Almost 45 years ago, Clifford Cecil Bartholomew killed 10 members of his family at Hope Forest but served just eight years behind bars. Is he still alive?
BEFORE Port Arthur, it was Australia’s worst mass killing. A father shoots dead his children, his wife and her sister on a South Australian property. CRAIG COOK reveals new details for the first time.
NOELEEN Paltridge doesn’t know if the man who murdered her mother and brother is still alive — but she hopes he is.
Clifford Cecil Bartholomew was 40 when, in a jealous rage, he killed 10 members of his family, including eight children, in a brutal bloodbath at Hope Forest, near Willunga.
The slaughter — the biggest until Port Arthur which claimed 35 lives in 1996 — occurred in the early morning of September 6, 1971, just hours after a Father’s Day celebration at the farmstead was supposed to bring the estranged family together.
Noeleen — Bartholomew’s eight-year-old niece — lost her mother and toddler brother when her Uncle “Barty” went on his rampage during which he also killed his wife and seven children.
In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Mail as the 45th anniversary of the tragedy approaches, the 52-year-old disability pensioner hasn’t spoken publicly for more than 25 years about the Hope Forest horrors but, has told of the hatred she still feels for the former slaughterhouse worker.
“In my mind he’s well f---ing dead but if he’s alive I hope he’s got arthritis and every other f---ing old man disease you can get,” Ms Paltridge said.
“I’ve seen some people die some terrible ways and I’m hoping that’s what he gets.”
Ms Paltridge, who lives in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, is still outraged her uncle, despite initially being given the death penalty, served just eight years for his unimaginable crime.
The prison term represented less than a year for each victim. Those killed were:
■ Ms Paltridge’s 26-year-old mother, Winnis Mary Keane, and 18-month-old brother Daniel Brian Sean.
■ Her aunty, Heather Alice Bartholomew, 40, along with her seven cousins — Neville Kenneth, 19, Christine Heather, 17, Sharon Anne, 15, Helen Joy, 13, Gregory Kim, 10, Roger Clifford, 7, and Sandra June, 4.
Several of the victims were first hit on the head with a rubber mallet and all were shot in the head with a .22 rifle.
Just 18-months old, ‘Danny’ was the last to be murdered, more than 30 minutes after the rampage began, shot in his cot with his dummy still in his mouth.
Ms Paltridge only survived being a victim herself after her stepbrother Terry Paltridge, then 23, thought “something wasn’t right” at the Father’s Day gathering and decided to return to Adelaide with her.
“It’s a wonder I’m not a murdering f---king psychopath myself,” the mother of four children, from three different men, says bitterly.
Ms Paltridge has told the Sunday Mail how she miraculously survived the massacre and reveals for the first time the shocking way she discovered her mother and brother were dead.
Bartholomew claimed “five months of mental torture” caused by his belief that his wife, Heather, was having an affair with a 22-year-old Vietnam War ex-serviceman led to his bloody shooting spree.
On release from Yatala Labour Prison in 1979, he was given a new name and identity — although there are no records for why he was afforded this privilege. For many years he remained in South Australia when his whereabouts was well known to several members of the extended family.
Bartholomew, who would be 84 today, is understood to have moved to Victoria more than 20 years ago to start a new life. It is not known whether he is still alive and his extended family refuse to discuss his dark past.
At one time he lived just a few streets from Ms Paltridge, who said she fantasised about killing him and of the dramatic night, when as a teenager, she went to “hunt him down”.
“I went there and was going to burn the house down with him in it but I wasn’t quite sure which house it was,” she said.
“And then later I had my own kids and you just can’t do it then — so he got lucky.
“If he’s dead now then well and good, but If he’s alive I’d really want to meet him
“There are questions I want to ask and the biggest is why he had to go and murder my mother and brother? What did they ever do?”
“And I want to know, over the years, how much he’s regretted what he did”
Her outrage at the length of the jail sentence is shared by the two former homicide squad detectives who attended the horrific scene at the rented farmhouse on the morning of the murders and conducted the gruelling investigation.
For the first time, Allen Arthur and Bill Richter, both 75, spoke to the Sunday Mail at length about the traumatic events of 44 years ago.
“Every Father’s Day it all comes back to me and I get a terrible feeling again,” Mr Allen, of Middleton, said.
“I think of all those people who didn’t get to have children and grandchildren and live a great life like me”
“Bartholomew didn’t just kill 10 people that day he wiped out an entire population.”
The police officers reveal several new secrets about the crime that rocked the nation..
“I’d seen plenty of dead bodies working in forensic laboratory but seeing all those kids and that baby lying there was devastating,” said Mr Richter, who lives in Port Lincoln.
“We never had any counselling back then. Big, burly coppers aren’t supposed to cry; you just got to go down the pub, grab a beer and slap each other on the back.”
Mr Arthur believes he would still recognise the person he calls “the most evil man you could meet.”
“He’s got sharp features which would stick out and his nose would give him away,” he said. “I was given his new name (alias) but I quickly forgot it. If someone bumped him off, I didn’t want anyone thinking I’d passed the name on.
“I’ve never wanted anything untoward to happen to him — but I hope he dies a very hurtful death by natural causes.”
Dead or alive, Bartholomew’s murderous rampage still haunts those who were torn apart by his actions.
“We have mass-murders every month in the US and Australia has had its share but this was the very first in our country,” Mr Arthur said.
“But most people around here today wouldn’t have a clue about this story. I know it’s hard on family but this (massacre) should be remembered.
“When bad things happen now, we need to know they’ve happened in the past and we need to try and understand why they happened.”
Justice Roma damned over early release
JUSTICE Roma Mitchell was the trial judge who sentenced Clifford Bartholomew to death on November, 23, 1971.
On December 11, 1979, as head of the SA Parole Board, she made the only public comment about why the murderer of 10 people was being released after just eight years.
Justice Mitchell (pictured), the woman who would later become a Dame Commander of the British Empire and serve for six years as Governor, defended the decision, saying it was “appropriate” and that Mr Bartholomew had been a “model prisoner”. She said the board had “fully expected” some public comment.
“However, I would describe it as comment — not disquiet,” Justice Mitchell said. “But, in any event, the board does not like publicity about individual cases.”
Police officers, prison officers and the public roundly criticised the decision, variously describing it as outrageous and defying common sense.
“People convicted of drink-driving offences serve longer than this man has done,” Bob Marley, a prison union official said at the time.
The assistant secretary of the Police Association, Bob Rice, agreed: “His term is not even been a drop in the ocean of a life sentence,” he said.
Frances Nelson, QC, head of the SA Parole Board for the past 32 years, said that if such a controversial case occurred these days, she would make an extensive public statement — revealing as much information as she could.
Ms Nelson said she had seen the Bartholomew case files and that they contained “meagre information” for an assessment.
“I’m not being critical of that board because we might reach the same assessment today but I suspect we would reach it in a better, more informed way as we get a lot more information now,” she said.
“We have specialists in forensic psychology who are experts in drawing a profile of an offender, and far more sophisticated tools to do risk assessments. It was a truly terrible case, but my recollection is that he was suffering some serious mental health issue not adequately addressed at the time.”
SA’s parole reforms — introduced during the mid-’70s — had a reputation for being “enlightened” but the decision to release Bartholomew shocked the community.
His case was compared with that of an Aboriginal man who had already served 30 years for raping a 12-year-old white girl when he was 16 and whose parole appeal was rejected the same day.
Former homicide squad detective Allen Arthur believes the fact the murders were considered a “domestic incident” was part of the reason Bartholomew was freed earlier.
“If he’d killed 10 strangers, there’s no way he would have been out that soon,” he said.