Dancing with Demons

by Tim Watson-Munro

  Far from hostile, Knight was deferential in his desire to co-operate. After a brief introduction, we exchanged strained pleasantries. During my time at Parramatta Gaol I had examined many murderers, but I felt poorly equipped to deal with a case of this magnitude. During that first hour or two I wondered by what arcane process, and at what point in this boy’s life, the wheels had started to wobble. He came across essentially as a polite, somewhat nervous kid. He was out of his depth and confused in the new, prison environment. He was like a boy setting out for his first day of high school after a long summer’s break – tentative, wearing ill-fitting long trousers, not yet an adult and no longer a child. I felt some fleeting compassion for him and for a moment I forgot why he was there. But then I snapped back; the sheer horror of his actions kept me firmly anchored to reality.

  I came to learn a lot about Knight and realised that his obsequiousness reflected his lifelong fascination with the military and an associated respect for uniforms and chains of command. From an early age, he had played with toy soldiers, often replicating famous battles.

  Julian and two other children in his family were adopted, although from separate birth mothers. I wondered whether the sad little boy had tried to compensate for his sense of abandonment by escaping into a fantasy world of mock battles. Certainly no one would challenge his authority and control how he manoeuvred his small tin fighters.

  Unlike most youngsters, who move on to other forms of play and fantasy, this military theme continued throughout Julian’s teenage years. In high school, he was keen to be involved in cadets, but since it wasn’t offered at his school, he insisted on being driven to a different high school where cadet parades were part of the curriculum. This involvement with school cadets caused no great alarm at the time; indeed, it would seem that his adoptive father Ralph, an army captain, had encouraged this interest with pride.

  Julian had a troubled time at school and university. Ralph had been posted to Hong Kong at about the time that Julian was due to commence school and the whole family had moved overseas. Julian spent eighteen months at the Stanley Fort School, before the family returned to Australia in 1975.

  The shift of schools and change of culture may have had a slightly destabilising effect upon the boy, but nothing in comparison to the two further school changes which occurred before he enrolled at the Westbourne Grammar School just in time to start Grade 6. I wondered if the frequent changes in Julian’s schooling might have had some bearing upon his poor capacity to maintain relationships in his later years.

  His time at Westbourne was shadowy. After three years there he was suspended after a schoolyard fight and left. He discontinued from his next school, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, after only a year. His mentors there had evidently considered him to be unsuitable to continue.

  In contrast, Julian’s senior years were more fruitful. Being highly intelligent, he was accepted into the academically prestigious selective school, Melbourne High, where he completed his High School Certificate. His scores were good enough for him to matriculate into the Humanities faculty at La Trobe University, nestled among the leafy trees of the northern suburbs. After a relatively carefree summer of 1985, which saw him employed as a part-time kitchen hand with McDonald’s in addition to occasional work as a door-to-door salesman, Julian commenced an arts degree studying politics, English and French as well as, forebodingly, modern German history.

  True to his well-chronicled history of alienation, he dropped out after only six weeks, citing his contempt for the ‘intellectual bullshit’ as the reason for his departure. Salvation was then to find him through his involvement with the Australian Army Reserve. Between the bouts of unemployment and depression which he endured throughout 1986, Julian discovered comfort and a sense of belonging through his participation as a reservist, posted with the 4/19 Prince of Wales Lighthorse Regiment. He attended a number of military training camps: a basic drill camp, an assault trooper course, and training in driving and military ordnance. The driving tuition was cut short due to a personality clash with another reservist.

  After years of alienation, failure and rejection, Julian was euphoric when he found out that he had been accepted into the Royal Military College at Duntroon, Australia’s elite officer training school. He believed his acceptance into Duntroon would finally realise a lifelong dream to become an officer and a gentleman. And with the trappings of office, no doubt he would be accorded the well-earned respect and acceptance from others, which had for so long been lacking in his life.

  His parents were more circumspect regarding their son’s capacity to cope with the anticipated rigours of residential military life. Insightful to his immaturity, they urged Julian to defer his entry for twelve months. Julian could not be dissuaded from his quest, however, and against the best advice of his friends and family he joined Duntroon in 1987. Like so many before him, however, he was disappointed by what awaited him there.

  Duntroon’s charter has long been to turn out refined young officers. Its comprehensive curriculum involved not only military matters, but also the essentials of protocol and good manners.

  It also had a long tradition of clandestine acts of bastardisation, the survival of which was seen as an essential rite of passage to manhood. Perhaps it was thought that the law of the jungle would help to weed out those weaklings who had fallen through the cracks of Duntroon’s psychological appraisal. The army psychology corps at that time had not advanced much beyond the standard tests developed during World War II, which provided useful information concerning a candidate’s intellectual capacity to master the rigours of march drills and trigger pulling, and their unquestioning willingness to stand for hours in the hot sun. Julian, in many ways, was well equipped and prepared to endure the harsh realities of military training at Duntroon, but due to his innate emotional frailty and simmering anger, he developed a swift resentment about being bullied and distinguished against because of his class.

  In most of these criteria, Julian generally excelled. Regrettably, however, the tests in those days did not allow for a clinical analysis of a candidate’s levels of depression, anxiety, alienation and psychopathy. If they had, Cadet Knight may never had had the opportunity to use his training to create mayhem and mass destruction. His high levels of unresolved anger, and his poor capacity to cope with any behaviours designed to destabilise his already jaded self-worth, also seem to have been overlooked.

  Although there is a plethora of documentation regarding the impact that trauma and atrocities in times of war can have on some unhinged soldiers, when it came to adequately assessing a candidate’s ability to withstand these onslaughts, the psychology corps of the Royal Australian Army basked in a sea of self-contented mediocrity. No doubt this was how and why Julian Knight managed to slip through the recruitment net.

  Since Knight’s sentence, I believe the army has broadened its procedures to include clinical profiling. Despite this small reassurance, I have occasionally awakened in a cold sweat, wondering how many other potential Knights are poised to explode after their experiences with the army.

  Tragically for all concerned, it is arguable that Knight himself was truly unaware of the extent and the intensity of his repressed though seething anger. I suspect that one catalyst for its potent release was the months of abrasive cruelty he was subjected to at Duntroon.

  There is a well-used expression in prison environments for describing misfits who are rejected by the jail’s population: ‘The bastard’s face doesn’t fit.’ More or less from the start, Knight’s face failed to fit at Duntroon. Unlike most of the boys there, and indeed their fathers and grandfathers before them, Knight had not enjoyed a privileged background. He had not been educated at the Melbourne or Sydney Grammar schools where simpering adherence to authority and a belief in your own superiority were worn as badges of honour. Furthermore, he had been raised on the wrong side of the Yarra River. It was rare for ‘commoners’ like Knight to grace the Duntroon environment, and those that di
d were generally referred to as ‘boons’, a pejorative term to emphasise how much they didn’t belong.

  More or less from the time that he arrived in Canberra on 13 January 1987, Knight was shocked by the behaviour of fascist superiors and the acts of victimisation he experienced. After spending the first week settling in and sorting through the excitement of receiving his military gear, he and the other novices were to spend the next five weeks surviving boot camp at the Majura Range. This basic training period saw him lumped in with the other 120 new recruits, ten men to a tent, on a parcel of land close to the Canberra airport. Knight reported that things started to unhinge shortly after their arrival, and claimed that his seniors began to constantly torment him.

  His mood continued to deteriorate as the first weeks passed by, his time regularly punctuated by being dressed down in front of his peers, leading to strong feelings of alienation. His initial report card at the end of the training period accused him of attempting to project an image of toughness. There was some hope for him, though, as he had received special mention for his performance during a three-day field exercise in the final week at Majura. Prophetically, this involved contact drill procedures for ambush and counter-ambush.

  It was a fairly forlorn and alienated Cadet Knight who finally arrived at the college barracks sometime in late February 1987 and was placed with Kokoda Company.

  Senior cadets at Duntroon, who were only eighteen months older than Knight, were all-powerful. Junior recruits were expected to obey, honour and respect them, without question. If they didn’t, the senior cadets determined the punishments. They were also responsible for extending rewards for conformity. It was no doubt reasoned that the senior cadets had earned their higher position by surviving the process of subservience themselves, so they would exercise their authority in a sensible, judicious and fair manner. Of course, the logic of this approach is inevitably flawed.

  Cadet Knight claimed to be subjected to a number of acts of bastardry. Knight’s superiors allegedly required him to fetch their roasted weaners with a plate in his mouth before crawling back to them over the mess room chairs. His money and belongings were regularly stolen and he was pushed and shoved, given faulty equipment and confined to barracks then reported as AWOL. By his account, Knight’s girlfriend at the time was also sexually assaulted when older cadets touched her breasts during a visit. He told me about one occasion when he and another junior cadet were given pieces of toast covered in butter, honey and peanut butter before being ordered to shove it in their mouths, unbroken, to eat. Shortly afterwards he returned to his room to discover buttered toast sticking to his ceiling. Another time, he alleged a marauding gang of senior cadets burst into his room, forcing him to the floor and pinning him down while his sideburns were shaved. Sideburns were evidently considered to be the mark of a ‘boon’.

  Knight also alleged that the instructing sergeants would regularly encourage and participate in fights between Kokoda and its rival Gallipoli Company. This practice was referred to as ‘bishing’ and took the form of water bomb and flour fights through to actual assaults. Knight alleged that one female cadet had to be hospitalised after being assaulted by her seniors and tearing a ligament to the hip. He further claimed that he was on occasions threatened by an officer, who had said he would take the cadet for a walk and that ‘funny things would happen’. As the persecution of Knight escalated, his mental health deteriorated. Matters came to a head one Saturday evening when whilst confined to barracks he escaped and attended The Bin, a local Canberra nightclub and hotspot. In a state of intoxication, he confronted and stabbed his ‘mess sergeant’, a person whom he blamed for many of his problems. In the fracas, Knight was injured and initially placed in a military hospital, before his father managed to have him released to bail in the community awaiting a court martial. He was placed on indefinite furlough from Duntroon and returned to Melbourne.

  By the next time I saw him at Pentridge, Knight had received a haircut and was out of his pyjamas. He appeared to be somewhat better connected in time and place. His mannerisms and body language indicated that he was pleased to see me and seemingly eager to share his views of the world. He had become a huge media item. Tragically, not long after the Hoddle Street killings, there had been a copycat massacre in the English village of Hungerford. Knight expressed some satisfaction that he had already become a global influence. Grandiosity was a consistent theme in his description of the world and his place in it. If his stint at Duntroon had been successful, he had planned eventually to join the well-paid ranks of the soldiers of fortune fighting for noble causes in faraway places like Angola.

  Knight’s confidence seemed to expand with every passing week, a consequence, I suspect, of the countless requests for his story. In addition to the media, prison groupies were writing to him with offers of support, love and potential marriage. It seemed psychological illness was no barrier to love.

  Over the subsequent months, Knight and I completed a rigorous psychological work-up. This included an assessment of his IQ, which fell within the superior range, in addition to a number of personality tests. These tests revealed a consistent pattern, indicating that Knight was not insane but nonetheless prone towards spontaneous outbursts of rage. In other words, he was clearly bad but not mad.

  And yet, in a curious way, I found him to possess some positive qualities. For example, he was highly creative and, although misguided in its focus, possessed an interesting sense of humour. This was reflected through his cartoons. Some of these, relating to prison life and firearms, were regrettably published in a Melbourne newspaper fuelling Knight’s growing ego. I was also touched by what appeared to be a deep and genuine concern for his mother and two siblings.

  I was convincingly brought back to earth about four months later.

  On 8 December 1987, Melbourne was subjected to yet another mass murder, this time at the Australia Post Headquarters located in the heart of the business district. Frank Vitkovic, a Melbourne University law school dropout and paranoid schizophrenic, had vented his murderous spleen by snubbing out the lives of eight employees at random while stalking prey on a number of floors within the building. The body count may well have exceeded twenty or thirty, had it not been for the heroic actions of a number of workers who managed to tackle the offender while his back was momentarily turned. A powerfully built man, who no doubt was additionally energised by the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he managed to struggle to a window and, despite efforts to restrain him, leap to his death on the pavement some ten floors below. Vitkovic understood the script. Unlike Knight, the would-be soldier, Vitkovic had done the honourable thing by dying on his feet.

  The day following this horrific event I had visited Knight in Pentridge’s notorious H Division, where he had been transferred for his own protection. This high security punishment wing was also used to lodge dangerous crims whose lives were at risk. There was already a contract on Knight’s life and a long queue of willing prisoners eager to kill him. As I had experienced at Parramatta, prison is about survival of the fittest. It is a jungle with a clearly defined pecking order. The person who killed Knight would earn enormous prestige and benefit from the associated privileges. For many of the men who were never to be released, one more life sentence as punishment for Knight’s murder was meaningless. And besides, the chance to put on a suit for a few days during a trial could alleviate years of accumulated boredom.

  When I arrived at H Division Knight, however, was focused upon more pressing issues than his own life expectancy, as his infamy was already being eclipsed and Vitkovic was now the focus of intense media scrutiny. Knight was at risk of becoming almost passé. But he was not to be out-foxed. He knew how to restore his honour. He volunteered his expertise on mass murder to the government of the day, by scribbling a gratuitous open letter to the premier, courtesy of the Melbourne Age. The letter audaciously called upon the government to institute more rigid gun control laws to protect its citizens, ensuring Knight managed to recl
aim his position in the spotlight. These actions prompted me to recalibrate my attitude towards him, and my approach to his behaviour, from that point onwards.

  The day of the Hoddle Street massacre started inauspiciously enough. At least, there was nothing to arouse suspicion as to what was going to unfold that evening. Knight had lunched with his mother, siblings and grandmother. It was his nanna’s birthday, but Knight was unable to fully enjoy the festivities. He was troubled. Knight had been charged with one count of malicious wounding for stabbing the mess sergeant and criminal proceedings were in train. A pending dishonourable discharge would follow the inevitable court martial at a future date.

  Knight no doubt spent that fateful afternoon at his nanna’s birthday pondering his future. Where had it all gone so terribly wrong? In the space of months, his fledgling career was in tatters. The Melbourne landscape he’d returned to was entirely different to the one he’d left in January of that year. The loose associates and small smattering of friends he had enjoyed before leaving for Duntroon had abandoned him, having disagreed with his decision to enlist. Fuelling his sense of dispossession, his own bedroom had been hastily redecorated in his absence, creating a bed-sitting room.

  Knight’s mood rapidly worsened while driving home late that afternoon. The clutch in his clapped-out Holden Torana had blown. Trivial as it seemed, the failure of his car might well have represented the final insult. It could be seen as a telling metaphor for Knight’s own failed life: disgraced, futureless and powerless.

  Knight attempted to drown his grief over the death of his beloved car by filling up on beer at the local pub. He claimed that it was while he was at the Royal Hotel that he first experienced a hallucination involving camouflaged militia who were to be ambushed. He referred to this as a ‘call to arms’, sensing with some excitement that conflict was imminent. He then left the hotel, returning to the comfort of the family home in Ramsden Street before retrieving his weapons, which were lodged under his mother’s bed. Knight’s firepower included a .22 semi-automatic Ruger rifle, an M14 Carbine and a twelve-gauge shotgun, which he had used for pig shooting. The M14 is the weapon of choice of the United States military. The semi-automatic .22 was a family heirloom, which Knight had received as a birthday present from a proud uncle twelve months earlier. All his weapons were registered. He also possessed a shooter’s licence. Consistent with safe firearm procedure, the truckloads of ammo were kept in a separate part of the house. Knight’s mum was contentedly watching evening television with her two other kids in the downstairs lounge room, oblivious to his movements.