by Gordon Kerr
The urge came on Macdonald again on 31 March 1962. He found a drunk man, Frank McLean, on a Sydney street and suggested conspiratorially that they go into an alley for a drink. When they turned the corner into the unlit Bourke Lane, Macdonald suddenly pulled out his knife and stabbed the 6ft tall McLean in the neck. McLean was a strong man and began to fight but Macdonald was able to punch him in the face and force him to the ground where he stabbed him frenziedly. When the big man lay dead in front of him, he sliced off his genitals and crept out of the alley. The stolen body part would end up in the waters of the harbour.
The case terrified the inhabitants of Sydney and the media frenzy continued. The authorities, under huge pressure to find the serial killer who was on the rampage, turned to clairvoyants. They then thought that he must be a doctor because of the neatness of the mutilations he had carried out. The reward was increased to $10,000 but they seemed no closer to apprehending him.
Macdonald lost his job at the sorting office but decided to open a delicatessen. He found suitable premises and moved into the apartment above. The urge to kill was never far away, though.
James Hackett was a vagrant who had the misfortune to bump into Macdonald in a bar one night. Macdonald now had a place of his own to which he could take his victims and he invited Hackett back to his home. As usual, when Hackett had drunk himself into oblivion, Macdonald pulled out a knife and thrust it into the comatose man’s neck. Hackett woke up, however, and a desperate struggle ensued. When Macdonald was stabbed in the hand in the midst of the fight, he became enraged, stabbing Hackett repeatedly in the heart, blood spraying everywhere. He made a futile effort to cut off Hackett’s penis, but, exhausted, fell into a deep sleep where he sat.
Next morning he awoke to a room resembling a slaughterhouse. There was blood on the walls and the ceiling and there was so much of it slooshing about on the floor that it threatened to seep through to the ceiling, of his delicatessen below.
First of all, he had to do something about his hand which had been badly cut in the fight. He cleaned himself up and went to the local hospital where the wound was cleaned up and stitched. Returning to the horror of that room, he dragged Hackett’s corpse downstairs and left it in a space under the shop. He spent the remainder of the day scrubbing and cleaning, trying to remove every stain. But it was impossible. The stains would not come off the walls or out of the floorboards where the blood had soaked into the wood. There was only one option open to him. He had to flee. He packed his bags and travelled to Brisbane where he found lodgings in a boarding house. He dyed his hair black, grew a moustache to disguise himself and waited for the news that Hackett’s body had been discovered and that they were looking for him.
The days passed, however, and there was nothing. Eventually the body was found, but Macdonald’s amazing luck was in. It had decomposed so badly that it was impossible to establish the cause of death or to accurately identify it. The police simply presumed that it was the body of the shop-owner, Brennan, and closed the case. Once again, he had got away with murder.
Macdonald could have carried on but for one fatal mistake. He foolishly returned to Sydney and was spotted by a former workmate who was astonished to see Alan Brennan, whose funeral he had attended six months previously, walking nonchalantly and very much alive along a Sydney street. He approached him, but Macdonald fled. The police were informed and the following day the newspapers had the story. ‘Case of the Walking Corpse’ ran one headline.
Macdonald went to Melbourne where he found work on the railways, but his disguise did not hide him for long. The police were now certain that he was ‘the Mutilator’ and it was only a matter of time before he was arrested.
William Macdonald was inevitably found guilty and given a life sentence, but in 1964 was declared insane after beating another inmate to death and sent to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.
By 1980, he was considered sane enough to be returned to a mainstream prison where he remains to this day. Ironically, ‘the Mutilator’, one of Australia’s most vicious serial killers, claims to have no desire to be released on parole because he believes the streets of Sydney are not safe.
Paul Charles Denyer
Killing was part of his vile nature. As a child, he began by slitting the throats of his sister’s teddy bears. From that, he graduated to slitting the throat of the family kitten and hanging it from the branch of a tree. It was later discovered that he was also responsible for disembowelling a friend’s cat and then slitting the throats of her kittens. He was fascinated by blood, gore and death, and spent his spare time watching slasher movies like Halloween, The Stepfather and Fear. It was only a matter of time before his urge to kill animals became an urge to kill humans. In a seven-week period in 1993, he would stab and slash to death three young women and violently assault another, a forty-one-year-old woman who was lucky to escape with her life.
Denyer was born in Sydney, Australia in 1972, the third of six children. The family had emigrated from England and settled in Campbelltown, a south-western suburb of Sydney. His parents told how he had rolled off a bench as a baby and banged his head, but it is unknown whether this had any effect on his later development into a monster.
At kindergarten, it was noted that he found it difficult to mix and make friends, but by the time he went to primary school, he seemed like a normal kid. Life changed in 1981, however, when his father found a job as manager of a steakhouse in the South Oakleigh suburb of Melbourne. The children were unhappy with the move, particularly nine-year-old Paul who had settled in well at school and did not relish making new friends and establishing himself in a new school. He was right. The move did not suit him and he became a loner, with no friends and little interest in his schoolwork.
His size did not help. He had grown into a large child, taller and fatter than his classmates. He was also developing an unhealthy fascination with knives and clubs, of which he had a large collection. He made lethal slingshot guns that fired pebbles and ball-bearings. It was around the age of ten that he began attacking his sister’s teddies and the family cat.
His first brush with the law came shortly before his thirteenth birthday when he was arrested for stealing a car. He was released with only a warning, but a couple of months later he was charged with theft, wilful damage and making a false report to the emergency services. He was charged with assault at the age of fifteen after forcing another boy to masturbate in front of some other children.
Aged twenty, finally, he met a girl called Sharon Johnson while he was working at a supermarket. He lost that job when he deliberately ran a convoy of empty shopping trolleys into a woman and child, knocking them down and injuring them. He applied to join the police force but his application was rejected because he was by this time grossly overweight. He was fired from his next job in a marine workshop because he spent all his time making the knives and daggers with which he was still obsessed.
People started calling him ‘John Candy’ because his size matched that of the large Hollywood film star, but by 1993 he was a social misfit who was unable to hold down a job of any kind.
Meanwhile, his fascination with death and killing had been increasing, fed by a diet of slasher movies, especially The Stepfather, the story of American mass murderer John List, which he watched continuosly.
In 1992, he and Sharon had moved into a flat in the city of Frankston. Sharon had to work two jobs to keep them afloat, while Denyer remained at home with nothing to do but cause trouble.
The first incident occurred when a neighbour arrived home one night to discover that her flat had been broken into. Clothing had been ripped and slashed and thrown around the apartment, and her pictures were smashed. Then another tenant of the block reported a peeping tom. Worst of all was what happened to another neighbour, Donna, who lived with her fiancé, Les, and their baby in an apartment in a nearby block.
One night in February 1993, Les and Donna came home with their baby late at night to find that someone had
scrawled in blood on the wall next to the TV the words ‘Dead Don’. In the middle of the kitchen floor they discovered the disembowelled body of Donna’s cat Buffy with a picture of a bikini-clad woman over it. The cat’s entrails had been spread around the kitchen and the words ‘Donna – You’re dead’ were written in its blood on the wall. It was a horrific scene.
The flat had been ransacked and Donna’s belongings were everywhere. Cupboard doors had been smashed and a picture of a half-naked woman, stabbed through the middle, was put in the baby’s cot. On the mirror on the dressing table in Donna’s bedroom was sprayed in shaving foam the words ‘Donna and Robyn’. What made it even more bizarre was that she had no idea who ‘Robyn’ was.
Needless to say, Donna did not spend another night in the flat. She moved in with her sister Tricia until she could find a new place to stay. Tricia’s neighbour was Paul Denyer.
Denyer reassured her that she would now be safe and boasted that if the police ever found out who was responsible he would personally take care of him. Meanwhile, the urge to do more than torment people had taken hold of Denyer. He claimed his first victim on 11 June 1993.
Elizabeth Shavers was found, partially clothed, on Saturday 12 June, having been reported missing when she failed to come home the previous night by the uncle and aunt with whom she was staying. Naked from the waist up, her bra around her neck, she was found in Lloyd Park on the Cranbourne Road in Langwarrin, not far from Frankston. Her throat had been cut and she had been stabbed viciously six times in the chest. Four deep cuts ran from her breasts to her navel and there were four more running at right angles to those, forming a grisly pattern across her abdomen. Her nose had been broken and there were cuts and scratches on her face. The post-mortem would confirm that she had not been sexually assaulted.
Police were unable to establish a motive for the murder. Elizabeth had no enemies and was not involved in drugs or dubious relationships. The only conclusion they could arrive at was that she had been killed randomly or someone had attempted to rape her and it had gone tragically wrong.
The investigation was extensive. Officers knocked on thousands of doors in the area and the bus driver and people who had been travelling on the bus she took that night were questioned. Nothing turned up.
Just under a month later, they had another seemingly random incident to investigate. Fortunately this victim survived, however. On 8 July, forty-one-year-old bank clerk Roszsa Toth was attacked by a man as she made her way home from work. Her assailant had a gun and dragged her into a nature reserve. She fought for her life, however, biting his fingers down to the bone and scratching him. He, meanwhile, pulled out clumps of her hair as he struggled to bring her under his control. She succeeded in fighting him off and staggered onto the road to stop a passing motorist. Her attacker fled into the night to lick his wounds. When police arrived at the scene to investigate, they found nothing to indicate who the man was. All they knew was that her fight had saved her life.
Twenty-two-year-old Debbie Fream was not as strong as Roszsa. She was found next day by a farmer near Carrum Downs. Reported missing later on the night that Roszsa Toth had been attacked, she bore twenty-four stab wounds to her neck, chest and arms and had been strangled. Debbie had given birth to a son just twelve days previously and had disappeared after driving to a local shop to buy a bottle of milk.
The police were now convinced that there was a serial killer on the rampage in Frankston. The bars of Frankston were deserted at nights and women locked and barricaded their doors. Every man became a suspect. The media followed every minute detail of the massive manhunt that had been launched, and a help centre, Operation Reassurance, was opened to advise women living locally how to protect themselves and what they should do if attacked.
He was expected to strike again and he did on the afternoon of 30 July. Seventeen-year-old Natalie Russell was cycling home from college in Frankston when she disappeared. A frantic search was launched, but her brutally wounded body was discovered eight hours later in some bushes next to a cycle track that ran between two golf courses. She had multiple stab wounds to the face and neck and her throat had been cut. Again, she had not been sexually assaulted but the savagery of the attack was shocking.
Denyer had made a fatal mistake, however, that would bring his career as a serial killer to an end.
A tiny piece of skin was found on Natalie’s neck and when analysed was found not to be hers. It had to be the killer’s. There had also been a sighting by a police officer of a yellow Toyota Corona near the cycle track that afternoon at around three o’clock, which was the time that the coroner estimated Natalie had died. Not only that, the policeman had written down the registration of the car from its registration label because it had no plates.
Everything began to happen very fast. When the number was fed into the police computer, it brought up a report by a postman who said he had earlier seen a man in a yellow Toyota who seemed to be trying to hide. The car also popped up as having been seen in the vicinity of where Debbie Fream’s body had been found. The car belonged to Paul Denyer.
When they called at Denyer’s flat at 3.40 p.m. the next day, he was out. They pushed a card through his letterbox asking him to contact them. At 5.15 p.m. they received a call from Sharon, but so as not to arouse her or Denyer’s suspicion, they said that it was no more than a routine enquiry. Shortly afterwards a large team of officers arrived at Denyer’s apartment.
When he opened the door, he expressed surprise at the large police presence, but calmly invited them in. The first thing the detectives noticed were the cuts on his hands. He, of course, provided alibis and stated that although he had been in the vicinity of a couple of the killings, he had absolutely nothing to do with them. When they asked him about the scratches, he explained them away by saying he had got his hands trapped in a fan while working on his car.
Denyer was taken to Frankston police station for further questioning and denied everything until the early hours of the next day. When they asked him for samples to run a DNA test, he knew the game was up, however. Suddenly, he blurted out, ‘Okay, I killed all three of them’.
His confessions were chilling. Of the killing of Elizabeth Shavers he said, ‘Walked in a bit of bushland beside the main track in Lloyd Park. Sat there, you know, stood in the bushes for a while just – I can't remember, just standing there I suppose. I held the “gun” to the back of her neck, walked across the track over towards the other small sandhill or something. And on the other side of that hill, she asked me if she could, you know – go to the toilet, so to speak. So I respected her privacy. So I turned around and everything while she did it and everything. When she finished we just walked down towards where the goal posts are and we turned right and headed towards the area where she was found. I got to that area there and I started choking her with my hands and she passed out after a while. You know, the oxygen got cut off to her head and she just stopped. And then I pulled out the knife ... and stabbed her many times in the throat. And she was still alive. And then she stood up and then we walked around and all that, just walking around a few steps, and then I threw her on the ground and stuck my foot over her neck to finish her off’.
Asked why the killing of Natalie Russell had been so savage, he told a tale of brutality and horror that places him amongst the worst killers in not just Australian history but in criminal history.
He had been waiting for a victim for about twenty minutes when she showed up. He sneaked up behind her, grabbed her and put a knife to her throat, cutting himself in the process and leaving behind the piece of skin that would convict him. She struggled at first but he stopped her by telling her he would cut her throat if she continued. She then told him if it was sex he wanted he could have it, if it meant he would let her live. But Denyer found this repulsive, offended by what he viewed as her loose morals. He forced her to kneel in front of him and then to lie on the ground. She struggled again and he cut her face. As she kneeled on the ground in front of him again
, he wound a strap around her neck to strangle her but it broke. He then threw her to the ground again as she struggled once more and cut her throat, a small cut, he said. He then stuck his hands down her throat, ‘grabbed her chords and I twisted them’. As she started to lose consciousness he cut her throat properly – ‘one big large cut,’ he told the disgusted officers, ‘which sort of cut almost her whole head off. And then she slowly died’.
He then explained that as he walked back to the Toyota, he saw the officers taking down the details of his registration number. He had simply turned round and walked home.
He told them he ‘just wanted to kill’, adding later that he hated women, or at least all women apart from his girlfriend Sharon Johnson.
Paul Denyer pleaded guilty to all charges and on 20 December 1993, was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.
In prison, Denyer has begun dressing as a woman and has also filed requests to learn what the Victorian government’s policy is on gender reassignment surgery for prisoners.
It seems that the man who hated women now wants to become one.
Ivan Milat
Belanglo State Forest is situated south of the town of Berrima in the Southern Highlands of the Australian state of New South Wales. Open to hikers, it is about three kilometres from the Hume Highway that runs between Canberra and Sydney. On 19 September 1993, a couple of people orienteering noticed a foul smell emanating from what appeared to be a pile of rubbish. They warily walked towards it and to their horror discovered that the rubbish was, in fact, human remains.
When police were called in they immediately began to speculate that these remains might have something to do with backpackers who had mysteriously disappeared in the area in the past few years. Four Germans, a couple of English girls and two Australians from the state of Victoria, had all vanished into thin air and not a trace had been found of them since.
