Notorious prisoners locked up in Barwon Prison
Child killers, rapists, sadistic murderers. These Barwon prisoners are responsible for some of Melbourne’s most gruesome crimes. Warning: Distressing content
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From a man who murdered his pregnant wife and toddler with a speargun to a sadistic schoolgirl killer and reviled rapist, Barwon Prison is home to men convicted of some of Victoria’s most gruesome crimes.
We take a look at some of the depraved criminals doing time inside the maximum security prison.
ARTHUR FREEMAN
It was a crime of unfathomable horror which sent shockwaves throughout Australia and made headlines across the globe — a father seen throwing his little girl off the top of the West Gate Bridge.
Freeman had been driving back from his parents’ holiday home on January 29, 2009, with his daughter Darcey, 4, and two sons, aged six and two, in the back seat when he stopped his car at the top of the bridge.
He took Darcey from the vehicle, carried her to the railing and dropped her over the edge.
“He put both his arms on the railing, looked over the side of the railing for a couple of seconds, then just casually walked back (to his vehicle),” one witness later said.
Darcey fell about 80m and later died in hospital.
Freeman pleaded not guilty by reason of mental impairment, but five psychologists refuted the callous child killer’s claim saying his actions clearly fitted the classification of “spousal revenge”.
Freeman was sentenced to life in jail with a non-parole period of 32 years for little Darcey’s murder.
Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan said Freeman’s prospects of rehabilitation were “bleak”.
“Any motive which existed for the killing had nothing to do with the innocent victim,’’ he said.
“It can only be concluded that you used your daughter in an attempt to hurt your former wife as profoundly as possible.
“Your attitude to these matters remains self-centred.”
The earliest Freeman can be released is January 2041. By then, he will be 67 years old.
ADRIAN BAYLEY
Adrian Ernest Bayley was sent to Barwon in June, 2013 on a 35-year sentence in 2013 for the “savage and degrading” rape and murder of Jill Meagher.
In a case that shook Melbourne, Bayley picked his target after walking past her on Sydney Rd in Brunswick as she left after-work drinks.
Bayley had already spent more than a decade in jail for various sex attacks and rapes and was on parole when he brutally killed 29-year-old ABC employee in September 2012.
CCTV footage captured Bayley trailing Ms Meagher before she disappeared around the corner, never to be seen alive again.
Bayley raped and strangled Ms Meagher in a Brunswick laneway at about 1.30am and left her there.
He returned in his car several hours later and bundled Ms Meagher’s body into the boot, eventually burying it in a shallow roadside grave in Gisborne South.
Bayley is reportedly loathed by other inmates in Barwon and has been held in protective units away from the general prison population.
The notorious killer and rapist was stabbed by another prisoner in 2017, suffering only minor wounds.
His extensive rap sheet has led him to be dubbed one of Victoria’s worst sex offenders.
Bayley’s earliest release date is 2055.
LESLIE CAMILLERI
The horrific abduction, rape and murder of two schoolgirls from Bega, NSW, remains one of Australia’s most sickening crimes.
In 1997, Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett kidnapped 14-year-old Lauren Barry and 16-year-old Nichole Collins from their campsite near Tathra and held them captive during a horrendous 12-hour ordeal before killing them and dumping their bodies at Fiddler’s Green Creek in Victoria.
In April 1999, Camilleri was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A court heard that just weeks before the violent murders Camilleri and Beckett had abducted a 19-year-old in Canberra and repeatedly raped her and threatened her with a knife.
At one point when the woman complained of being thirsty, Camilleri responded by spitting in her mouth.
Dressed in only socks and a T-shirt, the woman managed to escape her captors at a toilet blocked off the Hume Hwy near Bowral.
She fled through scrub and hid in a wombat hole.
The woman later told police she’d heard the pair discussing plans to kill her.
In 2012, Camilleri pleaded guilty to the 1992 murder of Glenroy teen Prue Bird who was 14 years old when she disappeared from her home, leaving a hot meal uneaten on the table and the television on.
He was sentenced to 28 years in prison for her murder to be served alongside his previous sentence.
Prue’s body has never been found.
JOHN SHARPE
Reviled double-killer John Sharpe cruelly took the lives of his pregnant wife and young daughter with a speargun.
Believing he was trapped in a loveless marriage with a moody and controlling woman, Sharpe shot two spears into the head of his 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 whisky 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 whom 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”.
STEVEN HUNTER
Student and budding justice worker Sarah Cafferkey’s decision to befriend Steven Hunter cost the young woman her life.
Hunter had completed his parole just 11 days before murdering Ms Cafferkey at his Bacchus Marsh unit in November 2012.
A suspected ice dealer, Hunter had argued with Ms Cafferkey before hitting her with a blunt instrument, possibly a dumbbell, and then stabbing her 19 times to the head, chest and abdomen.
After killing the bubbly 22 year old, Hunter moved her body to a Point Cook home and dumped it in a wheelie bin filled with concrete.
Police found Ms Cafferkey’s body five days after her worried mother had reported her missing.
Hunter had previously served a 13-year prison term for stabbing another young woman to death.
The cruel killer was jailed for life with no minimum term for Ms Cafferkey’s murder.
ASHLEY COULSTON
Triple killer Ashley Mervyn Coulston was a cold-blooded predator.
He was convicted of a horrific triple homicide in a Burwood rental house in July 1992.
In calm fashion he executed students Kerryn Henstridge, Anne Smerdon and Peter Dempsey.
He chose the victims after noticing an ad for a flatmate at the home.
Coulston gagged the three friends and bound their hands behind their backs and, after forcing each to lie on a floor in separate rooms, covered their heads with dressing gowns and towels.
He then systematically shot each of them through the head.
“In the annals of crime, the Burwood murders will be remembered as one of the most heinous multiple killings in this state,” Supreme Court Justice Norman O’Bryan said when sentencing Coulston to life with no chance of parole.
“Your motivation is obscure, but the evidence points most obviously to robbery and sexual gratification.”
MATTHEW WALES
When Margaret Wales-King and her husband Paul arrived for dinner at Margaret’s son’s Glen Iris 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 Department of Justice and Community Safety does not comment on the placement of individual prisoners “for safety and security reasons”, meaning one or more of the above prisoners may have been recently moved without public knowledge.
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