Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  He had been driving aimlessly when he saw a man and a woman in a parked car. The interior light went out, so Cooke thought he would stop and spy on the couple. He took the rifle with him. And when they spotted him and threw a bottle at him, he shot back.

  In Broome Street he stopped again, intent on doing a bit more burglary. He clambered over some railings and climbed up on to a balcony. Inside some French windows a man lay sleeping. The bed barred Cooke’s way into the room, so he shot from the hip at the sleeping body. The result was Brian Weir’s irreversible brain damage.

  Prowling around the block, Cooke saw a man sleeping on the verandah. Another shot from the hip ended John Sturkey’s young life. The next killing was even more deliberate. He leant the rifle against the garage of a house he had picked randomly in Louise Street and went to ring the front doorbell. Then he ran back to the gun and aimed at the doorway. When a man answered the door, Cooke shot him. Then he threw the rifle off the Narrows Bridge into the Swan River and returned the Holden to the house where he had stolen it. In the morning the owner noticed that the bulb of the interior light had been removed, but the matter was too petty to report to the police.

  Only the death of John Sturkey upset Cooke. ‘He was so young,’ he told the police. ‘He never had a chance. I will never meet him because he is up there and I’ll be down there. I’m just a cold-blooded killer.’

  With that last sentence, Cooke ruled out the possibility of being found not guilty by reason of insanity.

  Cooke also confessed to the murder of 33-year-old divorcée Patricia Vinico Berkman in 1959. Her lover, local radio personality Fotis Hountas, had found her body in bed in her flat in South Perth. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the head and chest. She left a nine-year-old son. And Cooke said that he had killed wealthy society beauty Jillian Brewer later that year. Aged 22, she too had been viciously murdered in her own flat. The killer had used a hatchet and a pair of scissors. There were no fingerprints. The doors were locked from the inside and there was no sign of any windows being forced. The police were mystified.

  Four months after the killing, 20-year-old deaf-mute Darryl Beamish, arrested for molesting four little girls, had confessed to the Brewer murder through a sign-language interpreter. At his trial, Beamish claimed the confession had been forced out of him. The prosecutor produced no other evidence. Nevertheless, Beamish was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  Cooke’s confession, on the other hand, was extraordinarily detailed. His description of the flat on the night of the murder fitted exactly with the photographs taken by the scene-of-crime photographer. He even explained the locked doors – he had stolen the key to the flat on a previous raid.

  On 17 March 1964, Beamish appeared before the appeal court with Cooke’s statement. However, the three appeal court judges – one was the original trial judge, the other two had dismissed Beamish’s appeals on two previous occasions – did not believe Cooke’s confession. But they did commute Beamish’s sentence from death to life imprisonment. Cooke was hanged in Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964.

  Name: Julian Knight

  Nationality: Australian

  Number of victims: 6

  Favoured method of killing: shooting

  Final note: he claimed his killing spree was a result of his desire to make an heroic last stand and go down fighting

  Cooke’s January night rampage is peculiar, but he otherwise exhibited the profile of a serial, rather than a spree, killer. In 1987 a lone gunman loosed off a hail of bullets in a more typical, random, mindless spree killing.

  At 9.30 p.m. on Sunday 9 August, young Alan Jury was driving along Hoddle Street near the suburb of Clifton Hill, Melbourne, when he heard a noise like a firecracker. His windscreen shattered. Quickly realising that someone was shooting at him, he stamped down on the accelerator and roared away from the danger. At the next service station he reported that a gunman was firing at passing cars.

  In the car behind him, Rita Vitcos also heard a bang and saw sparks fly off the surface of the road. She too accelerated away. Later, when she got out of the car, she found two bullet-holes in the driver’s door and realised how lucky she had been.

  Twenty-three-year-old Vesna Markonsky’s windscreen exploded as she drove down the Street. She jammed on the brakes. When the car came to a halt she discovered that a bullet had hit her in the left arm. She got out and a second bullet hit her, then a third. Her boyfriend Zoran, who was with her in the car, jumped out to help her. More bullets filled the air as he and a young doctor, who had stopped his car behind Vesna’s, ran towards the wounded girl. The doctor collapsed, hit.

  Another car pulled up behind Zoran’s. A bullet hit the driver in the right temple. He died instantly. A girl student stopped to help. She too was gunned down. When Zoran reached Vesna, he cradled her in his arms. She spoke a few words, then lost consciousness.

  Constable Belinda Bourchier arrived in a police car shortly afterwards. Zoran ran to her and tried to pull her revolver out of its holster. Covered in blood and in a state of shock, he yelled at her that he wanted to kill the bastard who had just murdered his girlfriend. More shots screamed past them. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Constable Bourchier, and they ran for cover behind some trees at the edge of the road.

  The gunman continued firing with deadly accuracy. More windscreens shattered and cars careered across the road. A motorcyclist swerved and crashed. He lay in the road trapped under his bike and two more bullets slammed into his body.

  After ten minutes of shooting, the police turned up in force. The shots were coming from the ‘nature strip’, a grass verge alongside Clifton Hill railway station. The police set up roadblocks and closed off the area.

  A police helicopter was called in. It flew in low over the nature strip. Its searchlight swept the ground. But the gunman had vanished.

  A few minutes later a police car, turning into Hoddle Street from the north, came under fire. A policeman on a roadblock there was also winged by a bullet. Another shot struck the helicopter flying overhead, but bounced off its armoured underside.

  Spotting the gunman near the track, a signalman managed to stop an oncoming train. He ran up the line, expecting to be shot in the back. But the gunman now seemed to be firing into the ground. The signalman reached the train and told the driver to reverse. When he looked back, the gunman had disappeared.

  In a street close by, two constables in a police car spotted a man with a rifle running along the road. They pursued him. The gunman turned in to a lane and they stopped the car, closing off the end. Out of the darkness of the lane came a hail of bullets. One shot hit Constable John Delahunty in the head. He flung himself to the ground and managed to crawl towards the gunman. His partner, Constable Lockman, crawled after him. They got within a few yards of where they believed the gunman to be when the wounded Delahunty saw his head rise above some bushes. Delahunty leapt to his feet and fired his revolver.

  The gunman ducked back down behind the bushes. A moment later a voice called out, ‘Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me.’

  ‘Put your gun down and come out with your arms up,’ Delahunty shouted back.

  A dark silhouette rose from behind the bushes. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ said the gunman again as he walked forward with his arms high above his head. He had a small moustache, a military haircut and identified himself as 19-year-old Julian Knight.

  Knight was an illegitimate child who had been adopted when he was a baby. His adoptive father was a career army officer, whom he greatly admired, and it was an emotional shock when his parents divorced when he was 12.

  Although he was generally regarded as bright, his schoolwork soon began to deteriorate. His reports said he was lazy, too easily distracted and too complacent about his abilities. He always had difficulty accepting authority. Unlike other spree killers, Knight was not shy. He had girlfriends and something of a reputation as the ‘class clown’ at Fitzroy High School. But from an early age he was preoccupied with Charles Whitman
and other lone snipers. Eventually he was expelled from school for his violent outbursts. Then he was accepted by the Royal Military College at Duntroon. He was almost 19 when he went to the Military College in January 1987. An army assessor described him as immature, overconfident and stubborn. He could not knuckle down to army discipline. In May he was charged with eight offences, including four counts of being absent without leave. Then, on 31 May, after a weekend confined to barracks, he slipped out and got drunk in a nightclub near Duntroon. A sergeant encountered him and ordered him out. Knight stabbed him twice in the face with a penknife. He was charged with assault and discharged from Duntroon in July 1987, after only seven months.

  Back at the police station, Knight seemed calm and subdued. He described how he had started the evening by drinking a dozen glasses of beer in a local pub to alleviate a terrible feeling of depression. Since his discharge, his whole life had been turned upside down. His mother had changed his bedroom into a sitting room, so he was forced to camp in his own home (just a few yards from Hoddle Street, on the other side of the railway tracks). His girlfriend had left him. He owed the bank thousands of dollars. A car he had hoped to sell had broken down that afternoon, and something had snapped.

  He had decided it was time to die – but to commit suicide offended his sense of military honour. Since his schooldays, he had fantasised about wars, particularly heroic ‘last stands’. He decided to go down fighting.

  He left home that evening at 9.25 p.m., carrying a shotgun and two rifles. He crossed the railway line to the nature strip. He knelt down, took careful aim and started to shoot at the cars coming down Hoddle Street.

  He kept on shooting until he had used up all his ammunition. He claimed to have hoped that a ‘battle’ might develop, but no one shot at him until Constable Delahunty fired his revolver. He groped in his pocket for the last bullet he said he had saved for himself. It had gone. So he surrendered, like a soldier who was surrounded and had run out of ammunition.

  In the space of 45 minutes Knight had fired at more than 50 cars, hitting 26 people. Seven of his victims were dead, or dying in the nearest hospital. Two days later, when what he had done had sunk in, Knight had a nervous breakdown and had to be confined to a padded cell. In November 1988 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Julian Knight will not be eligible for parole until the year 2013.

  Name: Frank Vitkovic

  Nationality: Australian

  Number of victims: 9

  Favoured method of killing: shooting

  Melbourne had scarcely recovered from the shock of the Hoddle Street rampage when four months later another mad gunman claimed a further eight victims.

  On 8 December 1987, 22-year-old Frank Vitkovic went to the Australia Post office, initially intending to kill an old schoolfriend against whom he harboured a grudge. He was suffering from depression and severe headaches. But the gun misfired and his friend escaped. Vitkovic then began to shoot at random.

  Twenty-year-old Judy Morris photographed the last sunset of her life on Monday from the roof of her father’s funeral parlour.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Judy, a Telecom Credit Union teller, as she pointed her camera at the horizon. ‘I want it on film so I can always remember.’

  She was speaking to her fiancé, 19-year-old Jason Miles, an apprentice chef she had met just a year before. According to Judy’s father, Ken Morris, it was Jason who had coaxed his shy daughter out of her shell.

  Shortly before sunset that night Judy told her fiancé that something was worrying her. Her workmates at the Credit Union on the fifth floor of the Australia Post building, at 191 Queen Street, had met about security that morning. The tellers had complained that the bullet-proof screens they had asked for a year before had still not been installed.

  ‘She was horrified at not having any security at work,’ Jason said. ‘Not for herself, but for everyone else.’

  As Jason moved to go that night, Judy said: ‘Don’t go.’ They lay in each other’s arms for a long time. It was as if she knew her time was up, he said.

  Next morning Judy Morris waved to her mother, Nola, as she walked to the train station and called out that she would see her that night. Six-and-a-half hours later Frank Vitkovic caught another train to Queen Street and entered the blue-tiled foyer of the Australia Post building.

  As Judy and Jason had contemplated the happy course of their own lives the previous evening it is likely that Vitkovic had already decided the course of his. Vitkovic came from the West Preston area of North Melbourne, home to many European immigrants of the late 1950s and 1960s. Yugoslav house painter Drago Vitkovic and his wife lived in a small white-painted weatherboard house on May Street, the very picture of respectability. The front lawn had been covered with concrete to give more off-street space for Mr Vitkovic’s brown Valiant station wagon and the family’s two other small vehicles.

  In these affluent surroundings, their son Frank grew into a good-looking, big framed youth who was over six feet tall. At high school he was placed in the top five per cent of students. Vitkovic also had a passion for playing tennis, becoming something of a legend on the twin clay courts of St Raphael’s tennis club. A strong backhand drive floored many opponents and scared others. Margaret O’Leary, a former club secretary, recalled that Vitkovic sometimes aimed his returns at an opponent’s body. It was enough to help him win the club championship in 1983.

  The young sons of immigrant families in the club quickly identified with Vitkovic. They became known in the clubhouse as ‘the ethnics’. Mrs O’Leary recalled that some of the young men idolised Vitkovic and his confidence blossomed.

  ‘The topic of conversation was always Frank Vitkovic,’ she said. ‘He found it very hard to lose.’

  Everyone agreed that Vitkovic was destined for bigger things. Nobody was surprised when, in 1984, he won a place at Melbourne University’s Law School. To start with everything went fine. Vitkovic told tennis-club friends he was ‘breezing through’. But in early 1986 things began to go wrong. Midway through his last year, Vitkovic abandoned his studies and helped his father paint houses.

  Those who knew him still detected no hint that Vitkovic was having problems. His family were good people. Nobody ever expected anything bad to happen to Frank.

  Vitkovic returned to Law School at the beginning of 1987, but it was a brief and unhappy experience. He left his studies again soon after because of ‘unsatisfactory progress’. He also sought help from Melbourne University’s Counselling Service during this period. He did not work after leaving university.

  Vitkovic kept a file of Melbourne newspaper clippings of Julian Knight’s massacre on Hoddle Street, underlining sections of the clippings in red. He also kept Rambo videos in his bedroom.

  In mid-September he had obtained a gun permit from the Central Firearms Registry in Melbourne after failing just one of the 14 questions. It was: ‘Should firearms be unloaded before you enter a house or building?’ He had answered: ‘No.’

  Around the same time, a salesman from Precision Guns and Ammo in Victoria Street, West Melbourne, sold Vitkovic an M-1 semi-automatic rifle for £275. Vitkovic sawed the stock and barrel off the 75-centimetre weapon to make it easy to conceal.

  The night before he went into the Australia Post building, he wrote in his diary: ‘The anger in my head has got too much for me. I’ve got to get rid of my violent impulses. The time has come to die. There is no other way out.’

  Judy Morris returned to her office from her 1 p.m. lunch-break on top of the world. Not only had she had the spectacular picture of the sunset developed, but she had bought a new outfit – white slacks with braces and a matching pink blouse. She showed them to her closest friend, a young supervisor who also worked behind the Credit Union counter.

  Judy also passed the pictures of the sunset around her friends in the Credit Union. Twenty-two-year-old Con Margellis, one of the regular staff, may have seen them.

  Margellis is the only apparent link between Vitkovic and the 1,00
0 people working that day in the Queen Street offices. He lived just a few streets from the Vitkovics in West Preston. He and Vitkovic had been at school together and had been friends for a number of years.

  At 4.10 p.m. that Tuesday Vitkovic emerged from the lift and greeted Mr Margellis inside the fifth-floor Credit Union office with the word ‘G’day.’

  He then brought out the carbine from under his green top and began firing shots in the direction of his friend. Police ruled out any homosexual relationship between them. Nor was there any dispute over a woman. Nevertheless Vitkovic was now shooting with murderous intent at his former classmate.

  The Telecom Credit Union staff scattered in fear. Someone pressed the alarm button. Judy Morris and her best friend ran towards the glass exit doors. A shot rang out. Both women fell. They lay on the ground until Vitkovic finished shooting and disappeared out of the exit to the lift wells. Margellis was safe. He had hidden in the women’s toilets. But Judy Morris was dead.

  The security doors shut tight behind Vitkovic, trapping him outside. He kicked the doors, trying to get back in. He went to the lifts and waited until one of the pink arrows flashed up. Then he rode to the twelfth floor.

  The Philatelic Bureau was quiet when Vitkovic burst in. In the customer sales section he let rip with automatic rifle-fire. The bureau’s 29-year-old supervisor Warren Spencer was killed while trying to take cover behind the office photocopier. His 24-year-old wife, Susan, mother of their two children, who also worked at the bureau, watched in horror as her husband died. Twenty-year-old Julie McBean and 18-year-old Nancy Avigone were shot dead at their desks.

  Below, Melbourne became aware of the shootings. As crowds began to gather in the street, Vitkovic took a sniper’s perch from a broken twelfth-floor window. He fired several bullets at the first motorcycle police officers who arrived at 4.15 p.m.