Cop reveals childhood link to Granny Killer horror
AS an 11-year-old boy Matthew Harmer stumbled on the first victim of Australia’s notorious ‘Granny Killer’ lying in a pool of blood. Now a seasoned policeman it’s an experience that still shakes him to this day.
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GWENDOLINE ‘Gwen’ Mitchelhill was slumped at the front door to her apartment block, surrounded by a pool of fresh blood.
Barely conscious, the 82-year-old was bleeding from her nose and ear and had deep bloody lacerations to the back of her skull — wounds caused by a hammer, violently whacked into the back of her curly grey hair.
No one knew it at the time but the kindly old woman had just become the first victim of notorious ‘Granny Killer’ John Wayne Glover, who murdered six elderly women on Sydney’s North Shore between 1989 and 1990.
Eleven-year-old Matthew Harmer and his nine-year-old brother Phillip had not long returned from school to their great-aunt’s Mosman unit block, when they were confronted with the bloody sight.
“She was still alive. She died later, at hospital,” says Matthew Harmer, 40, quietly.
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Almost 30 years on, the father-of-four and seasoned policeman has never spoken publicly about what he saw that day, but decades later its impact still shakes him.
It was Harmer’s first introduction to the force: the little boy earnestly giving his statement to police, recalling each detail, just as years later he would note down each uttering from interviewees while taking statements as a homicide detective.
“We knew her. She was just a nice old lady who’d give you sweets or a biscuit,” said Harmer.
“She was shaking, sort of. She was sitting up. We went back up to the apartment of one of the ladies to say that Gwen had fallen over out the front.”
But when the two women went to help, a defensive Mrs Mitchelhill tried to fight them off.
“It was strange, when you look back on it now, she was obviously knocking them away thinking that it was an attacker but they were trying to help, but because she was so injured she wouldn’t have known what was going on.”
Between March, 1989, and March, 1990, Glover murdered six elderly women, savagely attacked another and molested others.
His modus operandi was fast and deadly, attacking his frail victims from behind with savage blows from a hammer before stealing small amounts of money from their purses, and leaving the old women to die.
Matthew Harmer details a window of just 10 minutes between the time he and his brother arrived home, noting nothing out of the ordinary, and the time they found Mrs Mitchelhill dying on the front steps after they realised they had left Phillip’s hat at school and headed back out.
Glover was such an unlikely suspect, he slipped away from his crime scenes without anyone even noticing he was in the area.
The portly father-of-two more closely resembled a kindly Santa Claus figure than a cold-blooded killer.
Neither his wife nor his colleagues from his job as a salesman at Four ‘n’ Twenty pies suspected anything was wrong.
But when he’d finish work for the day, the grey-haired family man would park his car and — tucking a hammer down the front of his trousers — stalk the leafy streets for victims.
As more old women were found, police realised the deaths were no accident and they were looking for a serial killer.
But well-meaning neighbours kept washing down the crime scenes before detectives arrived, cleaning up unsightly blood, and with it any forensic evidence.
As a result, the statements from the Harmer children took on particular significance. The boys could provide a rare description of exactly how the crime scene was laid out before anyone had moved objects or the victim.
Years later, when Harmer got his first job as a detective at Chatswood Police Station, he was assigned to report to one of the detectives who worked on the Granny Killer task force, and could remember the statement made by Harmer as a younger man.
It was here he saw first-hand the persistence taken to crack a case.
He can still recall the satisfaction of seeing his close mates and colleagues solve the murder of Sydney luxury car dealer Robert Ljubic, whose body was found floating off Botany Bay after his disappearance in March, 2005.
“The boys didn’t give up and it resulted in a bloke getting convicted, it was like dog and a bone type stuff,” he said.
Similar dedication had led detectives to Glover but not before he had struck fear into the elderly and their relatives in a year-long reign of terror.
To reassure frightened citizens, police ran community safety meetings and set up a courtesy bus to help old women home from shopping areas.
Of course, when Glover found out, he applied to be one of the volunteer bus drivers.
Little over a month after Mrs Mitchelhill’s murder, Lady Winifreda Ashton was attacked on her way home from the supermarket.
Spotting the 84-year-old from his car, Glover parked, put on a pair of gloves and followed Mrs Ashton into her unit block bin room where he bashed her head into the concrete floor.
By 8pm, her body was found face down among the bins.
Her shoes, walking stick and handbag were nearby and her pantyhose had been removed and tied around her neck.
Then, as is characteristic of some serial killers, Glover had a cooling-off period.
By October, he was ready to kill again.
On his way home from work on October 18, Glover saw dementia sufferer Doris Cox outside Garrison Nursing Home in Mosman and struck up a friendly conversation, walking her through the complex, before slamming her head into a wall.
The old woman was found sitting in the gardens of her retirement village.
This was the first victim to survive Glover’s attack and police hoped Mrs Cox could provide a description but she was unable to recall the detail.
Sadly, it wouldn’t take long before police had another lead.
On November 2, Mrs Margaret Pahud, 85, was found facedown in a large pool of blood on a Lane Cove pathway.
She’d been on her way home from the local library when Glover fatally attacked her and pinched her purse.
Police were working overtime but they were chasing their tail — 24 hours later, Olive Cleveland’s body was found lying across the walkway of the Wesley Gardens Retirement Village in Belrose.
Her dress was pulled up and the 81-year-old’s pantyhose were tied around her neck; her spectacles and shoes placed neatly by her feet.
Then on November 24, Muriel Falconer was attacked at the front door to her Mosman home.
As Falconer, 93, opened the door, Glover grabbed her from behind, killing her in his trademark style with hammer blows to the head and tying her pantyhose around her neck.
But before he left, Glover stepped in a pool of blood, leaving a footprint which police matched to a pair of shoes in his possession.
By this stage, they had Glover pinned as a suspect.
His salesman job took him to all the locations where the murders occurred, and as he finished work in the midafternoon, he was available between 3-6pm, when the attacks occurred.
He also had contracts with several nursing homes where sexual assaults had been reported by patients, and witnesses recalled a grey-haired man of his description.
It was time to take him in for questioning but when police tried to contact him they reached his wife. She told them Glover was in the care of Royal North Shore Hospital.
He’d tried to kill himself … and he’d left a note behind.
“No more grannies” it read.
“Essie started it.”
Essie was Glover’s mother-in-law with whom he had a difficult relationship — and police were given insight into the curious motive that could be driving their killer.
They put Glover under surveillance but sadly there would be one more death before police had their man.
On 19 March, 1990, surveillance personnel followed Glover to an address at Beauty Point, where he was seen entering a house with a briefcase.
He was welcomed into the home by his close friend, Joan Sinclair, misleading police to believe it was a legitimate visit.
But when Glover didn’t emerge for several hours, they made a chilling discovery.
Looking through the window, police saw a hammer and what looked like blood on the carpet.
Upon entry, they discovered Sinclair’s body, dead, and naked from the waist down.
In the bathroom, they found Glover semiconscious in the bath with his face partially submerged in water. He was surrounded by bottles of pills and an empty whisky bottle. It took all their willpower to save the life of the callous killer but they needed their confession.
Interviewed at his hospital bedside, Glover admitted to murdering Sinclair, Mitchelhill, Ashton, Pahud, Cleveland and Falconer, and the attempted murder of Cox.
However, at his trial in March, 1990, he pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
A psychiatrist found Glover was sane at the time of the murders but suffered from a severe personality disorder and was driven by hostility towards his mother and his relationship with Essie.
In 1991, he was sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment, never to be released.
His family turned their backs, changed their names and moved to New Zealand. His only visits were from a former colleague Elizabeth Jury who had maintained contact with him, driven by the curiosity of unravelling how the man she remembered so fondly could commit such heinous crimes.
In September, 2005, Glover hanged himself in his cell but not before leaving police one final clue. A talented artist, he had handed Jury a sketch of a park and pointed out two pine trees.
Among the leaves of the trees, Glover had hidden the number nine.
Suspecting Glover had more victims than his confirmed six, police had questioned the killer, believing the illustrated number nine was his cryptic confession to murdering three others.
But Glover wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
This was his final, cruel sliver of power and he wasn’t going to give it up.
Instead he took his secrets and the identity of his suspected three additional victims to his grave.
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