Never to be Released Volume 4

By Paul B Kidd

More true crime cases that are the most evil of the evil, where the perpetrators have been sent to prison without the possibility of parole – ‘never to be released’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Five Mile Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781743004654

Paul B Kidd

Paul B. Kidd is a Sydney Radiio 2UE broadcaster and a recognised authority on Australian serial killers and criminals sentenced to life imprisonment. Author of thirteen books on Australian true crime and fishing.

Book preview

NEVER TO BE RELEASED

AUSTRALIA'S MOST VICIOUS MURDERERS

VOLUME 4

PAUL B. KIDD

For my friend Joseph Morris, director of the Morris Journalism Academy, in memory of his late father, the legendary crime reporter, Joe Morris, with whom I started out to write the first Never To Be Released all those years ago.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 The History of ‘Never To Be Released’

2 The Snowtown Serial Murders: Australia’s Worst Crime

3 Sef Gonzales: The Gonzales Family Murders

4 Bruce Burrell: The Murders of Kerry Whelan and Dorothy Davis

5 Jeffrey Gilham: The Almost Perfect Murders

6 David Harold Eastman: The Murder of Colin Winchester

7 Phuong Ngo: Australia’s First-Ever Political Assassin

8 Matthew James Harris: The Wagga Serial Killer

9 The Reid–Luckman Murder: The Shocking Murder of Peter Aston

10 The Only Two Cases of Murder That Beat ‘Never To Be Released’

Image section

About the author

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Paul B. Kidd

My background in journalism is that I am an outdoors men’s magazine editor, television and Sydney Radio 2UE talkback broadcaster, 60 Minutes researching producer and freelance photojournalist. There was a time when I only wrote, talked about and produced the fun things in life – fishing, boating, men’s adventures and the great outdoors, with lots of humour thrown in.

So how on earth did I get involved with the most terrible murderers this country has ever known? And not just once, but with this book it’s now 13 books in all, specialising in the most evil of the evil – the child killers, serial killers and those who rape and murder in packs like wild animals.

Nowadays it seems as though I’ve written about every human frailty imaginable and what those frailties can make one allegedly sane human being inexplicably do to another – or, in so many cases, others. The list is endless. Just think of something unimaginably evil and I’ve written about it. And it’s all true.

I don’t write about crazy people. Just the ones who are judged to be sane. The sane people who rape and murder children and elderly women and then throttle them with their underwear. Those who have sex with dead people, souvenir body parts, decapitate their victims so they can’t look at them while they are debauching their bodies, or disembowel their victims while they are alive. Or the woman who skinned her de facto husband and cooked part of him for his children’s dinners.

Yes, they were all sane.

So let’s face it, it’s a far cry from catching marlin and whiting, testing a new fishing boat or going on an adventure in Kakadu, the Kimberley or Guam.

So how did I get here on Murderer’s Boulevard?

Well, I’d always had a fascination for crime, having grown up in Western Australia while serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke made the suburbs of Perth his own private killing fields in the early 1960s. I arrived in Sydney in early 1963, just a couple of months before serial killer William ‘the Mutilator’ MacDonald was captured after having killed five men and locked away forever where he is to this day.

So in the late 1980s, while I was working at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph as the boating, outdoors and fishing editor, I loved to listen to the stories of my colleague and friend Joe Morris (Snr), the legendary police rounds reporter who had been following the cops around to the most horrific crimes for 50 years.

Joe had covered all of the famous cases – the Thorne Kidnapping, the Bogle–Chandler mystery, the MacDonald Mutilator murders and the Wanda Beach murder mystery are just a few that come immediately to mind. He was a walking, talking encyclopaedia of horror. He had seen the lot.

Joe was a real man’s man who had a hatred for the spineless cowards who raped and murdered children, and the bullies who hunted in packs and set upon lone women and gang-raped them before putting them to the knife or gun so that they left no living witness.

And, in particular, Joe despised Kevin Crump and Allan Baker, the ex-convicts who abducted Mrs Virginia Morse from her isolated farmhouse and murdered her in such horrific circumstances that the judge ordered that their papers be marked ‘never to be released’. You can read more about Crump and Baker in ‘The History of Never To Be Released’ in this book.

With Crump and Baker in mind, and Anita Cobby’s killers suffering the same fate, Joe and I, intending to write a book, set about looking for similar cases where the killer(s) had been sent to jail forever. As it turned out, there was no shortage of material from all around Australia. Sadly, after all of the research had been done and enough material and photos had been gathered for our book and we were at the writing stage, Joe suffered a stroke and passed away a week before Christmas 1991, aged 82.

Seeing as we had gone so far and Joe wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, I pressed on alone and, in June 1993, Never To Be Released: Australia’s Most Vicious Murderers was published and went straight in at No 3 on the bestseller list. And it is still on sale to this day.

Given that there was no shortage of additional material around Australia, Never To Be Released 2 and 3 followed over the years and they are also all still on sale.

And now, having written Never To Be Released 4, I can safely say that there will also be a number five and possibly more, given that someone being sent to jail forever – never to be released – seems a common occurrence throughout Australia these days.

Paul B. Kidd

Sydney, 2010

1

THE HISTORY OF 'NEVER TO BE RELEASED'

Across Australia today the term ‘never to be released’ is used when sending an offender to jail until they die. In some states it is called ‘life with no recommended fixed parole period’, but it means the same thing: life means life. In this book, and in the three previous books I have written on the subject – Never To Be Released: Volumes 1, 2 and 3 – I have covered such cases in every state, and in one of the territories, the ACT, where this recommendation has been handed down.

These days, never to be released means exactly that. Except for one man who was released on appeal and in another case where two men had their sentences reduced to manslaughter.(both stories you will find in this book), they are all still in jail. Several of them were released in a black rubber bag with a zipper up the middle having died in jail either by their own hand or old age. But that’s the only way out.

There was a time throughout Australia when there was no such prison sentence. Never to be released was merely a recommendation, reserved for the worst possible offenders. Prior to that, the worst of the worst – the child killers, the pack rapists/murderers and the serial killers – were hanged, and that was the end of that. Many Australians believe that that’s the way it still should be. In fact, I believe that it would be fair comment to say that if we woke up one morning to read headlines that Virginia Morse’s killers, Kevin Crump and Allan Baker; Anita Cobby’s murderers, John Travers, Michael Murdoch and the three Murphy brothers; the Bega-schoolgirl killers, Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett; and church elder Robert Arthur Selby Lowe, who murdered six-year-old Sheree Beasley in rural Victoria in 1991, had been taken out of their cells during the night and hanged there would be more rejoicing than public outcry. Australians are a notoriously revengeful lot.

But, unfortunately, that is never likely to happen. The last hanging – that of Ronald Ryan who shot a warder during a successful escape – occurred in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison in 1967. Hanging has since been abolished in every state of Australia. Now we, the taxpayers, have to feed and provide for these heartless killers – and many, many more like them – until they die because they will remain behind bars forever, never to be released no matter the circumstances.

The first time this recommendation was handed down was to Leonard Keith Lawson, who set the wheels in motion in 1954 when he was sentenced to hang for the rape of two models. The death sentence was reprieved to life imprisonment, then to 14 years and he was eventually released after serving only seven years. Six months later in November 1961, Lawson murdered two teenage girls. He was sentenced to double life imprisonment with the recommendation from the then Minister for Justice, Mr Mannix, that: ‘While appreciating that I cannot bind the hand of any future Executive Government, I am strongly of the view that Leonard Keith Lawson should never be released.’ Lawson never was. Despite numerous applications for parole over the years, the 76-year-old Lawson died of old age in his cell at Grafton Prison in 2003 after serving 42 years.

Next was the 1963 case of serial killer William ‘the Mutilator’ MacDonald. He murdered a man in Brisbane before violently killing four Sydney vagrants by stabbing them as many as 57 times and leaving them lying in public places – minus their private parts, which he souvenired with the skill of a Macquarie Street surgeon. Although it was obvious that MacDonald was as mad as a cut snake, incredibly the jury found him not only guilty but also sane when he committed the murders. MacDonald was sentenced to life in prison with a strong verbal recommendation from the bench that he never be released, and that his papers be marked ‘likely to offend again’.

MacDonald almost did offend again by bashing a fellow inmate half to death with a slops bucket soon after he went to Sydney’s Long Bay jail. He was immediately removed to the notorious Ward 21 at Morriset Mental Institution for the criminally insane, where he spent 20 years. In 1983, he was released back into mainstream prison population at Parramatta Gaol, deemed to be normal. At the time of writing, 83-year-old William MacDonald is still in prison having so far served 47 years for his crimes. He will never be released.

In 2000, I found William MacDonald in the Long Bay jail and interviewed him for my book Australia’s Serial Killers: The Definitive History of Serial Multicide in Australia. At the time, he had been behind bars for 37 years. Instead of the monster who had murdered five men and souvenired most of their cocks and balls, ‘Old Bill’ as he was affectionately known, was a harmless, stooped, little old Dickensian character with wispy fairy-floss hair and a goatee beard to match. He had animal posters on the wall of his cell and listened to classical music. MacDonald and I became friends and he allowed me to write a best-selling book about his crimes entitled The Knick-knack Man after the nickname they gave him in Parramatta Gaol because he ‘nicked his victims’ knackers’.

But while the crimes of Lawson and MacDonald were terrible and justice has been served, there were three horrendous cases that occurred in New South Wales before truth-in-sentencing legislation became law in 1989. These three pre-1989 crimes were deemed to be among the worst of the worst because they were perpetrated on lone women by more than one assailant. So grave was the nature of these murders that in each case the judge ordered that the killer’s papers be actually stamped ‘never to be released’ in the hope that a parole board of the future would deem the case to be as serious as he did and keep the prisoners behind bars forever.

The first of these three landmark New South Wales cases was that of Mrs Virginia Morse. In 1973, Mrs Morse was snatched from her secluded farmhouse at Collarenebri, western New South Wales, by ex-convicts, Allan Baker and Kevin Crump. Over the next 36 hours she was repeatedly raped and eventually murdered in unimaginable circumstances. So shocking was some of the evidence that it was suppressed from the public and only heard in a closed court. Also, the night before, Crump and Baker had shot dead a farm worker, Ian Lamb, as he slept in his car.

Found guilty in a New South Wales court of murdering Ian Lamb and conspiracy to murder Mrs Morse (they actually killed her in Queensland) Crump and Baker – who had joked their way through their trial – were sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that their papers be marked ‘never be released’. This was the first time that a sentencing judge had ever made such a request in Australia’s criminal history. So profound was Mr Justice Taylor’s disgust with the giggling pair that he said in summing up:

You have outraged all accepted standards of the behaviour of men. The description of ‘men’ ill becomes you. You would be more aptly described as animals, and obscene animals at that. I believe you should spend the rest of your lives in jail and there you should die. If ever there was a case where life imprisonment should mean what it says – imprisonment for the rest of your lives – this is it.

Justice Taylor then added what has become the benchmark for similar cases in the future and for parole boards assessing the perpetrators for release. He said:

If in the future some application is made that you be released on the grounds of clemency or mercy, then I would venture to suggest to those who are entrusted with the task of determining whether you are entitled to it or not, that the measure of your entitlement to either should be the clemency and mercy you extended to this woman when she begged you for her life. You are never to be released.

Crump and Baker will never be released in New South Wales, but if they were, they would find police waiting for them at the prison gates. From there they would be extradited to Queensland in chains where they would be found guilty of the actual murder of Mrs Virginia Morse and locked up with a new lot of hard men who wouldn’t approve of what they did. They would then spend the rest of their lives out of their comfortable New South Wales environment and instead be forever looking over their shoulders for fear of becoming a prison ‘trophy’ for someone with nothing to lose and keen to become a prison hero.

The second such case has often been described as the worst in Australia’s history. In 1986, five men abducted and repeatedly raped, tortured and eventually murdered nursing sister Anita Cobby in a cow paddock in western Sydney while she was on her way home from tending the sick at Sydney Hospital. So appalling was their crime, it prompted Justice Maxwell to say of the men – John Travers, Michael Murdoch and brothers Leslie, Michael and Gary Murphy – ‘that it was the most horrifying he had encountered in his 40 years associated with the law’. He ordered that all of the men’s papers be marked ‘never to be released’ – the first time this had happened since Crump and Baker 13 years earlier.

And then, in 1990, 16-year-old Bronson Blessington, 18-year-old Matthew Elliott and 24-year-old Stephen ‘Shorty’ Jamieson, were sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1988 abduction, rape and murder of bank teller Janine Balding from a car park in southern Sydney. In sentencing the trio, Justice Newman told the court the their crime was ‘one of the most barbaric killings committed in the sad criminal history of this state’. He strongly recommended that their papers be marked ‘never to be released’. This was now the third time in 17 years that this had happened.

From then on Crump, Baker, Travers, Murdoch, the three Murphy brothers, Blessington, Elliott and Jamieson became known as the ‘10 never-to-be-released lifers’. But therein lay the problem. At the time they committed their crimes, ‘never to be released’ was merely a recommendation. A life prisoner was entitled to appeal to the courts to have a nonparole period set from which time he would be able to appear before the Parole Board, and if he had been a good inmate, he would have the possibility of some day being released. These nonparole periods varied from eight to 25 years, with an average of 15 years.

Finally, in 1989, the truth-in-sentencing legislation put a stop to this practice in New South Wales. From then on ‘life meant life’. Since then, this legislation locked away forever the likes of backpacker serial killer Ivan Milat, John ‘the Granny Killer’ Glover, gangster Neddy Smith, and Peter Raymond Garforth, who murdered nine-year-old Ebony Simpson at Bargo in 1992.

And so, as their time behind bars rolled on, these 10 ‘worst of the worst’ murderers applied to have a nonparole period set, just like every other murderer who was sentenced before 1989, in the hope that someday they would be released. In 2002, Kevin Crump had a nonparole period of 30 years set, making him eligible for parole in 2003. This caused such outrage that it prompted the then New South Wales premier Bob Carr to bring about legislation that – in his words – ‘cemented the rest of these murderers in their cells for the rest of their lives’. Because of this, the Crump parole decision was ultimately rejected.

But, with the new ‘cement them in their cells’ legislation deemed to be unconstitutional by some of the pre-1989 murderers’ supporters who believed that they had the right to one day be free, it was taken to task at every turn. In nailing the lid of his political coffin shut tight forever, Peter Breen, a member of the Upper House of New South Wales, championed two of the three Janine Balding killers and one of Mrs Virginia Morse’s killers.

I wrote to the Sydney Daily Telegraph at the time, expressing my disapproval of Peter Breen’s attempts to get some of Australia’s worst-ever killers set free:

Dear Sir,

While it may be noble of MP Peter Breen to champion the cause of one of Janine Balding’s murderers, Stephen ‘Shorty’ Jamieson, who Breen believes was wrongly convicted, we must not lose sight of other cases Breen has gone in to bat for even though the killers admitted their guilt. One is another of Janine Balding killers, the then 14-year-old Bronson Blessington, who Breen described to me as ‘a lovely young man who is completely reformed and has gone over to God’. Let us not too hastily forget that Queensland child killer Barry Gordon Hadlow also found God in jail but it didn’t stop him from killing another kiddie in 1990 after he was released after serving 25 years for the first murder.

Blessington was fortunate enough to lodge an appeal before Bob Carr made his now-famous promise of ‘all never to be released lifers will be cemented into their cells’ legislation to the citizens of New South Wales. Thanks to Breen’s efforts, should a challenge to Bob Carr’s legislation be upheld, there is now a distinct possibility that Blessington could be granted a 30-year nonparole period and given that he has served 18 years already, could be out in 12 years.

Last year Breen also agreed with murderer Allan Baker that after serving more than 30 years for the abduction, rape and murder of Mrs Virginia Morse, Baker, who Breen described to me as ‘a decent sort of a bloke who had paid his debt to society’, should be given a determined sentence and someday be released. In 1973, Baker, in company with Kevin Crump, abducted housewife Mrs Morse from a farmhouse at Collarenebri shortly after she had seen her husband off to work and the children off to school. As they drove the terrified woman north over the Queensland border, Crump and Baker took turns at raping her and eventually committed atrocities to her that were so bad that their trial judge ordered the court closed to the public to hear the evidence. Both were described as ‘obscene animals’ by Mr Justice Taylor and sentenced to never to be released. Despite Breen’s efforts, Allan Baker will die behind bars.

Peter Breen is aware of the heartache he brings to the families and loved ones of the victims by what he is doing. Myself and a hundred others have told him many times. But it seems that endeavouring to release Jamieson, who, in Peter Breen’s own words to me, is ‘an habitual criminal with an IQ of a 10-year-old who prefers the comforts of jail to the outside where he could not survive and would most certainly re-offend anyway’, is far more important than the pain he is putting decent people through at the moment.

Paul B. Kidd,

author Never To Be Released 1, 2, 3 and Radio 2UE broadcaster.

Despite Peter Breen’s and others’ repeated attempts to find a way around the new legislation, they all failed. In November 2007, when the last appeal for Janine Balding’s killers fell over, the cell door was slammed shut for the final time on the last of the 10 most evil murderers New South Wales has ever known. And with that, it all concluded. The 10 murderers who were sentenced to never to be released prior to 1989’s truth-in-sentencing legislation are now finally locked behind bars forever. No more appeals, no likelihood of ever getting parole. That is where the 10 will die. And good riddance, I hear you say.

Nowadays, because of these landmark decisions made in New South Wales, the term ‘never to be released’ is commonplace throughout the courts of Australia. If a sentencing judge says that a prisoner will go to jail without ever having the possibility of parole, that’s the way it is. The law has been tried and tested. Now throughout Australia, rather than just a recommendation, never to be released means precisely that.

Paul B. Kidd

Sydney, 2010

2

THE SNOWTOWN SERIAL MURDERS

AUSTRALIA'S WORST CRIME

In 1999, six acid-filled barrels were found in an abandoned bank vault in South Australia’s Snowtown. They contained the grisly remains of eight dismembered bodies. A few weeks later, four men were arrested for what would prove to be the most prolific serial killings in Australian history with at least 11 known victims. This is the story.

Late one night in August 1992, three men carried a corpse into a bare country field in Lower Light near South Australia’s Gulf of St Vincent, 50 kilometres or so north of Adelaide. The grim scene was both an ending and a beginning. For 22-year-old Clinton Trezise, the field would become his resting place following his savage murder hours earlier. Leading the way was 25-year-old John Justin Bunting, an odd little man with a shambling gait. A Queenslander by birth, he had arrived in Adelaide almost by accident eight years before, but remained somewhat of an enigma to those who knew him. Physically he didn’t look capable of the sort of violence he would inflict on his victims. The only hint came when he started talking about his favourite topic – paedophiles, the vile nature of what they did to children, and what should be done to stop them. Bunting also ranted and railed against homosexuals at every opportunity, apparently incapable of separating the two groups of people in his mind.

It was this part of Bunting’s personality that spelt trouble for Trezise, an effeminate young man who had done nothing to make an enemy out of anyone. He had been killed earlier on that August day in Bunting’s home at 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Salisbury North, in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. Bunting had attacked him in the lounge room, striking Trezise repeatedly in the head with a blunt instrument, most likely a hammer. A terrified Trezise had unsuccessfully tried to ward off the attack by throwing up his hand in defence. Unfortunately for the young man, this fruitless attempt resulted in a heavily fractured hand from the vicious blows. Undeterred, a frenzied Bunting continued the assault, beating Trezise with the weapon until he collapsed unconscious, dying soon afterwards from blood loss and blunt head trauma.

The second man helping to carry the body was 20-year-old Robert Joe Wagner. Tall and muscled where Bunting was short and weak-looking, Wagner was the physical opposite of Bunting, and was clearly the strongman of the outfit. He had met Bunting in 1991 while living around the corner from his Waterloo Corner Road house at 1 Bingham Road, the home of the third man in the group, 37-year-old Barry Lane.

Wagner was an angry young man whose childhood had been disrupted by sexual abuse. He could not read or write and his school attendance had dropped off as he spent more and more time out and about in the northern suburbs. One evening in 1985, Wagner – aged 13 at the time – met Lane at a party and his life changed. Lane was also known as Vanessa – he was a transsexual