What some of Melbourne’s most notorious murder houses sold for
After the infamous Ristevski home finally sold for $1.27M, we take a look at some of melbourne's other homes where even a grisly crime didn't deter buyers.
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If you think vying for your dream home at an auction is bloodbath enough, you probably won’t want to read any further.
The property market can be a killer, but what if there’s actually been a murder in the home?
These are some of the Melbourne homes turned grisly crime scenes which have been snapped up by brave buyers — some for eye-watering prices.
Since March last year, Victorian agents and vendors have been barred from “knowingly conceal(ing) any material facts” about properties for sale, including whether they’d been the site of a murder, used as a meth lab, or had flammable cladding or asbestos.
They previously only needed to disclose such information when specifically asked.
AVONDALE HEIGHTS
23 Oakley Drive
The Avondale Heights home where Karen Ristevski was killed sold for $1.27 in August 2020.
Mrs Ristevski disappeared from the property in June 2016. The case gripped Australia from the moment she vanished without a trace.
A walker happened across the 47-year-old’s remains wedged between two logs in Macedon Regional Park in February 2017.
Ms Ristevski’s husband Borce had always maintained his innocence over his wife’s death, saying she had left the family home to clear her head after the couple had an argument over finances.
As police continued to probe him as the prime suspect, Ristevski prepared for his wife’s funeral, even carrying her coffin.
He was eventually charged with murder in December 2017 and remanded in custody.
Last year, on the eve of his scheduled five-week Supreme Court trial, Ristevski sensationally confessed to killing his wife, pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
It is not known how Mrs Ristevski was killed, with her remains so badly decomposed when found.
The five-bedroom home was listed for sale on March 11 with an asking price of $1.2-$1.3 million.
The couple’s daughter Sarah is set to be the beneficiary of the sale.
The property in Avondale Heights’ “premium residential pocket” last changed hands in 1994 for $125,000.
The auction is scheduled for April 4.
MORNINGTON
116 Prince St
Arguably one of the state’s most horrific killings occurred behind the charming weatherboard facade of a “romantic seaside cottage” on Prince St.
It was here that John Sharpe, dubbed the ‘Mornington Monster’, enacted his gruesome plan to kill his wife and young child.
On March 23, 2004, the evil Sharpe fetched a speargun from the garage and fired two spears into his pregnant wife Anna Kemp’s head as she slept.
He buried her in a shallow grave in the backyard.
But his calculated crimes didn’t stop there — four days later Sharpe turned the speargun on his 20-month-old daughter Gracie, killing her only to help perpetuate his story that his wife had left him for another man and taken their child with her.
It took three shots to kill the tiny child.
Sharpe then exhumed Anna’s body, dismembered it with a chainsaw and dumped her and Gracie at a local tip.
Several months later Sharpe was arrested and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment.
Two years after the heinous crimes, the three-bedroom was sold for $345,000.
Buyer Cheryl Baker told the Sunday Herald Sun she’d had a cleansing ceremony to ward off evil.
“It’s a lovely little house, it has got a lovely feel to it. There is nothing horrible here,” she said.
“Apart from what happened, which was terrible, I thought there was something really lovely here.”
The home changed hands again in 2010 for $525,000.
The gushing listing on realestate.com.au promised the cottage offered “a surprising interior” — but perhaps shocking is a more fitting word for what happened within those walls.
MURRUMBEENA
30 Omama Rd
An Omama Rd house was the scene of a brutal double murder in 2014, but that didn’t stop it from being crowned the most expensive house in Murrumbeena when it was sold three years later.
The five-bedroom house was thoroughly renovated by the new owners, following the cold-blooded killing of Robert and Cheryl Adamson in their home of 40 years.
Mr and Mrs Adamson were savagely attacked after opening the door to Thomas Hemming, then 21, early one February morning.
Hemming preyed on the couple’s good nature by asking to use their phone — a trick to gain entry and live out his fantasy of knowing what it felt like to kill.
Mr Adamson, an accountant, and his wife, a senior teacher librarian at Melbourne Grammar School, were found dead in the home by Mrs Adamson’s colleagues after she failed to turn up for work.
After he viciously stabbed the couple in a frenzied attack, Hemming walked 160m down the road to his home still covered in their blood.
He sentenced to 32 years behind bars.
The couple’s children, Michael and Katie, sold the home for $1.93 million the following year.
It hit the market again in 2017 where it was snapped up for $3.36 million thanks to a stunning luxury transformation.
MULGRAVE
143 Hansworth St
The Mulgrave house where an 84-year-old woman was stabbed to death before the callous killer sat down and ate a meal from her fridge sold for more than $1 million a decade later.
Grandmother Dora Sipovic was stabbed to death in her bed by an intruder who broke into the rear of the property in August 2007.
The killer then took food from Mrs Sipovic’s fridge and sat down to eat it.
Springvale South man Cuong Huy Pham was wearing clothes taken from Mrs Sipovic’s home when he turned himself into police over the brutal killing.
He was found not guilty on the ground of mental impairment and committed to custody at the Thomas Embling Hospital for 25 years.
The Hansworth St property was put on the market almost a year after Mrs Sipovic was slain, fetching $350,000.
The new owners “completely redesigned to new” the home, before selling listing it with price hopes of $700,000 in 2017.
It’s gruesome history didn’t stop a bidding war, with the eventual buyer splashing $1.055 million for the four-bedroom home.
COLLINGWOOD
147 Easey St
The scene of perhaps the most infamous unsolved murders in Melbourne, the terrace home sold for $1.095 million about three years ago.
The gory double homicide of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett on January 10, 1977, came to be known as the Easey Street murders and is still regarded as one of the city’s most shocking crimes.
The women’s bodies were found in their rented home after neighbours heard the crying of Ms Armstrong’s 15-month-old son, Gregory.
Ms Armstrong and Ms Bartlett, 27-year-old mates from Benalla, had been sexually assaulted and repeatedly stabbed in a frenzied attack three days earlier.
More than 40 years later, police are still trying to crack the cold case but believe the killer knew at least one of the women and was in the house for “some time”.
The house sat empty for almost six years following the gruesome deaths before the owner finally sold it in 1983.
In 2011 it changed hands again, fetching $571,000 at auction.
And in 2017, four decades on from the horrific murders, the two-bedroom home sold for $1.095 million before auction, following extensive renovations.
ABERFELDIE
31 Comberemere St
The house where gangland figure Mark Moran was gunned down in 2000 was sold in 2017.
A buyer eventually snapped up the Combermere St home about a month after it passed in at auction after failing to snare a single bid.
Moran was shot dead in an ambush outside his home on June 15. It is alleged Carl Williams pulled the trigger.
The five-bedroom period-style house passed in at auction for $2.7 million, later selling for $2.66 million.
It had been fully renovated since the murder and now boasts a swimming pool and spa, open fireplaces, alarm system, polished hardwood floors and an entertaining area on the top floor.
GLEN IRIS
1/152 Burke Rd
The townhouse where murderer Matthew Wales killed his mother and stepfather 18 years ago fetched $915,000 just five years after the shocking crime.
Margaret Wales-King, 68, and Paul King, 74, were drugged and bashed at the Burke Rd home before being wrapped in a kiddie pool and dumped in a bush grave in the Yarra Ranges National Park.
The callous killing of the millionaire couple from Armadale became known as the “Society Murders” and captured the public’s attention like few cases before it.
Former homicide cop Charlie Bezzina put the notoriety down to a combination of status and intrigue: it was a genuine mystery, involving the sorts of rich people whose lives were rarely put on show.
At a funeral service for the slain couple, Matthew — the youngest of Margaret’s five children — broke down in tears.
But police weren’t fooled and as forensic evidence piled up they swooped to arrest the baby of the family who eventually confessed, telling detectives the trigger had been a financial dispute.
Psychologists later reported he had been obsessed with perceived “injustices” he had suffered at the hands of his mother.
He is serving a 30-year jail sentence for the crimes.
The owner of the modern double-storey brick townhouse, previously rented to Wales, sold it five years later where it exceeded its $850,000 price hopes.
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