Since its first publication in 2000, Australia's Serial Killers has become a true crime classic. This edition is fully updated, bringing all the cases covered up to the minute. A recognised authority on Australia's most notorious criminals, Paul B. Kidd covers in unwavering detail 33 true stories of serial murder. In this gallery of infamy are world renowned killers the likes of the Night Caller, The Granny Killer, Ivan Milat, Kathleen Folbigg and the Snowtown murderers. Sixteen years in the researching, this comprehensive and ambitious work includes psychological opinions, court-room trials, detailed confessions, and exclusive prison interviews with three of Australia's most infamous serial killers.
Between 1989 and 2006, there were 5,226 homicides in Australia. Serial homicides account for 1% of this astonishing number of murders that were committed by 13 known offenders. In this 3rd volume of Serial Homicide, the following cases are discussed: On their way to Sydney for a festival, British backpackers Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke suddenly disappeared. Their bodies were the first of many to be discovered buried in Belango State Forest. Joanne was stabbed 35 times while Caroline was shot in the head 10 times. Seemingly unstoppable, The Backpacker Killer, Ivan Milat, went on to kill between 7 and 12 people. Known as The Moorhouse Murders, David and Catherine Birnie cruised the streets to abduct young women and bring them to their house. There they raped, tortured, and killed them without mercy. The Snowtown Murders, aka Bodies-in-barrels murders, were committed by four serial killers who targeted homosexuals brutally killing 12 people before they were stopped. Arnold Sodeman, the School-girl Killer, lured young girls between the ages of 6 and 16 with money and ice cream. None of his four victims made it home from the play ground or schools. Eric Edgar Cooke, the Night Caller, terrorized one community for four years where he killed a dozen people. His acts were so depraved it's questionable whether Cooke was even human.One victim was strangled to death with the cord from a bedside lamp, after which Cooke he raped the corpse, dragged it to a neighbor's lawn, then sexually penetrated it with an empty whiskey bottle. Lindsay Robert Rose is an Australian serial killer and contract killer from New South Wales, currently serving five consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the murder of 5 people between 1984 and 1994.
Notorious, numerous and varied, serial murderers from Australia have an eclectic record of crimes, methods and trademarks. Scrutinizing these murderers at length, this book aims to identify characteristics exclusive to Australian serial killers, connecting the crimes with the continent's geography, culture and social structure. Featured are murderers like the "Granny Killer" John Wayne Glover, William "The Sydney Mutilator" McDonald and "Backpacker Killer" Ivan Milat. Also covered are well-known events like the Snowtown Murders and killer couples like David and Catherine Birnie. Unique in the true crime genre, this book studies fictional Australian murderer Mick Taylor to examine how pop culture portrayals develop the distinct psychology of killers from "down under."
A gripping and shocking story of a serial killer mother, and the brave daughter who brought her to justice. Dulcie Bodsworth was the unlikeliest serial killer. She was loved everywhere she went, and the townsfolk of Wilcannia, which she called home in the late 1950s, thought of her as kind and caring. The officers at the local police station found Dulcie witty and charming, and looked forward to the scones and cakes she generously baked and delivered for their morning tea. That was one side of her. Only her daughter Hazel saw the real Dulcie. And what she saw terrified her. Dulcie was in fact a cold, calculating killer who, by 1958, had put three men in their graves - one of them the father of her four children, Ted Baron - in one of the most infamous periods of the state's history. She would have got away with it all had it not been for Hazel. Written by award-winning journalist Janet Fife-Yeomans together with Hazel Baron, My Mother, A Serial Killer is both an evocative insight into the harshness of life on the fringes of Australian society in the 1950s, and a chilling story of a murderous mother and the courageous daughter who testified against her and put her in jail.
Despite public fascination with, and interest in, the serial murder phenomenon, little research on this topic has been undertaken in Australia. High profile cases such as the backpacker murders in New South Wales and Snowtown murders in South Australia serve to heighten the public's awareness, and perhaps overstate the threat, of serial murder in Australia. Building on earlier research undertaken at the Australian Institute of Criminology, this study aims to examine the circumstances and characteristics of serial murders that have occurred in Australia since the inception of the National Homicide Monitoring Program in July 1989. Results show that between July 1989 and June 2006, there were 11 groupings of serial murders identified in the NHMP, committed by 13 known serial murder offenders, with a total of 52 known victims. This represents one percent of the total number of homicides in Australia over a 17 year period. The paper reports on the characteristics of offenders and victims, including the offenders' modus operandi. The analysis found that the profile of serial murder in Australia is similar to that found in international research. In at least two of the groups of serial murders the victims had been reported as missing to police. It is important to note that the paper reports on known homicides. The paper suggests that further research on the profile of long term missing persons and serial murder victims should be undertaken as well as exploring offenders who commit multiple murders on separate occasions, to identify what prevented them (apart from law enforcement intervention) from committing additional murders.
The Dark Man is the amazing true story of one of Australia’s first serial killers, who kept the colony of New South Wales in the grip of fear as the police ruthlessly hunted their man. In late 1896, three men go missing in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Each man has answered a newspaper advertisement posted by charismatic conman and notorious criminal, Frank Butler (one of his many aliases). Lured to the western goldfields by stories of the untold wealth that awaits them, the men find themselves at the mercy of the psychopathic Butler in some of Australia’s most isolated and inhospitable terrain. Motivated by the thrill of killing and by a sick pleasure in outwitting his trusting victims, Butler makes his prey dig their own graves before he shoots them in the back of the head, buries them, and steals their few meagre possessions. After an exhaustive search of the rugged mountains near Glenbrook, police discover the bodies of the victims. In a criminal investigation that would become legendary, police are led on an international manhunt as Butler uses a Master’s ticket from one of his victim to secure a berth on the steamer, the Swanhilda, headed for San Francisco. Following a dramatic arrest at gunpoint, Butler is returned to Sydney, found guilty, and hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol, having confessed to those three murders – and alluded to many more. This compelling account of a cold and calculating killer is told in a gripping historical narrative that brings Australia’s Gold Rush period vividly to life
NPR, One of the Best Books of the Year A “chilling but fascinating portrait” of a serial killer, and “a must-read for true crime fans” who enjoyed My Dark Places, The Stranger Beside Me, or I’ll Be Gone In the Dark (Buzzfeed) One of Argentina’s most innovative writers brings to life the story of a teenager who murdered 4 taxi drivers in 1982 Buenos Aires—without any apparent motive. Over the course of one ghastly week in September 1982, the bodies of 4 taxi drivers were found in Buenos Aires, each murder carried out with the same cold precision. The assailant: a 19–year–old boy, odd and taciturn, who gave the impression of being completely sane. But the crimes themselves were not: 4 murders, as exact as they were senseless. More than 30 years later, Argentine author Carlos Busqued began visiting Ricardo Melogno, the serial killer, in prison. Their conversations return to the nebulous era of the crimes and a story full of missing pieces. The result is a book at once hypnotic and unnerving, constructed from forensic documents, newspaper clippings, and interviews with Melogno himself. Without imposing judgment, Busqued allows for the killer to describe his way of retreating from the world and to explain his crimes as best he can. In his own words, Melogno recalls a visit from Pope Francis, grim depictions of daily life in prison, and childhood remembrances of an unloving mother who drove her son to Brazil to study witchcraft. As these conversations progress, the focus slowly shifts from the crimes themselves, to Melogno’s mistreatment and misdiagnosis while in prison, to his current fate: incarcerated in perpetuity despite having served his full sentence. Using these personal interviews, alongside forensic documents and newspaper clippings, Busqued crafted Magnetized, a captivating story about one man’s crimes, and a meditation on how one chooses to inhabit the world, or to become absent from it.
One young woman missing, two found murdered -- the gripping true story of Australia's longest-running homicide investigation ** Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for True Crime 2021** In the early hours of January 27, 1996, after an evening spent celebrating at Club Bayview in the Perth suburb of Claremont, 18-year-old Sarah Spiers called a taxi to nearby Mosman Park. But when the cab arrived, she'd already gone. Sarah was never seen again. Four months later, on June 9, 1996, 23-year-old Jane Rimmer disappeared from the same area, her body later found in bushland south of Perth. When the body of a third young woman, 27-year-old Ciara Glennon, was found north of the city, having vanished from Claremont in August 1997, it was clear a serial killer was on the loose, and an entire city lived in fear he would strike again. A massive manhunt focused first on taxi drivers, then the outspoken local mayor and a quiet public servant. However, almost 20 years later, Australia's longest and most expensive investigation had failed to make an arrest, until forensic evidence linked the murders to two previous attacks -- and an unlikely suspect. Stalking Claremont, by local newsman Bret Christian, is a riveting story of promising young lives cut short, a city in panic, an investigation fraught by oversights and red herrings, and a surprising twist that absolutely no one saw coming.
In this memoir, a forensic psychiatrist chronicles her work with more than 80 serial killers and her thoughts on what compels them. Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is more than that. She is one of the world’s leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in rooms with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers’ psyches in ways no profiler ever has before. In My Life among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims’ body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their Gloucester “House of Horrors”; and Brazil’s deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade. Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims—and the spouses and parents of the killers—to gain a deeper understanding of the killer’s environment and the public persona they adopt. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H.H. Holmes of the late nineteenth-century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties. Through it all, Dr. Morrison’s goal has been to discover the reasons serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you. Praise for My Life Among the Serial Killers “A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.” —Kirkus Reviews “A profoundly enlightening book. Morrison provides startling insights into what factors breed serial killers, and she avoids the broad generalizations that make other books of the topic seem slick and superficial. . . . This is an absorbing, disturbing book that makes it clear just how much we have yet to learn.” —Booklist
During the early 60s, Sydney was terrorised by a serial killer, William MacDonald, later dubbed the Mutilator. This work reveals the details of his crimes.
