100 Most Infamous Criminals (36 page)

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

T
here 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 corpse, despite some misgivings on the part of the coroner, was identified as that of Alan Edward Brennan, an ex-post-office sorter who recently opened the shop – and had since disappeared. Trouble was that, six months after he’d been buried, a fellow employee met Brennan on Sydney’s George Street. A belated examination of the clothes on the corpse showed that they were in fact prison-issue, and had been given to a man called Patrick Hackett, who’d served a short sentence the previous October for indecent language.

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

M
ark 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?”’