Australian Serial Killers - The rage for revenge (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  Mark seemed unconcerned, even by the fact that she had emptied his bank account, and Garion and his wife became suspicious. They also doubted the story because, after a fairly miserable life during which she had had eight children by a number of different men, Elizabeth seemed to be settling down with Mark. Three days later Garion reported his sister missing to the police.

  Robert Wagner and Barry ‘Vanessa’ Lane also lived not far from Waterloo Corner Road. Lane’s flamboyant dress – pink shorts in summer, for instance – and his record of paedophile convictions made the house a target for local children and the two men built a high fence around the building and kept four Doberman Pinchers to keep people away. Wagner, illiterate and dependent upon Lane, was a white supremacist with a loathing for gays and Asians, and a member of the far-right group National Action.

  In July 2000, Wagner, Bunting and Haydon pleaded guilty to four charges of murder in the Adelaide Supreme Court and were sentenced to life imprisonment with a twenty-six-year non-parole period.

  John Wayne Glover

  They called him the ‘Granny Killer’ or the ‘Monster of Mosman’. He was a vicious serial killer who specialised in the particularly brutal killing of elderly women. His method was always the same. He would select his victim and force her into an alley or secluded spot where he would proceed to pulverise her with his fists and a hammer in a frenzy of violence and horror. When she lay in a bloody heap at his feet, he would remove her underwear and would then strangle her with her own pantyhose. This last act was the calling card that identified the killer as the same one in all six cases.

  John Wayne Glover was not the type. A large, friendly man in his late fifties, he was considered an ordinary family man who loved his wife and two daughters and could be trusted with anything. He lived in a comfortable house in the fashionable and well-off Sydney suburb of Mosman, right beside Sydney Harbour. He worked as a sales rep for the Four ‘n’ Twenty Pie Company and was a volunteer with the Senior Citizens Society. A real good bloke, as the Aussies would say. But in reality he was a heartless killer who spent the easily won proceeds of his murders on gambling and booze.

  Glover, born in Wolverhampton in England, had been convicted of various petty crimes in 1947, being discharged from the British Army when these emerged. He emigrated to Australia in 1956, initially living in Melbourne. He had always had problems with older women, perhaps suggesting reasons for his later activities. He had never got on with his mother Freda, a woman who had had several husbands and many relationships. In Australia, when he married Jacqueline ‘Gay’ Rolls in 1968 and moved into his well-off in-laws’ house in Mosman, he encountered another older woman with whom he did not get on – his mother-in-law Essie Rolls, a cantankerous, domineering individual.

  His offending did not stop when he emigrated. Not long after arriving Down Under, he was convicted on two charges of theft in Victoria, and in New South Wales he was also convicted of stealing. In 1962, aged twenty-nine, while employed as a television rigger with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, he was arrested for the assaults of two women in Melbourne as well as theft.

  These assaults presaged his later, more vicious assaults. The victims were beaten about the face and body and forced to the ground as he frenziedly ripped the clothes from their bodies. On each occasion, the screams of the women alerted local people to what was happening and Glover was forced to flee before he could rape or kill them.

  After the second of these attacks, residents reported seeing a young man running into a nearby garden and police cornered Glover and arrested him. He told them that he had had a fight with his girlfriend and had been feeling very emotional. He was released on bail the following morning. As he was leaving the police station, however, he was intercepted by two other police officers who wanted to ask him some questions about a similar assault a few weeks previously. He confessed under their questioning and was charged with that attack, too. He was lucky, however, receiving only a three-year suspended sentence.

  He was in trouble again in 1965, picked up on a peeping tom charge. Sentenced to three months, he served only six weeks before being paroled. It would be many years before he broke the law again, apart from a minor shoplifting charge in 1978. Not everyone is convinced that he was squeaky clean during that time, however, and there are at least five unsolved murders between 1965 and 1989 that involved similar methods to those later used by Glover.

  In 1982, he was dismayed to learn that his mother Freda was following him by emigrating from England to Australia. He was even more upset when he learned that Freda planned to move into the Mosman house as a companion to Essie. His wife and her parents knew nothing of Glover’s criminal past and he was certain that Freda could not be trusted to keep it quiet. Fortunately for him, however, he succeeded in dissuading her and she went to live in Gosford, one hundred miles north of Sydney, just far enough away. She died in 1988 of breast cancer and he was diagnosed as having the same condition, an extremely rare occurrence amongst men. He underwent a mastectomy but developed prostate problems that rendered him impotent. It would later be said that he changed around this time as a result of his health problems.

  On 11 January 1989, eighty-four-year-old Margaret Todhunter was walking in a quiet road in Mosman when Glover drove past. He parked his car and, when he was certain no one could see him, walked up to her and punched her in the face, snatching her handbag in which was $209. He took to his heels with the handbag as she shouted after him. Given what happened to Glover’s other victims, she could consider herself very lucky.

  Gwendoline Mitchellhill was not quite so lucky a couple of months later.

  On 1 March, Glover spotted Mrs Mitchell hobbling along with the help of a walking stick. He opened the boot of his car and took out a hammer, tucking it into his belt, out of sight. He followed at a safe distance and when she arrived at the secluded entry to the retirement village where she lived, he raised the hammer above his head and brought it down heavily on her skull. He continued to bludgeon her about the head and body before grabbing her purse which contained $100. She was still alive when she was found but was dead by the time the emergency services arrived on the scene.

  The two attacks had the police puzzled and they were not even certain that they were connected. Finally, they reasoned that it was just another mugging – there had been many in the area – that had gone very wrong.

  It was ten weeks before Glover killed again. Lady Winifred Ashton had been playing bingo at the social club that Glover also frequented and was walking home when Glover saw her. He again followed her into the foyer of her apartment building where he attacked her with the hammer. She was a frail little old lady who was suffering from cancer at the time, but she put up a fight. However, Glover bashed her head continuously on the concrete floor until she was unconscious. He then removed her pantyhose and, pulling it tight around her thin neck, strangled her. He had established a calling card that would tell police that it was the same man carrying out these horrific crimes. He also arranged her shoes and walking stick neatly at her feet. He found $100 in her purse and returned to the social club to buy drinks with it and play the poker machines to which he was addicted.

  The police now knew they were dealing with a serial killer, a homicidal maniac who was heartless enough to unleash his violence on defenceless old ladies. Although he never had any interest in sexually assaulting the women he killed, he now very strangely started assaulting elderly, bed-ridden women in the nursing homes he visited in his capacity as a pie salesman. He began on 6 June by putting his hand under the nightdress of seventy-seven-year-old Marjorie Moseley at a retirement home in Belrose. When the police were called, she was unable to describe her assailant and they made no connection between these crimes and the murders.

  He did it again on 24 June at another retirement home, when he lifted an elderly lady’s dress and fondled her buttocks, and in the neighbouring room he stroked another woman’s breasts. Staff, alerted by the woman’s shouts, came running and
questioned Glover but he left without being held or his identity being established.

  On 8 August, he assaulted Effie Carnie in a back street of Linfield, not far from Mosman, not killing her but stealing her groceries. He impersonated a doctor on 6 October, putting his hand up the dress of a woman patient in a nursing home at Neutral Bay, a harbourside suburb, but again escaped.

  On 18 October he started a conversation with eighty-six-year-old Doris Cox and walked with her into the secluded stairwell of her retirement village. Suddenly, he smashed her face against the wall, using all of his strength. He rummaged in her purse, but finding nothing, left her for dead and went home.

  Unfortunately, Mrs Cox’s description of her attacker had police looking for a considerably younger man than Glover. It was a lucky break for him, especially when police began to think that they were probably looking for a local teenager with a grudge against grandmothers. Police concentrated all their efforts on this and Glover was free to continue his attacks.

  On 2 November, he offered to carry home the groceries of an elderly woman in Lane Cove, about ten miles from Mosman. The woman offered him a cup of tea in return but he declined. On his way back to the main street he passed eighty-five-year-old Margaret Pahud and, turning, hit her on the back of the head with a blunt instrument, probably his hammer. When she collapsed to the ground he struck her again on the side of the head, killing her. He grabbed her handbag and took off after neatly arranging her clothes as usual. Shortly after, he was buying drinks in the social club with the $300 he had found in her purse.

  Twenty-four hours later, eighty-one-year-old Olive Cleveland became his fourth victim. He engaged her in conversation on a bench near her retirement village in Belrose. When she stood up to go home, he grabbed her from behind and pushed her down a ramp onto a secluded lane. He beat her and slammed her head continuously against the concrete until she lost consciousness. He then removed her pantyhose, wrapped it around her neck and strangled her. Having tidily rearranged her walking stick and clothing, he removed $60 from her handbag and headed for the club. An increasingly worried state government increased the reward they were offering for information from $200,000 to $250,000.

  Although they were not yet being linked to the murders, on 11 January 1990 there was a significant breakthrough in the investigations into the molestations of the elderly women in nursing homes. Glover had visited the Greenwich Hospital that day in his work outfit. With an official-looking clipboard in his hand, he entered the hospital’s palliative care ward which was occupied at the time by four elderly women. He pulled up the nightdress of one of them and touched her indecently. When she screamed for help, a hospital sister arrived and found Glover. He ran out of the ward, but she managed to get the registration number of his vehicle and the police were called.

  Glover was identified as the attacker and he was asked to come to the police station to answer some questions. When he failed to appear, they called his house to be told that he had tried to take his own life and was in the Royal North Shore Hospital. He refused to answer any questions but handed staff of the hospital a note saying, ‘no more grannies ... grannies’ and ‘Essie started it’.

  When the note was passed to the squad investigating the Granny Killings, they knew they had their man. But they did not have any evidence and unless he talked, he would have to be allowed to go free. They decided not to alert him to their suspicions and put him under surveillance.

  He still managed to kill one last time. On 19 March, he visited sixty-year-old divorcee Joan Sinclair, a friend of his. Police officers watched him enter the house at around ten o’clock but by one o’clock there was no sign of him leaving and there appeared to be no movement inside the building. Increasingly concerned, at six o’clock they entered the building where they found Sinclair’s battered body, naked from the waist down and with the tell-tale pantyhose tied around her neck. Glover’s hammer lay in a pool of blood on a mat. Glover was found unconscious in the bath, which had been filled with water. He had washed down a handful of Valium with a bottle of whisky and had then slashed his wrists.

  Glover survived and at his trial pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, blaming his action on the aggression he felt towards first his mother and then his mother-in-law. However, the prosecution argued successfully that Glover had been well aware of what he was doing and had tried to trick the police into believing they were dealing with a sexually motivated murderer. In fact, it was claimed, Glover needed his victims’ money to feed his addiction to the poker machines at the social club he attended.

  Sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, he hanged himself in his cell on 9 September 2005.

  Just days before he killed himself, Glover handed a sketch to his last visitor. It was a drawing of a park and in amongst the palm trees was the number nine. This figure is believed to represent the number of murders that he had committed but had never been charged with.

  Peter Dupas

  According to friends, twenty-eight-year-old Nicole Patterson was one of the nicest people you could meet. A consulting psychotherapist who dedicated much of her time to helping disadvantaged young people, especially those with drug problems, she had turned the bedroom of her home into a consulting room and had placed adverts in the local papers, looking for clients. Unfortunately, one of those who read the advert was a man called Peter Dupas, a serial sex offender who had also turned killer.

  Dupas’s record stretched back to 1968 when he was just fifteen. He had been born in Sydney into a normal family in 1953, the youngest of three children. However, he had arrived many years after his siblings and his parents were more like his grandparents than his parents in terms of their age. He grew up, consequently, like an only child and, as a result, was spoiled and made to feel inadequate by an overprotective mother and a father who was something of a perfectionist. While he was still young, the family moved to Melbourne.

  His time at school was difficult. He was overweight and was teased a great deal about it, being nicknamed ‘Pugsley’ after a character in the television show, The Addams Family. He was also a poor learner and frequently bottom of his class.

  On 28 October, home from school and still wearing his school uniform, Dupas knocked at the door of his twenty-seven-year-old neighbour who at the time was nursing her five-week-old baby. He asked her if he could borrow a sharp knife as he was helping his mother to peel potatoes for that evening’s dinner. She handed him the knife, remarking on how good he was to help his mother in this way. Dupas suddenly lunged at her with the knife, stabbing her in the stomach. He threw her to the floor and straddled her, still stabbing away at her with the knife, striking her hands with which she was trying to fight him off. She was being cut on the hands, face and neck. As she grabbed the implement, trying to break it, he gasped between breaths, ‘It’s too late, I can’t stop now, they’ll lock me up’. He put his hand across her mouth to stop her screaming and began to bash her head on the floor. Suddenly, almost as quickly as he had begun, he stopped.

  Dupas was taken to a psychiatric hospital to be assessed, and it was concluded that he was ‘caught in an emotional conflict between the need to conform to the expectations of his parents and the unconscious urges to express his aggression and his developing masculinity’. He was put on probation for eighteen months and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.

  He left school and became an apprentice fitter and turner at the General Electric Company in Melbourne’s Notting Hill suburb, but he was in trouble with the law again on 10 March 1972, when he was caught spying on a woman taking a shower. In November 1973, he was questioned by police after driving his car alongside another and leering continuously at the driver’s twelve-year-old daughter. A few weeks later, he was arrested for rape.

  On 5 November, he had knocked on the door of a house at Nunawading, claiming to the woman who answered that his car had broken down. She went off to search for a screwdriver and he entered the house where he threatened her and her
eighteen-month-old baby at knifepoint. He had then raped her. It was not the first time he had tried this trick. On one occasion, he had stole some money and left, while on another, his terrified victim told him that her husband would be home at any minute and he fled.

  The police knew he was dangerous and that his crimes were gradually escalating. One described him as ‘an evil, cold, baby-faced liar’ who he thought would eventually kill if he was not stopped.

  He was not wrong.

  They discovered that he was very meticulous in the planning of his attacks. He selected his victims carefully and was cold and calculating in his preparation. Dupas was released on bail but remanded to a psychiatric hospital, Mont Park. He was allowed to visit home occasionally and was arrested again for a number of incidents at the nearby Rosebud Beach during these visits. He entered women’s toilets where he watched girls showering. A witness tipped off the police and he was caught in the act. Again, he was admitted to Mont Park as a voluntary patient, remaining there until 22 February 1974.

  Mont Park psychiatrists could find no serious psychiatric disorders but they intimated that he could suffer from personality problems in future. He got off lightly, being fined $140.

  He was not treated so leniently when he was tried for the rape of the woman in Nunawading. Describing it as one of the most appalling rapes imaginable – a woman in her own home, with a young baby whom he threatened to harm if she resisted – the judge sentenced him to nine years’ imprisonment of which he had to serve five years before parole could be considered.