16 at the time. After
quitting school, he found work at a motor scrap yard and in his early 20s he
married and fathered a baby girl. However, the union soon floundered due to
domestic violence and David’s extreme sexual demands.

Catherine Birnie (nee Harrison) had endured a similarly difficult childhood. Also
born in 1951, she lost her mother when she was just two years old. Her father
then moved to South Africa, taking Catherine with him. Two years later, he sent
her back to Australia, entrusting her to the custody of her maternal
grandparents.

Catherine first met David Birnie when she was 12 years old, and the two were
involved in a sexual relationship by the time she was 14. They then entered into
a criminal partnership, carrying out a robbery spree, which eventually saw David
sentenced to jail time and Catherine placed on probation. Her family used this
opportunity to convince her to break ties with him, which she did, obtaining a
position as housekeeper to the McLaughlin family. Over time, she became
involved in a relationship with Donald McLaughlin, son of the family, and the
two were married on Catherine’s 21st birthday.

Catherine and Donald would have six children together, but Catherine had never
forgotten David Birnie, and four weeks after the birth of her last child, she
abandoned her family to be with him. She later took the Birnie name by deed
poll and although they were never legally married, she and David lived together
as man and wife.

The Birnie household was far from normal. David Birnie had a veracious sexual
appetite, demanding intercourse as many as six times a day. He was heavily into
kinky sex and had a succession of sexual partners, all of whom Catherine
appears to have tolerated. So devoted was she to her man that when he first
floated the idea of abducting and raping women she was willing to go along.
Whether or not she initially agreed to murder is not known.

The first killing took place on October 6, 1986. On that day, Birnie lured 22-
year-old student Mary Neilson to his home with the promise of selling her some
cheap tires. Once there, Mary was forced into the house at knifepoint, bound,
gagged and chained to a bed. Birnie then repeatedly raped her, while Catherine
watched.

That same night, the couple drove Mary to the Gleneagles National Park where
Birnie again raped her. He then pulled a nylon cord around her neck and
strangled her, using a tree branch to form a garrote. After Mary was dead, Birnie
stabbed her in the chest (to release the gases as the body decomposed, he told
Catherine). Mary was then consigned to a shallow grave, before the depraved
couple drove home.

The ease with which the first murder had been committed encouraged Birnie to
do it again. A fortnight later, he and Catherine abducted 15-year-old Susannah
Candy as she hitchhiked along the Stirling Highway in Claremont. Susannah was
taken back to their Willagee home where she was gagged, chained to the bed and
raped. This time Catherine Birnie participated in the sexual assault.

Their lust sated, Birnie tried to strangle the girl. But she struggled so vigorously
that he was persuaded to abandon his efforts. He then forced sleeping pills down
her throat and waited until she passed out. Then he handed the rope to Catherine
and insisted that she strangle Susannah in order to prove her love for him.
Catherine willingly obliged. Like Mary Neilson, Susannah Candy was buried in
the State Forest.

On November 1, the Birnies were out trolling again when they came upon 31-
year-old Noelene Patterson, stranded at the side of the highway after her car ran
out of gas. Noelene was glad to accept a ride from the friendly couple. Once
inside the car, a knife was held to her throat, and she was forcibly taken back to
Moorhouse Street.

Following the same M.O. as in the previous crimes, Birnie gagged and chained
the unfortunate woman and then subjected her to a series of sexual assaults.
Unlike with the other victims, though, he did not kill her immediately, instead
holding her captive over the next three days.

David was clearly taken with Noelene and a jealous Catherine eventually gave
him an ultimatum. Either he killed Noelene, or she would do it herself. A short
while later Birnie drugged and then strangled Noelene Patterson. Her body
joined the others at Gleneagles.

On November 15, 21-year-old Denise Brown was waiting for a bus outside the
Stoned Crow Wine House in Fremantle when the Birnies stopped and offered her
a lift. She ended up being forced back to Moorhouse Street, where she was
gagged, chained and raped.

The following afternoon Denise was drugged and then driven to the Wanneroo
pine plantation, where Birnie raped her. He then evacuated a shallow grave and
dragged Denise into it. His lust still not sated, he penetrated her again as she lay
in the shallow grave, this time plunging a knife into her neck while he was
raping her. Presuming that the girl was dead, he and Catherine started covering
her with dirt. While they were doing so, Denise sat up in the grave, whereupon
Birnie struck her twice on the head with an axe. Their most grisly murder to date
duly accomplished, the sickening duo drove home.

The Birnies had now killed four women in the space of just 39 days. And they
would undoubtedly have continued had the brave teenager not escaped their
clutches. Now they were in custody and it was up to the courts to ensure they
were never at liberty to kill again.

David Birnie made that easy for them, pleading guilty to four counts of murder
and one count each of abduction and rape. He was sentenced to four consecutive
terms of life imprisonment.

Birnie’s first posting was to the maximum security Fremantle prison where, after
suffering a number of vicious beatings at the hands of fellow inmates, he was
placed in solitary confinement for his own protection. He was found dead in his
cell at Casuarina Prison on October 7, 2005. He had committed suicide by
hanging.

Catherine Birnie, meanwhile, had been sentenced to the same term as her lover
and was serving her time at Bandyup Women's Prison. A petition for early
release was refused in 2007. In 2010, the Attorney General revoked her right to
future parole applications, meaning she will spend the rest of her days behind
bars.
 Matthew James Harris

Matthew James Harris was an angry man, angry that he was adopted, angry that
his life hadn’t turn out the way he would have preferred, angry at the world in
general. And when Harris was angry, he found only one way to relieve his
symptoms. He strangled people.

Harris was born in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales on June 30, 1998. Given up
for adoption as an infant, he was taken in by the Harris family when he was 10
months old. He was by all accounts a normal child until the age of ten, when he
learned that he was adopted. After that, his behavior became increasingly
rebellious and by his early teens he was living on the streets and working as a
male prostitute. Several attempts to settle him with foster parents failed, as he
ran away from any home he was placed in.

In 1991, Harris was sentenced to two-and-a-half years for the armed robbery of
one of his sex customers. While serving that sentence he was introduced to
Elaine de Jong, a volunteer with the Adoption Triangle Organization. The two
struck up a friendship and after his release De Jong allowed Harris to stay at her
home, as she tried to wean him off his heroin addiction. She also helped him to
track down his birth mother, but the woman wanted nothing to do with him,
something that distressed Harris greatly and drove him further down the path of
drug addiction.

But other than his drug usage, Harris remained on the straight and narrow while
living with De Jong. That was all to change after he moved into his own
apartment.

On 20 June 1998, Harris and an accomplice, Kenneth Scott Frazier, arrived at the
home of Tran Nguyen on Nordlingen Drive, Wagga Wagga. Nguyen was alone
in the house with her three young children when the men knocked at the door
and demanded entry, saying they were police officers. Once inside, Harris and
Frazier produced large kitchen knives and menaced Nguyen, forcing her and her
children into the lounge. There, they demanded money and were given $58, all
of the cash that Nguyen had. Dissatisfied with their take, Harris continued to
threaten his terrified captives while Frazier ransacked the house. Eventually they
pulled Nguyen’s telephone from the wall and fled, leaving their victims
traumatized but unharmed.

The haul from this rather crude robbery was soon splurged on alcohol. But
Harris took something else away from the crime, a feeling of immense power,
gained from the terror he’d instilled in Nguyen and her three young children. It
was a feeling he yearned to experience again. That yearning would cost the lives
of three innocent people.

The first to die was Peter Wennerbom, the 62-year-old brother of Harris’ friend
and mentor, Elaine de Jong. Wennerbom was partially disabled, having recently
suffered a stroke. On October 1, 1998, Harris arrived at Wennerbom’s home and
asked to be let in, saying he wanted a glass of water. Once inside, he followed
Wennerbom to the kitchen, where he suddenly attacked, grabbing his disabled
victim by the neck and throttling him to death. The body would lay undiscovered
until October 4, when it was found by a neighbor. Harris later attended his
victim’s funeral.

Harris waited less than three weeks before committing his next murder. The
victim was Yvonne Ford, a 33-year-old who Harris befriended and later started a
sexual relationship with. Ford suffered from mild mental retardation, but she was
independent and able to care for herself. She also volunteered at a local dog
shelter.

On October 18, Harris paid Ford a visit and the two of them had sex. Later,
while they were having a bath together, he grabbed her by the throat and
strangled her, forcing her head under the water and holding it there. After his
arrest, Harris would be unable to explain his motive for the murder. “It could
have been anybody,” he said. “She was just unlucky.”

Yvonne Ford’s death was at first recorded as an accidental drowning, leaving
Harris free to kill again. He took that opportunity on November 3, when he
strangled his neighbor, Ronald Galvin. That same evening, Harris showed up at
Elaine De Jong’s home and asked if he could borrow her car. He used the vehicle
to move Galvin’s corpse, dumping it beside a remote road near Uranquinty,
where it was discovered on December 1.

As he lived next door to Ronald Galvin, Harris was interviewed in the course of
the police investigation. He seemed keen to co-operate, saying that he’d last seen
Galvin on the evening of Melbourne Cup day. According to Harris, Galvin had
been sitting on the stairway with several people, one of whom he described as “a
bloke I've never seen before.”

Harris was adamant that he knew nothing more about Galvin’s murder. However,
his demeanor during the interview caused suspicion and the officers asked him
to come down to Sydney Central Police Station for further questioning. During
the course of that interview, Harris admitted that he’d strangled Galvin. Then he
nonchalantly added that he’d also murdered Peter Wennerbom and Yvonne Ford.
Asked why he’d committed the murders, Harris shrugged. “I think it was just of
lot of anger,” he said. “I was getting rid of it and it was being projected onto
them.”

Matthew James Harris went on trial at the New South Wales Supreme Court on
December 3, 1999. He entered guilty pleas to three counts of murder and was
sentenced to three concurrent terms of 40 years in prison. The possibility of
parole was not excluded. Harris becomes eligible in November 2023.
 John Lynch
The Berrima Axe Murderer

On the morning of February 19, 1841, Hugh Tinney, a drover, was on his way to
Sydney with a team of bullocks. He had just stopped at the Ironstone Bridge,
outside the town of Berrima, when he noticed a dingo rummaging around in the
brush. Curious as to what the animal was after, Tinney scooted down the
embankment to investigate. He soon wished he hadn’t. The bushes concealed the
decomposing body of a large man, the back of his head caved in by a heavy,
blunt instrument.

The local constable was called and quickly identified the victim as a farmhand
named Kearns Landregan. Landregan had last been seen eating dinner at the
Woolpack Inn, in the company of a local farmer named John Dunleavy.
Dunleavy had recently bought a farm from the Mulligan family, who had
departed the district in haste, without letting anyone know where they were
going.

The mysterious Mr. Dunleavy, as it turned out, was actually a man named John
Lynch. Standing at just five-foot-three, Lynch seemed hardly able to have
overcome a large and powerful man like Landregan, a point he was quick to
make to the police. He steadfastly denied having anything to do with the murder.
He and Landregan had parted amicably after enjoying a pleasant meal together,
he insisted. Nonetheless, the evidence against him was strong. On February 21,
1841, John Lynch was charged with murder.

It took a year before the case came to court on March 21, 1842, and during that
time, Lynch never wavered in his claims of innocence. The jury, however,
disagreed, finding Lynch guilty. The presiding judge, Sir James Dowling, then
sentenced him to death, an outcome that Lynch accepted with surprising
fortitude. He left the courtroom with a smile on his face and assured his jailers
that he would not go to the gallows. “The Lord God will redeem me,” he
insisted.

John Lynch’s confidence in divine intervention lasted only as long as it took for
his appeal to be rejected and an execution date to be set. When it became
abundantly clear that he would be put to death, he asked for a priest and the local
magistrate to be brought to his cell, to witness his full confession. He had some
tale to tell.

John Lynch had arrived in Australia in 1832 aboard the convict ship Dunregon
Castle, having been sentenced to deportation for theft in County Cavan, Ireland.
He started life in his new country as a farm laborer, but soon tired of that
backbreaking occupation and returned to a life of crime. After joining up with a
criminal gang, he became a bushranger, robbing and stealing throughout the
district.

In 1835, he was arrested along with two of his gang for the murder of a man
named Tom Smith. Lynch confessed to the murder, but the jury chose to acquit
him while finding his two accomplices guilty. They were hanged, while Lynch
walked free. Thereafter, Lynch started to believe that God was watching over
him and giving approval to his criminal activities.

Shortly after his release, Lynch went to a farm where he’d once worked, near
Oldbury. There he stole a team of eight bullocks, intending to drive them to
market at Sydney and sell them. But his plans changed after he met a fellow
Irishman named Ireland on route. Ireland was traveling with an Aboriginal boy,
taking a wagonload of wheat, bacon and other produce to Sydney for his
employer, Thomas Cowper.

Lynch decided almost immediately to kill Ireland and steal his load, which he
figured would fetch a much better price than the bullocks. He therefore
suggested that they travel together and Ireland agreed. On the first night of their
journey, Lynch prayed to God, asking what he should do. According to him, God
gave his blessing to the forthcoming massacre.

The following morning Lynch asked the boy to help him round up his cattle. The
lad was happy to oblige but as soon as they were out of sight of the camp, Lynch
struck him on the back of the head with an axe, killing him instantly. He then
returned to the camp, where Ireland was making breakfast. While Ireland’s back
was turned, Lynch crept up behind him and struck a single killing blow. He then
sat down and enjoyed the breakfast that Ireland had been preparing.

After concealing the bodies in a cleft between two rocks, Lynch pointed his team
of bullocks in the direction of Berrima and set them loose. He then took
possession of Ireland’s team and the farm produce they were carrying. Lynch
remained two more days at the camp during which he was joined by two men,
named Lagge and Lee, who were in charge of a team of horses. The trio agreed
to travel on together, but as they neared Liverpool, they were approached by a
rather irate man on horseback. The man was Thomas Cowper, and he wanted to
know why Lynch was driving his team of bullocks and pulling his wagon of
produce.

Lynch had to think fast. And he did. He said that he’d met Ireland on the trail but
that had Ireland become ill and had then begged him to bring the goods to
market. He must have told a convincing tale because Cowper believed him, even
accepting Lynch’s offer to take the goods the rest of the way for him. In the
meanwhile, Cowper rode back into the bush to search for his ailing employee.
Lynch provided directions and, of course, they were wrong.

Lynch took his narrow escape as another sign from God, but he knew that he had
to move fast. Driving the team hard, he reached Sydney two days ahead of
schedule. There he employed a local hood to sell the produce for him and then
headed out of town with cash laden pockets. He had another close call when a
policeman stopped to question him about the stolen goods. Seemingly satisfied
by his answers, the constable allowed him to go on his way.

Lynch eventually reached Razorback Mountain, close to the spot where he had
killed Ireland and the boy. There, he met a man named Frazer, who was traveling
with his teenaged son, driving a fine looking team of horses. Lynch took an
immediate fancy to the team and decided there and then to kill the Frazers.

After traveling with his intended victims to a campsite at Cordeaux Flat, Lynch
made his move. First he lured the younger Frazer into the bush on the pretext of
rounding up the horses. The lad was killed by a blow to the back of the head.
Lynch then returned to the camp and killed the elder Frazer, striking him with an
axe while his back was turned.

With the team of horses now in his possession, Lynch headed back to Berrima,
where he had a score to settle with a farmer named Mulligan. The last time
they’d met, Lynch and Mulligan had squabbled over the price of some stolen
goods and Lynch had been harboring a grudge ever since.

Arriving at the Mulligan homestead, Lynch found only Mrs. Mulligan and her
daughter at home. He therefore retired to the nearby Black Horse Hotel,
returning later with a bottle of rum. Mulligan had in the meanwhile returned with
his teenaged son. He greeted Lynch like an old friend.

Goblets of rum were consumed and then Lynch and Mulligan got to haggling
over the price of the goods Lynch had sold him. Lynch wanted £30. Mulligan
was prepared to pay only £9. Back and forth they went without resolution, while
Lynch became angrier by the minute. He wanted to conclude the transaction and
be on his way.

It was Mrs. Mulligan who unwittingly broke the impasse, when she asked her
son, Johnny, to go into the woods to gather firewood. Lynch agreed to help the
boy, saying he needed to clear his head after drinking too much rum. Lynch’s
head was, however, clear enough. He had by now decided how he was going to
finish his business with Mulligan.

As soon as the trees provided enough cover, he struck Johnny Mulligan with his
axe, killing the boy instantly. He then returned to the house, where he murdered
both Mr. and Mrs. Mulligan. Finally, he raped and murdered the Mulligans’ 14-
year-old daughter, dispatching the terrified girl with the assurance that the world
was full of wickedness and she was better off dead.

Lynch disposed of the Mulligan family’s bodies in a huge funeral pyre. He then
took over their farm and possessions, legitimizing the transaction by posting an
advertisement in the Sydney Gazette under the name Dunleavy. He said that he
had bought the farm from Mulligan, adding that the family had moved away
from the region and that he would not be held responsible for their debts.

Over the six months that followed, Lynch lived an apparently upstanding life as
a respectable farmer, and had he continued to do so, he might well have got
away with multiple murder, fraud and robbery. However, his criminal instincts
soon resurfaced.

The murder of Kearns Landregan is atypical of the crimes committed by Lynch
in that he had nothing to gain from the man’s death. According to Lynch, he met
Landregan on his way back from Sydney and offered him a job doing some
fencing on his farm. During the course of their journey, Landregan confessed to
Lynch that he’d once been arrested for stealing a bundle of clothes.

“After I heard that, I was determined to get rid of him,” Lynch said, conveniently
forgetting his own criminal past. It was as though he was taking his new persona
as John Dunleavy too seriously and now wanted to rid the world of criminals.

After they dined together at the Woolpack Inn, Lynch and Landregan drove to
the Ironside Bridge where they planned to set up camp for the night. As
Landregan sat on a log by the fireside, Lynch snuck up behind him and cracked
his skull with his axe. But unlike Lynch’s other victims, the huge man did not die
with the first blow. Lynch had to hit him three times more before he finally lay
still. Lynch then went through his pockets and took £40 before departing the
scene. It was a murder that would ultimately cost him his life.

John Lynch was hanged at Berrima Jail on April 22, 1842. His tally of nine
victims is equal to John Justin Bunting’s as the most by an Australian killer.
Bunting, however, worked with various accomplices. Lynch’s murder spree was
all his own work.
 John Justin Bunting
The Snowtown Murders

John Justin Bunting, the man who would go on to become Australia’s worst
multiple murderer, was born in Inala, Queensland on September 4, 1966. As a
child, he displayed at least one characteristic of the fledgling serial killer. He
took pleasure in hurting animals. A favorite pastime of his was dropping insects
and other small creatures into a vat of acid.

During his teenage years the undersized, near-sighted and somewhat pudgy
Bunting became a neo-Nazi, buying completely into the warped ideology of that
movement. As he reached adulthood, his hatred solidified into a loathing of
gays, pedophiles, drug addicts and other “wasters” in society. By the time he
moved to Salisbury North in 1991, that loathing was primed to explode into a
campaign of torture and murder.

Bunting’s first known victim was Clinton Trezise, a 22-year-old who he
suspected of being a pedophile. Where exactly this suspicion arose from is
unknown, but Bunting seems to have acted upon the flimsiest of evidence, upon
any rumor or whiff of scandal.

Luring Trezise to his home on the pretext of a social visit, he immediately began
accusing the man of molesting children. Trezise’s protestations of innocence fell
on deaf ears. Bunting bludgeoned him to death with a spade, then buried him in
a shallow grave. The body would remain undiscovered until August 16, 1994.

Three years passed before Bunting struck again. By now he’d indoctrinated the
powerfully built Robert Wagner into his twisted worldview and the duo zeroed
in their deadly attention on a mentally disabled man named Ray Davies.

Davies lived in a caravan on the property of Bunting’s friend, Suzanne Allen.
His “crime” was that Allen suspected him of making sexual advances towards
her grandsons. Davies was murdered in December 1995, his body buried in the
backyard of Bunting’s home.

Two months after Davies’ death, Suzanne Allen disappeared. Her decomposed
corpse would later be discovered in the same grave as Davies, the man she’d
accused of being a pedophile. In the interim, Davis and Allen continued
receiving pension and benefit checks, which Bunting gladly cashed. He would
continue to do so up until his eventual arrest.

Bunting had now gotten away with three murders and in the manner of serial
killers the world over he must have felt invincible. With his willing accomplice
Wagner now in tow, he concocted a plan, a hit list of sorts, which he fashioned
into schematic of all the people he intended killing. Bunting called this his “rock
spider wall,” and it consisted of a collage of Post-it notes, linked together with
different colored yarns, something he’d seen on a TV detective show. On each of
the notes was a name of someone he suspected of being a pedophile. Bunting’s
method of choosing his next victim involved approaching the wall with his eyes
closed, hand outstretched. Whoever’s name he touched was as good as dead.

There is nothing to suggest that the next victim, Michael Gardiner, was involved
in abusing children. Yet he was openly gay and that was good enough for
Bunting who freely professed his belief that all homosexuals were pedophiles.

Gardiner was killed in August 1997, his body stored in a barrel that would later
be found in the vault of an abandoned bank in Snowtown. One of his feet had to
be severed in order to fit the body into its makeshift coffin.

The next to die was Barry Lane, a cross dressing homosexual who had been
Robert Wagner’s lover and was the source of many of the names on Bunting’s hit
list. Despite their association, Bunting was openly critical of Lane, describing
him as “dirty” and a “pedo.”

In October 1997, Lane made a call to his mother, telling her that he was moving
away and wanted nothing more to do with her. The call had, in fact, been made
under coercion by Bunting, Wagner, and a third accomplice named Thomas
Trevilyan. Lane's dismembered body would eventually be found in the
Snowtown bank vault, alongside that of Michael Gardiner. All of the bones in
his toes were crushed, suggesting that he’d been tortured prior to his death.

Thomas Trevilyan, accomplice in the Barry Lane killing, was the next victim.
Trevilyan suffered from mental problems and following the Lane murder,
Bunting had remarked to friends that he was afraid Trevilyan would “go
mental,” and give them away. Bunting and Wagner eliminated their risk in
October 1997, driving Trevilyan into the Adelaide Hills and hanging him from a
tree. When his body was found on November 5, 1997, it was assumed that he
had committed suicide.

Bunting had by now married a woman named Elizabeth Harvey, whose son,
James Vlassakis, looked up to him as a father figure. In 1988, a friend of
Vlassakis, Gavin Porter, moved into Bunting’s house as a guest. Porter was a
heroin addict and Bunting took an instant dislike to him, describing him as a
“waste” who “no longer deserved to live.” The final straw came when Bunting
found a used syringe that Porter had carelessly discarded on a couch. Not long
after, Bunting and Wagner strangled Porter as he slept in his car in the driveway
of Bunting's house. His body was stored in a barrel at the Snowtown vault.

Troy Youde, a half brother of James Vlassakis, was the next to die. Vlassakis had
confided to Bunting that Youde had raped him when he was a child and Bunting,
seething with rage, had decided to make him pay for it. In August 1998, Bunting,
Wagner and Vlassakis, dragged Youde from his bed and murdered him. Another
accomplice, Mark Haydon, assisted in the removal of the body to Snowtown.

Haydon also helped with the disposal of the next victim. Frederick Brooks, 18,
was Haydon’s mentally disabled nephew. Bunting invited Brooks to his house on
September 17, 1998. There, Bunting, Wagner and Vlassakis brutally tortured the
helpless teenager before killing him. Haydon continued collecting Brooks’
disability payments after his death.

Bunting, Wagner and Vlassakis murdered another mentally disabled man in
November 1998. Gary O’Dwyer had been severely injured in a car accident and
had no immediate family, making him an easy target for the vile trio. O’Dwyer
was killed in his own home. His body, later discovered in the Snowtown vault,
showed clear signs of torture.

For his next murder, Bunting turned closer to home. The victim was Elizabeth
Haydon, wife of Bunting accomplice, Mark Haydon. Elizabeth disappeared from
her Adelaide home on November 20, 1998 and was reported missing by her
brother. The police were immediately suspicious of Mark Haydon’s failure to
report his wife’s disappearance. It would be this suspicion that would eventually
provide the break in the case.

Unfortunately, that break arrived too late to save Bunting’s last victim. David
Johnson, another half-brother of James Vlassakis, was lured to the Snowtown
bank on May 9, 1999, on the pretense of viewing a computer for sale. Once
there, he was overpowered by Wagner and then tortured into providing his bank
details and PIN number. Wagner and Vlassakis then drove to Port Wakefield and
attempted to draw money from Johnson's bank account, leaving Johnson in the
custody of Bunting. When they returned Johnson was dead.

Bunting and Wagner later dismembered Johnson's body, and added a new
perversion to their M.O. They fried and ate parts of Johnson’s flesh.

By now, the net was closing on Bunting and his depraved apprentices. Police
inquiries into Elizabeth Haydon's disappearance led eventually to the disused
bank in Snowtown. On May 20, 1999, officers searched the premises and
discovered eight bodies, concealed in drums in the vault. Bunting, Wagner,
Vlassakis and Haydon were arrested that same day.

In September 2003, John Bunting was found guilty on eleven counts of murder
and sentenced to eleven consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
His main accomplices, Wagner and Vlassakis, were given seven and four life
terms respectively. Mark Haydon pled guilty to the lesser charge of assisting in a
murder and was convicted on two counts.
 Frances Knorr

In September 1893, the new tenant of a house in the Melbourne suburb of
Brunswick decided to plant a vegetable garden in his backyard. The man got to
digging, but he’d barely started when his spade unearthed what appeared to be a
pile of decomposing flesh and bone. Looking closer, the man was horrified to
see a tiny human corpse. The child had a length of rope tightened around its
neck.

The police were immediately called and arrived at the house to examine the
body, which they determined to be of an infant girl. They soon established that
the previous tenants of the home were a couple named Knorr who had also lived
for a time at another house on the same street. When those premises were
searched, the police found the remains of two more infants, both boys, buried
just beneath the surface in the backyard.

In the days that followed, the police initiated a search for the previous tenants at
the two houses, Rudolph and Frances Knorr. They weren’t hard to find, having
moved recently to Surry Hills in Sydney. Within days of the gruesome discovery
the Knorrs were in custody and were extradited to Melbourne to face the music.
Under questioning, Frances Knorr admitted to burying the babies, although she
insisted that they had died of natural causes. The forensic evidence, however,
said different.

Frances Knorr was born as Minnie Thwaites in Hoxton New Town, Middlesex,
England on November 6, 1867. Her father was a well-to-do and respectable hat-
maker, operating his business in Chelsea, London. Minnie, however, grew to be
a rebellious and promiscuous teenager and after one scandal too many, her
family decided that an extended trip to Australia might be best for her.

Nineteen-year-old Minnie Thwaites arrived in Sydney aboard the Abyssinia in
1887. She promptly changed her name to Frances, and soon after began work as
a domestic servant. She later worked as a waitress, and while thus employed she
met Rudolph Knorr, a German-born waiter, who supplemented his meager
earnings through petty crime. The couple began courting and were married at St
Philip's Anglican Church on November 2, 1889.

Three years into the marriage, Frances gave birth to a baby daughter, who she
named Gladys. But by now she’d already tired of her husband and she started an
affair with a fishmonger named Edward Thompson, following him to
Melbourne. Thompson later ended the affair and the Knorrs were reunited.

These were difficult times, with Australia in the midst of a depression, but
Rudolph Knorr had never been averse to stepping outside the law to make a
buck. In February 1892, his clandestine activities eventually caught up with him
when he was arrested and send to prison for selling furniture that he’d bought on
higher purchase. Penniless, alone and with a baby to care for, Frances decided to
set herself up as a “child minder,” taking in and caring for the babies of unwed
mothers.

This was a fairly new industry that had started out with good intentions. Single
motherhood in that era carried an extremely negative social stigma and unwed
mothers were prepared to pay a minder to take in their children on a long-term or
even full-time basis. The deal usually involved a down payment of between £5
and £20, followed by a smaller monthly sum. In return the baby would be cared
for and the mother would be allowed to visit at prearranged times.

The problem was that many of the child minders were unscrupulous operators
who had no intention of sticking to their end of the bargain. No sooner had the
mother departed than they’d arrange to sell the baby to a childless couple.
They’d then disappear and set up shop elsewhere. There were also those baby
farmers who simply killed the child and pocketed the down payment. The most
notorious of these, Amelia Dyer of England, was suspected of murdering over
200 infants.

Francis Knorr was no Amelia Dyer, but she was certainly dishonest in her child-
minding business. Why else would she have lived at so many Melbourne
addresses in such a short time, why would she have constantly switched between
her married and maiden names? These moves were meant to cover her tracks, as
she sold off the babies entrusted to her care. And those that she couldn’t sell, she
strangled.

Only one of Knorr’s victims was ever identified, Isaac Marks, the little boy who
had been found buried in the backyard in Brunswick. At the inquest into his
death, the coroner testified that he’d been strangled with a length of tape. The
inquest also heard testimony about Knorr’s many dealings with unwed mothers,
how she’d sell babies or swap them and how she’d sell them on to other baby
farmers at reduced rates. A 13-year-old housemaid who worked for the Knorrs,
told how Frances had sent her to a neighbor to borrow a shovel and how she’d
seen her digging a hole in the spot where Isaac Marks was later discovered. The
evidence was damning and it led to Knorr being indicted on three counts of
murder.

Yet despite the strong evidence against her, Frances Knorr steadfastly denied
murdering the babies or having anything to do with burying them. Then she
made a serious misstep, writing to her former lover, Edward Thompson and
asking him to fabricate evidence that would get the case against her dismissed.
Thompson showed the letter to his mother who took it straight to the police. It
would be a key component of the prosecution case at the trial.

Francis Knorr went on trial on April 11, 1893, charged only with the murder of
Isaac Marks. The proceedings lasted for five days and terminated in a guilty
verdict. In those days, that carried a mandatory sentence – death by hanging.

It was a sentence that deeply divided opinion in Australia. The newspapers were
damning in their assessment of the convicted murderess but the public,
particularly women, were on Knorr’s side. As she awaited execution in the Old
Melbourne Jail there were a number of protests and petitions on her behalf. The
state hangman, Thomas Jones, even committed suicide two days before the
execution, after his wife threatened to leave him if he went through with it.

Knorr spent her final days in her cell, praying and singing hymns. As the
execution date approached she finally broke down and admitted murder. “Placed
as I am now within a few hours of my death, I express a strong desire that this
statement be made public, with the hope that my fall will not only be a warning
to others, but also act as a deterrent to those who are perhaps carrying on the
same practice. I now desire to state that upon the two charges known in evidence
as Number 1 and Number 2 babies, I confess to be guilty.”

Francis Knorr was executed on January 15, 1894, while 200 protesters stood
outside the prison gates and sang hymns. She walked unaided to the scaffold and
stood calmly while the noose was placed around her neck. “The Lord is with
me,” she said in an unwavering voice. “I do not fear what men may do to me, for
I have peace, perfect peace.” Moments later the trap was sprung and the
notorious baby farmer plunged to her death.
 Eric Edgar Cooke
The Night Caller

Perth, Western Australia, was a safe place to live in the early 1960’s, the kind of
place where windows were left open at night, doors unlocked, where keys were
left dangling in the ignitions of motor vehicles. Then, over the expanse of eight
blood-drenched months in 1963, all of that changed, with the reign of terror
unleashed by a psychopath named Eric Edgar Cooke, the man known as, “The
Night Caller.”

Eric Edgar Cooke was born in Perth on February 25, 1931, the oldest of three
children. His father was an abusive alcoholic who regularly beat his wife and
kids, with Eric the favorite target of his rage. Neither did the diminutive boy find
any respite at school. Cooke had a harelip and a cleft palate resulting in a speech
impediment that made him a constant target for bullies.

Eric grew up a quiet, shy boy with few friends. Those who bothered to look
beyond his physical problems found him to be polite and likeable. But already a
deep resentment was simmering just below the surface, and it exploded into rage
whenever the boy was upset. On one occasion he burned down a church when
his audition for the choir was unsuccessful.

Leaving school at age 14, Cooke worked at a succession of unskilled jobs. By
now, his father had all but given up on supporting his family and spent most of
his time in various Perth taverns. Eric’s meager wage was the only thing keeping
his mother and younger sisters fed and clothed. Always short of cash, he began
burgling houses, sometimes vandalizing the premises and committing arson. He
also became a compulsive peeping tom.

In 1949, the law finally caught up with Eric Cooke. Nabbed via fingerprints left
at several crime scenes, he was found guilty of burglary and sent to prison for
three years. The sentence was relatively light because Cooke’s lawyer had
argued that Cooke was stealing to feed his mother and younger siblings.

Released from prison in 1951, Cooke appeared to be a changed man. He began
attending services at the local Methodist church and became a well-liked
member of the congregation. But the old Eric Cooke soon emerged and he was
caught stealing from the church coffers, only escaping another term of
imprisonment because the vicar declined to press charges.

Cooke joined the Australian armed forces in 1952, lying on his enlistment form
to hide his criminal past. He was found out just three months later and promptly
discharged. Thereafter, he found work as a truck driver.

In 1953, Cooke married 19-year-old Sarah Lavin, the ceremony taking place at
the Methodist Church in Cannington. The next two years were the happiest and
most stable of Cooke’s tumultuous life. He was a good husband and father, and
his wife and children lacked for nothing. Little did they know that the small
luxuries they enjoyed were being paid for by Cooke’s criminal activities.

Those activities eventually caught up with Cooke in 1955, when he was arrested
for stealing a car and sent to prison for two years at hard labor. But this latest jail
term did nothing to curb his criminal inclinations. In fact, Eric Edgar Cooke was
about to accelerate his one-man criminal campaign against the citizens of Perth.
And his crimes were about to turn violent.

On September 12, 1958, Cooke stole a car and ran down cyclist Nel Schneider in
a hit-and-run attack that would become a favorite tactic of his. Schneider
survived but suffered severe injuries. On November 25, Cooke broke into a
house in Applecross and beat 15-year-old Mollie McLeod unconscious. Three
months later, on December 27, he committed another hit-and-run, striking Kathy
Bellis with such force that she was thrown 18-yards across an intersection.
Miraculously, Bellis survived. Cooke’s next victim would not be so lucky.

On January 30, 1959, Cooke was burgling the South Perth apartment of 33-year-
old Pnena Berkman. When Berkman woke and tried to raise the alarm, Cooke
attacked her, stabbing her to death with a diving knife.

Cooke launched two more attacks in 1959. In August, he bludgeoned 17-year-
old Alix Doncon so severely that she would suffer from epilepsy for the rest of
her life. In December, he hacked Jillian Brewer to death with an axe in her
Cottesloe apartment. He then mutilated her body with a pair of scissors.

The new decade started with similar violence. In April 1960, Cooke reverted to
his old M.O., running down Glenys Peak on a Bayswater street. She survived.
Frustrated by his lack of success, Cooke carried out two more hit-and-runs in
May, seriously injuring Jill Connell and then knocking down a trio of pedestrians
in a single incident.

Cooke was arrested on unrelated charges shortly after this latest attack and sent
to prison for yet another spell of incarceration. He re-emerged in early 1962 and
picked up where he’d left off.

On March 3, 1962, 23-year-old Anne Melvin was attacked in her bed in
Nedlands, her assailant fleeing after she started screaming. On December 29,
Cooke launched a similar attack on Peggy Fleury in Cottesloe. He beat Fleury
with his fists and with a flashlight, but fled when her screams woke others in the
house. This latest attack was to prove a prelude to his deadliest rampage yet.

On January 26, 1963, Cooke burgled a house in Como and stole a .22 caliber
rifle and ammunition. Later that evening, he snuck up on a parked car and started
firing at the occupants. Nicholas August was struck in the neck. His girlfriend
Rowena Reeves suffered a wound to her arm.

A short while later, Cooke broke into an apartment and shot 29-year-old
accountant Brian Weir to death as he slept. Next he drove to Nedlands where he
shot and killed 19-year-old student John Sturkey and 54-year-old retiree
George Walmsley in quick succession.

With the city of Perth in uproar and police carrying out a major manhunt to find
the killer, Cooke lay low for a couple of weeks. On February 9, he re-emerged to
kill Rosemary Anderson in a hit-and-run. Rosemary’s boyfriend, John Button,
was subsequently convicted for her murder.

And still, Cooke wasn’t done. On February 15, he strangled 24-year-old social
worker Lucy Madrill to death in her apartment. In June, he attacked Carmel
Read in her bed, fleeing the scene when she started screaming. Less than a
month later, on August 10, he shot and killed University of Western Australia
student Shirley McLeod.

The police were by now under immense pressure to catch the killer before he
struck again. Desperate for a lead, they considered fingerprinting every adult
male in Perth as well as confiscating and test firing every .22 rifle. Then, out of
nowhere, they caught a break.

In September 1963, an elderly couple discovered a rifle hidden in some bushes
in Geraldton. They reported it to the police, who immediately placed the area
under surveillance. Seventeen days later they were rewarded for their efforts
when Cooke came to retrieve his weapon and was arrested at the scene. Under
questioning he quickly confessed to the murders.

Eric Edgar Cooke went on trial for six counts of murder in November 1963. He
was found guilty and sentenced to hang, subsequently refusing all efforts to
launch an appeal on his behalf. Cooke was put to death on October 26, 1964, the
last man to be executed in Western Australia.
 John Coombes

John Leslie Coombes had done this before. Twice in fact, and each time the
parole board had seen fit to set him free. Now though, Coombes stood before a
judge who was determined that he would never get the chance to kill again. On
August 26, 2011, Justice Geoffrey Nettle sentenced Coombes to life without
parole. Sadly, the sentence came too late to save the pre-school teacher who he’d
so brutally murdered and mutilated.

Coombes showed a predilection for violence from an early age. As a child he
took pleasure in torturing and killing the family pets, as a young adult he
gravitated to burglary and robbery, usually accompanied by levels of violence
way beyond what was needed to subdue his victims. It seemed only a matter of
time before he graduated to murder, and so it proved.

On February 26, 1984, while on a fishing trip, he and accomplice Glen Conlon
murdered 20-year-old Michael Peter Speirani. Speirani was stabbed, thrown into
the water and then run over with a motorboat. Coombes and Conlon then slashed
at Speirani’s body so that it would be “easier for the fish to finish him off.”

Less than 10 months after the murder of Michael Speirani, Coombes killed
again. On November 17, 1984, he and another accomplice, Andrew Harold Opie,
entered the Edithvale home of 44-year-old Henry Raymond Kells. Their
intention, according to Coombes later testimony, was not to kill Kells, but to
“rough him up a bit,” as both Coombes and Opie held a grudge against him. But
the plan soon went awry. Kells was brutally stabbed to death.

This time, though, the killers had been less careful. Just ten days after the
murder, on November 27, Coombes and Opie were arrested and charged with
Kells' murder. A year later, in December 1985, Coombes was sentenced to life
imprisonment. It was a sentence he had no intention of serving.

On September 22, 1988, Coombes and another convicted murderer, Dean
Ashley, escaped from Ararat Prison, using some water pipes left behind by
contractors. They remained at large for just two days before being apprehended
on a train near Mildura. Coombes received an additional six-month sentence for
the escape.

In October 1996, having served less than 11 years of his life sentence, John
Coombes was paroled. It proved to be a short-lived reprieve, as the police had by
now linked him to the killing of Michael Speirani. Re-arrested in December of
1996, Coombes was tried and found guilty of the Speirani murder. The sentence
this time was a ridiculously lenient ten to fifteen years. Coombes was out in
nine. Within two years, he would commit his most brutal murder yet.

On August 12, 2009, Coombes was staying at the Port Phillip home of a friend,
Nicole Godfrey. Also present was a mutual acquaintance, Raechel Betts, a 27-
year-old pre-school teacher. Coombes and Betts ended up in bed together, but
then got into a heated argument during which Coombes strangled the young
woman and then stabbed her repeatedly. Afterwards, he dragged the corpse to
the bathroom, tied Raechel’s feet to the taps in the tub and began butchering her.
He then wrapped the body parts in plastic bags and threw them from Newhaven
pier, hoping that they’d sink to the bottom. They didn’t. The following day, a
dismembered leg with a distinctive tattoo washed up on a Phillip Island beach.
Over the next week more grisly finds followed, resulting in a massive police
operation to identify the victim and her killer. That search led inevitably to John
Coombes. He was arrested in November 2009.

Coombes initially denied all involvement in the murder, but by the time the
matter came to trial in May 2011, he’d changed his tune and confessed. By then,
his confession was academic anyway. The prosecution had a star witness in
Nicole Godfrey, who admitted that she’d been present in the house on the night
of the murder. Godfrey was initially charged with being an accessory after the
fact, but struck a deal to avoid jail time. In court, she gave a graphic description
of how she’d heard Coombes dismembering Raechel’s body in the bathroom,
while she lay on the bed and turned up the TV to drown out the horrific sounds.

John Leslie Coombes was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole on
August 26, 2011. Passing sentence, Justice Nettle said that Coombes had “a
frightening predilection for homicide,’’ and given the chance would almost
certainly kill again.


 Leonard John Fraser
The Rockhampton Rapist

Leonard John Fraser was born in Ingham, Queensland, on June 27, 1951, the
third of four children. As a child, he had serious learning disabilities, although
there was nothing to suggest the killer he would become. By the time he quit
school in 1965, aged just 14, he could barely read and had trouble writing his
own name.

Fraser was soon a prolific juvenile offender, earning arrests for assault, theft and
transporting stolen goods. At 15, he was sentenced to a two-year term in a
reformatory. Upon his release he earned his first adult sentence, twelve months
hard labor.

Released after serving half that term, Fraser’s feet had barely hit the ground
when he was in jail again, this time on theft charges. Further convictions
followed in 1972, first for living off the proceeds of prostitution, then for a string
of robberies that put him away for five years.

By now, Fraser was well known to law officers as a habitual offender. What they
didn't know was that he had already crossed the line to sexual violence, having
committed a brutal rape on a 37-year-old French tourist in Sydney, shortly before
his robbery arrest.

In June 1974, Fraser was free again and it didn't take him long to pick up where
he'd left off. At 10 o’clock on the morning of July 11, he attacked a young
woman in the Sydney suburb of St Mary’s. Twisting the woman’s arm behind
her back (a method that would become part of his M.O.), he pushed her down an
embankment. There he raped her, later forcing the victim to walk hand-in-hand
with him back to the road before he fled the scene.

Six days later, on July 17, Fraser attempted another rape, but ran off after being
disturbed. Fortunately for the police, he left his wallet at the scene.

Arrested soon after, Fraser surprised detectives by confessing to the rape of the
French tourist two years earlier. In December 1974, he was sentenced to 22
years, with eligibility for parole in seven.

Fraser was released in 1981, after serving the minimum seven years. He moved
next to Mackay, Queensland where he got a job as a laborer on the railroad. In
1982, he was arrested for aggravated assault on a woman, an offence for which
he served a ludicrously lenient sentence of two months.

This latest brush with the law appeared to have reformed Fraser. After his
release, he entered a seemingly stable relationship and fathered a daughter. He
also held down a regular job for the longest period of his life, two-and-a-half
years.

But this newfound stability was never going to last. In late 1985, a 21-year-old
woman was raped on the beach at Shoal Point. Given the M.O., the police
immediately knew who was responsible. Convicted on the charge, Fraser was
sentenced to 12 years. This time he was made to serve the full term.

Fraser was freed in January 1997, and moved to Mount Morgan, a town of some
3,500 residents, near Rockhampton. On April 22, 1999, a woman named Lynette
Kiernan called the Rockhampton police to report that she’d just seen a little girl
attacked in a vacant lot adjacent to her home.

According to Kiernan, the girl had been struck on the head by a man, who then
appeared to rape her. The assailant had then fled, but had returned a short while
later with a car. He’d lifted the girl’s body from the weeds where it lay, placed it
in the trunk of his vehicle, and then driven away. Unfortunately, the witness had
waited 20 minutes before calling the police. By then, attacker and victim were
long gone.

The little girl was soon identified as 9-year-old Keyra Steinhardt and within a
day her attacker, John Leonard Fraser, was in custody. However, despite the
eyewitness recognizing him and his car, he steadfastly maintained his innocence.
It would be two weeks before he eventually confessed to murdering Keyra and
led the police to her brutalized body. DNA evidence found in the trunk of
Fraser’s car soon firmed up the case against him.

Fraser went on trial for murder in September 2000. Found guilty, he was given
an indefinite life sentence, effectively life without parole.

But investigators now firmly believed that Fraser had killed before. The blood
found in his car was not only from Keyra Steinhardt but from a second victim as
well. Police suspected that Fraser might be the serial killer responsible for the
disappearances of three local women and a 14-year-old schoolgirl.

Natasha Ryan had disappeared on her way home from school on September 2,
1998. Julie Dawn Turner, 39, who had worked with Fraser at the Rockhampton
abattoir, had gone missing on December 28, 1998, after leaving a local bar in an
intoxicated state. Beverly Doreen Leggo, 36, had also known Fraser. She had
vanished without a trace on March 1, 1999.

Finally, there was 19-year-old Sylvia Maria Benedetti who had gone missing on
April 17, 1999. Six days after her disappearance, officers had been called to the
derelict Queensland Hotel. In one of the rooms they found the carpet soggy with
blood, the walls and ceiling spattered with it. Forensic examination would reveal
that the blood, four liters of it, was from Sylvia Benedetti.

However, none of this amounted to conclusive evidence and with no bodies and
Fraser’s resolute denials of guilt, the police were at a dead end.

Fraser might well have gotten away with murder had he kept his mouth shut. But
like so many serial killers before him, he could not resist the temptation of
bragging about his misdeeds. Inevitably, his jailhouse boasts reached the ears of
the authorities.

Confronted by detectives, Fraser broke down and confessed, even offering to
lead investigators to the bodies. Sylvia Benedetti’s remains had, in fact, already
been found, hidden in the bush near Sandy Point Beach. But despite his promises
of co-operation, Fraser failed to locate any of the other victims. It didn’t matter,
there was now enough evidence to indict him and in April 2003 he was back in
court, charged with four counts of murder.

A sensational turn in the trial occurred when Natasha Ryan, missing 4-and-a-half
years, turned up alive and well. She had run away from home and had been
living secretly with her boyfriend, less than a mile from her mother’s home.

It made no difference to the other three charges against Fraser. On May 9, 2003,
after deliberating for less than a day, the jury convicted him of the murders of
Sylvia Benedetti, Beverly Leggo and Julie Turner. On June 13, Judge Brian
Ambrose sentenced him to three indefinite terms of life imprisonment.

The sentence meant that Fraser would be ineligible for parole until the age of 81,
provided he lived that long.

He didn’t.

On December 31, 2006, Leonard John Fraser was taken to a secure unit at the
Princess Alexandra Hospital after complaining of chest pains. He died there of a
heart attack the following day. He was 55 years old.
 Paul Steven Haigh

Paul Steven Haigh was already a hardened career criminal when he embarked on
the yearlong killing spree that would mark him out as one of Australia’s most
brutal serial killers, responsible for the deaths of seven people, including a 10-
year-old boy.

In 1978, just two weeks after being paroled from a sentence for a string of armed
robberies, Haigh was back to his old tricks, carrying out a series of heists that
turned bloody the minute anyone offered resistance. The first to die was 58-year-
old TattsLotto employee, Evelyn Adams, gunned down during a holdup in
September 1978 because (according to Haigh) she refused to obey his orders.
Three months later, in December 1978, he committed another murder, this time
shooting 45-year-old father of two, Bruno Cingolani, while robbing his pizza
restaurant. “He tried to protect his take,” Haigh explained, “But I needed the
money to help break a mate of mine out of prison.”

The murders had been committed in daylight in public locations, but there were
no witnesses and no evidence to link Haigh to the shootings. Still, the hyper-
paranoid killer was worried, worried that he’d be exposed and determined to
avoid another prison term. In early 1979, he decided to take care of the problem,
eliminating anyone who knew about his criminal activities.

The first person marked for death was long time Haigh sidekick Wayne Keith
Smith, aged 27. Smith was shot to death in June 1979, while he lay in bed in his
St. Kilda Road apartment. Haigh later attended his victim’s funeral, driving to
the cemetery in the same vehicle as Smith’s pregnant girlfriend, sister and
brother-in-law.

The next to die was another of Haigh’s associates, Sheryle Gardner. The 31-year-
old was murdered as she sat in her car in Ripponlea in July 1979. Gardner’s 10-
year-old son, Danny, was sitting beside her eating a hamburger at the time, but
that did not deter Haigh. After “consoling” the weeping child for 10 minutes, he
pumped three bullets into the back of Danny’s head. “It made no sense for us to
kill the woman so she couldn’t get us arrested and then leave the kid alive so we
could be arrested for his mother’s murder,” Haigh later said. And in typical serial
killer fashion, he blamed his victims for the murder, calling Sheryle Gardner a
bad mother for putting her son in harm’s way.

Horrendous as the double murder of the mother and son was, Haigh was still
prepared to sink several steps deeper into depravity. In August 1979, he lured his
girlfriend, 19-year-old Lisa Maude Brearley to an apartment in Olinda. There he
instructed one of his criminal associates to rape and sodomize her at knifepoint.
Haigh then attacked Lisa, a woman who he described as “a kind-hearted and nice
enough lass,” with a knife, inflicting 157 stab wounds. He later claimed that he
planned on stabbing her 20 times but kept losing count and having to start again.
“She was a loose end that needed taking care of,” he’d later explain, as though
that justified everything.

Haigh was an obvious suspect in the murder of Lisa Brearley, and it wasn’t long
before he was arrested. Under interrogation, he proudly admitted to six other
killings. Charged with those crimes and convicted on all counts, he was
sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.

But prison walls proved no impediment to Haigh’s murderous instincts. While
serving time at Pentridge Prison in 1991, he murdered his cellmate, convicted
rapist Donald George Hatherley. Haigh claimed that it was really an assisted
suicide and that he’d obtained Hatherley’s “permission” to carry out the murder.
He achieved this by wrapping a noose around Hatherley’s throat, kicking a
cupboard out from under his feet, and then pushing down on Hatherley's
shoulders until he choked to death. “The other deaths I'd been involved in were
from a criminal frame of reference,” Haigh said at his trial. “This one was
different. It was a growth experience for me. My heart tells me I did no wrong.”

The jury, however, disagreed. They found Haigh guilty of murder and added
another life term to his sentence. The safety of that sentence was tested in April
2011, when Haigh won the right to appeal. Specifically, he wanted to challenge
the refusal of parole.

Thankfully, the Victoria Court of Appeal turned down Haigh’s application,
meaning that Paul Steven Haigh will see out the rest of his days behind bars.
With his history of extreme violence, it is highly likely that this unrepentant
killer would kill again, given the opportunity.

 John Wayne Glover
The Granny Killer

On the afternoon of March 1, 1989, two young boys exiting an apartment block
in the affluent Sydney suburb of Mosman were shocked to see an elderly woman
crawling towards the glass doors at the front of the building. The woman’s face
was covered in blood and it was obvious that she’d suffered serious head
injuries. The boys ran for help, rousing residents from the building who
recognized the injured woman as 82-year-old Gwendolin Mitchelhill.

An ambulance was soon on the scene and rushed Mrs. Mitchelhill to hospital.
Initially, it was assumed that the woman had suffered a fall, but the examining
physician soon put paid to that theory. Broken ribs, two blackened eyes and
severe head trauma pointed to a savage assault. The doctor alerted the police
while a team of medics fought desperately to save Mrs. Mitchelhill’s life.
Unfortunately, she succumbed to her injuries.

Homicide detectives had meanwhile begun questioning residents in the area and
although no one had actually witnessed the attack, a motive soon surfaced. Mrs.
Mitchelhill’s handbag was found at the scene, but her purse was missing. It
appeared that the murder was a mugging gone wrong.

A week passed, with investigators making scant progress in the case. Then
another elderly Mosman resident was attacked. Lady Winfreda Ashton, 84, was
the widow of the renowned Australian artist, Sir William Ashton. On May 9,
1989, she’d been to a doctor’s appointment, done some shopping and visited
with friends.

Later that evening, a resident in the complex where Lady Ashton lived went to
dump some garbage and discovered the elderly woman lying on the ground near
the bins. Blood had seeped from a head wound and her pantyhose had been
knotted so tightly around her neck that it had cut into her skin. Despite the chaos
of the scene, the victim’s shoes, walking stick and handbag had been placed
carefully nearby.

There were many similarities to the Mitchelhill murder, leading investigators to
speculate that the same perpetrator was responsible. Those suspicions were
firmed up when the autopsy report came back. The victim had been punched as
well as being struck with a blunt instrument, possibly a hammer. Her head had
also been slammed into the concrete floor. There was no sign of sexual assault
but as in the previous murder the victim’s purse had been stolen, again providing
a link. Now the chase was on to catch the killer before he claimed another life.
Unfortunately, it was not to be.

On October 18, 1989, 86-year-old Doris Cox was attacked in her front garden
and severely beaten. She survived but was too traumatized to provide a
description of her assailant.

Less than a month later, on November 2, a young girl walking along a lane in
Mosman, stumbled upon the body of 85-year-old Margaret Pahud. The victim
had suffered severe blunt force trauma to her head, leaving the ground spattered
with blood. Unfortunately, by the time the police arrived, some concerned citizen
had washed the blood away. The murder was, however, clearly the work of the
same man. As in the previous cases, the victim’s personal belongings were
neatly arranged. Again there was no evidence of sexual assault, and again the
victim’s purse was missing.

The killer was accelerating now. Just one day later he attacked and killed 81-
year-old Olive Cleveland. She was found lying face down on a path at the
nursing home where she lived, her belongings arranged near her feet. The back
of her head had been caved in and her pantyhose were pulled taut around her
neck. Unfortunately, blood evidence had again been flushed from the scene
before the police arrived.

By now, investigators had established a pattern to the murders. All occurred on
weekdays at around three in the afternoon; all were within a restricted
geographical area; all involved robbery, although that did not appear to be the
primary motive.

On November 24, a neighbor of 93-year-old Muriel Falconer became concerned
when the pensioner didn’t answer her door. Despite her advanced years, Mrs.
Falconer was still quite active and the neighbor had seen her the previous day,
returning home with her shopping.

Entering the apartment with a spare key, the neighbor saw Mrs. Falconer lying
on the floor, naked from the waist down, a puddle of blood on the floor near her
head. The neighbor ran immediately to call the police.

This time, thankfully, there’d been no busybodies to tamper with the scene and
the blood on the floor yielded the first solid evidence of the case, a footprint. As
in the other murders, the victim had suffered horrific blunt force trauma to the
head and her stockings were knotted around her throat. Her shoes and handbag
had been deliberately arranged, her purse had been emptied. Despite the
suggestive way in which the body was posed there was no evidence of sexual
assault.
With the Sydney press now carrying blood-chilling headlines about the “Granny
Killer,” a task force of 70 detectives was assigned to the case. Their first action
was to request dockets from neighboring police precincts of all assaults directed
against elderly women. Studying the witness testimony one consistent detail
began to emerge, the description of a white male suspect, about 50 years old
with gray hair. The man was described as about 5-foot-7, powerfully built with
broad shoulders, a thick chest and a bulging stomach. He dressed smartly and,
according to one report, drove a blue car.

The description was all very well, but without a suspect to match it to, it wasn’t
much use. Then, on January 11, 1990, the police caught a break, with the report
of a seemingly unrelated crime.

Daisy Roberts, an elderly patient at Greenwich Hospital reported to nursing staff
that a gray-haired man had entered her room, placed his hands under her
nightdress and fondled her breasts. The police were called and after questioning
staff were able to identify a possible suspect. He was a salesman for a pie
company who called on the hospital as part of his sales route. His name was
John Wayne Glover.

Glover was tracked down and asked to appear at Chatswood police station for
questioning the following day. When he failed to show, officers went to his home
to pick him up. There, Glover’s wife told them that he’d attempted suicide and
was now at Royal North Shore Hospital. The suicide note Glover had written
included the cryptic phrase “no more grannies.”

Officers were not allowed to question Glover that evening. When they returned
the following day, he flatly refused to talk, although he did allow detectives to
take a Polaroid photo of him. When the photo was shown to Mrs. Roberts, she
immediately identified him as her attacker.

Glover was now the main suspect in the Granny Murders, and was placed under
24-hour surveillance. Meanwhile, the police delved into his history.

John Wayne Glover had been born in Wolverhampton, England on November
26, 1932, and had immigrated to Australia in 1956, bringing with him a long rap
sheet of arrests for petty crimes.

He was soon in trouble in his adopted country, racking up a catalog of arrests for
offences ranging from larceny to indecent assault. Despite this, he managed
somehow to stay out of prison until he landed a three-month term on an assault
charge. He was released after just six weeks.

Glover married in 1968 and went to live in the home of his parents-in-law in
Mosman. He fathered two children, but he had a difficult relationship with his
mother-in-law, Essie, echoing the similarly contentious relationship he’d had
with his own mother. Both women had died in the months leading up to the
murder of Gwendolin Mitchelhill.

Glover made an unlikely serial killer. He was 56 for one thing; most serial killers
begin their murderous careers by their late twenties. On the other hand there was
his record of assaults against women, and that enigmatic phrase in his “suicide
note.” All the task force could do was watch and wait.

On March 19, 1990, the surveillance team observed Glover entering a house in
Balmoral. They assumed that he was meeting with his solicitor, and sat down to
wait. However, as the hours passed with no sign of him re-emerging, they
became concerned and decided to investigate. Approaching the residence they
looked into a front window and saw a bloody hammer lying on the ground. The
officers then forced the front door and entered.

Inside they found the semi-nude body of a woman (later identified as 60-year-
old Joan Sinclair). Her head was wrapped in a bloody towel and a pair of
pantyhose was pulled tightly around her throat.

After ascertaining that the woman was dead, the officers continued their
search.
They found John Glover half submerged in the bathtub, writhing and moaning.
One of his wrists had been slashed and an empty bottle of Vat-69 whiskey lay
nearby. It was later determined that he’d tried to kill himself with an overdose of
Valium.

Glover was taken to Royal North Shore Hospital where he remained under
police guard. On March 20, 1990, he was interviewed regarding the murders and
admitted to all six of them. On March 28, he was formally charged with six
counts of first-degree murder.

On November 29, 1990, Glover was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to
life in prison without parole. He would serve only 15 years of that time.

John Wayne Glover committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell on
September 9, 2005. He remains the prime suspect in nine other murders of
elderly women.
 Kathleen Folbigg

When Kathleen Folbigg was 18 months old, her father murdered her mother,
dragging her out into the street and stabbing her 24 times in front of horrified
neighbors. His motive, he later told police, was to save his daughter. “I had to
kill her,” he said, “because she would have killed my child.”

Thomas John Britton was arrested that same day and would spend 14 years in
prison. He would be deported to the United Kingdom following his release. For
Kathleen, the results were almost as catastrophic. With no other relatives to care
for her, she was made a ward of the state and placed in foster care.

In September 1970, the three-year-old Kathleen was fostered by a couple named
Marlborough, who later expressed an interest in adopting her. Their motives
were not entirely altruistic, as Deidre Marlborough treated the child as a virtual
slave and prevented her making friends. Kathleen tolerated this treatment until
she was 15. Then she quit school and started working at a series of low-paying
jobs. At 20, she met and fell in love with Craig Folbigg, five years her senior.
The couple settled in Mayfield, a suburb of Newcastle. Within a year, Kathleen
was pregnant and in February 1989 she delivered a healthy son who she named
Caleb.

Five days after the birth, Kathleen took Caleb home, but a few days later she was
back at the hospital, explaining to staff that the baby appeared to be having
difficulty breathing. Doctor’s diagnosed a “lazy larynx,” said it was nothing
serious and assured her that Caleb would grow out of it. They were wrong.

At around 2:50 a.m. on February 19, 1989, Craig Folbigg woke to the sound of
his wife screaming. He rushed to the sunroom where the baby slept, and found
Kathleen standing over the crib. “My baby,” she wailed. “Something’s wrong
with my baby.” Something certainly was wrong. Caleb Folbigg, just 20 days old,
was dead. The official cause of death would be given as Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome (SIDS) or “cot death.”

Seven months on and Kathleen was pregnant again, delivering a son named
Patrick in June 1990. Four months later, on October 19, Craig was again woken
by his wife’s screams. He rushed to the baby’s room and again found Kathleen
hovering over the baby. Lifting the child from the crib, Craig thought that he
noted faint breathing. He immediately started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and
by the time the ambulance arrived had managed to revive Patrick.

The episode, however, had exacted a heavy toll on the tiny infant. He was blind,
and doctors believed that he’d suffer epileptic fits for the rest of his life. As it
turned out, the rest of his life was all too short.

On the morning of February 13, 1991, Kathleen phoned Craig at work, and in a
frantic voice, told him: “It's happened again.” Craig left work immediately and
pulled up in front of his house just as the ambulance arrived. Patrick was rushed
to hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival. An autopsy determined that the
cause of death was an “acute asphyxiating event” resulting from an epileptic fit.

Devastated by the death of another child, the Folbiggs left Newcastle and moved
to Thornton in March 1991. Eighteen months later, in October 1992, Kathleen
gave birth to another child, a daughter this time, who the couple named Sarah.
Sarah would survive for 11 months, longer than her siblings. But events soon
picked up a familiar pattern - another late night crisis, another mad dash to the
hospital, another baby dead. As in the case of Caleb, death was attributed to
SIDS.

After Sarah's death the Folbiggs moved again, this time settling in Hunter Valley,
a popular wine-producing region north of Newcastle. Their fourth child, Laura,
was born in August 1997 and remained healthy for the next 19 months. Then, at
around midnight on March 1, 1999, Kathleen made an anxious call and
summoned an ambulance. Emergency services staff arrived to find her
performing CPR on her daughter. It was too late. The little girl was already
dead.

But Laura was too old to have died from SIDS, so the coroner recorded her
cause of death as “undetermined,” and ordered a police investigation. It was the
beginning of the end for Kathleen Folbigg.

Detective Sergeant Bernard Ryan was assigned to the case. And his suspicions
were immediately aroused when he learned that four of the couple’s children had
died in similar circumstances. Still, his initial interviews with the Folbiggs
turned up nothing untoward. Craig and Kathleen seemed genuinely distraught at
the tragedies that had been visited upon them.

The Folbiggs marriage, meanwhile, was breaking down, understandable perhaps
under the circumstances. In March 2001, Kathleen moved out, leaving most of
her personal possessions behind. It was while clearing out those possessions that
Craig Folbigg made a horrific discovery. In a bedside drawer he found
Kathleen’s diaries. The contents, he later told the court, made him “want to
vomit.” He took them immediately to the police.

Kathleen had been a keen diarist all her life, and usually threw her journals away
once they were full. These however, she appeared to have overlooked. They told
the story of a deeply disturbed woman. On the one hand, she wrote of her joy at
becoming a mother. On the other, she spoke of the resentment she felt after each
birth when the attention shifted away from her to the new baby. Tellingly, she
spoke of how stress had “made her do terrible things” and how she had “flashes
of rage, resentment and hatred” toward her children.

In another entry, written while she was pregnant with Laura, Folbigg alluded to
previous actions that she regretted. “Obviously I'm my father's daughter. But I
think losing my temper and being frustrated and everything has passed. I now
just let things happen and go with the flow. An attitude I should of had with all
my children. If given the chance, I'll have it with the next one.”

Another, particularly chilling entry read: “With Sarah, all I wanted was for her to
shut up. And one day, she did.” It wasn’t an admission of murder, but it was as
close as the police could get to providing a motive.

Kathleen Folbigg was arrested at her home on April 19, 2001, and charged with
murdering her four children. At her trial, the prosecution contended that she’d
smothered each of the children because she could not deal with the day-to-day
stresses of being a mother. Folbigg denied this, but the evidence against her was
pretty damning. When the matter went to the jury they took less than eight hours
to find her guilty. The sentence of the court was forty years, with no possibility
of parole for thirty. In 2005, this was reduced on appeal to thirty years, with no
parole period for twenty-five.

Kathleen Folbigg is currently serving her time in protective isolation. Other
prisoners take a very dim view of women who murder children, especially their
own.
 Archibald McCafferty
The ‘Kill Seven’ Murders

A native of Scotland, Archibald McCafferty arrived in Australia with his family
in 1958. He was just ten years old at the time, but it did not take him long to
introduce himself to the authorities in his adopted land. By the time he was
placed in an institution for juvenile offenders at age 12, he already had a long
record for theft, destruction of property and delinquency. One detective
described him as “the toughest kid I have ever met.”

McCafferty continued this theme into adulthood. By age 24, he had racked up
thirty-five convictions and served jail terms for burglary, car theft, larceny,
vagrancy and receiving stolen goods. He’d also been convicted of assault, after
he attacked a police officer who was trying to arrest them.

In April 1972, McCafferty met and fell in love with Janice Redington. The
couple was soon married, much to the delight of Archie’s long-suffering parents
who thought that marriage might settle him down. Those hopes were dashed just
six months into the union, when McCafferty beat his new bride so badly that she
had to be taken to hospital. Contrite afterwards, he entered a psychiatric clinic
and sought help for his anger issues. However, his remorse was short lived. He
soon checked himself out, threw away the sedatives he’d been given, and hit the
bottle. It wasn’t long before he was back to beating Janice and the fact that she
was pregnant made no difference to him.

On February 4, 1973, Janice gave birth to a baby boy who the couple named
Craig Archibald McCafferty. Despite Archie’s horrendous abuse of Janice during
the pregnancy, the baby was healthy, and his father absolutely doted on him.
Archie’s parents again had hope, believing that fatherhood might have a positive
effect on their troubled son, and for a while that seemed to be the case. But then,
on March 17, when Craig was just six weeks old, tragedy struck.

At around 3:30 a.m. on that Saturday, Janice woke to her son’s cries. Craig had
endured a troubled night and Janet made the fateful decision to bring him to her
bed to comfort him. She started to feed him but exhausted by a lack of sleep, she
soon dozed off.

About six hours later, Janet woke with the sun on her face. A glance at the
bedside clock told her it was 9 a.m., and she realized that she must have fallen
asleep. It was then, as wakefulness took hold, that she felt something under her
body and realized that it must be Craig. She jumped immediately out of bed,
looked down at her son and saw that something was wrong. The baby did not
appear to be breathing and there was blood on his face. Janice had rolled over in
her sleep and suffocated him.

The death of his son hit Archie McCafferty hard. He started drinking even more
heavily than usual and accusing Janice of murder. At the funeral wake beat her
in front of guests and when she fled, he followed her into the garden and beat her
with a fence picket.

Shortly after that incident, friends booked him into the Parramatta Psychiatric
Centre, his third admission to that facility in just nine months. When he checked
himself out a few days later, he went directly to his favorite tattoo parlor, where
he asked to tattooist to etch a design on his chest, in memory of his son. Days
later, he was back, this time asking for the number ‘7’ to be added to his already
prodigiously inked skin. When the tattooist asked what the number signified,
McCafferty said that seven people had to die in order that his son could be
brought back to life. The tattoo artist thought that he was kidding, but
McCafferty was serious. Deadly serious.

Archie and Janice had separated after Craig’s death and by August 1973, Archie
was living with Carol Ellen Howes, a 26-year-old woman he had met at
Parramatta Psychiatric Centre. Also living in their apartment was Julie Todd, 16,
another former Parramatta patient. Joining this odd collective were three 17-
year-olds Michael Meredith, Richard Whittington and Richard Webster, who
Archie had met a few days earlier.

On the evening of August 24, 1973, McCafferty and his gang were cruising in a
stolen car when they spotted 50-year-old George Anson staggering along the
road. Standing at just over five feet, the World War II veteran was an easy mark,
especially as he had just left the Canterbury Hotel, somewhat the worse for
drink.

Anson offered very little resistance as the gang pulled him into an alley. Their
motive was robbery but then something strange happened. According to
McCafferty’s later confession, he heard the voice of his dead son whispering in
his head. “Kill seven,” it said, “Kill seven, kill seven…”

The voice drove McCafferty into a frenzy. He started kicking Anson repeatedly
in the head and ribs. Then he produced a knife and began plunging it into
Anson’s back and neck, inflicting seven wounds. Leaving Anson dead in the
alleyway, he staggered back to the car, with his gang in close pursuit. All of them
were in awe of the blood-soaked McCafferty, all except Rick Webster. “Why did
you do that?” he asked. In that moment, McCafferty marked him for death.

Three nights later, on 27 August, McCafferty took his gang to the Leppington
cemetery to show them the grave of his son. It was a cold, rainy night but
McCafferty, stoned on angel dust, seemed oblivious to the weather. Then the
voice started up again, “Kill seven… Kill seven… Kill seven…” McCafferty
knew what that meant. There was going to be another murder tonight.

He dispatched Julie Todd and Michael Meredith to a nearby road to hitchhike,
instructing them to abduct any driver who stopped to pick them up. Todd and
Meredith did as they were told and less than a half hour later returned, holding
42-year-old Ronald Neil Cox at gunpoint. A miner who had just finished his shift
at the Oakdale colliery, Cox had been on his way home when he’d spotted the
two teenagers hitchhiking in the rain. Taking pity on them, he’d stopped, only to
have a rifle shoved into his face. He was then forced to drive to the cemetery,
where McCafferty and the rest of the gang waited. There he was made to lie face
down in the mud while McCafferty and Meredith held rifles to the back of his
head.

Cox begged for his life, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. McCafferty and Meredith
emptied their rifles into his skull.

After the murder of Ronald Cox, the gang members returned to McCafferty’s
apartment where they sat drinking beer and watching TV. But McCafferty
wanted another victim, so he dispatched Julie Todd and Richard Whittington to
pull the hitchhiking ruse again.

In the early morning hours, 24-year-old driving instructor Evangelos Kollias,
stopped to give Todd and Whittington a ride and was abducted at gunpoint.
Kollias was forced into the back seat and told to lie on the floor while
Whittington held a gun on him. Todd then drove the car back to the apartment.

The gang set off for Liverpool, with Kollias in the back seat, reassured by
McCafferty that he would not be harmed as long as he co-operated. In truth,
McCafferty was already concocting a plan whereby he would kill Kollias then
drive his car to Blacktown, where he would murder his estranged wife Janice
and her parents. That would make six of the seven victims he required to bring
his son back from the dead. The seventh would be Rick Webster, who
McCafferty felt had betrayed him.

At some point during the journey, McCafferty brought the car to a stop and
ordered his gang to drag Kollias from the car and kill him. Whittington was
chosen to carry out the murder and did it with a single bullet to Evangelos
Kollias’ head. The gang then headed for Blacktown, intending to massacre
Janice McCafferty and her family. Fortunately, the vehicle did not have enough
gas to reach their destination and McCafferty had to put his plans on hold until
the following day. He would never get the chance.

It turns out that McCafferty was right to suspect Rick Webster of disloyalty. As
soon as the teenager was able to get away from the rest of the gang, he went to
the police. McCafferty and his cohorts were arrested the next day, with Archie
immediately confessing to the murders. “All right, I knocked the bloke at
Canterbury. I knocked the bloke at Leppington. And I knocked the bloke at
Merrylands. I knocked all three of them,” he said. He also said that he had
intended cutting off Janice’s head and sending it in a box to the chief of the
Criminal Investigation Bureau.

Held for trial in February 1974, McCafferty unsurprisingly pleaded not guilty on
the grounds of insanity. Three psychiatrists called to testify as to the veracity of
his defense were unable to agree whether he was insane or not, but they all
agreed on one thing, that Archie McCafferty was an extremely dangerous man
who would kill again given the chance. The jury agreed with that assessment,
finding McCafferty guilty on all counts. The judge then sentenced him to three
terms of life in prison.

Of McCafferty’s co-accused, Michael Meredith and Richard Whittington were
each sentenced to 18 years in prison. Richard Webster was found guilty of
manslaughter and sentenced to four years. Julie Todd was given ten years, but
hanged herself in a bathroom at Silverwater Detention Centre shortly after her
incarceration. Carol Howes, heavily pregnant with McCafferty’s child, was
acquitted on all charges.

And so Archie “Mad Dog” McCafferty was sent to Long Bay Prison to begin his
sentence. There, he quickly developed a reputation as “Australia’s worst
prisoner,” acting so violently and unpredictably that he had to be tranquillized
much of the time. He was also not yet done with killing. In September 1981,
Edward James Lloyd was found stabbed to death in his cell and McCafferty was
charged with his murder. He was later found guilty of a reduced charge of
manslaughter.

Over the years that followed, McCafferty was moved constantly between
Maitland, Long Bay and Parklea prisons, as officials struggled to cope with his
unpredictable behavior. Eventually, though, his conduct improved to the point
where he could be moved to the minimum-security Berrima prison, south of
Sydney. Then, amazingly, Australia’s most violent inmate began to be allowed to
spend weekends away from the prison without supervision.

In 1997, McCafferty was granted parole on condition that he would be deported
to Scotland. Archie vigorously opposed the deportation order but was ultimately
unsuccessful. On May 1, 1997, he was put on a plane and sent back to the land
of his birth, a place he’d last visited forty years before.

Back in Scotland, McCafferty did not take long to return to his old ways. In
October 1998, he received two years probation after he led police officers on a
wild car chase through the streets of Edinburgh and then threatened to kill them
when they arrested him.
 Edward Leonski
The Brownout Strangler

During the Second World War, the city of Melbourne, Australia was subjected to
nightly ‘brownouts.’ These were not as stringent as the blackouts imposed on
British cities as a precaution against bombing raids, but they did mean that
streetlights were dimmed, throwing the city into a murky twilight. Over a period
of 15 terrifying days in May 1948, a killer stalked this eerie half-light, attacking
several women and leaving three of them strangled to death. His name was
Edward Joseph Leonski.

Edward Leonski was born on December 12, 1917 at Kenvil, New Jersey, the
sixth child of Russian immigrants. A few years after his birth, the family
relocated to New York City where Edward spent his formative years.

Edward’s childhood was not a happy one. His father was an abusive alcoholic,
his mother mentally unstable and confined to an institution on several occasions.
One of Edward’s brothers was also diagnosed with psychiatric problems, while
two other brothers were serving prison terms by their teens.

Notwithstanding the turmoil going on around him, Edward was a bright boy who
did well in school. Graduating in 1933, he took a business course and finished in
the top 10 per cent of his class. Thereafter he found employment as a clerk with
Gristede Bros Superior Food Markets and was still working there when he was
called up for military service in February 1941.

Leonski was assigned to the 52nd Signal Battalion at San Antonio, Texas.
Military life seemed to bring out another side of him. He began to drink heavily
and became somewhat of a braggart, who enjoyed demonstrating his strength.
One of his favorite tricks was to walk along a bar counter on his hands. He also
gave a more sinister demonstration of his physical prowess while stationed in
Texas. He was accused of trying to strangle a woman. Unfortunately, the military
authorities failed to appreciate the seriousness of the offence. They put it down
to drunken mischief, gave Leonski a reprimand, and shipped him off to
Australia. Three Australian women would pay a heavy price for their leniency.

Arriving in Melbourne in February 1942, Leonski quickly picked up where he’d
left off in Texas, embarking on nightly drinking binges before staggering back to
his barracks at Camp Pell in the early morning hours. He’d been in Australia
only a few weeks when a woman accused him of trying to rape her in her St
Kilda flat. Again, the authorities failed to realize the seriousness of the situation.
They sentenced Leonski to 30 days in the stockade. A month later he was back
on the bar circuit, drinking himself into a stupor and harassing women. It was
only a matter of time before that harassment went too far.

On May 30, 1942, a 40-year-old woman named Ivy Violet McLeod was found
dead in the doorway of a shop near the Bleak House Hotel, Albert Park. She had
been beaten and strangled to death, leaving the police baffled as to the motive.
Her purse was found untouched in her possession ruling out robbery, and
although her skirt had been lifted above her waist, there was no evidence of
sexual assault.

Detectives were still puzzling over the murder six days later, when another
strangled woman turned up. Pauline Thompson, 31, had been drinking at a local
bar the previous evening, in the company of a young man with an American
accent. The police believed that the American might be one of the G.I.’s
stationed at Camp Pell, but not wanting to offend the wartime authorities they
didn’t pursue that line of enquiry too vigorously.

Then, on May 18, another woman was dead. Gladys Hosking, 40, had been out
for a late night stroll. She was found on a muddy footpath close to Melbourne
University. As with the other two victims, her skirt had been raised to reveal her
underwear, although she hadn’t been raped. This time though, there was a
witness.

A local man contacted the police to say that on the night of the murder he’d been
approached by a disheveled and obviously inebriated American G.I. who’d
asked him for directions. The soldier’s uniform had been covered in mud, he
said.

The police were extremely interested in this witness’ statement, especially as his
description of the soldier matched that of the man who was seen with Pauline
Thompson on the night she was killed. It also tallied with the descriptions given
by a number of women who had survived recent attacks.

A line-up of American servicemen was arranged, with several women picking
out Leonski as the man who had assaulted them. When the witness to the
Hosking murder also picked him out, Leonski was arrested.

Leonski immediately confessed to the killings, offering a bizarre motive. He said
that he’d killed because he was fascinated by the female voice. “That's why I
choked those ladies,” he said. “It was to get their voices.”

Whether or not the motive was designed to pursue an insanity defense, it didn’t
work. Found guilty by a military court martial on July 17, 1942, Leonski was
sentenced to death. General Douglas MacArthur personally signed the order of
execution on November 4, 1942.

Edward Leonski went to the gallows at Pentridge Prison a week later on
November 9, becoming only the second American serviceman to be executed
during World War II.
 Bevan Spencer von Einem
The Family Murders

On the afternoon of July 24, 1983, a man walking his dog near an airstrip in the
One Tree Hill area of Adelaide made a horrendous discovery. The corpse of a
young man lay in the bushes, fully clothed and in the early stages of
decomposition. The man when immediately to call the police and it did not take
them long to identify the victim. In fact, his abduction had been one of the most
highly publicized crimes in Adelaide’s recent history.

It had happened at around 6 p.m. on the evening of June 5, 1983. Richard
Kelvin, the 15-year-old son of a local TV personality had just walked a friend to
the bus stop on the corner of O'Connell and Marian Streets, North Adelaide, and
was returning home, where dinner waited on the table for him. He was just half a
block from home when a car pulled to the sidewalk beside him and someone got
out. Richard was dragged into the vehicle, which then sped off. People living
near the scene, later recalled the teenager’s frantic calls for help, the sound of car
doors slamming and the roar of the vehicle, which may have had a damaged
muffler.

An immediate search was launched for Richard Kelvin, but as the weeks went by
with no sign of him, hope began to fade that he would ever be found alive. So it
had tragically proved, but the discovery of the corpse left police with a mystery
to clear up. Richard had obviously been dead for only a couple of days. Where
had he been during the interceding weeks?

The autopsy was able to clear that up. It was obvious that the boy had been held
somewhere, raped, tortured and drugged over an extended period before
eventually succumbing to his injuries. Cause of death was determined to be
massive blood loss caused by anal trauma. This had been caused by the insertion
of a blunt object, possibly a beer bottle. The victim had also suffered bruising
and injuries on his head and back, likely to have been caused by blows delivered
by his killer. Traces of four drugs were found in his system, including Mandrax
and Noctec.

The drugs, as it turned out, provided the police with an early breakthrough.
While sifting through prescriptions issued for the various medications, they
came across the name Bevan von Einem. Von Einem was well known to the
Adelaide police. He’d previously been questioned regarding the murders of three
young men. The circumstances of those deaths were remarkably similar to that
of Richard Kelvin.

Four days after the body was discovered, von Einem was pulled in for
questioning. He denied any involvement in the murder, saying that he’d been in
bed with the flu on the night Richard Kelvin was abducted. His mother would
back up his story, he said. In addition, he would provide blood and hair samples
as well as carpets and other items from his home for the police to test.

Von Einem’s willingness to cooperate surprised investigators, making them
wonder if they had the right man. But a search of von Einem’s house and
subsequent forensic tests on the items found, put the investigation right back on
track.

Firstly, there were the drugs, bottles of Mandrax and Noctec, which von Einem
had obtained by visiting a number of different doctors. Then there were hairs and
fibers found on Richard Kelvin’s body and clothing, hairs that matched von
Einem, fibers that matched the carpets in his home.

The case was strengthened further when a former associate of von Einem (a man
referred to in police records only as “Mr. B”) came forward. He described in
great detail how he and von Einem would cruise for young male hitchhikers, ply
them with drug-laced drinks and then drive them to von Einem's Campbelltown
home. There the men would be raped and sexually abused overnight, before
being released the next day.

The police now believed they had enough evidence against von Einem and he
was arrested and charged with Richard Kelvin’s murder on November 3, 1983.
The committal hearing was set for February 20, 1984. By then, von Eimem must
have realized that he needed to explain away the forensic evidence, so he
concocted a new story.

He now claimed that he’d met Richard Kelvin on O'Connell Street and Richard
had willingly gotten into his car. They had driven to von Einem’s house, where
they’d spoken for a while about the problems Richard was having at school and
about his bi-sexual inclinations. Two hours later von Einem dropped Richard off
in the Adelaide CBD giving him $20 to take a cab home. Richard was alive and
well when they parted company, he claimed.

The story was frankly ridiculous and rather than help von Einem’s case,
probably contributed to his indictment for murder. The court date was set for
October 15, 1984.

Von Einem pleaded not guilty at trial, and having concocted his story at the
committal, had little choice but to stick with it. His defense team even
extrapolated on the narrative, suggesting that someone else had abducted
Richard after von Einem dropped him off. The story was given short shrift by the
jury. They took just seven-and-a-half hours to convict. The judge then sentenced
Bevan von Einem to life in prison, stipulating that he must serve at least 24 years
before becoming eligible for parole.

With von Einem now safely behind bars, the police began looking into four
unsolved cases in which the M.O. closely matched the Kelvin murder. Between
1979 and 1982, four young men – Alan Barnes, Neil Muir, Peter Stogneff, and
Mark Langley – had been abducted, raped and murdered. Von Einem had been
the prime suspect, and rumors had been rife about a sinister group of
homosexual child abusers named ‘The Family’ who were supposedly behind the
killings. The group was said to include some of the elite of Adelaide society,
including doctors, lawyers, judges and politicians.

At the time, prosecutors did not have sufficient evidence to proceed with a
murder trial. Now, they believed that they did, provided they could enter
evidence from the Kelvin trial to establish M.O.

On September 15, 1989, Bevan von Einem was arrested in his cell at Yatala
Labor Prison, and charged with the murder of Alan Barnes. On November 10,
another charge was added, for the death of Mark Langley.

Unfortunately, von Einem would never stand trial for the Barnes and Langley
murders. After a judge ruled evidence from the Kelvin trial inadmissible, there
was just no way to proceed successfully with the prosecution and all charges
were dropped. Prosecutors and police alike remain convinced that von Einem
was responsible for the murders, and several others beside.

Bevan von Einem is currently serving his time at Port Augusta Prison. There he
continues to offend, having been accused of raping a fellow inmate and having
been caught in possession of child pornography. He will be eligible for parole in
2020.
 John & Sarah Makin
The Baby Farmers

On June 23, 1892, a young woman by the name of Amber Murray placed an
advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald. It read that Miss Murray was
looking for a “kind person” to take charge of her baby son, Horace, in exchange
for a small fee. Horace had been born out of wedlock on May 30, 1892, and
Amber was finding it impossible to care for her son while holding down her job
as a chambermaid. She was also having a hard time dealing with the stigma
attached to being an unwed mother.

A few days after the ad ran, Miss Murray received a letter from a man who
identified himself as John Hill, and offered to adopt Horace for a fee of £6. Mr.
Hill said that his wife had recently had a miscarriage and that the couple was
desperate to adopt a baby boy. He assured her that the child would find a loving
home with his extended family.

A Sydney address was provided and Amber Murray duly called on the residence.
She was somewhat disconcerted by John Hill’s shabby appearance, but he spoke
so kindly and gently that her fears were allayed. Then he introduced her to his
two teenaged daughters and the deal was done. Amber paid the required sum and
was given a receipt. She asked whether she might see Horace from time to time
and was assured that it could be arranged. She left with a broken heart but felt
certain that she’d done the right thing for her son’s future.

Unbeknownst to Amber Murray she’d just condemned Horace to an early grave.
John Hill was actually John Makin, who along with his wife, Sarah, was
involved in the odious business of baby farming.

John Makin was born on February 14, 1845, at Dapto, New South Wales, the
fourth of eleven children. His wife Sarah was born on December 20, 1848 in
Sydney. Sarah had previously been married when she met John in 1871. The
couple wed that same year. They’d have ten children, five sons and five
daughters.

During the early years of the marriage, John Makin worked as a drayman for a
local brewery. But after an accident rendered him unable to work, he and his
wife began taking in illegitimate babies in exchange for money. They’d usually
scour the classified advertisements in the local papers looking for babies being
offered for adoption, a common practice in those days. Then, after negotiating a
payment of between £3 and £5, they’d take custody of the child. Somewhere
along the line they hit on the idea of murdering the children and pocketing the
cash. Horace Murray was just one of their many victims.

On October 11, 1892, a plumber named James Hanoney was working in the
backyard of a property in Macdonaldtown, trying to clear a blocked drain.
Hanoney soon found the source of the obstruction, a bundle of foul-smelling
clothing. Then as he pulled the smelly mess from the drain he was shocked to
find that the clothing was wrapped around the decomposing corpses of two
babies. Hanoney immediately called the police. A search of the property
uncovered the putrefying remains of five more infants.

The previous tenants of the property were 50-year-old John Makin and his 47-
year-old wife Sarah. The Makins had since moved to a house in nearby Redfern,
but by the time the police arrived they’d vacated those premises, leaving behind
the bodies of three more infants. They were eventually traced to Chippendale,
where more tiny corpses were found buried in the backyard. Their grisly toll
now stood at 12.

John and Sarah Makin, along with their daughters Florence, 17, Clarice, 16,
Blanche, 14, and Daisy, 11, were all placed under arrest. The girls were later
released without charge, but the senior Makins were both indicted for murder.

The Makin trial was a sensation throughout Australia and the Sydney Supreme
Court was full to overflowing on each day of the trial. John and Sarah denied
any involvement in the deaths of the infants and their defense team tried to paint
them as a caring couple who helped young women in distress by caring for their
illegitimate children.

But the evidence told a different story. First, Amber Murray took the stand to
describe how she’d handed over her son to John Makin, how she’d continued to
pay him 10 shillings per week for the boy’s upkeep, how Makin had used all
manner of excuses to prevent her seeing her son and had eventually moved
away, leaving no forwarding address.

Three other grieving mothers identified clothing that they had given to Sarah
Makin along with their babies. Makin had later sold the clothes to a pawnbroker.
Another couple testified that they’d given Makin their baby to care for until they
were in a position to provide the child with a home. They’d given Makin a
substantial down payment, but within days he’d contacted them to say that the
previously healthy child had died. Makin had then demanded £2 toward the
funeral costs.

But the most damaging testimony against John and Sarah Makin came from their
own children. Sixteen-year-old Clarice testified that she’d seen clothes
belonging to the dead babies in her mother’s possession. Daisy Makin testified
that Horace had not been with them when they moved from Redfern to
Macdonaldtown. The implication was clear. Horace Murray had been killed and
buried at Redfern.

The ruling in the case was never in doubt and with the guilty verdict there was
only ever going to be one sentence. Both John and Sarah Makin were
condemned to death. On hearing the sentence, Sarah collapsed into her
husband’s arms.

John Makin went to the gallows at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Prison on August 15,
1893, after two appeals and a plea of clemency were denied. His wife eventually
had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor, to be served at
the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay.

In 1911, Sarah Makin’s daughters successfully launched a campaign for her
release. She had served 19 years behind bars. She died on September 13, 1918 at
Marrickville.
 Peter Dupas

Peter Norris Dupas was born on July 6, 1953, in Sydney, New South Wales. He
was the youngest of three children, but because his siblings were considerably
older, he was treated almost as an only child, his every need catered to. When
Peter was still a toddler, his family relocated to the eastern Melbourne suburb of
Mount Waverley, where he would later attend Waverley High School.

By all accounts, Peter was a normal teenaged boy. But beneath the surface, a
monster lurked and it emerged for the first time on October 3, 1968. On the
afternoon of that day, 15-year-old Peter Dupas knocked on his neighbor’s door
and asked if he could borrow a knife to peel some vegetables. No sooner had the
woman handed over the knife than Dupas turned it on her, stabbing her in the
face, neck and hand before she was able to fight him off. Dupas would later tell
police that he had no idea why he’d attacked the woman but “just couldn’t help
himself.” He was placed on 18 months probation and received two weeks worth
of therapy at Larundel Psychiatric Hospital.

Whatever that therapy entailed, it did not do Peter Dupas much good. On July
25, 1974, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for a vicious attack on a
woman in her own home. Dupas had broken in and threatened the victim with a
knife before tying her up and raping her. He’d also threatened to harm the
woman’s baby if she resisted.

Released from prison in 1979, Dupas waited just two months before picking up
old habits. Over a ten-day period, he attacked four women in separate attacks.
That earned him another five years inside.

Dupas was free again in February 1985. A month later, he raped a 21-year-old
woman on a beach at Blairgowrie, after threatening her with a knife. He was
sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for this latest transgression, but served just
seven before being paroled in 1992.

Less than two years later, Dupas was in trouble again, over an incident that
occurred at Lake Eppalock in January 1994. Dupas had gone to the recreation
area armed with a rape kit – a hood, knife, insulation tape and handcuffs.
Spotting a woman entering a public toilet he followed and confronted her at
knifepoint. When the woman’s friends responded to her screams, Dupas ran for
his car. He sped off at such high speed that the vehicle careened out of control
and crashed. Arrested at the scene, he was later convicted on one count of false
imprisonment and sent back to prison for three years and nine months.

Dupas was released in September 1996 and thereafter moved to the Melbourne
suburb of Pascoe Vale. While he was serving time, one of his jailors had sagely
commented that Dupas was an angel in prison and a monster on the outside. He
could not have known how true those words would turn out to be.

Nicole Amanda Patterson was a 28-year-old psychotherapist, who operated her
practice out of her home in Northcote. She had recently placed an ad in the local
newspaper, the Northcote Leader, offering her services. Not long after, she
received a call from a young man named Malcolm, who wanted counseling to
overcome a gambling addiction. An appointment was arranged for 9 a.m. on
April 19, 1999.

Some time between 9:00 and 9:30 a.m., two of Nicole Patterson’s neighbors
thought they heard screams coming from her house. But the screams were soon
cut off and the neighbors took no further action. That same afternoon, Nicole’s
boyfriend tried to call her and got no reply. Later that evening, a friend of
Nicole’s called at her home to collect her for a dinner engagement. Finding the
front door ajar, the friend entered. She found Nicole’s naked, severely mutilated
body in the living room.

An autopsy would later reveal that Nicole Patterson had died from 27 stab
wounds to her chest and back. Small pieces of yellow PVC tape were found
attached to her body, suggesting that her attacker had used tape to restrain her.
Worst of all, both of her breasts had been hacked off and apparently carried away
by the killer.

The police soon had a major break in the case. Having determined that the attack
had occurred sometime between 9:00 and 9:30, detectives checked Nichole
Patterson’s appointment book and turned up the name “Malcolm,” along with a
mobile telephone number. The number belonged to a university student who
claimed that he’d never met Dr. Patterson and offered an alibi for the time of the
murder. The police then learned that the student had given his number to a man
who’d promised him a holiday job. The man’s name was familiar to detectives –
Peter Dupas.

Dupas was arrested at the Excelsior Hotel in Thomastown on April 22, 1999. He
initially denied involvement in the murder, but the evidence said otherwise. First
there were the scratches on his face and forearms for which he could provide no
reasonable explanation. Then there were the items found in his house, blood
stained clothing, PVC tape similar to that found at the crime scene, a ski mask
and a bundle of newspaper clippings about the murder.

Peter Dupas went on trial for the murder of Nicole Patterson in August 2000, the
jury delivering a guilty verdict after less than three hours of deliberation. This
time, the judge finally got it right and sentenced him to life imprisonment. But it
would not be the last time the legal system locked horns with Peter Norris
Dupas. Not by a long shot.

The investigators who worked the Patterson case had never believed that Dupas
had remained inactive between his release in 1996 and the murder in April 1999.
They were right.

On October 4, 1997, the mutilated corpse of Melbourne prostitute Margaret
Maher had been found behind a Safeway supermarket in Broadmeadows. Maher
had been stabbed several times and had also suffered blunt force trauma to her
right forehead. Her killer had also removed her left breast and forced it into her
mouth. A black woolen cap was found just feet from the body and police were
able to obtain a DNA sample from it. They now had a match – to Peter Dupas.

Just a month after the murder of Margaret Maher, a 25-year-old Melbourne
woman named Mersina Halvagis was stabbed to death while visiting her
grandmother's grave at the Fawkner Cemetery in the northern suburbs of
Melbourne. The attack had been particularly vicious, with the victim suffering
87 knife wounds, mainly to the breasts and upper abdomen.

This time there was no DNA to link Dupas to the crime, but there was a
considerable body of circumstantial evidence. Dupas lived close to the cemetery
and was known to visit his grandfather’s grave there; he was observed with a
facial injury just after the murder; after an eyewitness gave an accurate
description of a man seen near the crime scene, Dupas attempted to alter his
appearance; the eyewitness later picked out Dupas from a photo array, as the
man she had seen. In addition, Dupas reportedly told a fellow inmate that he had
killed Halvagis.

Peter Dupas would be found guilty of the murders of Margaret Maher and
Mersina Halvagis, and would have two more life terms added to his sentence.
But was that the full extent of his serial killing career? The authorities don’t
think so. At least three more murders - Helen McMahon in February 1985;
Renita Brunton in 1993; and Kathleen Downes in December 1997 – have been
linked to Dupas with varying degrees of certainty. For now at least, the vicious
killer remains safely behind bars.
 Arnold Karl Sodeman
The Schoolgirl Strangler

Born in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn on December 12, 1899, Arnold
Sodeman inherited some bad genes. His father, Karl, suffered from psychiatric
problems and would eventually die in a mental institution, like his father before
him. Arnold’s mother had problems too. She was prone to bouts of amnesia,
although in her case they might have resulted from the regular beatings doled out
by her husband.

As a boy, Arnold also felt the sharp end of his father’s wrath, especially when his
father had been drinking. Arnold tolerated it until the age of 13, when he ran
away to work in the coalmines at Wonthaggi.

In common with many serial killers, Sodeman took to criminality at an early
age. He was only 17 when he was arrested for theft and forgery, and had just
turned 18 when he was shipped off for a 12-month stint at a reformatory. He’d
barely been released when he was in trouble again, this time for wounding the
stationmaster at Surrey Hills rail station during a holdup. That caper earned him
3 years hard labor with an extra year added after an escape attempt.

Released in 1926, Sodeman found work as a manual laborer, and seemed to have
turned over a new leaf. People who knew him from this time described him as
hard working, amiable and generous. In 1927, he married the former Bernice
Pope at Collingwood and by all accounts they had a happy marriage. Their
daughter Joan was born in 1928 and Sodeman was said to absolutely dote on her.
It appeared that Arnold Sodeman had finally got his life together.

And yet who knows what was going on behind the façade?

On November 9, 1930, Sodeman was drinking at a bar in the Melbourne suburb
of Armadale. Across from the tavern was a park where a group of pre-teenaged
girls was at play. Sodeman watched the girls for a long while, with one of them
in particular catching his eye. Eventually, he left the bar and crossed to talk to
her.

The girl Sodeman was interested in was 12-year-old Mena Griffiths. Sending the
other children to a nearby store to buy candy, he asked Mena to run an errand for
him. Trustingly, the girl followed Sodeman across a field to an abandoned
building, where he attacked her. Mena’s brutalized body was found two days
later. She’d been gagged and bound, then raped and strangled to death.

Two months later, on January 10, 1931, Sodeman claimed another young victim.
Hazel Wilson was 16 years old when Sodeman lured her to an abandoned house
in the suburb of Ormond. She was found a day later. The way that she was bound
suggested that her killer was the same man who’d murdered Mena Griffiths.
With virtually no clues to go on, though, the police weren’t confident of making
an arrest. Soon the investigation had ground to a halt, and the killer had dropped
from sight.

Serial killers generally go through a cooling down period between murders, a
timeframe that can vary from hours to decades. In Arnold Sodeman’s case, it
lasted four years.

On New Year’s Day, 1935, 12-year-old Ethel Belshaw was visiting the beach at
Anderson's Inlet, with her family. Also at the beach that day were Arthur
Sodeman, his wife, Bernice, and his daughter, Joan.

Around mid-morning, Ethel told her parents that she was going to buy an ice
cream. A short while later she was seen walking along the beach with a man who
was pushing a bicycle. She was never seen alive again. Her body was discovered
the next day, hidden in scrubland. She’d been raped and strangled and the
distinctive way in which her wrists were bound left the police in no doubt that
the ‘Schoolgirl Strangler’ was back.

The police interviewed over 10,000 people in the wake of the Belshaw murder.
One of them was Arthur Sodeman, but he gave the investigators no reason to
believe that he might be involved.

Almost a year passed without any progress in the case. Then, on December 1,
1935, another girl was dead, this one even younger than the previous victims.

June Rushmer was just 6 years old when she encountered Sodeman riding his
bicycle along a road in Leongatha. Unlike his previous victims, Sodeman knew
June, so when he offered her a lift on his bike, she accepted. Then, after letting
the girl off about a mile from her home, he made a grab for her. June screamed
and ran into a field, but Sodeman soon caught up with her. The child’s body was
found the next day, lying among some bushes.

Shortly after the body was discovered, a witness came forward to say that he’d
seen June with a man on a bicycle. Sodeman was working on a road repair crew
at the time and as he always cycled to work, his workmates started teasing him,
suggesting that he might be the killer. The usually mild-mannered Sodeman
reacted angrily, his response so vehement that one of his colleague’s became
suspicious. The man reported the incident to the police and Sodeman was taken
in for questioning soon after.

Initially, he denied everything, and with no real evidence tying him to the
murder, he might well have walked. But then, inexplicably, he changed his tune,
confessing to the Rushmer murder and those of the three other girls. The details
he provided convinced the police that they finally had their man.

Sodeman went on trial for murder in February 1936, the proceedings lasting just
two days and ending with a guilty verdict and sentence of death. A subsequent
appeal, based on the premise that Sodeman suffered from a mental condition that
was exacerbated by the consumption of alcohol, was rejected.

Arnold Karl Sodeman was hanged at Pentridge Prison, on June 1, 1936. An
autopsy later revealed that he was suffering from leptomeningitis, a disease that
causes congestion of the brain when aggravated by alcohol.
 Martha Needle
The Black Widow of Richmond

Martha Needle did not have the best start in life. Born Martha Charles in
Morgan, South Australia on April 9, 1863, she had a childhood that was blighted
by poverty. Not only that, but she was raised by a tyrannical father, who
terrorized his wife and children. It was perhaps unsurprising therefore, that she
showed signs of mental instability as a child, and was prone to outbursts of
temper.

In 1875, Martha’s abusive father died and she left home to enter domestic
service. In the years that followed, she grew to be a beautiful woman, catching
the eye of many potential suitors. Her choice of husband was therefore rather
surprising. Henry Needle was several years Martha’s senior and a carpenter by
trade. The couple married at North Adelaide in 1882.

During the first years of their marriage, the Needles lived at Cubitt Street in
Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. They appeared a happy and well-suited
couple and were blessed with three daughters, Mabel, Elsie and May, all born
between 1882 and 1886. But after the birth of their children, the Needles’
relationship became strained. Neighbors noticed that Martha frequently went out
unaccompanied and her husband often appeared morose and bad tempered.
There were spats, and fits of jealousy.

On February 28, 1885 one of the children, Mabel, became ill and soon
succumbed to a mystery ailment. Martha seemed distraught at her death and
tearfully told neighbors how the little girl appeared to just “fade away.” Mabel’s
death, however, saw the family better off financially. Martha collected £100
(about £40,000 at today’s value) from a life insurance policy.

Four years after Mabel’s death, in September 1889, Henry Needle himself
became ill, with symptoms that included severe stomach cramps and bouts of
projectile vomiting. Martha, putting their differences aside, nursed him through
his illness, but it wasn’t long before Henry was refusing to eat anything that his
wife prepared. He gave no explanation for his refusal, but any plate or cup she
handed him would invariable end up being flung and smashed to pieces against
the bedroom wall. His refusal to eat, of course, further weakened his condition
and he eventually died on October 4, 1889. Death was attributed to “subacute
hepatitis, enteric fever, and exhaustion due to obstinacy in not taking
nourishment.”

Martha collected £60 after her husband’s death, with the balance of his £200 life
policy held in trust for his two surviving daughters. Not that they would be
around to collect it. Elsie died on December 9, 1890, of “gangrenous stomatitis
and exhaustion.” May followed less than a year later on August 27, 1891. Her
death was attributed to “tubercular meningitis.” The deaths netted Martha the
£120 held in trust for the children. She used most of it to build an elaborate
family memorial at the local cemetery. She could be seen most days, decked out
all in black, visiting the gravesite.

In January 1892, Martha sublet a house in Richmond owned by brothers Otto
and Louis Junckens, who operated a successful saddlery business. Otto was
attracted to the pretty young widow and it wasn’t long before the two became
lovers. In April of that year, he proposed and Martha gleefully accepted.

But the upcoming marriage did not meet with universal approval. Louis in
particular was critical of his brother’s choice and he soon turned their mother
and older brother, Herman, against Martha. On August 18, 1893, Louis became
ill, his condition deteriorating so rapidly that it was feared he would not see out
the week. Believing he was about to die, Louis decided to square things away
with his brother and summoned Otto to his bedside to give his blessing for the
marriage. By the next day Louis’ symptoms miraculously lessened and within
days he’d made a full recovery from his mysterious ailment.

Louis Junckens probably thought that he’d had a narrow brush with death. But
death stalked him still. In April 1894, his symptoms returned, dissipating for a
brief period when a relative arrived from Adelaide to nurse him. When she left
on May 10, he appeared healthy. The same evening, Martha Needle visited the
Toole Brothers grocery store and bought a box of “Rough on Rats,” a popular
rodent poison of the era. The following morning she prepared a bowl of oatmeal
for Louis, who consumed barely half of it before he became violently ill and
started vomiting. He died on May 15, cause of death given as “inflammation of
the stomach and membranes of the heart.”

With Louis out of the picture, Martha must have thought that the last
encumbrance to her upcoming wedding had been removed. She was wrong.
Hermann Juncken arrived from South Australia to attend to his brother’s estate,
and if anything, he was even more opposed than Louis.

That meant only one thing to Martha, Herman was going to have to follow Louis
to the grave. Arsenic was again employed. Shortly after arriving in Melbourne,
and enjoying a meal that Martha had prepared, Herman became ill. He soon
recovered but became ill again two days later, after eating breakfast. Again the
symptoms dissipated, only to return after consuming another of Martha’s meals.

Herman was attended by Dr. Boyd, who immediately suspected poisoning. He
therefore took a sample of Herman's vomit and sent it to the Government
laboratory for analysis. The tests confirmed his suspicions. The sample
contained arsenic and there was only one person who could have put it there.

Boyd took his findings to the police, who called in Herman Junckens and asked
him if he was prepared to participate in a sting operation. Herman was more than
willing. The following day, Herman visited his brother’s house. Once there he
asked Martha to make him a cup of tea. She gladly agreed, returning minutes
later with the beverage. To her surprise, Herman accepted the cup and then
placed a whistle in his mouth and blew on it, summoning detectives who were
hiding outside. Realizing what was happening, Martha tried to wrestle the cup
away from him, but Herman held her at bay until the police burst in. The tea was
later tested and found to contain enough arsenic to kill five people.

Martha was charged with attempted murder, but it would soon get worse for her.
The bodies of Louis Juncken, Henry Needle and Martha’s three daughters were
exhumed and tests proved that they had all died of arsenic poison. The
indictment was then upped to five counts of murder.

Despite protesting her innocence to the end, Martha Needle was tried, found
guilty and executed on the gallows at the Old Melbourne Gaol on October 22,
1894. Confusion exists to this day as to her motives for poisoning her daughters.
Although it is true that she benefitted financially from the crimes, she splurged
all of the money on the grand memorial to her murdered children.
 Christopher Worrell & James Miller
The Truro Murderers

On April 25, 1978, a man named William Thomas was searching for mushrooms
in a field in the Truro district, some 40 miles northeast of Adelaide, Australia.
Spotting what he thought was the leg bone of a cow, he was about to move on
when he noticed that the bone had a shoe attached. Thomas was unsure what to
make of the find, so he left the area. However, the image played on his mind, so
he returned five days later with his wife to carry out another search. This time he
found a skull, congealed blood and items of discarded clothing. Leaving them
where they were, he left and called the police.

Detectives and a crime scene unit were soon dispatched to the area, but failed to
turn up any significant clues. The police were however able to identify the
victim. She was 18-year-old Veronica Knight, reported missing from an
Adelaide street just before Christmas, 1976.

Almost a year on from the discovery of Veronica Knight’s body, some hikers
found another skeleton, just half a mile away. Jewelry found at the scene
identified the victim as Sylvia Pittman, a young woman who had vanished at
around the same time as Veronica Knight.

The discovery of two bodies in such close proximity to one another seemed like
too much of a coincidence, especially as they’d been reported missing at round
about the same time. The police therefore went into their records and checked on
other missing persons reports from that period. To their surprise, they discovered
that five more young Adelaide women had been reported missing during that
timeframe, and none of them had ever been found.

It was beginning to look like the women had met with foul play and Detective
Superintendent Harvey, the officer in charge of the investigation, therefore
ordered a search of the area in which Veronica Knight and Sylvia Pittman had
been discovered. Eleven days later, Harvey’s suspicions were confirmed when
two more skeletons were found. They were Connie Iordanides and Vicki Howell,
two of the missing girls. Harvey now firmly believed that they’d fallen prey to a
serial killer.

But despite the discovery of the bodies the police had very little evidence to go
on. It was time to turn to the public for help and with the state government and a
local newspaper putting up a reward of $40,000, an appeal for information was
launched. It soon paid dividends.

In May 1979, a woman calling herself ‘Angela’ contacted the police and advised
them that an acquaintance of hers, a man named James Miller, might be able to
help in their enquiries. Angela recalled a conversation that she’d had with Miller
in February 1977, at the funeral of Christopher Worrell, a friend of Miller’s who
had been killed in a car crash.

A distraught Miller had pulled Angela aside and told her that Worrell had “done
something terrible.” He then went on to describe how Worrell had kidnapped
raped and murdered seven young women over a two-month period between
December 1976 and February 1977. Miller had been a witness to all of the
murders but hadn’t participated. He’d merely acted as a driver to Worrell. As
Worrell was already dead, Angela hadn’t bothered reporting Miller’s
‘confession’ to the police.

The information was extremely interesting, especially after police discovered
that Worrell had been released from a prison term for rape shortly before the
murders started. His death occurred eight days after the last abduction, which
might explain why the spree had suddenly stopped.

It didn’t take long to track down James Miller. He’d fallen on hard times since
Worrell’s death and was found living in a homeless shelter and doing odd jobs in
exchange for bed and board. He was immediately placed under round-the-clock
surveillance and was arrested when he tried to flee, after realizing he was being
watched.

Brought in for questioning on May 23, 1979, Miller was at first uncooperative.
However, after six hours of sustained interrogation, he eventually broke down
and decided to confess.

He said that on December 23, 1976, Worrell had instructed him to drive around
Adelaide looking for girls. When Worrell spotted a girl he liked, he told Miller to
pull over. Worrell then began talking to the girl and convinced her to get into the
car. They then drove to Truro where Worrell raped and killed the girl. This
scenario was repeated six more times over the next two months. Miller insisted
that he was not directly involved in the murders as he was gay, and had no
interest in girls. Under gentle coaxing by the police, he agreed to lead them to
the three bodies that had not yet been discovered.

By now it was already 10:30 p.m. but the detectives did not want to delay the
search for bodies. They immediately set off for Truro with Miller under heavy
guard. Before the night was done, they’d also visited Port Gawler and Wingfield,
uncovering the remains of three victims.

With the victims now recovered, the police turned their attention back to James
Miller. His evidence just didn’t make sense. Why would seven decent young
women get into a car with two strangers? One of the women had been engaged
to be married; another had been on her way home from a shopping trip; yet
another had been waiting for a friend to pick her up for a movie. The more the
investigators thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the women had
been forcibly abducted.

The police began leaning on Miller. Soon he began to tell the horrific story of
what really happened.

James Miller was a career criminal, a petty thief who had been sent to reform
school at age 11, and had spent most of his 34 years locked up on charges
ranging from car theft to breaking and entering. It was during one of his many
periods of incarceration that he met 20-year-old Christopher Worrell and was
instantly infatuated. Within a week they were sharing a cell and had become
lovers.

Miller was eventually released and the two teamed up again nine months later
when Worrell was granted parole. The men planned on getting an apartment
together. However, although Worrell allowed Miller to sometimes perform oral
sex on him, the physical side of their relationship diminished. Worrell made it
clear to Miller that he was more interested in women. Still, Miller remained
besotted with him and would do anything he asked.

Chris Worrell was a good-looking young man with a natural talent for picking up
women. Soon he’d persuaded Miller to drive him around as he solicited girls at
bus stops, hotels and railway stations. If a girl agreed to accompany them, Miller
would drive to a remote spot, then go for a walk while Worrell had sex with the
girl in the car. Sometimes Worrell would tie the girls up, but Miller had no
inkling that he’d start killing them.

By December 1976, Worrell and Miller were sharing a flat in Ovingham and
trawling for girls every night. On the evening of Thursday, December 23, 1976,
the pair were cruising downtown Adelaide when Worrell instructed Miller to
stop and let him out. He disappeared into the mass of Christmas shoppers,
returning a while later with a young woman (Veronica Knight). Knight had
become separated from her friends during a shopping trip and Worrell had
offered her a lift home. According to Miller, Worrell then convinced Knight to
go for a drive with them into the Adelaide foothills.

At their destination, Miller pulled the car onto a dirt road and went for a walk as
he always did. When he returned, about an hour later, he found Worrell sitting
calmly in the front seat and the girl lying motionless in the back. Worrell told
him that he had raped and killed the girl. Miller flew into a rage and grabbed
Worrell by the shirt, but Worrell produced a knife and threatened to kill him
unless he let go.

Worrell then directed Miller to drive to Truro, where they disposed of the body
in a field before driving back to Adelaide.

The following day, Worrell carried on as if nothing had happened. He and Miller
never spoke about the murder and Miller never even considered reporting it to
the police. He was too afraid of losing Chris.

On January 2, 1977, the deadly pair went trawling again and picked up 15-year-
old hitchhiker, Tania Kenny. They drove to Miller’s sister’s house where they
knew no one was home. Worrell and Tania went inside, while Miller waited in
the car. A while later, Worrell called Miller inside.

Tania was in the children’s playroom, bound, gagged and strangled to death. On
seeing the dead girl, Miller again flew into a rage but calmed down after Worrell
threatened to kill him. They then hid Tania’s body in a cupboard, returning later
that night to retrieve it. They drove Tania to the Dean Rifle Range near
Wingfield, where they buried her in a shallow grave.

Miller could easily have stopped the murder spree by going to the police. But he
was so devoted to Worrell that he continued to accompany him night after night
as he trawled for victims. His favorite spots were the Adelaide Railway Station,
Rundle Mall, and the Mediterranean and Buckingham Arms hotels. Miller
stressed that he never played any part in picking up the girls. His role, as he put
it, was that of “chauffeur and mug.”

On January 21, 1977 they picked up 16-year-old high school student Juliet
Mykyta at the Ambassador Hotel in King William Street. Juliet was sitting on
the steps of the hotel waiting for a bus when Worrell offered her a lift. She was
driven to a secluded spot along Port Wakefield Road, where Worrell raped and
strangled her. Her body was eventually dumped near Truro, covered with tree
branches.

And still Worrell wasn’t satisfied. In fact, he was accelerating. Within the space
of a single week in early February, he’d claim four victims.

The first of those was 16-year-old Sylvia Pitmann, picked up from Adelaide
Station on February 6, driven to Windang and strangled with her own pantyhose.
The following day, Worrell picked up 26-year-old Vicki Howell. Miller took a
liking to Vicki and hoped that Worrell wouldn’t kill her. But he did nothing to
stop Worrell strangling the woman to death.

On February 9, Miller and Worrell were cruising in the center of Adelaide when
they spotted 16-year-old Connie Iordanides. They did a U-turn and offered her a
lift, which she accepted. Connie was driven to Wingfield, where Worrell forced
her, kicking and screaming, into the back seat. At this point, Miller got out of the
car. When he returned Connie was dead.

Just three days later, on February 12, Worrell and Miller committed their fourth
murder in a week. In the early hours of Sunday morning the depraved duo
picked up 20-year-old hitchhiker Deborah Lamb in downtown Adelaide.
Deborah was heading to Port Gawler and Worrell offered to take her. They drove
to the beach and Miller again went for one of his walks. When he returned
Deborah was nowhere to be seen and Worrell was filling in a hole with sand. A
forensic examination would later reveal that Deborah Lamb had been buried
alive.

There seems little doubt that Worrell would have gone on killing until he was
caught. And at the rate he was going he would likely have become Australia’s
most prolific serial killer. But fate had other plans for Chris Worrell.

On Saturday February 19, 1977, he and Miller were driving back from Mount
Gambier. Also in the car was a female acquaintance, Deborah Skuse. Worrell
was behind the wheel and was driving recklessly, having earlier consumed
several cans of beer. Just north of Millicent, their vehicle had a blowout and
careened off the road, rolling a number of times. Worrell and Skuse died at the
scene. James Miller walked away with a fractured shoulder.

It was at Worrell’s funeral, that Miller confessed their crimes to ‘Angela’
(actually, Amelia, Chris Worrell’s girlfriend).

James Miller went on trial in February 1980. He entered not guilty pleas to each
of the seven counts of murder, but the jury gave short shrift to his defense that he
was not an active participant in the murders. They found him guilty on six
counts and not guilty on one (Veronica Knight - the jury accepted that he might
not have known that Worrell was going to kill the girl).

Miller was sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment and sent to the top-
security Yatala prison to serve out his sentence. He died there of cancer on
October 22, 2008. He was 68 years old.
 James Ryan O'Neill

He is Australia’s longest serving prisoner for a single offence, the brutal 1975
murder of 9-year-old Ricky John Smith. And yet, James Ryan O’Neill is much
more than that. We know for example that he committed another child murder
within months of killing Ricky. We know also that he abducted and raped at least
a dozen pre-teen boys. And there is evidence linking him to eight more murdered
children across Australia. That would make him the country’s most prolific child
killer.

James O'Neill was born Leigh Anthony Bridgart in Melbourne, Victoria in 1947.
As a child he attended Brighton and Caulfield Grammar School and Scotch
College, and was an intelligent boy who generally got good grades. After school,
he worked for a while in real estate. Then he became a gun dealer with alleged
links to Melbourne’s underworld. At least that was what he told his friends, but
then again, he was always known to spin a tall tale.

In 1969, a friend of Bridgart’s was loading a pistol when the weapon accidently
discharged. The bullet struck Bridgart in the head entering through his right
forehead, traveling downward and exiting through the back of his neck.
Miraculously, he escaped serious brain damage, although the injury destroyed
most of his sense of smell and taste. It did something else too, revealing a dark
side to his personality. In 1971, he was charged with sexual offences against four
boys in Victoria. Facing serious jail time if convicted, he skipped bail and fled to
Western Australia.

Flying below the radar, Bridgart headed for the remote Kimberley region in the
far north of the state. There, he remained constantly on the move. In 1973, he
married a barmaid named Carol, who he’d met in Fitzroy Crossing. A year later
he showed up in Derby, where he landed a job with the Department of
Agriculture. He was soon fired, after he was caught trading food for sexual
favors with Aboriginal children.

Bridgart, in fact, had trouble holding down any sort of job. He was never short of
a story though, claiming at different times to be a Vietnam vet and an undercover
ASIO agent. People who knew him regarded him as “weird.” But they had no
idea what he was capable of.

On the afternoon of Thursday, August 29, 1974, 12-year-old Jimmy Taylor left
his home on Knowsley Street, Derby to go to a local store. He was later seen
walking along Loch Street, carrying a cardboard box. Then, a gray pickup, with
a white man at the wheel, stopped and offered Jimmy a ride, which he accepted.
He was last seen putting his box in the backseat and hopping in the front.

Jimmy Taylor wasn’t reported missing until September 5, because his family
assumed that he had gone to visit relatives at nearby Myroodah Station,
something he’d often done in the past. When the police were eventually
informed, a search was launched for the youngster, ranging from Wyndham to
Carnarvon. But no sign of Jimmy Taylor was ever found. It was as though he’d
just dropped off the edge of the earth. Or been swallowed up by it.

Two months after the disappearance of Jimmy Taylor, Bridgart departed Western
Australia, selling his gray pickup truck before he left. He showed up next in
Tasmania, settling in Hobart.

In November 1974, Leigh Anthony Bridgart became James Ryan O’Neill by
deed poll. Three months later, he celebrated the birth of his first child and also
committed the murder that would ultimately send him to prison for life. O’Neill
was on his way to the hospital to pick up his wife and newborn son on February
10, 1975. Spotting nine-year-old Ricky John Smith unattended, he lured the boy
into his truck then drove him to a remote area. There he raped Ricky, before
pulverizing his head with a rock.

In the weeks that followed O’Neill tried to abduct two more youngsters but they
thankfully escaped. Nine-year-old Bruce Colin Wilson was not so lucky.
Abducted in a near identical crime to the Ricky Smith murder, he was raped and
bludgeoned to death in April 1975.

O'Neill was accelerating, hunting for new victims on an almost daily basis. Who
knows how many innocent kids he would have brutalized had he not been caught
in the act of trying to abduct a young boy in May 1975.

As was the legal custom of the day, O’Neill was tried for only one murder, that
of Ricky John Smith. At his trial, he pled insanity, citing the bullet wound he had
suffered. But that held little sway with the jury. After deliberating for just three-
and-a-half hours, they found O’Neill guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life
imprisonment.

But despite the conviction, investigators and prosecutors were bothered by one
question, were the Hobart killings the only murders committed by James
O’Neill? Given what we know about offenders of this type, it seems highly
unlikely, and although there is no substantive proof to link O’Neill to any other
murders, there is a raft of circumstantial evidence.

In 1998, documentary filmmaker Gordon Davie interviewed O’Neill with a view
to making a film about unsolved child murders. Over the course of those
interviews, Davie became quite friendly with the convicted killer. He also picked
up a disquieting pattern of lies told by O’Neill. Questioned about places he’d
visited or lived in, O’Neill lied about eight locations. On further investigation, it
turned out that children had disappeared from all of those places, the
circumstances startlingly similar to those in the murders of Ricky John Smith
and Bruce Colin Wilson.
 Ivan Milat
The Backpacker Killer

On Saturday, September 19, 1992, orienteering enthusiasts Ken Seily and Keith
Caldwell were navigating a course in the Belanglo State Forest, about 60 miles
south of Sydney. Late in the afternoon, the pair stopped for a break near a
wooded gorge called Executioner’s Drop. They were about to set off again when
Seily picked up a horrid smell, which he at first thought was from an animal
carcass. That was until he spotted a shaft of bone and a swatch of hair that on
closer inspection turned out to be human. The two men ran to the finishing point
of their course and called the police.

Over the previous three years, detectives from Sydney's Kings Cross police
station had been investigating the disappearances of a number of backpackers
from the area, so when the report came in, it wasn’t long before the area was
swarming with cops. Floodlights were quickly erected, and crime scene units got
to work processing the scene. They continued through the night.

The following day a second corpse was found, lying partially covered by a log
about 100 feet from the first. The bodies were identified as those of Caroline
Clarke and Joanne Walters, British backpackers who had gone missing five
months earlier, while hitchhiking from Sydney to Adelaide. Caroline had been
stabbed to death; Joanne had been stabbed and shot. There was evidence of
sexual assault. The killer had spent some time at the crime scene judging by the
number of cigarette butts on the ground. He’d also left behind a number of shell
casings, later determined to be from a .22 Ruger rifle. That looked like a
promising lead but eventually led nowhere, as the investigation stalled.

In October 1993, a man named Bruce Pryor was collecting firewood in the forest
when he found a human skull and thighbone. A call brought officers racing to the
area, where they discovered a second body.

The victims were James Gibson and Deborah Everist, two 19-year-olds from
Victoria, missing since 1989. Both had been brutally stabbed to death. One of the
knife wounds had severed James Gibson’s spinal column, and the killer had tried
to inflict a similar wound on Deborah Everist, suggesting that he’d deliberately
delivered these cruel blows in order to immobilize them. According to the
pathologist it would have left the victims fully cognizant of what was happening
to them, but unable to do anything about it.

Four young victims had now been discovered within the space of just a year and
although the authorities were denying it, the words “serial killer” were being
liberally reported in the media. The police responded by forming a task force,
under Superintendent Clive Small.

An experienced investigator, known for his attention to detail, Small
immediately got to work setting up a hotline to receive information from the
public. He also sent 40 officers, assisted by cadaver dogs, to carry out a grid
search around the area where the corpses had been found.

Other members of the task force were assigned to tracking down the murder
weapon. This was no easy task. Over 50,000 .22 Rugers had been imported into
Australia between 1964 and 1982. Undeterred by these daunting numbers,
detectives began quizzing gun shop owners and local gun club members.

Twenty-six days into the Belanglo Forest search, the police made another
gruesome discovery, the skeletal remains of a female victim. She was later
identified as German tourist, Simone Schmidl, last seen hitchhiking in
Liverpool, west of Sydney, on January 20, 1991. She had suffered numerous stab
wounds, including the now familiar thrust to the spinal column.

The autopsy on Simone Schmidl had barely been completed when the searchers
found two more bodies. German nationals Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja
Habschied, 20, had set off from Sydney on December 26, 1991, bound for
Darwin. Somewhere along the road they’d accepted a ride from a killer.

Neugebauer had been strangled, then shot six times in the head. His girlfriend
had suffered an even more horrendous fate. From the position of her body it
appeared that she had been forced to kneel before being decapitated with either a
sword or a machete. Her head was missing from the scene.

With ballistics conclusively linking the Neugebauer and Walters murders,
Superintendent Small called a press conference and announced that the police
now believed a single perpetrator was responsible for all of the murders. This
was hardly news to the assembled media, who had been reporting the serial killer
theory from the start.

The case was by now attracting international attention and in Birmingham,
England a man named Paul Onions had been following with particular interest.

Onions had visited Australia in 1989/90, basing himself at a backpacker hostel in
Sydney's Kings Cross. Short of cash, he decided to hitchhike to Adelaide where
he hoped to earn some money as a fruit picker. He set off on January 25, 1990,
hiking south on the Hume highway, but he had no luck that morning and was
considering abandoning his trip when a silver pick up truck stopped and the
driver, a tall, well-built man with a handlebar moustache, offered him a lift. He
gladly accepted.

The driver of the vehicle identified himself as “Bill.” Speaking in a broad
Australian accent, he told Paul that he was of Yugoslav descent, lived nearby,
and was divorced. He was pleasant enough at first, but after about an hour, his
demeanor changed. His tone became more aggressive and he started making
derogatory remarks about, “pommies.” A short while later, he stopped the car
and drew a gun. “This is a robbery,” he said. He then reached under the seat and
produced a coil of rope.

Paul Onions had a decision to make, and the course he chose probably saved his
life. He levered the door open, jumped from the cab and ran, sprinting directly
into oncoming traffic.

“Stop or I'll shoot!” Bill shouted from behind him, but Paul kept going. He
managed to flag down local resident Joanne Berry, who drove him to the police
station at Bowral, where he reported the incident.

Paul Onions returned to England a few weeks later and heard nothing more from
the Australian police. Now, he wondered if “Bill” was somehow connected to
the “Backpacker Murders.”

Back in Australia, the mammoth investigation continued, with hundreds of tips
coming in from the public. One was from a woman who suggested that the
police check out a man named Ivan Milat, who drove a four-wheel-drive vehicle,
lived near the forest and owned dozens of guns. Another call was from Joanne
Berry, who described how she’d helped Paul Onions escape from a gunman.
These, like the hundreds of other calls, were logged into the task force computer
system, and were soon lost. The system was already overloaded.

On November 13, 1993, Paul Onions eventually decided to phone the Australian
High Commission in London. He was given the number for the task force hotline
and placed a call, describing the incident in detail to the officer who answered.
The man seemed disinterested, and after the call was terminated, Onions
surmised that his information hadn’t been of any use.

In December 1993, task force detectives Gordon and McCluskey began
investigating Ivan Milat, a suspect whose name had been put forward by three
separate callers. The detectives learned that Milat had served several prison
terms, on charges ranging from armed robbery to assault. He’d also been
accused of abducting two hitchhikers on the road between Liverpool and
Melbourne, and raping one of them. He’d been acquitted on that charge, but the
modus operandi and location of the crime, together with Milat’s criminal past,
set alarm bells jangling. Milat was placed under surveillance. By March 1994,
he’d been elevated to the top of the suspect list.

However, the evidence against Milat was circumstantial. He was an ex-con with
a history of violence, who lived in the area, drove a four-wheel drive truck,
owned several firearms and was known to hunt in the Belanglo forest. The
investigators needed something more, something that would place Milat in the
area of the murders, at the time they were being committed.

The obvious place to find such information was among the tips submitted to the
task force hotline. But it only took a few attempts before it was clear that the
computer system wasn’t up to the task. The decision was then taken to work
through the reports manually, a massive job with no guarantee of success. Luck,
though, was with the searchers. Two days after starting their search, one of the
detectives stumbled on the statement submitted by Paul Onions.

Onions was immediately contacted, and it was arranged to fly him out to
Australia. He arrived in early May 1994, whereupon he took detectives back to
the scene of the attempted abduction and talked them through the harrowing
ordeal. Thereafter, he was asked to view a photo lineup and positively identified
Ivan Milat as his assailant.

This, of course, was not sufficient cause to charge Milat with the Backpacker
Murders. But it was enough to arrest him for the assault on Paul Onions and to
obtain a search warrant on his properties. Hopefully, those searches would
provide the evidence that investigators needed.

On Sunday, May 22, 1994, officers carried out coordinated raids on Milat’s
home, as well as those of six of his relatives. Milat surrendered without a fight
and was taken into custody while search teams executed their warrants. They’d
soon have all the evidence they needed.

Concealed within various locations in the home, police found a Bowie knife, a
homemade silencer and several firearms, including a disassembled Ruger .22
that would prove to be the murder weapon; they found sleeping bags belonging
to Simone Schmidl and Deborah Everist; they found a striped top belonging to
Caroline Clarke and a headband that had belonged to Simone Schmidl. In
addition, there were cable ties and a length of rope similar to that found at the
crime scenes. A water bottle, a camera and various items of camping equipment
found at the homes of Milat’s siblings had all belonged to the victims. And at the
home of Milat’s mother, the police found a cavalry sword with a curved blade,
consistent with the cut that had removed Anja Habschied’s head.

Ivan Milat was charged with seven counts of murder. At trial he offered an
unusual defense, claiming that one or more of his brothers had committed the
murders and that he had been set up by his own family. Given the ironclad
prosecution case against him, it was never likely to succeed.

On July 27, 1995, Milat was found guilty on all seven counts of murder. He
was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole.





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 About The Author

Robert Keller has had a deep fascination with true crime since his early teens
and has researched and studied literally thousands of cases. He is also one of the
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