Chapter Twenty-Seven

When Detective Sergeants Black and Douglass arrived at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport early that evening with William MacDonald handcuffed between them, they were met by a huge crowd of press photographers, reporters and curious onlookers, all keen to get a glimpse of the elusive ‘mutilator murderer’.

Not expecting this reception, the detectives had to jostle their way through the crowd to a waiting police car and escort which sped MacDonald to Police Headquarters, where he was officially charged with the murders of Alfred Greenfield, Ernest Cobbin and Frank McLean.

As Patrick Hackett hadn’t officially been declared murdered, that charge would come later. Late that evening MacDonald was taken, under armed escort, to Long Bay Jail in suburban Sydney and locked in a one-man maximum-security cell.

Meanwhile, the NSW Commissioner of Police, Norman Allan, ordered an immediate inquiry into investigations concerning the Hackett case. Earlier he had summoned the Deputy Commissioner, Bert Windsor, and leading officers on the ‘Walking Corpse’ investigation to a conference at Police Headquarters.

A furious Commissioner Allan said that an inquiry would be made into some of the aspects of the initial inquiry on the death of the man whose body was found at Concord.

Commissioner Allan said to the press: ‘My first responsibility is to determine if the body under the shop met its death by foul play. If the death was by foul play, then we have to determine who was responsible. This matter is receiving considerable attention by police. Later, further inquiries will be made in respect of the initial inquiry.’

Armed with the ‘human glove’ fingerprints that matched Hackett’s to those of the corpse, the numbers on the suit jacket and trousers that led to Hackett, and MacDonald’s intricately detailed confession, the inquiry, satisfied that the decomposed body found beneath the shop in Concord Road was indeed that of Patrick Joseph Hackett, turned with a vengeance on the initial investigation and its participants.

On the evidence given to him, Commissioner Allan was less than impressed. He said that if the officers had followed normal procedure in the first place they would have discovered:

• the numbers in the suit that led to Hackett;

• the 27 holes in the bloodstained shirt;

• blood on the floor of the residence, on the remainder of the linoleum and on all of the clothing found beneath the house;

• that Mr G. Parini, an Italian fruiterer who had a shop nearby, claimed to have seen Brennan a few days after the shop was closed and the sign was in the window;

• a record of the taxis that Brennan rang to take him to the city on Monday, 5 November and Tuesday, 6 November;

• that Brennan had withdrawn money from his bank account on Monday, 5 November;

• that Brennan’s hand had been stitched (this had been recorded in the name of Brennan) at Western Suburbs Hospital on the morning of Sunday, 4 November;

• that Brennan’s fingerprints, which were taken from the shop at the time of the discovery of the body, had they been tried for a match to those of the corpse, would have proved that it was not Brennan’s body; and

• that Brennan’s neighbour, Philip Treglown, who owned a garage next door, was positive that he had seen Brennan and another man inside the shop the evening before Brennan disappeared.

A second coronial inquest into the Hackett/Brennan case was quickly convened.

Sergeant Frank Ferris, of Strathfield Police Station, the first officer on the scene, said in his initial report for the Coroner that in his opinion there were enough fingerprints available from the body to determine whether or not they were on record at the Central Fingerprint Bureau at Police Headquarters. After checking, it was concluded that the prints were not on file, when in fact they were.

Then, in a second report lodged on the same day, Sergeant Ferris said that although Sergeant Robertson of the Fingerprint Bureau did not have a complete set of prints, there were sufficient for him to say there was no record of the dead man’s prints at the Bureau.

In light of further developments, Sergeant Ferris said that he now knew that Sergeant Robertson had established the identity of the dead man by comparing the prints taken from the corpse with Hackett’s print file when it was discovered from the identifying numbers on the suit that the deceased could be Hackett.

Sergeant Ferris said that it seemed he had made a mistake in a telephone conversation with Sergeant Robertson. Sergeant Ferris told the Coroner that he had made no specific inquiries on whether there had been any progress in identification of the fingerprints before submitting his report.

Also under intense questioning, Dr Irwin Smith, who conducted the post-mortem on the corpse, stood by his initial examination results and steadfastly maintained that the body was in such an advanced state of decomposition, and so eaten by maggots and rodents, that it would have been impossible to say if there had have been any stab wounds to it or not or if the penis and testicles had been mutilated.

While this second coronial inquest found that no laws had been broken, it recommended that disciplinary action should be taken against a number of officers involved in the initial investigation, that the corpse found under the premises at 71 Burwood Road, Concord, was definitely that of Patrick James Hackett, that he had been murdered, and that William MacDonald should be charged with his murder.