Author Geoff Wilkinson recalls the scene minutes after the Hoddle St slaughter
Former Herald Sun journalist and author Geoff Wilkinson describes Hoddle St minutes after Julian Knight’s murderous spree.
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Strangely enough, the thing I remember most is the stillness.
It seems unlikely, given the carnage and confusion, that Hoddle St was still and quiet in the minutes after the dust settled 25 years ago.
But that’s the way I remember it.
Subconsciously I’ve probably been trying ever since not to remember what I saw and heard that night while doing my job as Victoria Police media director.
These days, rigid crime scene investigation protocols would almost certainly mean the force’s media liaison officers would not be allowed inside the inner perimeter of such a large and complex scene so soon.
But that Sunday night, in the immediate aftermath of something no one had encountered before, the perimeters were vague and there didn’t seem to be time for protocols and procedures.
That’s how I came to be walking up and down Hoddle St counting bodies.
I remember being halfway through the Sunday night movie when I got the callout - and never feeling the need to see how the movie ended.
I remember being both annoyed by the call from D24 at 9.45pm on a Sunday night and pleased the job was only five minutes from home.
That’s how I came to be heading for the horror of Hoddle St while it was still unfolding.
As soon as I left home and switched on the police radio in the car the enormity of the situation became obvious.
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There was a constant clamour of operational units trying to either report what they’d found, call for assistance or just find out what they were dealing with.
When I reached a road block in Heidelberg Rd, approaching the foot of the Hoddle St overpass, the radio traffic was chaotic.
Mistakenly, I chose not to add to it by making a call simply to report that “Media 290’’ had reached the scene. Instead, I did what reporters do. I took notes.
It was clear from radio reports that shots were still being fired and the gunman had not been caught. The fact that three different weapons had reportedly been seen or heard made it a real possibility there was more than one killer at large.
One of the radio calls I remember was from a young policeman on the Clifton Hill side of the railway line, reporting that a bullet had creased the back of his patrol jacket.
His narrow escape was also monitored by his girlfriend, a policewoman working at D24 whom I had worked with previously while she was a public servant posted to the chief commissioner’s reception desk.
Thankfully it was weeks later, while assisting an ABC crew planning a TV documentary, before it became obvious that the sniper had been on the elevated railway track waiting for his next shot at the time.
To the west, he nearly killed the young policeman. To the east, he could have had a clear shot at a policewoman standing beside my car.
I was still monitoring the radio and taking notes, with the car’s interior light on, when the crew of the police helicopter hovering over Clifton Hill reported it had been hit by gunfire.
When I looked out and up, the chopper - Air 490 - was above me. When I heard its crew tell the radio operator they were going to land in an athletic field that was behind me in Heidelberg Rd, it seemed like a good time to turn out the light.
It was 38 minutes from the first radio report about a man shooting at cars in Clifton Hill to the one, about 10.15pm, recording the gunman’s arrest in a street in North Fitzroy.
Then there was a nervous lull before anyone seemed to be satisfied there was only one gunman and the danger had passed.
When the scene was finally declared safe enough for emergency services to enter, the obvious way to quantify what had happened seemed to be to draw a map of the mayhem ... a diagram of death.
It also seemed to be the quickest way to answer at least some of the dozens of questions I knew I was about to be asked by reporters swarming to the scene and battling deadlines.
How many dead? How many injured? How many men, women and children? How many cars? How many weapons? How many gunmen?
Fortunately, the first policeman I encountered when I walked into Hoddle St through the Ramsden St railway crossing was Peter Butts, a good bloke with a sensible view of the media’s role in life and first-hand knowledge of some of what had happened.
Dressed in plain clothes, he and his partner had risked their lives by comforting a critically wounded woman - who later died in hospital - as she lay beside a dead man in the gutter on the east side of Hoddle St.
They were just trying to shield her from any further harm, he explained as if it was the sort of thing they did every Sunday night.
No one who entered that crime scene, or even looked at it from a distance through a long lens, is likely to ever forget it.
The first entry on my diagram was a young, newly married man lying in the middle of the road, pinned under the motor cycle that had fallen with him when he was shot.
A little further north the driver of a car was dead at the wheel. To the south, a body lay in the gutter with its face covered by a police patrol jacket.
Further south, near the Mobil service station, was the most confronting sight of all _ the body of a young mother, slumped across the front seat of the family car with horrific head injuries caused by a shotgun blast fired through the passenger side window.
Her husband had driven on a short distance to try to escape the killing field. He and their toddler son suffered only minor pellet wounds and lacerations, but have no doubt been suffering ever since.
Bullet-riddled cars with shattered windows had turned from easy targets to exhibits. Blood had spattered on car seats and stained the bitumen.
By the time I’d finished my diagram, reporters, photographers and TV cameramen had gathered at both ends of the crime scene, desperate to play their role in recording the biggest story most had ever seen.
A lot of the next few hours and the next few days is a bit of a blur, and that suits me fine.
But I still remember the stillness.
Or maybe it was numbness.
MORE: KEITH MOOR RECOUNTS MEETING KNIGHT
Geoff Wilkinson is a former Herald Sun senior writer and author.
He was Victoria Police media director from 1981-89. Three months after the Hoddle St massacre he launched Australia’s first Crime Stoppers program.
This account was first published in 2012
Originally published as Author Geoff Wilkinson recalls the scene minutes after the Hoddle St slaughter
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