How the Kingsgrove Slasher terrorised a city
It was a bizarre and frightening crime spree the likes of which police had never encountered before — sleeping women and girls repeatedly cut in their own beds before their stealthy attacker fled into the night.
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“I screamed out, ‘Mummy, mummy, a man’s in my room.’
“While I was watching him he slashed me twice on my left shoulder with something very sharp, but I felt no pain.”
It was 1956, and 14-year-old Georgina was believed to be the latest victim of the Kingsgrove Slasher — a shadowy figure who would terrorise the Sydney suburbs over three years.
It was a bizarre and frightening crime spree the likes of which police had never encountered before and could find no parallel for overseas.
Women and girls were being targeted as they slept in their beds and repeatedly cut with a sharp blade before their attacker fled into the night.
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No one felt safe. Bedroom windows once left open to beat the summer heat were firmly closed.
But the attacks continued across suburbs including Kingsgrove, Beverly Hills, Earlwood, Turrella, Undercliffe, Arncliffe, Greenwich and Lavender Bay.
As the prowler’s exploits made lurid headlines, the terror only grew, with the police hindered by both ill-considered reports from nervous citizens and the deliberately false claims of others.
But eventually the bogeyman would be caught and revealed as 29-year-old David Joseph Scanlon — a well-regarded, unassuming clerk and husband by day, the knife-wielding intruder by night.
Scanlon’s wife had “no clue” of his shocking crimes — instead asking her husband to put new locks on the doors and windows of their home to keep her safe from the Slasher.
It took an extraordinary effort by police to get their man, with officers conducting nightly stakeouts of the attacker’s main hunting ground for more than four months hoping to catch him in the act.
They finally got a break in the early hours of May 1, 1959.
Officers hiding in nearby scrub raised the alarm as the prowler struck in Earlwood, then fled on foot. At last, the chase was on.
“Constables W. Gaffney and R. Sadlier burrowed under bushes near Henderson Street, Turrella, and saw a man run past the overhead railway bridge,” reads one report from the time.
“They chased him and saw a man dive into a swamp.”
The police went in after him and Scanlon was soon in handcuffs and quick to admit his guilt.
A committal hearing heard from his many victims and other witnesses, with one doctor telling of treating a girl suffering up to a dozen cuts to her breasts.
A 68-year-old woman told of waking up as Scanlon attacked, finding her pyjamas slashed and suffering a cut to her abdomen.
A teenager said she’d hit an intruder on the head with a high-heeled shoe after spotting him reaching for her 10-year-old niece through a window.
And an elderly widow shared how she’d found a cut on her breast after being woken by the sound of a sheet being cut.
Det Sgt Brian Doyle asked Scanlon why so many of the victims had suffered cuts to the chest.
He said Scanlon replied: “It was just something to let them know that the ‘Kingsgrove Slasher’ had been in their room with them. It was a sort of a trademark … something to identify my jobs.”
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Scanlon pleaded guilty to 18 charges in September 1959, and was sentenced to 18 years’ jail, where he would be offered psychiatric treatment.
His lawyer said he’d lived a “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde existence”, being a perfectly responsible, likeable and decent citizen during the day while performing “bizarre and sadistic acts at night”.
Doyle told the court: “The crimes committed by Scanlon had a serious adverse effect over a long period on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the districts raided by him, and such effects will not quickly be removed.”
Jill Williams was a teenager living in Campsie in 1956 and recalls going to bed with the windows closed and a tennis racquet by her side for protection as the Slasher prowled the streets.
“It was big at the time because there weren’t (as many) murders back then,” she told the Canterbury-Bankstown Express in 2016.
“Everybody started shutting windows and doors. It had never occurred to anyone before I think.
“I must have read all the stories about it because I got myself in such as state … I think I lost three years of sleep because of that man.”
Gavin Gatenby, was 10 at the time of the attacks and living in Strathfield.
“When I was very young I had a bedroom at the front of the house looking out onto the street. My father rigged the window in my bedroom so it was impossible to raise up. (He) drilled the (window) sash and inserted a nail into the hole,” he said.
“All over Sydney, people were scared the Kingsgrove Slasher would strike. Nobody knew when or where he might strike next.”
Originally published as How the Kingsgrove Slasher terrorised a city
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