Bad, mad and blood-curdling, anthology of crimes that shocked Australia: Part 1, A-C
A man snaps and shoots dead 10 family members, a street gang implodes after an orgy of violence, and the serial killer chillingly dubbed the Night Caller. We begin an alphabetical compilation of crimes that horrified, intrigued and scandalised a nation.
Some were the stuff of nightmares, others turned into TV hits and bestsellers but all are still capable of sending a chill down your spine.
In this alphabetical compilation of crimes that scandalised Australia, we highlight some the most notorious, brutal and outright bizarre crimes that both horrified and intrigued a nation.
A...IS FOR
IN the 1990s The Assyrian Kings gained a brutal and bloody reputation in Sydney’s south western suburbs.
However, the notoriety of the ruthless street gang of refugees — who fled northern Iraq after the Desert Storm war — skyrocketed after they were deemed responsible for the savage murder of Constable David Carty in Fairfield in 1997.
After the murder many members were arrested or fled Australia and the gang was effectively finished.
But a few years later rising Sydney gangster Raphael Joseph, also known as Rafi Tooma or “Huss” or “Hussany”, and some other equally violent associates formed DLAST HR to fill the void left by those involved in the death of Carty.
Within a couple of years “Huss’’ was a wanted man himself when he was named as the number one suspect in the shooting murder outside a strip club at the Sefton Playhouse in 2002.
He then went on the run fleeing to America where no doubt he cultivated his drug connections. While he was in America, DLAST HR was believed to be responsible for the senseless slaying of two young men at the Rocks.
The men Naser Ghaderi, 24 and Keyvan Ghajaloo, 25 were gunned down while they stood outside their cars in Hickson Road.
Joseph’s life on the run came to an end when he was arrested in San Diego in 2006.
He fought extradition and appealed to then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008 saying he would be “tortured or killed” by rival Sydney gang members and that a $100,000 contract had been placed on his life by an Australian crime family and members of a gang called the Sydney’s Bronx Boys wanted him dead.
He was deported back to Australia where he picked up his life of crime moving into the drug trade in a major way but was never pursued over the Sefton Playhouse murder.
He quickly established lines of major drug supplies into Sydney using connections from overseas.
He also knew murdered Hells Angel Wayne Schneider whose body was found naked in a shallow grave in Thailand in 2015.
By then police had arrested 14 of Dlasthr’s most influential and senior men. Police believed they had ripped out the heart of the outfit and while some low-ranking members remained on the street, they were rendered leaderless.
Soon after the arrests, founding member Joseph disappeared. It is believed he was murdered, his body most likely stuffed into a 44-gallon drum and burnt. His remains have never been found.
He was last seen having dinner at the Star Casino with a Comanchero bikie on March 20, 2014 before he was lured to a meeting later that night in Auburn by text.
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B IS FOR...
JEALOUS Clifford Cecil Bartholomew shot and killed his estranged wife, sister-in-law, seven children and 18-month-old nephew in a brutal bush bloodbath borne out of jealousy.
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 that was supposed to bring the estranged family together.
The 40-year-old bush slaughterman’s point blank range brutality was triggered by the obsessive belief wife Heather was having an affair with a Vietnam vet identified only as Mr X in later court transcripts.
In what became known as the Horror of Hope Forest, Bartholomew put on rubber gloves and walked into his farmhouse near Willunga in SA with two rifles and a mallet and struck his wife over the head before shooting her in the face.
He then went to the dining room and continued his demonic rampage. Those slain were children Neville, 19, Christine, 17, Sharon, 15, Helen, 13, Gregory, 10, Roger, 7 and Sandra, 4; sister-in-law Winnis, 26; and her son Daniel, 19 months.
When interviewed, Bartholomew told detectives he had to kill all his family because he loved them too much to ‘leave them behind”.
“I had to kill my wife, there was no other way out but to stop her from ever seeing (Mr X) again,” Bartholomew said.
“But somehow with all the screaming noises that was splitting my head wide open, and that horrible look on my wife’s face, I couldn’t control my actions and just went on (killing) until everything was finally quiet.”
In his confession, Bartholomew claimed “five months of mental torture” caused by his belief that his wife was having an affair had triggered the bloodbath.
Bartholomew was sentenced to death in 1971. This was later commuted to life in jail.
He was released after just eight years - or nine months per murder.
He changed his name, remarried and raised more children, with his new family having no idea of the killer in their midst.
“I couldn’t believe it, none of us can,” one of his stepchildren later told media outlets in 2018.
“To know the full story is horrendous — he just isn’t the man we thought we knew.”
Bartholomew died aged 71 in 2002.
Bartholomew’s niece, Noeleen Paltridge later said she had been living in fear of “Uncle Barty” hunting her down and inflicting a final punishment.
“I’m glad he’s dead but there are a lot of questions I’d have liked to have asked him, face-to-face,” said Ms Paltridge, who still has regular nightmares about the killer.
“I just hope he died a horrible death like my family did.”
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C IS FOR...
ERIC Edgar Cooke was the reason thousands of people started locking their doors and cars during the 1960s.
Cooke, nicknamed “The Night Caller’’, terrorised Perth, still like a country town then, with his acts of violence.
Cooke’s random killings and different methods of violence made him one of Australia’s most notorious and baffling serial killers.
From 1959 to 1963, he committed 22 violent crimes, eight of which resulted in death.
Cooke’s strange killing spree involved a series of seemingly unrelated hit and runs, stabbings, stranglings and shootings.
His notorious crimes feature in author Robert Drewe’s memoir The Shark Net about his early life growing up during the reign of one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers.
Cooke was convicted of wilful murder on 28 November 1963 after a three-day trial by jury in the Supreme Court of Western Australia before Justice Virtue.
The convicted killer thanked the judge and “accepted the verdict calmly’’.
His long-suffering wife Sally - who had seven children with Cooke – posted a handwritten note on her front door on the day he was hanged, asking people to leave the family alone.
The aftermath of Cooke’s terror reign lasted for years to come for his own family, his victims’ families and two innocent men who had been earlier wrongly convicted for two of his crimes.
In 1959 Melbourne heiress to the Robertson chocolate empire, Jillian Brewer, 22, was found murdered in her Cottesloe apartment.
Miss Brewer had been stabbed to death with a tomahawk and a pair of scissors. A deaf-mute young man Darryl Beamish was sentenced to death in 1961 for the crime.
It took decades for Beamish and his supporters to get his conviction quashed in 2005 after a sixth appeal. He was later awarded $425,000 for his wrongful imprisonment.
John Button served over five years in prison for the manslaughter of his girlfriend Rosemary Anderson, 17, in a 1963 hit-run as she walked down a Perth road.
The truth was that Cooke had a fondness for stealing cars and targeting women who were walking along the streets.
Ten minutes before he was hanged on October 26, 1964, Cooke swore on the Bible that he had killed Brewer and Anderson with it later discovered that several women had been left permanently disabled by Cooke’s callous hit-run attacks.
Button’s conviction was quashed in 2002 and he was awarded $460,000 from the WA Government.
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