In 1992, a New South Wales schoolgirl disappeared on her way home from school, leaving the nation in shock. So, what exactly happened to nine year old Ebony Simpson - and why was she murdered?
The Port Arthur Tragedy: Stan Grant presents the 1996 massacre where Martin Bryant shot dead 35 people and wounded 23 others. Bryant's killing spree at a well-known tourist attraction lead to major changes in Australia's gun laws.
On 19th April 1999, several times convicted criminal Peter Dupas posed as a new client of psychotherapist Nicky Patterson. Having made arrangements for his first appointment, 28-year-old Nicky welcomed Dupas into her home under the pretence that she would be giving him counselling for gambling. Dupas then attacked Nicky with a knife before mutilating her body. Evidence at the scene led police to Dupas. Dupas was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole in August 2000 and was later found guilty of the separate 1997 murders of Margaret Maher and Mersina Halvagis and was given two more life sentences.
On 8th November 2010, Jason Downie broke into the house of his friend’s girlfriend, where Chantelle Rowe and her parents were asleep. Woken up by the intruder, Andrew Rowe confronted Downie but was stabbed at least 29 times and eventually died. Downie then turned to Rose Rowe as he attacked and killed her in the same way. After witnessing the attack on her parents, 16-year-old Chantelle hid under her bed in terror, but Downie proceeded to stab her to death. When their bodies were found Downie showed no remorse but instead was seen to be grieving, laying flowers outside the Rowe family home. When traces of his DNA and semen connected him to the frenzied attack, he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 35 years.
Katherine Mary Knight lived in the small town of Aberdeen, NSW. In the early hours of March 1st 2000, Knight attacked her de facto husband John Price by stabbing him repeatedly. One day earlier, John had gone to court and taken out an Apprehended Violence Order against her. Knight’s experience as an abattoir worker and her obsession with knives may have aided in how she then mutilated the body. After skinning John’s body she then decapitated him and cooked parts of his body to serve to his relatives. After noticing John missing from work, his employer notified police and one of the most horrific crime scenes in Australian history was to be uncovered. She was the first Australian female to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and her papers were marked ‘never to be released’.
On 20th July 1969, Derek Percy approached 12-year-old Yvonne Tuohy and her friend Shane Spiller whilst they were playing at their local beach in Warneet, Victoria. He snatched Yvonne into his car before trying to get Shane too, but Shane managed to defend himself. Percy took Yvonne to a remote location where he then murdered her. Shane contacted the police and was able to recall several things about Percy’s car, including a navy sticker which led police to the local Navy base HMS Cerberus and to Percy. After his arrest Percy admitted to the crime and calmly led police to Yvonne’s body. Controversially, Percy was found ‘not guilty’ on reasons of insanity but was considered too dangerous to ever be released. Since then, Percy has been a suspect in a number of murders and disappearances of other children all over Australia including 7-year-old Linda Stilwell who went missing from St Kilda beach in 1968. He was known as Australia’s most notorious child killer until his death in prison in July 2013.
The crime committed by Robert Farquharson has been etched on the minds of Australians since 2005. Farquharson drove his car into a dam off the Princes Highway near Winchelsea on Father’s day, drowning his three sons, Jai, 10, Tyler, 7 and Bailey, 2, who were sitting in the back. After two trials, Farquharson was found guilty of murder with the prosecution confirming he killed his children to get revenge on his wife from whom he had recently divorced.
On the 14 July 2001, British couple Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees stopped on the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory after a man flagged down their car. This man, later identified as Bradley Murdoch, shot Falconio before tying Lees up. She managed to escape while Murdoch was distracted, hiding in nearby bushes for five hours until she was able to run out into the road and flag down a truck driver who took her to safety. Falconio’s body has never been found.
The Strathfield massacre in Sydney on the 17th August 1991 will be forever remembered as one of Australia’s most shocking gun crimes. A lone gunman, Wade Frankum, entered a shopping mall one afternoon, had a cup of coffee and observed shoppers going about their business. Moments later, he stabbed a teenage girl next to him before opening fire on unsuspecting shoppers. The devastation left eight dead and six wounded. Before police arrived, he took his own life.
Five year old Darcey Freeman suffered a horrific death at the hands of her father on the 29th January 2009. Driving her to her first day at school, he stopped the family car on the Westgate Bridge and callously threw her off the side, in full view of her two older brothers. He then returned to his car and drove to the law courts in central Melbourne where he handed himself in, pleading with officials to take his boys off him.
On Easter Thursday in 1986, a car bomb exploded outside the Russell Street Police HQ in central Melbourne. Constable Angela Taylor was caught by the full force of the blast and succumbed to her wounds 21 days later in hospital. She was the first serving female Australian Police officer to be killed in the line of duty.
Raechel Betts was a young woman from the Melbourne suburbs whose life spiralled out of control after she began selling drugs on behalf of a male acquaintance. Tragically this man, unbeknownst to Raechel, was a double murderer who had slipped through the parole system. In August 2009, her remains washed up on a Phillip Island beach. Her body had been dismembered.
In August 1997, Hoddle Street in Clifton Hill, Melbourne became the scene of utter carnage as disgraced Army cadet, Julian Knight shot and killed seven people and injured countless more. He was given 27 years minimum sentence and despite several legal petitions, the Victorian government has said it is unlikely he will be released.
Allison Baden-Clay was a beauty queen with a successful real estate husband. They lived in Queensland with their three young children. In 2012, Allison’s body was discovered in a creek, ten days after being reported missing by her husband. In July 2014, Gerard Baden-Clay was found guilty of murder after a protracted trial. He appealed the verdict and in 2015, to widespread outcry, his conviction was downgraded to manslaughter.
The Snowtown murders were so barbaric and shocking the Australian community still struggle to come to terms with what happened. But the trial that led to the horrific outcome began years earlier, when Police began a routine re-investigation of a missing person’s case in Adelaide.
In 1997, Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Becket abducted two teenagers: 14-year-old Lauren Barry and 16-year-old Nichole Collins. The girls were camping with friends only a few kilometres from home when they decided to leave the camp to visit friends. As they emerged from the bush they were picked up by Camilleri and Beckett. They were driven across the state of Victoria and subjected to 9 hours of rape and torture. After the harrowing ordeal, the two friends were stabbed to death and buried in scrubland near Fiddlers Green Creek.
The Queen Street massacre was a spree-killing that occurred on the 8th of December 1987 at the Australia Post offices in Melbourne, Victoria. The attack resulted in nine fatalities, including the perpetrator, and many more injuries.
In the 1990s, the bodies of seven young backpackers were discovered in Belanglo State Forest, a 9,400-acre wood in New South Wales, Australia. The bodies, each riddled with stab wounds, had been posed face-down with loose hut-like structures of sticks constructed over them. The killings, which became known as the Backpacker Murders, were discovered to be the work of Ivan Milat, an Australian man with a prior history of abduction and rape. He was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, plus 18 years. In June 2012, Milat’s great nephew, Matthew Milat, 18, was convicted of murdering one of his friends with an axe in Belanglo State Forest.
In October 1997, Law student Anu Singh held two dinner parties to say goodbye to her friends after she had allegedly divulged to them that she and her boyfriend Joe Cinque were to die in a suicide pact. The dark plot would result in only Joe’s death. The twisted crime became notorious for its chilling cruelty and bizarre plot which led to Singh being found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. She was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, but was released early in 2001.
In the weeks after Morgan Huxley was found dead in his Neutral Bay flat, police were interviewing everyone who knew the popular 31-year-old businessman. A young man seen on CCTV footage running after Mr Huxley as he left The Oaks Hotel early on September 8th, 2013, was identified as Daniel Jack Kelsall, a kitchen hand and cleaner from the local Sydney Cooking School. The officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Senior Sergeant Mark Dukes, said that when Kelsall was first voluntarily interviewed by police he was not considered to be Mr Huxley’s murderer.
The Town of Albury on March 16, 1985 – A shop worker in a store saw a man exposing himself in a car outside. Her boss called the cops. The Police arrived and arrested the man, as was routine even flashers were fingerprinted. Five days later, the flasher’s prints arrived at the central fingerprint bureau in Sydney. The detective noticed a scar on the little finger and it rang alarm bells. So began the unravelling on one of Australia’s most shocking crimes. A trail that led to double murderer and multiple rapist Raymund Edmunds – a trail that spanned 2 states and almost 20 years.
Dubbed the Black Widow, she murdered one partner and tried to kill another by shooting him in the head while he was sleeping. In both instances she had forged documents to transfer property and assets into her name. The body of her first victim, Carl Gottgens, has never been located and now Byers is using a loophole in the law to get out of jail, 17 years after she was convicted of his brutal murder.
Police on duty are always at risk but the ambush of two constables in Walsh Street, South Yarra, 25 years ago was as random as it was barbaric. The plan that morning was to kill police – any police – as a payback for the death of a gunman shot by armed robbery squad detectives 13 hours earlier. To older officers this was an event frozen in time, to younger ones it is a couple of names on an honour board at the academy and to Victorians it is an event that shaped the community.
Jill Meagher was a 29 year old Irish woman living in Australia who was raped and murdered while walking home from a pub in Brunswick, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, in the early hours of 22 September 2012. Meagher’s case was initially classified that of a missing person, as she had failed to return home to her husband, Tom Meagher. But it soon became a homicide investigation. Her disappearance attracted widespread media attention and a review of closed-circuit television images from the area of her disappearance. Her body was discovered six days later near Gisborne South, about 50 kilometres (31 miles) north of Brunswick.