100 Most Infamous Criminals
Page 22
Ned Kelly
Ned Kelly, a quiet, soft-spoken man, it’s said, was the last and greatest of Australia’s folk-hero bushrangers, with a fanatical hatred of the law. His father, a Victoria farmer, had been transported as a convict from Belfast in Ireland in 1841, and he himself had spent three years in prison as a boy for horse- and cattle-stealing. Whatever the source of the hatred, though, it seems to have boiled over when a police constable arrived at the Kelly farmstead one day in April 1878, looking for his brother Dan. The whole family resisted; the constable was wounded and when a warrant was issued for Ned and Dan Kelly, they took to the bush with two other young tearaways, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne.
In October of that year, they fought a gun battle with a police patrol sent after them at Stringybark Creek. A sergeant and two troopers were killed and from that moment on Ned Kelly, aged just 23, became Australia’s Public Enemy Number One. Identifying him was one thing, though; catching him quite another. For not only did Kelly and his gang have an old and intimate knowledge of the Victoria countryside, they also had many sympathizers – particularly, it’s said, among women – who put them up and passed on information about the police’s whereabouts. When the Kelly gang robbed its first bank at Euroa in December of that year – after taking twenty hostages – the police were 100 miles away on a wild goose chase.
A photograph of Kelly in his armour
An artist’s impression of Kelly shooting his way out of trouble
In February 1879, in any case, the gang left Victoria for New South Wales and robbed a bank in Jerilderie, with thirty local people locked up in a hotel as insurance. Kelly’s reputation as a brazen and defiant criminal spread, and the police became a laughingstock as he continued to evade capture, despite the arrest of some of his sympathizers and the posting of large rewards. Finally, in June 1880, Kelly decided to humiliate them still further. He sent Joe Byrne to Beechworth, where Byrne calmly shot a former accomplice of the gang, who was supposed to be under police protection. Then he took off, aiming to draw a large body of police into a train ambush at Glenrowan, where Kelly had already taken over sixty hostages and had had a section of the track removed.
Warned by a local schoolmaster, though, the police stopped the train and turned the tables: thirty-seven strong, they ambushed the gang, who were holed up in a hotel with their hostages. Ned Kelly, wounded, escaped into the bush; in the middle of the seven hour siege, during which all the other members of the gang died, he reappeared with his guns – and entered Australian history for ever – wearing black face- and body-armour made from iron plough mouldboards. He was only brought down by being shot in the legs. The armour had taken twenty-five bullets. Asked why he’d come back when he could have escaped, Kelly said:
‘A man gets tired of being hunted like a dog. . . I wanted to see the thing end.’
He was hanged in Melbourne in front of a huge crowd in November 1880 – his last words were:
‘Such is life.’
But not long afterwards his armour was put on show in Hobart, Tasmania in an ex-convict ship, along with waxworks and mementoes of the convict-transport system. The ship, which was later moved to Sydney, was scuttled there, armour and all, by indignant citizens who didn’t want to be reminded of such things.
Katherine Knight
Katherine Knight had a talent for decapitating pigs. The razor sharp boning knives she had used in her working life in the abattoirs of New South Wales would be the very same tools she later employed to kill her common-law husband.
Knight exhibited a terrifying streak of violence in the years leading up to the murder. She would cut up boyfriends’ clothes and vandalize their cars in fits of rage. There were reports too of her involvement in strangulation, stabbing, burning and savage beatings. She once placed her first-born, Melissa, on railway tracks minutes before a train was due – because the father had walked out on her, driven away by Katherine’s jealousy and violent behaviour. (The two-month-old baby only escaped almost certain death because a local drifter happened to come along at the right time.) A few days later, she disfigured a 16-year-old girl’s face with a butcher’s knife. Later, she would further practise her slaughter skills on her partner’s eight-week-old puppy, cutting its throat in front of her horrified boyfriend.
In 1994, Knight met John Price, known as ‘Pricey’. He was a well-liked man; even his former wife, with whom he’d had four children, spoke of him only in glowing terms. The relationship with Katherine was not easy – the couple often had terrible fights – but six years later Kath and Pricey were still together. By early 2000, though, Pricey began to share his concerns about the relationship with friends and colleagues. He even told a local magistrate that he feared for his life, showing him a stab wound he’d received from Kath. The end of their tempestuous union would come on February 29th 2000.
Price and Knight, photographed together just a week before the grisly murder
Knight later claimed she had no recollection of what happened that evening. We know from forensic evidence, though, that at some point Knight donned a black negligee bought at a local charity shop. It’s probable that she was wearing the flimsy garment when she and Pricey had sex – it is certain that she had it on when she began stabbing him, at least thirty-seven times, destroying nearly all of his major organs.
At 7.45am the following morning, Pricey’s boss phoned the local police to report that his employee had not yet arrived at work. The authorities visited Pricey’s bungalow, forced the door and found his skin hanging in a doorway. His decapitated corpse was lying in the living room, and his head was in a large pot, simmering away on the kitchen stove. On the dining room table were two servings of food, consisting of boiled vegetables and generous portions of cooked corpse. Placement cards indicated that the two settings were intended for Pricey’s children.
In October 2001, Knight changed her not guilty plea and admitted that she had killed John Price. The following month she became the first woman in Australia to receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Speculation remains as to whether she ate any of the meal prepared from Pricey’s body.
William Macdonald
There was a sigh of relief in Australia in the 1960s when the identity of a homosexual serial killer known as The Mutilator was finally established. For he turned out to be William Macdonald, an Englishman, who claimed in his defence that he’d been raped at the age of 15 by a British army corporal. All this had happened in England, thousands of miles away from the home of proper men. He was not, after all, home-grown.
The search for The Mutilator began in July 1961, when the body of a forty-one-year-old blacksmith was found under a shed beside the Domain Baths in Sydney. The corpse had been stabbed thirty times; the genitals hacked off, and an attempt had been made to sever the head.
The sheer frenzy of the attack suggested to the police that the motive was jealousy, the revenge of some rival lover or husband. But then, five months later, another man’s body, mutilated in exactly the same way, was found in a public toilet in a Sydney suburb. Because of its location, the police began to take for granted that the man they were looking for was ‘a psychopath homosexual… killing to satisfy some twisted urge.’
It wasn’t until four months later, in March 1962, that The Mutilator struck once more. A young couple with a baby found the still-breathing body of an emasculated man lying in a gutter in another Sydney suburb. The killer had not quite finished his work. Frank Maclean had only been stabbed in the neck, but he’d already lost too much blood from his other major wound to be able to talk. He died shortly afterwards.
The government now offered a large reward for information leading to The Mutilator’s arrest, but for another seven months there was not a whisper. Then, in November of that year, a deputy inspector of health went to an unoccupied surburban shop where neighbours had been complaining of a bad smell. Under the building at the back was the partly decomposed body of a man who bore all the sadistic marks of The Mutilator.
The case now fell into place. For a neighbour remembered seeing Brennan with another man in the shop on the night before his disappearance. A notice had appeared at the shop’s door the next day, saying that the owner had cut his hand and would be away for three weeks. Upstairs in the bedroom, along with a bloodstained pillow, had been found a copy of a book about Jack the Ripper…
An Identikit picture of Brennan was published in the press; and was recognized by two clerks at the Spencer Street Railroad Station in Melbourne as fitting a station assistant there called David Allan. ‘Allan’ was arrested and later confessed – not only to the murders, but also to his real name, William Macdonald. He was taken to Sydney and tried for the murder of Patrick Hackett, whom he’d picked up, drunk, he said, outside a Sydney hotel. He was sentenced to life in prison, and later transferred to the Morriset Mental Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
‘Chopper’ Read
Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read is a career criminal turned celebrity. He has written a series of books about his experiences and the 2000 film Chopper was based on his life.
Born in 1954, Read spent his first five years in a children’s home. His mother was a Seventh Day Adventist and his father, an ex-army martinet, used to beat him. He was bullied at school. At the age of 14 he was made a ward of state and as a teenager he was placed in several mental institutions.
By his mid-teens he was the leader of the Surrey Road gang. Then he began robbing drug dealers, removing his victims’ toes with bolt-cutters or a blowtorch if they were reluctant to give him their money.
When released from jail in the 1980s, he also claimed to have extorted money from fellow criminals by strapping a stick of gelignite to his chest and threatening to blow them both up if they did not pay up. ‘I can’t believe I ever had the audacity,’ said Read later. ‘I also can’t believe that it always worked.’
Between the ages of 20 and 38, Read spent just 13 months out of jail, serving time for armed robbery, assault and kidnapping. In Pentridge prison’s H division, he started a gang war, leading the so-called ‘Overcoat Gang’, who wore long coats to conceal their weapons.
During his time in Pentridge, he was said to have attacked 63 men and tried to kill 11. He also had his ears cut off, though there are conflicting stories about how this occurred. His stomach was slit open and he lost several feet of his intestine, but he says that he took his revenge – both in jail and outside.
Read always reckoned that the one crime that brought him to public prominence was the 1987 shooting of the drug dealer, Siam ‘Sammy the Turk’ Ozerkam, outside Bojangles Nightclub in St Kilda, Melbourne. ‘I’ve pulled the shotty out and gone bang and it’s bye, bye, Turk,’ said Read, though he still maintains it was an act of instinctive self-defence.
Read claims he was bullied in school, but what happened to him there was as nothing compared to what he went through in jail
While in jail in 1990, Read began writing to John Silvester, a journalist who had written about him in the Melbourne Age. He had a talent for telling stories and his letters were edited into book form and published as Chopper: From the Inside the following year. A series of 12 more volumes followed, including a children’s book. Material from his prison books provide the material for the movie Chopper.
In 2001, Read appeared in an award-winning TV drink-drive campaign, saying: ‘When I was in prison I got slashed down the face, my ears cut off, I had a claw hammer put through my brain just here, cut-throat razors here and here, butcher’s knife there, ice-pick there, ice-pick up the back there… If you drink and drive and you’re unfortunate enough to hit somebody, you ought to pray to God that you don’t go to prison.’ In 2005, he toured Australia with the show ‘I’m Innocent with Mark “Jacko” Jackson’. His name was also used to promote beer.
While in jail Read contracted hepatitis C from sharing a razor. In 2008, he refused a liver transplant on the grounds that there were more deserving cases, but he did give up drinking to prolong his life. How much can we believe of what he’s told us? ‘Once you pick up pen and paper, you can take people on a journey anywhere,’ he says ‘The trouble is they come back later on and ask: “Is that true?” I say: “Who gives a sh*t?”’