Criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro names Australia’s most evil man
Criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro gives his verdict on a rogues’ gallery of Australian criminals and reveals who is the nation’s most evil man. LISTEN NOW
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From mass murderers and billion-dollar fraudsters to hitmen and the criminally insane, psychologist Tim Watson-Munro has assessed them all.
Indeed, in his 41-year career he has worked with an incredible 30,000 prisoners or offenders from across the country and also many of their victims.
Now for the first time he reveals his hit list of the nation’s most dangerous, most complex and/or loveable rogues — those he has dealt with or those whose files have passed across his desk.
And his thoughts on some, such as the Mafioso “Black Prince” Alphonse Gangitano, will surprise.
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JOHNNY CRIBB
John Ernest Cribb died, aged 67, in Goulburn Jail’s maximum security Supermax in February. He was serving life for the brutal murder of Sydney mother Valda Connell and her children Sally, 10, and four-year-old Damien at Swansea, NSW, in August 1978.
Watson-Munro met him in his cell when he was at Parramatta jail and believes he was one of the most evil men in Australia.
“Cribb was a guy who had abducted a mother and two kids in the Hills district. Had she’d come home 10 minutes late and none of this would have happened. He’d drive around NSW for 300km, here, there and everywhere. He raped the mother in front of the children, and he killed the children in front of the mother and then killed her. He had no remorse at all. And I think he gets the gong for the most evil, and the Murphy brothers are not that far behind.”
MICHAEL, GARY AND LES MURPHY
The trio, along with ring leader John Travers and Michael Murdoch, were convicted of the abduction, rape, torture and brutal murder of Sydney nurse Anita Cobby in February 1986.
“Just evil, it was an atrocious and brutal crime. Michael Murphy died (in Long Bay Goal) and my view is the others should never be released. Unredeemable.”
Anita Cobby’s husband: ‘Every night I dreamt of killing her murderers’
JULIAN KNIGHT
On August 9, 1987, for seemingly no reason, former soldier Knight went on a shooting rampage, killing seven people and injuring 19, in Clifton Hill in Melbourne, in what became known as the Hoddle Street Massacre. Watson-Munro was asked to assess him days after his arrest and determined he was not insane. He also formally spoke with his wounded victims at the behest of authorities.
“No psychosis, no delusions, no hearing of voices, no seeing space ships, no messages from God or the devil. It took a while to really firm up on the non-psychotic argument. There was some suggestion he may have had what’s described as a catathymic crisis which in common parlance is temporary insanity. But he wasn’t crazy and that case ended up with a sentence hearing in the Supreme Court of Melbourne. There was very little evidence led, it was over in a day or a day and a half. I’ve been involved in pleas for people that steal cars and rob banks that go for longer than that. So at the end of the day, he put his hand up because there was no defence and then it was really about mitigating factors. There were very few, beyond saying, and that’s no excuse of all, but he went to Duntroon. He was bastardised, he came from the wrong side of the tracks, Clifton Hill back then, 32 years ago, was not the sort of gentrified, middle class suburb it is today. And you know, he was going to Duntroon, sharing bunks with boys from private schools and they picked on him, and prior to Hoddle Street he was grounded. He couldn’t leave the barracks, it was a form of punishment. He went to the Private Bin nightclub in Canberra and he stabbed his mess sergeant, who by the way, was a year older than him. So you had little boys in uniforms thinking they were men, picking on other kids, and I would have thought at that time he should have been picked up and been seen by psychiatrists and properly treated. In fact that didn’t occur. His father was a captain in the Australian Army. He was a linguist and it was organised that Julian would return to Melbourne awaiting a court martial, and it was in that intervening period that he committed the Hoddle Street atrocity.
“I know, with Julian, he does reflect on it, and … I spoke with him and he expressed that he was sorry for what he had done. It’s hard not to think about what you’ve done when you’ve spent the last 32 years now in custody, with no real prospects for release. And Julian’s a highly intelligent bloke, he’s done a degree in university, but he does menial tasks around the jail. I think he’s more reviled now than he was when it happened because back then he was a teenager. Now he’s a guy, you know, he’s 50, thereabouts, so it is a difficult one for him.”
Keith Moor: My jailhouse meeting with Hoddle St killer Julian Knight
ALPHONSE GANGITANO
Nicknamed the Black Prince of Lygon Street, the Melbourne gangster was the face of the Carlton Crew and closely connected to crime bosses in Sydney and Perth. He was murdered at the start of Melbourne’s infamous gangland wars, which saw as many as 75 revenge assaults and murders.
“Alphonse was highly intelligent, complex, came from a good Italian background. His father Philip was highly respected, but he (Alphonse) always wanted to be a gangster, he loved watching gangster movies and all the rest of it. But there was another side to him. He was a family man. He had two young daughters when I knew him. He had a partner, and I was struck by two things. There was one time when he came to see me in my waiting room, and all the other crooks were going very green and white. They were worried, and I said ‘Come in’. And he said, ‘Look I like seeing you, doc, but I don’t want to hang around with all these lunatics and bad guys in the waiting room. It’s not good for my image. Could we meet next time for coffee?’ There was a coffee place downstairs in the medical centre where I worked, I said that was fine.
“But there were other things. He loved literature, he enjoyed reading Oscar Wilde and we’d have discussions about that and, you know, prior to him being murdered I think he was looking for a way to reduce his profile in that regard. But he could be extraordinarily violent and he was certainly feared by many. A psychopath? Well there were certainly psychopathic aspects to Alphonse, there’s no argument in terms of the lifestyle that he chose. I didn’t detect a lot of remorse when I spoke to him, but there were other aspects of his functioning that were quite endearing. I don’t think he was born evil, but he did evil acts and loved the role of the gangster.”
ALAN BOND
The Australian businessman and one-time Channel 9 owner, who died in 2015, was behind what was, at the time, the biggest corporate collapse in Australian history. He was jailed in 1992 for siphoning off $1.2 billion from Bell Resources.
“I’ve spent four years with him, in fact, so I came to know him pretty well. I mean not every day, but I would go to Perth, he would come to Melbourne, it was all part of a psychological workup for the two major criminal trials, which was Bell Resources and ripping off the shareholders over the Irises (a Vincent van Gogh painting he paid $54 million for).
“It’s interesting because when I was a kid that’s when he was doing Yanchep (a coastal suburb development in Perth) and I can remember my father saying, ‘This is a guy to watch, he’s extraordinary’, and I never dreamt as a teenager that I’d end up on the other side of a desk interviewing him about his life and what he’d done. And as the rapport developed, one day I said, ‘Well look, you know Alan, there was Yanchep, you’re in your 20s, you made a lot of money then, you could have retired on it. Why didn’t you?’ He said, ‘Tim you’ve got to understand, I was never about the money. It was always about the deal’.
“He loved the thrill of the deal and so, I think, in his own deluded, self-justifying way, Alan believes the money he took from Bell to prop up Bond ultimately would be repaid to people, because it would give him some relief to do other deals and the money would come back. I actually don’t buy that argument, but I think that was going on with him. Some people might say he was ruthless, He had no remorse. Both matters went to trial … he had an ego the size of Texas and the whole thing with the America’s Cup, of course, was not only to win it for the sake of winning — because he liked to win — but it was also going to be a marketing tool for him in terms of furthering Bond Corp. So he was very clever in that regard, narcissistic yes.”
CARL WILLIAMS
The Melbourne gangster, convicted murderer and drug trafficker was killed in jail in 2010.
“A very evil man, don’t know that he was born evil. His father was a crook. Carl started out as a shelf stacker and, you know, he was a sort of nobody who worked for the Moran (family). He was shot by the Morans in the stomach and that established the platform for clearly the most vicious and longstanding revenge story in Victorian criminal history.”
Lawyer X: The gangland secrets Carl Williams took to the grave
IVAN MILAT
The Backpacker Killer murdered seven people and buried their bodies in the Belanglo State Forest in NSW between 1989 and 1993.
“A very evil man. Who knows what was going on in his thinking in the lead up to the first offence, the first time he abducted someone and killed them. But I suspect that they would have been very vivid, rich fantasies. That starts with … sexual masturbatory fantasies, pornography and it’s all about power and control and eventually the fantasy is insufficient to give the excitement and satisfaction and the next step is to act out on those fantasies.”
‘Simply evil’: Why ‘bad, not mad’ Ivan Milat will take his secrets to grave
Cancer: Dying serial killer Ivan Milat pictured in handcuffs leaving hospital
‘Werewolf”: Backpacker killer Milat’s bizarre rant and life advice from jail
