Canterbury’s criminal history highlighted in new exhibition featuring the Kingsgrove Slasher
FOR three years in the 1950s, a man known as the Kingsgrove Slasher cast a blanket of fear over Sydney with seemingly random attacks on sleeping women.
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ON a sticky summer night in 1956, Campsie teenager Jill Williams lay in bed with her windows closed and a tennis racquet by her side.
The racquet was her only defence against the Kingsgrove Slasher, a man who broke into homes in the middle of the night and attacked women in their sleep by slashing their clothes and bed sheets.
He’s the subject of a new exhibition, The Canterbury-Bankstown Express reports.
Eluding police capture for three years, the “Slasher” was revealed to be Arncliffe resident David Scanlon when he was eventually caught in 1959.
Over that period, up to 25 women were attacked across several Canterbury suburbs, including Kingsgrove, Beverly Hills, Earlwood, Turella, Undercliffe and Arncliffe in the St George area and Greenwich and Lavendar Bay on the north shore.
His reign of terror cast a blanket of fear across Sydney with women afraid to leave their homes at night and the public at a loss as to the Slasher’s identity.
It would also change the way people behaved as they went to sleep at night — once open doors and windows were closed and some people even had bars to prevent people entering.
Ms Williams, 73, was a teenager living in Campsie when the Slasher began his spate of attacks and recalls being petrified at night.
“It was big at the time because there weren’t (as many) murders back then,” Ms Williams.
“Everybody started shutting windows and doors. It had never occurred to anyone before I think,” she said.
As an only child with protective parents, Ms Williams would look furtively through the papers to find out more about the Slasher.
“My parents used to get the newspapers in a room. They used to buy the Truth, which used to be a really sensationalist paper. I must have read all the stories about it because I got myself in such as state,” she said.
It got so bad that she did not dare open the window, even in the summer.
“I really was scared and eventually dropped off to sleep,” Ms Williams said. “I think I lost three years of sleep because of that man.”
Her cousin, Jean Nolan, lived in Rockdale at the time and also recalls the fear that pervaded the St George and Canterbury communities.
“People didn’t talk about it as readily as they talk about it nowadays,” Ms Nolan said, adding home security became a concern for many families.
Turella resident Gavin Gatenby was a 10-year-old boy living in nearby Strathfield when the Slasher roamed the streets.
He remembers his father installing extra security measures to safeguard the house in case of attack.
“When I was very young I had a bedroom at the front of the house looking out onto the street. My father rigged the window in my bedroom so it was impossible to raise up. (He) drilled the (window) sash and inserted a nail into the hole,” the 57-year-old said.
“All over Sydney, people were scared the Kingsgrove Slasher would strike. Nobody knew when or where he might strike next,” he said.
There seemed to be no pattern to the attacks with victims ranging from 7 to 72.
An essay by Therese Murray on the Slasher — which won the 2012 Ron Rathbone Local History Prize — stated: “Time and again, sources point to Scanlon’s motives coming from the thrill of being caught rather than any intention to harm the women and girls”.
On the night of April 30, 1959, police trapped the Slasher at Nannygoat Hill, Earlwood. He turned out to be David Joseph Scanlon, an office clerk. He was sentenced to an 18-year jail term.
Little is known of Scanlon’s life after he was released from prison, but his reign of terror remains an intriguing part of Canterbury’s criminal history.
HERITAGE EXHIBIT RELIVES CONSTABLE’S BLOODY DEATH
CANTERBURY’S criminal history takes the spotlight as part of this year’s National Trust Heritage Festival with a new exhibition highlighting the region’s dark past.
Canterbury’s Crooks: An Exhibition on Historical Crime is now showing at Campsie Library.
The crimes that made Sydney headlines are detailed, such as the case of the Kingsgrove Slasher, a man who broke into homes during the night and slashed the clothes and bedsheets of sleeping women.
The Slasher, who was revealed to be David Joseph Scanlon, an office clerk from Arncliffe, terrorised the Canterbury and St George areas and was also known to strike on the North Shore.
The 130-year-old murder case of Constable Hird will also be highlighted as part of the exhibition.
On August 13, 1885, the body of William Hird was found near Prout’s Bridge, close to the present day location of the Canterbury railway station.
About 3am, two market gardeners made the gruesome discovery – the policeman’s brutally beaten body lay in a pool of blood.
“Hird was killed by two heavy axe blows to the head, one to the right side of the head, badly disfiguring him,” said Colin Beacroft, a member of the Canterbury Historical Society.
Two men, Joseph Thompson and Ellis Birch, were taken into custody.
After an inquest held at the Rising Sun Hotel on Canterbury Rd – now the site of an Aldi supermarket – Thompson and Birch were charged with manslaughter at Newtown Police Station.
Both were believed to be drunk when they got into a scuffle with Hird that fateful evening.
The blows killed him almost instantly.
Hird was born in Scotland in 1852 and joined the NSW police force in 1882. A former sergeant in the East Riding Police Force in Yorkshire, he was survived by his wife and five children.
His headstone is at St Paul’s Church, Canterbury, and pays tribute to the courageous spirit of the 33-year-old: “Constable in the NSW police force who was killed while courageously carrying out his duty”.
His story, and that of the Slasher, can be seen at the Campsie Library exhibition until May 29.
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