Chapter Eight

‘I had gone out that night fully prepared to murder someone,’ William MacDonald says. ‘The demon’s voice was back louder than ever, telling me to “kill, kill, kill”. It was a cold but mild night, and was showering on and off, so I wore warm trousers, a shirt, jumper and jacket and black leather shoes. In my carry bag I had packed a raincoat, my shiny new knife and three large bottles of beer and a bottle of wine as “bait”.

‘My reconnaissance over the previous months indicated that it would be much easier to find a victim in and around Sydney than in Brisbane or New Zealand, as there were many more homeless men there.

‘I had selected a number of likely parks within walking distance from where I lived, and I knew that just after closing time was the best time to meet them, as they adjourned from the hotels and wine bars to the parks.

‘I found Alfred Greenfield, though I didn’t know his name at the time, sitting on a bench beneath a huge Moreton Bay fig tree in Green Park, opposite St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst at about 10.45p.m.,’ MacDonald says. ‘He was a friendly and very talkative sort of a fellow, and he said he was very dejected because he had just had an argument with his lady friend and didn’t have any money left to go to a “sly grog” shop [where liquor was sold illegally] and buy more beer and drink his problems away.

‘He was rather well-dressed, wearing a sports jacket and slacks, and certainly didn’t look like the run-of-the-mill down-and-outer you would find in a park. I could tell that he was the working type by his rough hands. He was hoping to meet someone who would share their bottle with him. He was perfect for my plans for the evening.

‘He soon cheered up when I produced a bottle of beer from my bag and told him that there was more where that came from. I introduced myself as Allan and he told me that his name was Alf and that he worked in a foundry. He said that he had been in the army and when I told him that I had been in the Lancashire Fusiliers he showed genuine interest about what it was like and what I did while I was in the services.

‘This kept the conversation going until we finished the first bottle; he then suggested that we move elsewhere, as it was against the law to drink in public parks and Green Park was visible from both Burton and Victoria Streets to patrolling paddy wagons and he didn’t want to spend the night in the drunk tank at Central Police Station.

‘He said he knew a place at the Domain Baths. We could get in the back way through a hole in the fence and the police wouldn’t bother us there. The drizzling rain had stopped and we walked along Victoria Street then down William Street and then down through Woolloomooloo and up a set of steps to the hole in the fence. We climbed through and he led me down some broken concrete steps to where we sat on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour and drank more of the beer. There was no one else around.

‘I hardly had a drink — I watched Alf while he became very drunk,’ MacDonald says. ‘I suggested that it could rain any minute and it would be a good idea if we moved to underneath a shed that was nearby. I helped him get up and partially carried him to the shed.

‘He didn’t say anything when I left him with the bottle and went outside for a minute and put my raincoat on and buttoned it up to the collar. I didn’t tell Alf that it wasn’t the rain that I was worried about getting on my clothes. I went back underneath the shed and as he sat there quietly drinking and smoking a cigarette I reached into my bag and wrapped my hand around the handle of the knife and slipped it out of its sheath.

‘I had read in magazines and books that when you were stabbing someone to death the best place to start was in the throat or heart. From the angle where I was crouching I couldn’t get a clear shot at his heart so I decided to catch him off guard and go for the throat. The demon in my head was screaming louder than ever before, urging me to commit murder.

‘I raised the knife backwards over my shoulder and plunged it sideways into his throat with all my might. The force of the blow knocked him sideways and he let out a scream and clutched at his throat with both hands. I think the first blow stuck the blade right through his neck and it came out the other side. I could feel warm fluid all over my hand. I pulled it out and lunged the knife at him again in the direction of his throat and this time I think it deflected off his hand and into his jugular vein and cut it, because his screaming turned into gurgling noises and I could feel warm blood spraying everywhere out of his mouth and all over my hands and face as he tried to call out.

‘Then I set upon him to kill him and shut him up. I think at this stage I wasn’t all that worried if anyone came along — I would have killed them too, and enjoyed doing it. I was furious that he was still alive, and I pushed him over onto his back and knelt on his chest, and with both hands I buried the knife through his hand and into his Adam’s apple.

‘In the rays of moonlight beaming through the cracks in the floorboards of the changing shed above me I found myself looking into the face of Alexander Rice again. This only enraged me more, and I stabbed and stabbed him in the face and neck until he lay still. But even then I couldn’t stop. I rolled him over and stabbed him in the back of the neck and on the head and shoulders.

‘I was dripping in blood, a lot more than I thought I would be. I was glad that I’d had the foresight to wear the raincoat, as there was no way that I could have walked home unnoticed with so much blood on my clothes. I sat beside the body, exhausted.

‘But I wasn’t finished yet. Now that I knew it was Alexander Rice that I had killed, I had more work to do to make sure that he wouldn’t rape any more young men, even in Hell. I wiped the blood from my hands and the knife on my raincoat. I rolled him back onto his back and undid the buttons on his shirt, which was drenched with blood, and took off his trousers and underpants and folded them and placed them on top of his shoes, which I had placed beside his body. I made sure that I didn’t leave any bloodied fingerprints on any solid surfaces.

‘Using my left hand I grasped his penis and testicles in a bunch and held them up as I sliced them off at the base. The knife was very sharp so I made a good job of it, and cut out the whole area surrounding his privates as well. There was very little blood, obviously because his heart had stopped pumping. I walked the few yards to the sea wall and threw them as far as I could out into the bay. The murder and mutilation had taken about 15 minutes.

‘I went back to where the body lay, collected up the empty bottles and bottle tops, just in case they had my fingerprints on them, and put them in my bag along with my raincoat and knife, checked my clothes as best I could in the moonlight for any traces of blood and left the same way I had arrived. I saw no one and I was convinced that no one saw me.

‘Instead of walking back through Woolloomooloo I turned left and strolled up the path which led to the main road that goes through the Domain, then I turned left again and walked past the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I stopped at a tap beside the road and splashed my shoes with water and washed my hands and face and dried myself with my handkerchief.

‘I was home in my room in half an hour. It was about midnight. As I cleaned myself up and put the knife and raincoat in newspaper, along with a brick I found in nearby Redfern Park, and tied them up to throw off the Sydney Harbour Bridge the following day, I felt revolted, and I was very, very disgusted with myself at what I had done. I was confused about why I had cut the man’s privates off and I was revolted with myself that I could do such a thing.

‘But then I told myself that it wasn’t me who did that ghastly thing. It was the demon inside me — he was my other personality and I couldn’t control him. But at the same time I had to admit that it was a nice revenge on Alexander Rice, and it was a certain way of ensuring that he wouldn’t harm any young men again. But then my other personality told me that it wasn’t Alexander Rice at all, it was some poor innocent stranger.

‘Was the demon using the memory of the rape by Alexander Rice as an excuse to commit murder and make me believe that what I was doing was right? And why was the demon making me choose people who wouldn’t be missed? Or was it because they were an easier target as they were unsuspecting derelicts?

‘Inside me now was this terrible conflict between the real me and the demon who wanted to commit murder supposedly to avenge the horrible thing that had been done to me and that had ruined my life. I promised myself that this would be the last murder. I would not do it again. It must stop.

‘But the following day as I walked to the Harbour Bridge to throw the parcel off I realised that in fact there would be more, because I loved the feeling of power that it gave me. It was a feeling that I had never known before in my life. I had always been the victim and now I had the power to reverse the roles.

‘I couldn’t wait for the paper to come out on the Monday morning. I was very disappointed with the small write-up that it got, but at least it was on the first page. I read it over many times, and found it hard to believe that it was me that I was reading about.

‘No one mentioned the murder at work on the Monday and I felt quite safe, but the following day when they told the joke about the four [fore] skindivers, although I laughed along with them, I was terribly paranoid that they would suspect that it was me.

‘But after the joke there was no more mention of the murder and in a couple of days I felt at ease. My conscience bothered me terribly those first few days back at work, but that also went away after a short time and my life was back to normal.

‘Over the next few months the paranoia came and went as I imagined that my workmates were conspiring against me and laughing about me behind my back. Not about my homosexuality, because I managed to cover that up very well, and as far as I knew no one was aware of it.

‘One man in particular, Aub Beltz, a big Ukrainian man in his fifties, was always having a go at me about something or other, usually about the fact that I didn’t have much to do with anyone and minded my own business. One day I had had enough of him ridiculing me so I took a long-bladed kitchen knife to work with me and told him that if he didn’t leave me alone then I would use it on him. He dobbed me in to the boss and I was hauled into his office and asked to explain why I had done it. I explained what was going on and I was let off with a caution.

‘But it didn’t stop Beltz from tormenting me. As soon as the knife incident had died down he was back at me again. Another day he wouldn’t let up on me again, so I crept up behind him and was about to strangle him with my bare hands but he turned around suddenly and saw me and slapped me in the face, so I backed off.

‘Even after that he persisted in his taunts of me. I bought a starting pistol and threatened to kill him, but he realised that it wasn’t a real gun and dobbed me in to the boss again, for having a go at him. I wound up in the boss’s office again but he was sympathetic about what Aub was doing to me and I didn’t lose my job. Instead he gave me more shifts when Aub Beltz wasn’t working, to keep us apart.’

But while Beltz was belligerent towards him and went looking for trouble, another of his workmates, John McCarthy, 27, was a lot less harsh in his opinion. ‘Allan was definitely eccentric in his ways,’ McCarthy said, ‘but he kept to himself and didn’t go out of his way to offend anyone. He was an absolute loner, didn’t have any women friends and I guess the best way to describe him would be as “gruff and unsociable”. It was almost impossible to hold a conversation with him, and all of us at work believed that he was incapable of making friends.

‘But the most memorable thing about him was the way he got about. He walked with a remarkably high step with his head held high and his back ramrod stiff. It was almost as if he was a soldier on parade.’