Living on the edge: mental illness stalked Bondi killer Joel Cauchi

Joel Cauchi’s mental health had been deteriorating. Sleeping in a car at times, he had developed a fixation with knives, and wanted to meet people for shooting guns.

Joel Cauchi at the beach. A former flatmate says: ‘I don’t feel he would have done anything in a normal situation, so my thought is that his mental illness got worse or somehow he got involved with drugs.’ Picture: supplied

The last time neighbours saw Joel Cauchi at his childhood home in Toowoomba, he was banging on the door shouting to be let in.

His parents, Andrew and ­Michele Cauchi, either weren’t home or deliberately weren’t ­answering.

That was just two months ago, and followed a previous complaint from Cauchi to police about his ­father “stealing” his collection of knives.

What triggered Cauchi to subsequently go on a stabbing rampage, killing six innocent people and seriously injuring many ­others including a baby at a Bondi shopping centre on Saturday, will be a central question for police in the days ahead.

But what is known is that in ­recent years his mental health had been deteriorating. Sleeping in a car at times, he had developed a fixation with knives, wanted to meet people in Sydney to shoot guns, and according to internet searches had been advertising as a male escort.

There were no criminal charges against him in his home state of Queensland, but there were ­repeated run-ins with police, who say the interactions suggest his mental health declined in the past four to five years.

On one occasion early last year, he complained to officers about his father stealing his knives, but police believed his parents took them for his own and others’ safety, according to sources familiar with the Bondi investigation.

Cauchi, 40, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in year 12 at Toowoomba’s Harristown State High School in 2000, health sources told The Australian.

He received clinical treatment through Queensland Health for the next 12 years, before being ­discharged into the care of his Toowoomba GP and a private psychiatrist.

It’s understood the transfer ­decision was made after he completed a degree at the University of Southern Queensland, and that authorities had assessed him as being high functioning.

A source said while there had been some interactions with police, Cauchi showed no signs of serious violence.

He had grown up in a pretty but run-down gabled timber weatherboard cottage, with an overgrown cottage garden bursting with flowers in full bloom.

Toowoomba’s hardluck suburb of Rockville, in the mountaintop city west of Brisbane, is picturesque but rough.

A nearby street is known locally as “DV alley’’ for the regular domestic violence call-outs to police.

Joel Cauchi. Picture: supplied

A neighbour, who asked not to be named but has lived on the street since the 1960s, has known the Cauchis for decades.

She recalls a concerned ­Michele Cauchi confiding with her recently about how worried she was about her son.

“I think he’s been a worry for a long time. The last time I saw him was a couple of months back, he was banging on the front door but no one opened it, no one ­answered,” the neighbour said.

She said Andrew and Michele Cauchi were good people, giving an example of Andrew taking meals to an elderly neighbour who had broken a collarbone.

But Andrew could also “just start preaching at you”, she said.

The Cauchis’ children Joel and Jasmine were born when they were living in the Rockville home, and Michele drove them to school every day, the neighbour said.

They were a deeply religious family, and had been members of the Toowoomba City Church, founded by Ian Shelton.

Mr Shelton, who has since ­retired, remembers the family from decades ago.

He said it was true that Cauchi had mental health issues, but “none of us would have expected him to do that”.

In recent years, but before the pandemic, Cauchi had briefly ­attended the Victory Life Church in Toowoomba, a pastor there confirmed. She said he was in the church but not for very long, and left little impression on her.

“He came and went, he didn’t seem very committed,” she said.

A woman who briefly dated Cauchi after meeting him in a Toowoomba church four years ago says she had been put off by his odd behaviour at the time.

“We went to the same church. He always sat by himself,” said the mother of five, who asked to be identified only as Lulu.

“I asked him out and we went on a couple of coffee dates. But he always had this compulsion – he always carried hand sanitiser, this is before Covid, and he was always sanitising his hands, wiping the table down of all the crumbs and things like that. I sort of just ­decided he was a bit strange.”

Not long after, Cauchi moved to Brisbane, she said.

Michael Moran lived with Cauchi for six months in Carina, Brisbane, during the “Covid period”, and is now trying to comprehend how his former flatmate could have become one of the nation’s worst mass killers.

“I don’t feel he would have done anything in a normal situation, so my thought is that his mental illness got worse or somehow he got involved with drugs,” Mr Moran said.

“I never felt like he would have threatened or hurt me.”

Josephine Eileen Everson, who dated Cauchi for a few months in 2022 in Toowoomba, was also struggling to reconcile how the “sweet and kind” man she knew could become a ruthless killer.

Queensland Police Assistant Commissioner Roger Lowe said investigators would focus on “what changed” and how a man who had “for a number of years functioned in society” could commit such a horrific crime.

There was no indication the ­attack had any “political focus, any ideology or religious motivation”, he said.

There was also no previous history to explain his apparent targeting of women in his 15-minute killing spree, in which five of the six dead were females.

Cauchi had never been found to be in “possession of knives in a manner that’s unlawful”, he said.

Mr Lowe added that Cauchi had been living an “itinerant lifestyle” sleeping in cars and backpackers hostels, moving between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Video footage shows Joel Cauchi with knife in hand, running through Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre as people try to disperse. Picture: 9News

The last time he reached out to his family was last month and he would sometimes text his mother with an update as to where he was.

In response to questions about whether Cauchi was obsessed with knives and if he had ever called the police because his family had confiscated weapons from him, Mr Lowe said they were investigating a 2023 event concerning family members.

Cauchi’s family said in a statement on Sunday that their “thoughts and prayers” were with the families and friends of victims.

The policewoman who shot and killed him was “only doing her job to protect others and we hope she is coping alright”, the statement read.

“Joel’s actions were truly horrific, and we are still trying to comprehend what has happened. He has battled with mental health ­issues since he was a teenager,” it read.

Mr Lowe said the family had contacted police after it saw ­images of the killer in the media, reporting that it believed the person to be its son.

“Whilst the investigations are in their infancy … I can say that the man has never been arrested by police in Queensland nor has he been charged with any criminal ­offence,” he said.

“He has been in contact with the police, primarily in the last four to five years, and that would be the most contact we have had with him.

“We have people in our society who suffer from mental health, they go about their days without trouble, without causing these types of crimes.

“Mental health in society is not a crime. We do not run an intelligence regime on persons who suffer from mental health.

“There’s going to be an exchange of information if a person were to present such a security risk in society that we would need to monitor that behaviour.”

The last interaction with Queensland police was in December when he was “street-checked” on the Gold Coast.

Much is known about Cauchi already because he frequently posted online, leaving numerous reviews, both positive and negative, about locations ranging from coffee shops to strip clubs.

In October 2020, he wrote on an outdoors-focused Facebook group: “I am looking for groups of people who shoot guns, including handguns, to meet up with, chat with and get to know. Please send me a DM if you can help me out! I live in Brisbane by the way.”

A knife-sharpener vividly remembers the day Cauchi came into his workshop three years ago to have the blades of his hunting knives honed.

“He gave me these two hunting knives and told me that he uses them every day in the house,” the Queensland business owner, who asked not to be named, told The Australian.

“A pig sticker, and the other was another type of hunting knife, probably about eight inches long.”

A pig sticker is a thin, pointed blade with a double edge, about 25cm long, he said.

The business owner said ­Cauchi had a “really blank personality … Nothing angry, distorted, nothing like that,” he said.

“He wasn’t happy, he didn’t smile. He was just very vague, very blank.”

The business owner clarified that Cauchi did not use either of those knives in his rampage on Saturday.

Weeks after he picked up the knives, Cauchi left a scathing ­review, saying his knives had not been sufficiently sharpened.

“I put in two knives (one of which is pretty expensive) to be sharpened and he blunted them both,” Cauchi wrote in the one-star review.

“I made sure that I clearly, ­repeatedly and correctly gave all instructions when I put them in and he blunted them.”

A year ago, he reviewed the Minx Gentlemen’s Club on ­Sydney’s Pitt St, as a “really fun place”.

On the Cauchis’ street, the lawns are neatly mown, and the neighbours know each other.

Their home carries an ornate “welcome” sign next to the front door, but no one was answering on Sunday.