Andy Albury prime suspect in up to 14 unsolved murders in north Queensland
EX-ABATTOIR worker Andy Albury the prime suspect in up to 14 unsolved murders as police investigate possible cold case breakthrough.
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EVIL killer and ex-abattoir worker Andy Albury is the prime suspect in up to 14 unsolved murders as police investigate a possible cold case breakthrough and links to a tiny slaughterhouse in outback Queensland.
Dubbed Australia’s Hannibal Lecter, the convicted killer has allegedly confessed to butchering his victims in a random killing spree including on a lonely stretch of road infamously known as the “highway of death”.
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Asked why he killed, he said: “It doesn't worry me what I kill – they're all blood and guts inside.”
Killing someone is like “thumping on a cockroach”, the Ku Klux Klansman told a psychiatrist.
“He’s good for it,” said former Northern Territory Police Detective Sergeant Les Chapman. “This guy killed for sheer pleasure. He was a butcher. And one of the most dangerous criminals I’ve ever come across.”
Ex-detective Chapman, who jailed Albury in 1983, told The Sunday Mail he had told Queensland Police the cold-blooded monster had boasted of killing 14 others in a spree while he moved between Townsville and Mount Isa.
“He confessed to 14 murders to me,” Chapman said. “We only got him for one. That got him life in prison. But we know he killed others.”
Queensland Police, acting on a tip-off, have descended on Hughenden on the notorious Flinders Highway to investigate fresh leads in one of the nation’s most baffling murder mysteries: the disappearance of hitchhiker Tony Jones in 1982.
Detectives have scoured the slaughterhouse for clues and are trawling through records and interviewing locals. They refuse to confirm if they have a prime suspect in the 32-year-old investigation but claim they are close to cracking the case.
“I told police Albury was active in northwest Queensland,” said Chapman. “He’s a prime suspect. If it’s not him, it has to be someone in the same category, but there are very few psychopaths on the planet as dangerous as him. He’s a real-life Hannibal Lecter.”
Hughenden butcher Stewart Christensen, who owns the abattoir, said it was an out-of-the-way place.
“Someone could have been killed, chopped up and fed to the pigs and no-one would have noticed,” he said. “You’d never find a body or DNA, there are deep old pits full of bones all over that ridgeline.”
Albury was convicted of using a broken bottle to mutilate Gloria Pindan on Mitchell St, in Darwin, on November 25, 1983. He cut off her nipples and gouged her eye out with his finger. She was punched, kicked, slashed, bruised, beaten, mutilated – for no reason at all. Blood spatter was 1m up a nearby wall.
“Albury is an extremely dangerous man,” one psychiatric report stated. “His mental disorder is such that he has a casual disregard for the act of killing. He still fantasises about killing people. He has a fantasy about terrorising a town by committing casual, motiveless murder for the purpose of making people frightened that they may be the next to be killed.”
Albury is serving life – never to be released –in a Darwin maximum security prison.
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