Mornington Monster John Sharpe murdered family with speargun as they slept

Fifteen years have passed since reviled double-killer John Sharpe cruelly took the lives of his wife and daughter with a speargun — but one question about the Mornington Monster’s shocking murders remains unanswered to this day.

Sharpe with wife Anna and daughter Gracie. It was the last picture taken before they were killed.

Fifteen years have passed since he murdered his wife and daughter and John Myles Sharpe is edging towards the back end of a long jail term.

But there would still be few more vulnerable prison inmates than this reviled double-killer.

The man who became known as the Mornington Monster is regarded as well-behaved behind bars, the embodiment of the term ‘model prisoner’.

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He is quiet and causes no trouble inside the maximum security environment which has been his home for a decade and-a-half with at least another 18 years to come.

But everyone knows why he is there and, in a world of dangerous men, he would be at dire risk if not confined to a protection unit.

John and Anna on their wedding day. Picture: Supplied

The reason is that he is responsible for two of the most atrocious deeds in recent Victorian criminal history.

Sharpe was — on the face of it — an inoffensive suburban family man from bayside Mornington until March 23, 2004.

That night, he went to the upstairs bed he shared with wife Anna, knelt beside her and levelled a speargun at her head.

“Anna was asleep in her bed and I used it — used the spear and fired it — fired it into Anna’s head on two occasions,” he was later to recall.

This hideous episode was only just beginning after Sharpe acted on, what he said, was months spent fantasising about killing his wife.

“You know what you’re doing is sort of insane, but there’s just this weird part of you that’s almost unstoppable or something,” he later told investigators.

Sharpe made a tearful and unconvincing press conference with his father Myles.

Police search for the remains of Gracie and Anna at a Mornington Peninsula rubbish dump. Picture: Brett Hartwig

“You’re almost like on automatic pilot.”

Sharpe spent the next four days ruminating on what to do with their daughter Gracie, at one stage considering the mad option of raising the child himself and, presumably, hoping there wouldn’t been too many questions asked about Anna’s whereabouts.

Some of the time was occupied dismembering his pregnant wife’s body and burying it in the backyard and destroying evidence.

What he had already done was horrific but Sharpe then took a scarcely believable step.

He went to Gracie’s room to kill her, unable to look at her face as she woke screaming and wounded before the end.

Sharpe was unable to look Gracie in the face as he murdered her.

Both were disposed of in a Mornington Peninsula tip, beginning weeks of botched attempts by Sharpe at covering his tracks.

Sharpe explained their disappearance by saying Anna had left him, taking Gracie with her.

He used Anna’s ATM card at a bank in the southeastern suburbs and sent bogus emails to her mother in New Zealand to maintain the facade she was alive.

Homicide investigators were later to obtain video of him disposing of the card and a mobile phone and arranging to buy a mattress to replace the one on which he had killed Anna.

Forensic work found blood in the house and rough notes outlining his strategy of lies were uncovered.

Sharpe is driven from the St Kilda Rd police station after being charged with the murders.

Sharpe was to give an initial police statement on May 20, offering the version Anna had left in a silver car, directly contradicting another version he had put about that she was last seen in taxi.

At one stage, he made a tearful media call for help to find his wife and child.

To say it was unconvincing would be an understatement.

On June 10, homicide investigators arrested Sharpe and questioned him intensively for more than five hours.

He was then let go before being arrested again 12 days later and told that, this time, he would be charged with the murders.

Sharpe had nowhere to go and confessed to what everyone already knew.

The biggest question remained unanswered; why did this ever happen?

Sharpe provided no real justification, pathetically blaming the victim.

He spoke of a loveless marriage, moaning about how his wife’s “hot and cold” personality and how she would “wear the pants”.

But — if this feeble man despised his wife so much — why did Gracie have to die, too?

“I don’t really know. Irrational bloody madness,” was his answer.

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