Crimes that shocked Melbourne: Julian Knight, Paul Haigh and Mr Cruel some of the killers who terrorised Melbourne’s east
CHILLING attacks by Julian Knight, Paul Haigh and the mysterious Mr Cruel are among the most awful crimes ever committed in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
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VICTORIA’S eastern suburbs have been witness to many horrific crimes which have stunned the community.
In our series on the worst crimes that have rocked each of Melbourne’s regions, True Crime Scene has chosen five of the most shocking in the eastern suburbs in recent memory.
The Hoddle Street massacre
IN the words of Supreme Court judge Justice George Hampel, the Hoddle Street shooting spree in Collingwood was “one of the worst massacres in Australian history”.
Armed with three guns — two rifles and a pump action shotgun — disaffected army reject Julian Knight randomly opened fire on anything that moved along Hoddle St on the night of August 9, 1987.
Julian Knight’s victims (L-R): Tracey Skinner, 23, Robert Mitchell, 27, Gina Papaioannou, 21, Johnny Muscat, 26, Dusan Flajnik, 53, Kenneth Stanton, 21 and Vesna Markovska, 24. Nineteen others were injured in his 46-minute shooting spree.
It took the young troubled gun nut 46 minutes to kill seven people and injure 19 others before he ran out of ammunition.
“I was trained target up, fire, shoot to kill,” Knight would later say.
“See a target, shoot to kill. Don’t hurt. Shoot to kill.”
Detective Graham Kent, the investigator who interviewed Knight afterwards, said: “He was very happy and actually wanted to tell the story.
“He actually sort of revelled in that storytelling. (It was like) this was his 15 minutes and he had the bragging rights, and he wanted to say how well he’d done.
“For him, it was an adventure.”
When sentencing Knight to life with a 27-year minimum term, Justice Hampel said: “At the time there was, and I think there still is, a sense of bewilderment as to why a highly intelligent, educated young man of nineteen years of age, with no previous criminal history, could have done what you did.”
SPECIAL REPORT: Reconstruction of the Hoddle St massacre
Triple murderer who picked his victims at random
TRIPLE killer Ashley Mervyn Coulston was a cold-blooded predator.
He stands convicted of a nightmarish triple murder 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 judge 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.”
SPECIAL REPORT: What drove monster Coulston to kill?
Is this chilling killer Victoria’s worst?
DURING his murderous spree, the man who would become the state’s worst mass murderer allowed an accomplice to rape his then girlfriend, Lisa Brearley, in the Olinda State Forest in August 1979.
The killer, Paul Steven Haigh, then stabbed the girl 157 times.
Haigh figured the DNA his accomplice left behind would guarantee the rapist’s silence about the murder.
According to Haigh, he tricked Ms Brearley to travel into the forest with him and his friends by telling her they were going to a party.
Haigh said Ms Brearley was “devalued as a person and a female” during her ordeal.
He held a knife to Ms Brearley’s throat while his friend raped her.
“When the fellow who wanted sex with her had finished using her body to that end, I attacked her with the blade,” Haigh wrote.
He had a specific number of stab wounds in mind.
But he kept losing count and had to start again, he said.
When Ms Brearley’s front was covered in wounds he turned her over and stabbed her back.
“When I was satisfied of no chance of a miraculous recovery, I stopped,’’ he said.
“The intensity of her fight fazed me — it wasn’t like in the movies. It was the only one I have ever had a nightmare about.’’
According to Haigh, Ms Brearley was killed because she knew details about guns he had used during a double murder.
“Lisa became a loose end we agreed to silence,” Haigh said.
VICIOUS MIND: Why cunning Paul Haig confessed to murder
The Easey Street murders
FRIENDS Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett were butchered in their little house in Easey St, Collingwood.
Between them, the two young friends were stabbed 84 times by a mystery killer who has never been apprehended.
The stabbing murders of Ms Armstrong, a single mum, and Ms Bartlett, have remained a grisly mystery since January 1977.
Several suspects have been cleared through DNA testing.
Ms Armstrong was raped and stabbed 29 times during the home invasion.
Blood stains indicated she was first stabbed between her bed and window then dragged by her legs into the middle of the room and stabbed repeatedly.
Ms Bartlett was stabbed 55 times.
The killer did not rape her.
Ms Bartlett received many wounds on her forearms and the front of her body before falling, dead or dying, face down in the hall, outside Ms Armstrong’s bedroom.
Ms Armstrong’s 16-month-old son, Gregory, was left unharmed in his cot.
It was a frenzied attack carried out by a man of unnatural strength and ferocity, police said.
NEVER SOLVED: DNA clue in 1977 murder
The terrible reign of Mr Cruel
THE sex-driven child abductor and killer known only as “Mr Cruel” cast a dark shadow of fear across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs during his reign of terror in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
The clever and meticulous pedophile first abducted a young girl, 10, from her Ringwood home on December 27, 1988.
Armed with a knife and a handgun, and wearing a balaclava, he bound and gagged the girl’s mother and father before abducting her.
After holding the girl captive and assaulting her, he released her wrapped in a garbage bag in Bayswater.
Mr Cruel struck again on the night of July 3, 1990, abducting a 13-year-old girl from her Canterbury home.
Wrapped in a blanket, she was later released in Kew.
On the night of April 13, 1991, Mr Cruel abducted 13-year-old Karmein Chan from her parents’ Templestowe home.
Karmein was not as lucky as the previous victims — in April 1992 her skeletal remains were found buried in a shallow grave in a Thomastown field.
She had been shot through the head.
Despite an exhaustive police investigation, the identity of Mr Cruel remains a mystery to this day.
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