Notorious prisoners of Maryborough Correctional Centre
In the 20-year history, the Maryborough Correctional Centre, some of Queensland’s most brutal and infamous criminals have served their time behind bars, including convicted murderers and underworld figures.
Police & Courts
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The Maryborough Correctional Centre marks its 20-year anniversary in April 2023, a milestone acknowledged by the local MP and celebrated by its 300 staff.
Since first opening its doors in 2003, the prison has held some of Queensland’s most vicious and infamous criminals.
Maryborough Labor MP Bruce Saunders congratulated the centre and its staff on 20 years, saying it had played an important role in not only rehabilitating prisoners but supporting the community and emergency services during the storm season.
“I want to thank the facility and its staff for all their efforts in keeping Maryborough and its surrounds safe,” Mr Saunders said.
Police and Corrective Services Minister Mark Ryan also paid respect to the staff at the centre.
“The work these officers do is on the front line of community safety,” he said.
“They manage a cohort of extremely challenging and complex people within the centre and it is demanding work.
“I thank all of the officers past and present for their exceptional commitment to keeping their fellow Queenslanders safe.”
The following is a list of some of the most notorious prisoners to spend time in the Maryborough Correctional Centre during its 20 year history.
Matthew Bradley James Tench
A 27-year-old man who brutally murdered a sex worker at a Fraser Coast motel is a current inmate at the Maryborough Correctional Centre.
On November 3, 2018, Matthew Bradley James Tench, who was then 22 years old, and Linda Lovett, a 58-year-old Thai sex worker, arranged to meet for sex after he found her through a classified ad.
He had stopped at an ATM to withdraw cash before going to the Maryborough City Motel.
Ms Lovett had been staying at the hotel for about a week and had plans to go to Brisbane.
Tench, who had secretly brought a knife with him, arrived and showered before the two engaged in sexual activities.
After he had gotten what he wanted, he approached Ms Lovett and stabbed her multiple times to her head, neck and upper body.
Ms Lovett attempted to escape, walking towards the door of the motel room, while Tench also walked to the door, slipping on her blood and falling over.
Other guests and the manager heard screams and saw Ms Lovett stumble from the room, covered in blood.
She did not make it far outside the door before she succumbed to her wounds, which included a cut to the neck – later determined as the cause of death due to blood loss.
The court heard Tench had smoked cannabis the day before, but was not intoxicated at the time of the attack.
He had been sexually abused as a child and had a disturbed childhood.
Judge David Jackson said as well as the 26 wounds inflicted on Ms Lovett, she also had defensive wounds to her hands and arms.
He said when Tench was interviewed by police the day after the attack, he told them he’d “had enough of life in general”.
During that interview with police, Judge Jackson said, Tench had told them he’d “been through so much s**t” he had hit breaking point and “felt like killing people”.
Tench was sentenced to life imprisonment with the time he had spent in presentence custody declared as time served.
Garry ‘Shorty’ Reginald Dubois
One of Queensland’s most notorious murderers died at Maryborough Correctional Centre in June 2021, taking his secrets to the grave a week before the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing inquest was due to begin.
Garry “Shorty” Dubois took his own life in his single-occupant cell at Maryborough Correctional Centre, where he was found unresponsive.
He was convicted for the 1974 murders of Brisbane mother Barbara McCulkin and her young children in 1974.
Officers and paramedics tried to resuscitate the triple killer for about 50 minutes but he was pronounced dead at 5.20am.
In 2016, Dubois was sentenced to life in jail for raping and murdering Leanne McCulkin, 11, and her sister Vicki, 13.
He was also found guilty of the manslaughter of their mother Barbara McCulkin, 34.
Dubois and accomplice Vince O’Dempsey took the McCulkins from their Highgate Hill home and drove them to an area of bushland.
A criminal associate of the men, Peter Hall, told a trial Dubois confessed the killings to him, saying O’Dempsey took Mrs McCulkin off into the darkness where he believed she was strangled.
When O’Dempsey returned, the pair raped the girls before killing them.
The McCulkins bodies have never been found.
William Kelvin Fox
Notorious killer William Kelvin Fox was out on bail for the April 1992 attempted murder and kidnapping of Barbara Hellwich at a Miami caravan park when he murdered his ex-wife Patricia Gaye Atkinson and injured three others near Gympie in August 1996.
Fox, now 67, remains incarcerated at the Maryborough Correctional Centre, where he is serving two life sentences.
But for years in the 1990s he eluded police by living in the bush following violent crimes against his own family and friends.
Fox, also known as Kevin Ford, had been added to the police top 10 list in October 1993, after shooting Ms Hellwich in the face, head and neck while she held her then two-year-old son in her arms.
The woman had tried to intervene in a domestic dispute between Fox and his de facto wife Coleen King, who had only just moved out of a women’s shelter weeks earlier, according to newspaper articles from the time.
Fox was arrested in 1995 by a Tiaro police officer after he was recognised in a random vehicle intercept south of Maryborough.
He was released on a $20,000 surety from the Southport Magistrates Court that same year, despite police opposing bail.
On August 27, 1996, Fox barged into his estranged wife’s rented Glenwood Estate home, 30km from Gympie, about 6.30am and shot her in the head.
Police on the scene later that day said it was believed the former couple had been in a dispute over a house deed.
At the time, police said Fox also shot his middle son Peter’s 18-year-old girlfriend, Julie Cotter in the arm as he arrived, with Peter, then 19, being cut by glass as he jumped through a window to escape also being shot.
Following the 1996 morning rampage, police said Fox drove 4km to another farmhouse where he fired through a window and hit then-60-year-old John Horrex on the back of his body.
The murderer then dumped his car and headed off on foot into the bush between Gympie and Tin Can Bay.
The experienced bushman once again escaped police until he was caught in February 1997.
About 40 police officers surprised Fox at a shed converted into a home in Mt Glorious, northwest of Brisbane when they converged on him after he exited the house early one morning.
Fox was jailed for life in February 1998 for the 1996 shooting spree.
The convicted murderer was given another life sentence in September 1998 for the 1992 attempted murder of Ms Hellwich.
Andreas Mueller
A Cairns taxi driver was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012 for murdering a 21-year-old student he picked up in his cab.
Today, Andreas Mueller is serving his sentence at Maryborough Correctional Centre.
Erica Liddy had moved to Cairns from Coen on Cape York to further her studies as a ranger before she got into Kuranda man Andreas Mueller‘s taxi on April 10, 2011.
Mueller, 52, had agreed to take the young woman to a friend‘s home, but on the way there she asked if she could go to his place instead.
The crown prosecution told the Cairns Supreme Court that just before dawn, Mr Mueller stabbed Ms Liddy below the eye with a butter knife while she slept on a couch at his home, then lay her on his bed and went to sleep next to her.
He eventually took her to a bus stop at Freshwater, but only after sleeping and working another shift in his cab, the court was told.
Mueller called 000, but did not wait for the ambulance to arrive at the bus stop. Ms Liddy died in hospital three days later.
Justice Jim Henry sentenced Mueller to life in prison, with a non-parole period of 15 years.
Lee Owen Henderson
Champion boxer, underworld figure and convicted murderer Lee Owen Henderson was the country’s most notorious prison informer, used by police as a shortcut to convictions, despite admitting in one court that he was a compulsive “10 out of 10 liar”.
A master manipulator, he even had his own prison letterhead which promoted his services as: “Info gathering, strategic planning, criminal ID analysis, tracking, covert surveillance, interrogations, protection specialists and negotiators” before he was exposed as a total fraud who – it was said – would “shop his own mother to buy his freedom”.
He was part of a prison riot in 1986 after he was revealed to be leaking information to corrective services officers.
It was the height of an era when prison informants reigned supreme. Henderson was inside Long Bay Jail’s maximum security 13 Wing, known as The Bronx, alongside Comanchero bikies facing trial over the Milperra massacre where six bikies and a 14-year-old girl were killed.
The Comanchero set Henderson up by telling him of a drug stash.
When prison officers went straight to the hiding spot they found no drugs but the prisoners knew they had a snitch in their midst.
With Henderson in danger, it was decided to make it look as if he was rioting to cover up moving him to safety – but Henderson, who was described by one armed robbery unit as “The General” in their web of informants, took the game one step too far.
Henderson, who was on remand for conspiracy to murder, sent out a note saying he would handle the negotiations and the three officers would not be touched so long as the wing was not gassed or stormed.
The officers managed to free themselves.
The riot led to the formation of the state’s Witness Protection Unit Program, and Henderson was moved to Goulburn jail.
Cleared of conspiracy to murder, he moved to Queensland where in November 1988, he murdered young mum Tracey Dovey, giving her a hotshot of heroin and raping her as her five-month-old baby cried.
He is currently serving two life sentences at Maryborough Correctional Centre.
Mark Albert Smith
A convicted baby killer is currently serving a three year sentence in Maryborough jail for another horrific attack on a child.
Mark Albert Smith, 42, pleaded guilty to assault occasioning bodily harm when he faced Hervey Bay District Court on February 1, 2023.
Crown prosecutor Stephanie Gallagher said the charge related to the shaking of a baby in 2020 at Maryborough.
Smith, who was previously known as Mark Albert Shoesmith, was found guilty of manslaughter in the previous case by a jury in a Townsville Supreme Court trial.
He was 27-years-old at the time of the incident in December 2007, which resulted in a baby’s death.
Ms Gallagher said Smith had killed that baby by either hitting her in the head or hitting her head against an object.
The baby, Rose-Marie Williams, died after her life support was switched off five days after she was taken to hospital.
During Smith’s then trial, intensive care consultant Dr Emma Hothersall, who treated the infant in the hospital emergency department, said her brain injuries were so severe surgery was not an option.
Smith appealed his first conviction and was granted another trial. But another jury later found him guilty.
He was sentenced to eight years in prison after he was convicted of the manslaughter of Rose-Marie Williams.
Ms Gallagher said the injuries caused to Rose-Marie were “significant” and that Smith had “concocted a story” to try to conceal what he had done.
She said three months after his sentence for Rose-Marie’s manslaughter had expired, he committed the fresh offence.
Judge Michael Burnett said Smith had a “highly prejudicial upbringing” and had been educated to Year 8.
He said Smith’s offending was against a “defenceless child”.
Smith was sentenced to three years in prison with a parole release date of July 1, 2023, taking into account time already served.
Smith was also placed on a child protection register for five years.
Lionel Patea
A former bikie who savagely beat his girlfriend to death spent time as an inmate at Maryborough Correctional Centre.
Lionel Patea, a former Bandidos bikie gang enforcer, is serving two life sentences: one for the brutal murder of the mother of his child, Tara Brown, 24, whom he ran off the road and bashed to death with a metal fire hydrant cover as she lay trapped in her car in September 2015; and one for the bashing murder of father-of-two Greg Dufty, 37, who was killed in the Gold Coast Hinterland in July 2015.
His body has never been found.
In 2018, it was revealed Patea would be moved from the Maryborough Correctional Facility to Lotus Glen in the Cairns tablelands because he was a “danger to other prisoners”.
Patea was earning about $250,000 a year as a standover man and collector for the Bandidos bikie gang prior to being incarcerated.
He had been in the outlaw motorcycle club since his late teens and rose quickly through the ranks due to his “propensity for violence”.
During sentencing for the brutal killing of Ms Brown, Patea asked to be “ultimately judged by God”.
Bojan Vulic
A “premeditative murderer” who stabbed a teenage girl 45 times walked free from Maryborough Correctional Centre in 2019.
Graduate teacher Bojan Vulic was 24 when he lured his ex-girlfriend – student Vlatka Mrmos, 17 – into a car and murdered her on January 16, 2004, because she no longer wanted to be with him.
At the time of her death, Vlatka was scared of Vulic and told her family he was controlling, only allowing her to leave her home when he said and even trying to dictate when she shaved her legs.
After returning from a family holiday to Croatia, Vlatka was relentlessly called by Vulic seeking an explanation as to why she had ended their three-year relationship.
Vlatka feared he would hurt her, but got into a car with him not knowing he had bought a 40cm US Marine knife and had it under the seat.
Vulic lost control of the car on Brisbane’s Southeast Freeway and had a minor crash because he was speeding.
The pair got into a fight and Vulic said he did not remember anything after that.
But witnesses who stopped to help after the crash saw him stab Vlatka relentlessly.
When she was dead, Vulic sped the car the wrong way up an off-ramp and hit another car before running off.
Ultimately declared fit to face the charges, Vulic pleaded guilty in July 2006 and was jailed “for life” – a minimum of 15 years in jail.
Raymond Akhtar Ali
In 2000, Raymond Akhtar Ali was found guilty of the gruesome 1998 murder of his newborn daughter while the baby‘s mother, Amanda Leanne Blackwell, 22, was found guilty of manslaughter.
Blackwell, who worked in Ali‘s halal butcher shop, became his virtual “sex slave’’ and fell pregnant to the married man, the Supreme Court heard.
Minutes after she secretly gave birth at a Logan Village property, Ali killed the baby.
A post-mortem found the newborn suffered severe fractures, likely from being crashed against a hard surface while still alive.
Her right leg was severed, she had been cut in half at the abdomen, and her reproductive organs had been removed.
In 2013, Ali, who was then an inmate at Maryborough Correctional Centre, won a $3000 compensation payout because he was forced to eat vegetables in jail.
The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Ali, 60, was discriminated against on the basis of his religion and ordered the state government pay $3000 compensation into a trust fund.
The former Halal butcher was paroled and deported to Fiji in 2017 but brought legal action against the government, seeking $20,000 in compensation.
The Muslim man said he had been unable to use a shared toaster while at Woodford Correctional Centre because other prisoners would regularly use it to heat ham and other pork products that violated his halal diet.
Earlier this year, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal found the state indirectly discriminated against Ali over a period from 2016 to 2017 by failing to provide an alternative to the shared toaster.
But the tribunal made no compensatory orders, finding the contravention was eventually remedied, “albeit later than it should have been”.
Gregory George Glebow
In October 2012, a prisoner at Maryborough Correctional Centre launched a brutal attack on another inmate, killing the young man two days before he was to be released from jail.
Gregory George Glebow killed Leonard Raymond Gordon, 22, at the centre on October 9, 2012.
During his sentencing in Brisbane Supreme Court, the court heard a “strongly built” Glebow calmly picked up a ”two pronged” metal bar — used by prisoner’s to do chin-ups — and without warning callously struck an unsuspecting Gordon with such force the attack could be best described as an execution.
Prosecutor Ben Power, in written submissions tendered in court, said Glebow was aware Gordon was scheduled for release — but that in all likelihood the choice of victim was “entirely random”.
“(Glebow) walked up behind Leonard Gordon who was sitting on a bench in the prison yard and murdered him by striking him in the side of the head,” Mr Power said in his submissions.
“The blow was struck with such force that a hole was punched through Leonard Gordon’s skull, killing him almost instantly.
“(Glebow) showed no emotion about what he had done and in fact took steps to have others secure his property and then reported the killing to a prison guard.”
Glebow was first sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2002 for the bashing murder of Brisbane father Michael Christopher Greer after mistakenly assuming he was gay.
Mr Greer was punched and kicked repeatedly by Glebow and a mate while repeatedly calling him a “faggot” at Manly, on Brisbane‘s southern bayside, on March 4, 2002.
Mr Greer died nine months after the attack as a result of fatal blood clots which formed on his lungs as a result of the attack.
Justice David Boddice sentenced Glebow to a mandatory term of life imprisonment.
Jake Scott Ashman
A young man who stabbed his neighbour to death was found guilty of murder despite inventing an “intricate tale” about a bogus third party.
His revised version of events, where he claimed he’d acted in “self defence” after his neighbour walked in on him on the toilet in the bathroom they shared was also rejected.
Jake Scott Ashman, 25, stabbed Darren Ints 34 times in the Granville unit complex where they lived with four of the punctures penetrating the victim’s heart.
Justice Peter Davis handed down his decision on May 27 in the Brisbane Supreme Court after a four-day trial in the Supreme Court in Rockhampton from May 9 to May 12, 2022.
During the trial, the court heard two different versions from Ashman about the events of February 17, 2019 – the first when he spoke to police on the day of the murder and the second when he took the stand to give evidence in the trial.
In the 62-page decision published on May 30, 2022, Justice Davis described the first version, where Ashman claimed he went into Mr Ints unit to see if he was OK after hearing noises, as “incredible”.
“Not only did Ashman lie and say that he did not kill Mr Ints, he sought to then explain some of his actions by inventing a story about a note having been left in unit three,” Justice Davis wrote in the decision.
Ashman, who spent time in custody at Maryborough Correctional Centre, had claimed he found a note instructing the finder to clean up the blood, consume marijuana, not call for any help until the next day and burn the note.
In his second version of events, Ashman admitted to the stabbing but said it was in self-defence after Mr Ints stormed into the bathroom armed with a knife and lunged at him as he was getting up from sitting on the toilet.
Ashman claimed his neighbour then opened the door and entered the bathroom and, while he was pulling his pants up, he watched Mr Ints “lunge” for a yellow handled knife he’d left on the basin days prior after opening a packet of razors.
He said Mr Ints then attacked him, “lunging” at him with the knife in his right hand and placing his left hand on his throat, causing him to punch back in retaliation and managed to get the knife off Mr Ints and stabbed him.
Justice Davis said it seemed unlikely a knife like that would be used to open a packet of razors.
“It also seems unlikely that the knife would be left in a shared bathroom,” he said.
Justice Davis sentenced Ashman to life in prison and declared 1195 days presentence custody as time served.
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