Killer Andy Albury considered the Northern Territory’s own Hannibal Lecter
A clean shirt gave away this murderer who mutilated his victim and told a psychiatrist that killing a person is just like thumping on a cockroach
Northern Territory
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ANDY Albury has a fantasy.
He would arrive in a random town on any given day and start killing residents, one by one.
And the reason - to provoke sheer terror in his fellow man.
People would be in fear of their lives, thinking that they could be the next person to be killed.
“He is not seeking publicity or notoriety,” one psychiatrist said.
“He simply gets pleasure out of the thought of having that degree of control over people.
“There is a sadistic element to his killing. He derives pleasure from the mutilation of the body but he finds pleasure hard to describe. He says it ‘makes things interesting’. He makes it clear that given his casual attitude to murder, he would kill again given the opportunity.”
Albury has inflicted fear in some of the most hardened criminals and is the only killer who frightened former detective Les “Chappy” Chapman. The ex-sergeant put away eight killers in his 29 years in the NT police force, but nobody sent a shiver up his spine like Victorian-born Albury.
In a letter to Chief Justice Brian Martin, Albury wrote: “I have no wish to die. I am unstoppable - I love my work.
“I do not understand what the meaning of the word kindness is, it’s never been shown to me so why in the f*** should I show it. This is not some sort of weird attempt at justification for killing - I do what I do by choice or urge.
“I will kill again, it’s what I do for an occupation.”
And as part of his training, he asked prison officers at Darwin Correctional Centre if he could watch thriller The Silence Of The Lambs.
He’s since been dubbed the Territory’s Hannibal Lecter.
There is little known about the making of the man, except that he loved his mother.
THE SILK SHIRT
But much has been learned about him since the day he used a broken bottle to mutilate Aboriginal woman Gloria Pindan on Mitchell St, in Darwin, on November 25,1983. And it was by sheer luck that he was arrested for the horrific slaying.
Albury, who was drunk, doesn’t remember much of the murder, nor does he recall putting a bloodied cowboy shirt into a nearby bin.
But that would prove to be his greatest mistake.
Investigating officers scoured Darwin city, looking for a ringer with dirty jeans and a clean shirt.
“There was a long sleeve white silk cowboy shirt that was covered in blood,” Chapman recalls, sitting on the balcony of his Virginia home almost 30 years later.
“So I thought, ‘oh Jesus, this will be easy - we’re after a ringer who’s come into town for the weekend. He will have no shirt on and dirty jeans or he will have a clean shirt on with dirty jeans’.”
The hung-over officer didn’t go back to the station, instead he walked the Smith St Mall looking for this dirty ringer.
“I talked to this chap and said, ‘where were you last night mate?’
“He said he was at the Vic Hotel, and I said, ‘you didn’t see a cowboy up there with a white silk shirt on?’
“And he said, ‘yeh, there was one up there, he was drinking jugs of rum’.”
Chapman says he and partner Sergeant Dennis Hart walked into the hotel and saw a ringer with dirty jeans and a nice clean shirt.
“There he was,” he says.
He had come back to the pub to get his shoes.
Chapman sat him down and had a nice friendly chat about his movements leading up to the murder.
Albury told the detective he worked at the Batchelor abattoir and got into town the night before Ms Pindan was killed.
“I said, ‘were they the clothes you had on when you came into town?’
And he said, ‘yeh’ and I said, ‘are you sure you didn’t have a different coloured shirt on?’
Albury admitted to wearing a white silk cowboy shirt.
“He made it easy for me - you don’t get them like that, especially when you’re feeling a bit seedy,” he said.
Chapman walked Albury back to the police station for questioning and noticed he had dried blood behind his ear.
It didn’t take the 22-year-old butcher long to confess to the murder of Ms Pindan.
“I grabbed this gin, took her over into the lot and killed her,” Albury told detectives Chapman and Hart in the interview.
“I started to kick her, and hit her, then I got one stubble beer bottle top and started to cut her. After I finished cutting her, I pulled out her eye and left her there.”
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When asked how he ripped her eye out, Albury responded: “Put my finger in the socket twisted down with the end of my finger and just give it a jerk.”
When asked why he killed her, he said: “It doesn’t worry me what I kill - they’re all blood and guts inside.”
But his interview with police was not the first time he had come into contact with the authorities that day.
The morning after the brutal killing, Albury went to a police station to ask if anyone had handed in his wallet, which he had lost during his drunken escapades.
It had not been handed in, so he went back to the crime scene to see if it had fallen out of his pocket during the murder.
“I had just a quick look around - I didn’t want to be seen there,” he told detectives.
Albury then went to Lameroo Lodge, adjacent to the crime scene, to see if it was there before he watched police arrive at the site.
He stood 55m from the scene as police scoured the area looking for clues
“You couldn’t see the body, but just the cops and cop cars,” he told police.
He was arrested about two hours later.
‘CHAPPY, I LIKE YOU’
Chapman spent seven hours with Albury inside a small interview room at the cop shop, bringing him coffee and pies.
“This lad has got some big feet on him and he started swinging those feet towards me,” he says. “He got the Ian Thorpe feet and I was starting to get weary of him.
“When Dennis came back in, I went and made some coffees and he later slipped me a piece of paper that said, ‘don’t you leave me alone with this chap again’.
“When I went back there to get him to read the transcripts and sign them ... he just pulled the biro on me and put it right next to my eye. He held it about a centimetre away. All I could do to protect myself was bugger all. He was that quick and he just said to me: ‘Chappy, I like you’. “He only had to push it and he could have killed me so I’m glad he liked me.”
Chapman recalls how Albury used to send him Christmas cards from prison with a festive message written in his own blood. He would sign the cards, “Bigfoot”.
“I told him that if we ever go to war here, I’ll come and get you out and you will be in front of me all the time, because I wouldn’t trust him behind me - he’s got that kill-crazy look,” he says.
“When I saw him at the Vic Hotel, I knew he did it.
“He didn’t show any nervousness, he didn’t waiver at all - it was his eyes.
“I had to be cautious of him all the time because if you gave him a little bit, he would have taken you out.
“My first big case that came along was Andy Albury.”
FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE
The 29-year-old victim was left with 28 external injuries after her chance meeting with Albury. Blood splatter could be seen one metre up a nearby wall. She was naked. Her nipples had been cut off.
She was punched, kicked, slashed, bruised, beaten, mutilated - for no reason at all. The pathologist found multiple injuries caused Ms Pindan’s death, expressing that no single blow was the fatal one.
It was a long assault with death coming towards the end of the beating.
Albury told police the killing was a pleasure.
“I think I’ll do it again. I get enjoyment out of it, don’t know why,” he said. He told a psychiatrist that he saw killing as “about the same as thumping on a cockroach”.
Albury has since been declared a dangerous man who should never be released from prison. In 2001, legislation was changed which saw an end to indefinite sentences for murder and entitled Albury to a default non-parole period of 20 years. At that point he had spent 18 years in prison.
But the then-director of public prosecutions Rex Wild QC made sure that never happened, applying to the NT Supreme Court for Albury to remain in prison for the rest of his natural life.
Justice Martin granted the application on November 12, 2004 - almost 21 years after the killing. The now retired judge was inundated with psych report after psych report, all of them indicating one thing - this man was a danger to the community.
“Albury is an extremely dangerous man,” one report stated. “His mental disorder is such that he has a casual disregard for the act of killing. He still fantasises about killing people.
“He has a fantasy about terrorising a town by committing casual, motiveless murder for the purpose of making people frightened that they may be the next to be killed.”
Former Northern Territory Prisons medical director Chris Wake once said the ex-slaughterman had above average intelligence.
“We treat him with great respect in that regard in the prison system,” he said.
“The most recent attempt to move him into a community setting resulted in him severely injuring an inmate with a cricket bat.
“Albury enjoys his reputation as a ‘monster’ and cleverly invokes voices, the written word and behaviour patterns to perpetrate the idea that he is quite mad.”
And the madman has painted quite a colourful path in jail. He was segregated from other inmates while in Darwin’s maximum security B-Block. In 1988, he put a garden hoe through the head of inmate John Michael Knox. Albury claimed deceased The Doors singer Jim Morrison ordered him to spill blood. When asked why he attacked the prisoner, Albury replied: “Because Jim told me to. He talks to me. He tells me to do things. I’m pretty happy for the moment - he’s letting me sleep on the bed. Usually, he makes me sleep on the floor.”
When asked if he bashed Knox because he was a child molester, he said: “Sure I didn’t like him because he was a child molester, but that’s not the reason for it. I had to get him for Jim. Jim’s getting old - he wanted some blood to preserve his youth.”
He was found not guilty of attempted murder on the grounds of insanity. Albury was later moved to Alice Springs prison.
Despite being in the maximum security section, he was handed a cricket bat during a friendly game, which he used to strike another inmate in the head. The victim was sitting nearby playing chess. The blow cracked his skull. This attack was the product of a voice - but this one didn’t come from Morrison, it was a message from TV’s Don Beech.
Albury told psychiatrist Lester Walton that he watched an episode of The Bill in prison a few days before the 2001 attack. He reportedly said: “I’m Don Beech’s tool. He gave me permission in my cell this morning.” Beech was a corrupt detective in the British cop show.
Albury got an extra four months jail for spitting in the face of Alice Springs prison officer Joseph Barber.
“Give me a day or another life sentence,” he told magistrate Daynor Trigg, before walking from the dock and adding: “See you next time - and there will be a next time.”
The convicted killer has sent death threats written in blood and ink to Territory ministers, including the then-correctional services minister Eric Poole and predecessors Mike Reed and Don Dale. He has also threatened the life of a prison guard.
WHO REALLY KILLED PATRICIA CARLTON?
In another bizarre twist, Albury told an Alice Springs court a steel plate had been implanted in his head at birth and magnets in the sky would travel in square patterns, giving the plate directions.
Those magnets told him to burn his prison cell - so he did. He was convicted of property damage.
Albury has been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorder. One psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia. But that has been disputed by others.
His mental state is the reason why he hasn’t been tried for a number of other murders he has confessed to around Australia.
He has admitted to at least 13 murders, according to the cop that arrested him.
Chapman can’t be certain about Albury’s involvement in each of his confessed killings, thinking he may be “big noting” himself.
One of the most controversial cases was that of Aboriginal woman Patricia Carlton.
She was killed in Mt Isa, in Queensland’s northwest, about seven weeks before the Gloria Pindan murder.
Her husband Kelvin Condren was jailed for life for the murder. His conviction was secured after he made a confession to police. But at the trial he denied he had killed his wife. Condren claimed he was bashed by officers until he admitted to the murder.
And he had an alibi.
He was arrested for public drunkenness by police at 6pm on September 30, 1983. He spent the night in the watch house. His wife was last seen alive at the Mt Isa Hotel about 7.30pm. Witnesses remembered her because she laughed at her new thongs - which seemed a little odd. She was found seriously injured in the hotel carpark about 5am.
Condren was released from custody about two hours later, just in time to see his wife pass away in hospital.
And yet he was convicted for her murder following a nine-day trial. The Crown case rested on Condren’s confession during his record of interview with police, which he made under duress.
“They kept at me, accusing me and threatening to lock me away in a cell. I was under pressure, shaking with fear and very frightened,” he told a journalist.
“Eventually I signed it, just went along with it to stop the pressure.”
But if an alibi wasn’t enough to convince police and prosecutors of Condren’s innocence, another man confessed to Carlton’s murder from a prison cell 1300km away. That man was Andy Albury.
Four weeks after Condren was arrested for murder, Albury told five policemen, including Chapman, and a psychiatrist that he had killed an Aboriginal woman in Mt Isa in late September, 1983. Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Barton - who was the officer-in-charge of the Carlton murder - confirmed Albury left Mt Isa on a Greyhound bus for the Territory about 8.30pm on the night of the attack.
But when Sgt Barton interviewed Albury, he said nothing. And when he was put on the stand at Condren’s trial, he recanted his admission to the killing.
Condren’s incarceration lasted almost seven years before evidence he was in police custody at the time of the murder emerged.
His only avenue of appeal had been exhausted so it seemed Condren was doomed to stay in the Stuart Creek Prison, in Townsville, for a murder he did not commit.
But the then-Queensland attorney-general Dean Wells referred the case to the Full Court, which later quashed the murder conviction and ordered a retrial.
Albury signed an affidavit, saying he found “a black sheila, took her into a vacant lot and killed her” in Mt Isa on September 30, 1983. It was handed to then-Queensland director of public prosecutions Royce Miller QC, who decided not to proceed with the retrial and dropped all charges.
“It is my firm belief that my arrest and conviction were due to the fact that I am an Aborigine,” Condren told the Sunday Territorian about five months later. And to add insult to injury, the Criminal Justice Commission did not recommend action be taken against the police officers who put him in jail. That, he believed, was the most humiliating part of his ordeal.
The commission heard witness Louise Brown signed a statement saying she’d seen Condren hitting his wife with an iron bar. She said it was untrue but she signed it because police told her: “You will be in trouble if you don’t.”
The Queensland cabinet awarded Condren $400,000 in compensation for the wrongful imprisonment in 1995. But his wife’s murder is still an open case. Albury was never tried over the killing and it is unlikely he ever will be.
Chapman says: “To get a conviction, with his mental state, would have been a bit hard. But either he did it or he was with someone who did.”
Chapman says Albury confessed to fatally stomping on sleeping pensioner Alfred Donald Beales, 52, in an Alice Springs river bed in 1982.
“There was enough evidence to put him up but to get a conviction might have been a bit difficult so we didn’t worry,” he said.
THE UNSOLVED CASES
Detectives from New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and Victoria have interviewed Albury about a dozen unsolved murders since 1976. But most claims had been disproved.
Albury’s murder stories were elaborate and detailed.
He once described how, as a South Australian fisherman, he had hacked a victim to death with a machete, put the body in a bag and tossed it into the Port Adelaide river. He reportedly told prison officers: “I cut him in half and all his entrails fell out and I cut off his head and stuffed up his torso.” He also said he was involved in some “family” killings in SA.
Albury claimed he was 15 when he committed his first murder - that of a 14-year-old boy who he buried under a boat shed on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
He said he used a bottle of poisoned alcohol to kill three Aborigines in the Todd River, Alice Springs, in 1981.
Most of his eccentric claims have been disproved.
But it is likely he will only ever be convicted of the one murder - which police refer to as the most bestial in the Territory’s history.
A VIOLENT LIFE
So what put the animal in the man?
Albury was the product of a broken marriage. He never knew his father and lived with his mother and older brother. He described his first stepfather as a violent man, who would give him harsh beatings. He spent most of his childhood on the Mornington Peninsula, about 70km southeast of Melbourne, and had limited schooling.
At some point during his childhood Albury came to the Territory and attended Nightcliff Primary School. But he was deemed “uncontrollable”.
He was made a Ward of the State and placed in Victoria’s Turana Youth Detention Centre - which has been labelled dangerous and unhealthy - at 15. At 17, he starting work on a cattle station in Western Australia.
The work ended after six months and Albury’s life became quite transient, with short-term jobs on stations and in roadhouses in Kununurra and Coober Pedy, South Australia. He was a donkey shooter before joining the army in early 1981 - aged 19.
Albury described his year in the military as “running around with an M-60 machinegun”. “They had me on Largactil too - they reckon I was a bit of a nutter,” he said.
But his personality traits were not lost on his superiors. Albury threatened to shoot one of his officers and was dishonourably discharged on December 7, 1981.
He spent time in Adelaide, Alice Springs and travelled to Queensland before arriving in Darwin in late 1983.
In 22 years of life, Albury developed a hatred of Aboriginal people and started to believe in the ideals of the Ku Klux Klan. He admitted that when he was younger, he and his friends would chase Aboriginal kids and beat them with sticks. He has also expressed a dislike for Asians, “wogs and homosexuals”.
In 2003, a psychiatrist gave his opinion of Albury, saying: “It should be noted that a psychopath cannot be explained in terms of anti-social rearing or development. They are simply morally depraved individuals who are unstoppable and untreatable. Their violence is often planned, purposeful and emotionless.”
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