The horrific family crimes that shook Melbourne’s leafy suburbs
THE SON who slayed his mother and stepfather in his backyard. The father who murdered his pregnant wife and daughter with a speargun. The mum who killed her young boys, calling it “her greatest act of love.” They’re the family crimes we’ll never forget.
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PICTURESQUE storybook houses line the streets of Melbourne’s affluent suburbs.
With exclusive schools and rock-bottom crime rates, these leafy enclaves are seen as safe, privileged neighbourhoods.
But behind the security gates, high fences and double doors, some horrific killings were carried out — by those the victims loved most.
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We look back on some of the gruesome familial homicides that rocked Melbourne’s most idyllic suburbs over the decades.
The society murders
It was the double-murder that shocked residents of Glen Iris.
When Margaret Wales-King and her husband Paul arrived for dinner at Margaret’s son’s home on April 4, 2002, they had no idea it would be their last meal.
The millionaire couple from Armadale were drugged, bashed on the back of the neck with a piece of wood and left facedown in the front garden of the Burke Rd townhouse their youngest son and stepson shared with his wife Maritza and young son, Domenik.
An autopsy later found the pair might have survived for up to six hours before dying of asphyxiation.
Their adult children reported them missing four days later and their disappearance gripped the public’s attention like few cases had before it — it was a mystery involving the sorts of rich people whose lives were rarely put on show.
Their bodies were found in a shallow bushland grave at Marysville nearly a month after their murders.
At a funeral service for the slain couple, Matthew broke down in tears, perhaps in a show of grief for the many news crews gathered outside St Peter’s Catholic Church in Toorak.
Despite this, he remained at the top of the suspect list and, as forensic evidence piled up, Matthew was eventually arrested.
During his police interview, he confessed to the murders, telling detectives the trigger had been a financial dispute.
Matthew’s IQ was limited at 83, and psychologists reported he was obsessed with the “injustices” he had suffered at the hands of his mother, whom he felt had never accepted him as an independent man.
Matthew is serving a 30-year jail sentence for the crimes.
The jilted husband
After telling her husband of 23 years she had met someone else, Julie Ramage was killed in her Balwyn home.
On July 21, 2003, high-flying businessman James Ramage bashed and strangled the mother of his two children in the family room of their Percy St house, just a month after she had left him and moved into a Toorak apartment.
He bundled her petite lifeless body into the boot of his Jaguar and drove to Kinglake where he buried her in a shallow grave.
Afterwards, Ramage washed his car, cleaned the home, ordered new bench tops, took his son to dinner, met with lawyers — and then surrendered to police.
Ramage said he “lost it” when his estranged wife ended the marriage, told him she was “repulsed” by the thought of sex with him and had formed a new relationship.
He infamously beat a murder charge to be convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 11 years’ jail after claiming provocation.
Ramage is the last person in Victoria to successfully use the provocation defence before it was abolished in 2005 following widespread outrage.
He only served eight years behind bars after he was given parole in 2011.
The Weekend at Bernie’s killer
He was a renowned interior designer who lived a glamorous life with his long-term partner Michael O’Neill by his side.
But behind closed doors, O’Neill felt “controlled and belittled“ by the in-demand Stuart Rattle and, on the morning of December 4, 2013, he snapped, hitting Rattle over the head with a saucepan in their South Yarra home before strangling him with a dog lead.
His bizarre actions following the violent murder earned O’Neill the nickname “Weekend at Bernie’s killer”.
He made cups of tea for his dead lover in their Malvern Rd apartment and carried on his day-to-day life as normal, pretending Mr Rattle was alive.
The grim charade went on for five days with O’Neill taking the couple’s fox terriers for walks, catching up with friends and even texting a friend from Mr Rattle’s phone.
The court heard at one point he even sat by Mr Rattle’s body in bed and watched episodes of Dr Who, adjusting the TV as if to give the dead man a better view.
O’Neill eventually burnt down their home in an attempt to make Mr Rattle’s death look like an accident.
O’Neill was sentenced to a maximum of 18 years in jail, with a 13-year minimum.
The apartment where the murder took place was sold for $2.05 million in April 2015.
The mum who killed
Donna Fitchett wanted out of her marriage but couldn’t face leaving her two sons — so she hatched a meticulous plan to kill them in what she termed her “greatest act of love”.
The qualified nurse gave Thomas, 11, and Matthew, 9, a cocktail of drugs before strangling one and smothering the other at their Balwyn North home on September 6, 2005.
After killing the boys, she left a note for her husband David: “I am so sorry for your pain upon the discovery of what I have done. I can’t abandon the boys. I pray I don’t live through this”.
The court heard on the day of the killings, Fitchett wrote to her psychologist detailing what she planned to do and said she was not crazy, that the killings were her “greatest act of love”.
“Sadly I’m too broken to go on. Today the boys will be given an overdose as I cannot and wouldn’t ever abandon them,” she wrote.
She admitted to the killings but pleaded not guilty to murder on the grounds of mental impairment.
She claimed her major depressive disorder had led to the boys’ deaths because she intended to take her own life and felt she could not leave them behind.
Prosecutors had wanted her jailed for life, which would have made her the only woman in Victoria serving a life term, but she was instead jailed for 27 years, with a non-parole period of 18.
In sentencing Fitchett, Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Curtain said the crimes were “truly appalling and offensive to civilised society”.
“You were their mother. Your responsibility was to nurture, care for, love and protect them,” she said.
Fitchett is in a psychiatric unit at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre and is eligible to be released as early as 2023.
The Mornington Monster
Believing he was trapped in a loveless marriage with a moody and controlling woman, John Sharpe shot two spears into the head of his pregnant wife, Anna Kemp, as she slept in their Mornington home.
He covered her body with towels so he wouldn’t have to look at her and went to sleep on a fold-out sofa downstairs.
The couple’s 20-month-old daughter, Gracie, was asleep in another room.
Four days after he murdered Anna on March 23, 2004, Sharpe downed several glasses of whiksy and Coke then turned the speargun on Gracie, killing her to help perpetuate his story his wife had left him for another man and later telling police: “the child belongs with the mother”.
Sharpe exhumed Anna’s body from the shallow grave he had dug in the backyard, dismembered it with a chainsaw, then dumped her and Gracie at a local tip.
A tearful Sharpe later faced the media over his wife’s disappearance, maintaining his story that Anna had left and taken Gracie with her.
During a three-month charade, Sharpe sent his mother-in-law flowers for her birthday purporting to be from Anna, wrote letter’s to his slain wife’s friends, withdrew money from her account and made calls from her mobile phone in an effort to fool people into thinking she was still alive.
On Tuesday, June 22, police swooped, arresting Sharpe at his parents’ home.
He was grilled for 11 hours and confessed to the murders of his wife and child.
Sharpe’s vicious crimes earned him the nickname of Mornington Monster and he was sentenced to two life sentences with a minimum of 33 years.
During sentencing, Supreme Court Justice Bernard Bongiorno said: “Gracie was a defenceless child for hwom you had a legal and, more importantly, a moral responsibility and whatever your motive for killing Anna might have been, in Gracie’s case it was simply so that your first crime would not be discovered”.
The Jack the Ripper suspect
Windsor was once home to one of Melbourne’s most intriguing murderers who even made the suspect list in the Jack the Ripper murders.
Frederick Bailey Deeming — who was known by many aliases — murdered his first wife and four children in the UK in 1891 before moving to Melbourne and murdering his second wife, burying her under concrete in the fireplace of their rented Windsor home.
Under the alias Albert Williams, Deeming emigrated to Melbourne with his wife Emily in December of 1891.
The couple rented a house in Andrew St and, on the same day, Deeming bought cement and tools, including a shovel, from a store in High St.
Emily was murdered that same month, on Christmas Day, and Deeming vanished.
In March 1892, the landlord was showing a prospective tenant through the Winsor home when they were overcome by a terrible smell.
They moved the stone at the bottom of the fireplace and made the gruesome discovery — the body of Emily, oozing and with the scalp detached.
An investigation revealed Deeming had several aliases and, with help from authorities in England, police learnt Deeming’s first wife and four children were murdered and also buried under the fireplace.
The media jumped on the story and it wasn’t long before suspicions arose that Deeming could be Jack the Ripper.
Deeming was eventually captured in Western Australia and brought back to Victoria to stand trial for Emily’s murder.
The trial lasted three days and he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He was executed on May 24, 1892 at Old Melbourne Gaol.
While in jail, Deeming wrote a book confessing to being the infamous Whitechapel serial killer but it was never proven.
Little girl lost
It was a summer night in 1976, and the Worledge home in Beaumaris was like many others of its time.
Airconditioning was a rare and expensive commodity, so people often opened their homes to take advantaged of any breeze as they slept.
But on January 13, little Eloise Worledge, 8, was snatched from her bed and never seen again.
Her abduction sent shivers down the spines of parents across the state and from that moment, many families started to lock their doors.
Eloise’s father, Lindsay, had checked on her about 11.30pm and found her safely sleeping but her bed was empty at 7.30 the next morning.
The flywire screen on the little girl’s bedroom window in Scott St had been cut, but police believed Eloise was lured from her home because the hole was too small for an adult to climb through.
And experts concluded it had probably been cut from the inside.
A neighbour reported hearing a car speeding down the street about 2am but a massive police hunt — at the time the biggest in the state’s history — found little evidence.
In the days after Eloise was taken, police issued a $10,000 reward for anyone who helped track down her abductor.
It was no secret that Mr Worledge was considered a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance from very early in the investigation.
Mr Worledge and his wife Patsy were in the process of separating when their middle child was taken.
At an inquest years later, Mrs Worledge told detectives that at the time of Eloise’s disappearance she believed her husband was involved.
But Mr Worledge denied it and even took a lie-detector test to try and prove his innocence, but the results were inconclusive.
A 2003 Coroner’s inquest failed to name any suspects, recording an open finding.
The inquest considered Mr Worledge as a suspect but police said there was no evidence either parent was involved.
Mr Worledge died in February last year, with police no closer to knowing what happened to his daughter.
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