Lesbian vampire killer who drank victim’s blood
Tracey Wigginton, dubbed the “lesbian vampire killer” led a pack of girls as she hunted down a victim. Warning: Confronting
WARNING: Confronting content
It was Friday, October 20, 1989 and overhead the waning moon was 80 per cent visible in the night sky above Brisbane as council worker Edward Baldock searched for a taxi.
The 47-year-old father-of-four had been out drinking and playing darts at the Caledonian Club in Kangaroo Point.
The slight, balding grandfather, a kindly man, was quite intoxicated and was holding on to lamp posts as he made his way down O’Connell Street not long before midnight.
It was then a green Holden Commodore pulled up beside him.
Inside the car were four women, and from inside the car 24-year-old Tracey Wigginton called out to him.
The 183cm tall, 95kg factory worker with dark hair and deep, dark eyes had been burning with anger all day, plotting and planning.
After drinking with her friends at the lesbian club Lewmors in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, she was out on the “hunt” for a victim.
After pulling up beside Mr Baldock, Wigginton said something to him and he got into the car.
He was so drunk he fell asleep in the back as Wigginton ordered her lover Lisa Ptaschinski to drive to a spot she had in mind; she’d found her victim.
Tracey Avril Wigginton was a fan of the Occult who claimed to be a vampire with a “need to feed” on animal or human blood.
Two weeks earlier, she had met Ptaschinski and started an affair even though Wigginton still lived with another lover.
That woman, Wigginton claimed, had a wandering eye which had made Tracey angry, culminating that Friday in a feeling that she was “an emotional volcano”.
Wigginton arranged to meet Ptaschinski, an unstable woman hospitalised 80 times in five years for self-harming or drug overdoses, and two others.
Kim Jervis and Tracey Waugh, lovers both aged 23, had already been drawn into Wigginton’s supposed Satanic cult.
Wigginton, who had several different personalities including an alter ego “Bobby”, had convinced Ptaschinski to slit her veins to be sucked for blood.
Waugh, a shy Catholic private schoolgirl, believed Wigginton was “the Devil's bride”, telepathic and could make her body disappear, leaving only cat’s eyes.
Jervis, who previously had collected dolls and Garfield cats and contemplated becoming a nun, had been told after breaking a crucifix necklace she was a “chosen one”.
Jervis believed she was a “destroyer” in the witches’ circle of Wigginton who had the power to rip the arms off anyone who stopped her from feeding on blood.
At the lesbian club, the four drank Riccadonna Spumante for two hours until Wigginton said it was time to go.
Jervis agreed to leave with her and Waugh and Ptaschinski tagged along as they drove to the city’s Botanic Gardens, then over the Story Bridge through Kangaroo Point.
“And that’s where I saw him,” Wigginton would later tell The Courier-Mail.
“He was drunk walking down the street. He was the one, I don’t know why, he just was.
“I told Lisa ‘stop the car’. Kim got in the front seat and he got in the back.
“He was so drunk he fell asleep. I said to Lisa ‘drive’.
“I told her to go to the West End near the big shed.
“They all knew something was up. I didn’t have to say a thing.”
Orleigh Park curved around the lip of a bend in the Brisbane River, from the West End Ferry terminal to Riverside Drive.
On one side was the GPS Rowing Club shed and the headquarters of the South Brisbane Sailing Club.
Stories would vary as to whether Wigginton offered Edward Baldock a lift, or she had posed as a prostitute offering him sex.
After parking, Ptaschinski led Baldock down to the riverbank and Wigginton joined them, but came back because her own knife wasn’t up for the job of killing someone.
Mr Baldock had taken off all his clothes except for his socks, and folded them in a neat pile beside him.
At the car, Jervis handed over the silver “ninja” butterfly knife she carried for protection when she went out in the Valley.
Down at the riverbank, Ptaschinski was talking with Mr Baldock when Wigginton approached from behind and took a knife out of her pocket.
When Mr Baldock asked what she was doing, Wigginton silently stabbed him in the back and as he tried to grab her hand, stabbed him in the neck.
Wigginton pulled his head back by the hair and stabbed him in the front of the throat.
What ensued Ptaschinski would later liken to a shark’s feeding frenzy, as Wigginton mercilessly stabbed the man in a frenzied attack which left Edward Baldock’s head almost severed.
Wigginton then smoked a cigarette as she watched Mr Baldock die, later saying she felt “nothing”.
She would also later tell police in a formal interview that Mr Baldock “had made a gargling sound. I knew the blood was coming out of his mouth”.
Ptaschinski returned to the car, leaving Wigginton to drink her victim’s blood.
After 15 minutes she also returned to the car, having washed herself and the knives in the river.
As the girls drove off, Waugh could smell blood on Wigginton’s breath.
When she arrived back at her flat in the northwestern Brisbane suburb of Enoggera, Wigginton realised she had left behind her Commonwealth Bank keycard and before dawn went back to search for it, without success.
Her flatmate said Wigginton had looked sick and pale, with vacant eyes “like a zombie”.
A few hours later, a rower discovered the naked body of a man covered in wounds.
Edward Clyde Baldock had been stabbed 27 times, the main arteries in his neck and his jugular vein severed, with stab wounds on the left and right sides of his torso.
He had puncture marks on his upper back and shoulders and there was evidence someone had pushed their fingers into some of the stab wounds.
Police searching the area found Mr Baldock’s wallet with $35 cash in it poked under the door of the nearby sailing club.
In one of his shoes, pushed down towards the toe, they found a Commonwealth Bank keycard stamped with the name Miss T Wigginton.
When police knocked on her door, Wigginton’s story that she had been down near the river but knew nothing about the murder at first convinced police.
Detectives could not believe that a woman was capable of such violence.
But by the end of the day, all four women were in custody and on Monday, October 23, 1989 they faced court charged with Mr Baldock’s murder.
On February 1 the following year, all four women were committed for trial in the Supreme Court of Queensland.
Wigginton pleaded guilty to Mr Baldock’s murder.
She enjoyed the notoriety, saying in one grab to the media: ‘It’s hard to be famous, isn’t it? A legend in my own mind’.
The other three pleaded not guilty and went to trial over 14 days.
The trial was a sensation, with the courtroom packed and coverage of the hearings being relayed around the world.
The murder was described as “one of the most brutal and bizarre crimes Australia has ever seen”.
Ptaschinski, heavily built like Wigginton, sat stony-faced in the dock.
She gave a baleful glare to the court as she folded her arms, one black sleeve rolled up showing a tattoo of interlocking female gender signs.
The jury took 48 hours to convict Ptaschinski of murder and Jervis of manslaughter.
The fourth woman, Tracey Waugh, was acquitted after the court decided she had played no active role in the murder and had tried to prevent Kim Jervis from taking part.
The trial heard that after murdering Mr Baldock, Wigginton had brought Ptaschinski and Jervis down to view her handiwork, while Tracey Waugh stayed in the car.”
Ptaschinski was sentenced to life, and Jervis received 18 years, which was reduced to 12 years on appeal.
Wigginton was sentenced to life imprisonment, which in Queensland means 20 years or less.
Tracey Avril Wigginton’s life had come into focus, with reporters delving into her background.
She had grown up in Rockhampton, the adopted child of her biological mother’s own adoptive parents.
Born on August 4, 1965, Wigginton claims she was physically and sexually abused during a dreadful childhood in the care of George and Avril Wigginton.
The couple had adopted her when her mother Rhonda Hopkins could not longer cope after her first marriage broke up.
When they died in 1981, the Wiggintons left Tracey – then aged 15 – a $75,000 inheritance.
She returned to live briefly with Rhonda Hopkins, who would later say she did not accept her daughter’s lesbianism.
Wigginton moved in with a family friend, Kaye Warry and lived with her until she was 20 years old, Ms Warry describing her as “a loving girl, gifted artist and devout Catholic”.
In 1982, Wigginton did a hospitality course at Rockhampton TAFE, cut her hair short, and began calling herself “Bobby”.
She had met a woman called Sunshine and the pair were “married” in a Hare Krishna wedding ceremony in Cairns.
Wigginton worked as a bouncer at a club, dressing all in black and wearing a studded wristband and a collar which supposedly had a lock for which only Sunshine had a key.
She worked briefly as a prostitute.
Wigginton sought out a man to make her pregnant so she and Sunshine could have a child, and she did get pregnant but miscarried.
It was around then she began talking about witchcraft, claimed she was corresponding with a white witch in Adelaide and stopped going to Mass.
Wigginton would draw figures which were half animal and half human and watch horror movies, repeatedly playing the scenes in which people were maimed or killed.
She drew patterns in blood from animal meat and from cuts she made on her own body.
Although she and Hopkins would reconcile, Wigginton spoke of making her mother “pay” for the years she spent with her adopted parents.
Wigginton left Rockhampton and moved to Brisbane and into the Enoggera flat with a lover.
She became more reclusive and started calling herself by another alter ego, Fred, and kept items like an animal bone, Tarot cards, candles and a black cloth in a bag.
Wigginton had the “eye of Horus” tattooed on the back of one hand and her zodiac sign Leo on the other; she also had tattoos of a black rose and of Merlin the magician.
A week before the killing, Wigginton sharpened two knives on a stone.
Hours before the killing, she watched a video, replaying a segment where someone’s head exploded after being shot.
Wigginton was incarcerated to serve her sentence in Brisbane Women’s Prison.
In 1991, her mother Rhonda Hopkins gave an interview in which she refuted the claims of vampirism about her daughter.
“She told me she didn’t drink blood and I believe her,” Ms Hopkins said.
“When she was a kid she could never stand the sight of blood.
“She’s a beautiful, loving, good-natured girl. To her family, Tracey will always be this gorgeous loving, wacky kid who always used to have us in stitches.
“Tracey is not evil. She said: ‘I’ve killed that man, I’ve done it, I regret it and I have to live with it now.
“She is extremely charismatic, you can’t help but like her. She’s very popular in jail.”
Ms Hopkins could not believe a psychiatrists’s assessment Wigginton had multiple personalities, but conceded her daughter had a butch side when she became “Bobby”.
She said the problems started when she became part of the Brisbane lesbian community after moving down from Rockhampton
“She and (her lesbian lover) were both country girls and were not part of the city lesbian community in Brisbane. I am very against that lesbian community,” Ms Hopkins said.
In Brisbane Women’s Prison, Wigginton helped run the library, but one former inmate said she “was not like the other girls”.
“She would sit there for hours rolling marbles and grating her teeth,” said Vicki Geritz.
“She also rolls the silver foil from cigarette packets round and turns it in her hand until it disintegrates.
“She’s evil. She’s a strange person in a world of her own.”
In an interview with The Courier-Mail from behind bars in 1996, Wigginton said she was in a “blind fury” as she stabbed Mr Baldock.
She said she had, in the moments she was taking his life, released repressed rage from a childhood filled with abuse.
“Murder is a terrifying experience,” she said.
“It’s extremely scary to have that much power. It’s playing God with life and death.
“Nobody should have that sort of power … but we all do.”
In 2003, there was an outcry when Wigginton was moved to the minimum security prison farm, Numinbah Women’s Correctional Centre in the Gold Coast hinterland.
In 2006, Wigginton assaulted a prison officer and another inmate.
She made four unsuccessful parole applications before, finally, she was released.
After serving 22 years for the murder, Wigginton walked from Numinbah Correctional Centre on January 11, 2012 and was taken into accommodation run by Sisters Inside at Southport.
Aged 46, and suffering from diabetes, she was visibly heavier than when she went in and walked with the aid of crutches.
Wigginton maintained a low profile until 2019, when she shared on Facebook chilling images encouraging people to “panic, because I’m back”.
On a Facebook page with the name of one of her alter egos, she posted pictures of vampires, witches, demons and a pile of skulls and bones.
One post made reference to eating people, saying “do not meddle with the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup”.
Nine News filmed Wigginton, who appeared to have gained a massive amount of weight, in a suburb of southeast Queensland.
Nine interviewed Edward Baldock’s daughter Tracey, who said Wigginton should have stayed in prison forever.
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