DESPITE the extreme nature of his crime, the mass killer appears to be extraordinarily ordinary – Dr Jack Levin, sociologist and author
FRANK Vitkovic was ordinary, but not normal. Few glimpsed the black fantasies squirming behind the mask he held up to the world, and by the time they did, it was too late. He had set himself for a day of reckoning that would make him Australia’s worst mass murderer until Martin Bryant and Port Arthur.
On a hot Tuesday afternoon in 1987 the failed law student walked into a Queen Street office block in Melbourne’s central business district to settle a score that existed only in his head. He was bent on killing an old school friend, then taking as many lives as he could before taking his own.
It was a tragedy that he killed eight people, one more than the pathetic Julian Knight had at Hoddle Street a few months earlier. It was a miracle he didn’t kill many more.
A thousand people worked on the eighteen floors at 191 Queen Street. In the brown bag Vitkovic carried into the building, he had a sawn-off military carbine and ten magazines loaded with enough high-powered ammunition to shoot scores of them.
Afterwards, investigators were to find forty-one empty shells and 184 live ones, proof that the pudgy loner with a gun and a grudge had been prepared to keep shooting until police arrived. But chance, although it dealt death to eight and wounded five others, ruled otherwise.
By some twisted blessing, Vitkovic had been cheated when he bought the .30 calibre Ml carbine at a West Melbourne gunshop a few weeks before.
As a firearms expert was to explain in the coroner’s court much later, the semi-automatic’s trigger spring was faulty. Instead of springing back into position after each shot, the trigger had to be manually jiggled back into position before being squeezed again.
It meant that instead of spitting out a stream of bullets as it was designed to do, the rifle was effectively reduced to a ‘bolt action’.
Security film footage of the first minutes of Vitkovic’s rampage shows him repeatedly looking down at the weapon as he clumsily fiddled with it. This was to give a lot of people a chance to flee and hide before he could shoot them. It also might have given a brave man the opening he needed to tackle Vitkovic and disarm him. But that was later …
NO-ONE knows when Frank Vitkovic felt the first twinges of alienation that festered like a boil in his brain and burst into the atrocity of 8 December, 1987. He was to leave behind a note that said he felt ‘the seeds of doom’ as young as eight years old. But if anyone noticed that the boy was disturbed, they didn’t talk about it then and haven’t since, at least publicly.
Vitkovic was born on 7 September, 1965, two years after his only sister, Liliana. Like hundreds of thousands of young Australians of his generation, he had migrant parents. But, unlike most, his parents came from different countries and had married across different cultures. His father, Drago, was a Yugoslav, and his mother, Antoinetta, was Italian.
Drago Vitkovic was a self-employed painter until he hurt his back in a car accident and became unemployed, circumstances Frank later hinted might have led to tensions in the family. Antoinetta Vitkovic worked as a domestic in hospitals. They lived in a neat house in May Street, West Preston, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, where they nursed ambitions for their children.
Frank and his sister worked hard to live up to the migrant dream of forging a better life in a new country. Liliana became a legal secretary. Frank was renowned among his contemporaries at local Catholic schools for the prodigious amount of homework he did, often studying more than four hours a night.
At secondary school, there was little outward sign of inner turmoil. But, in 1983, when he was seventeen, he was caught lying on the floor at Northland shopping centre, looking up a woman’s dress.
Police called his mother and referred him to a psychiatrist, who reported that it was an ‘adolescent adjustment’. Vitkovic was mortified and remorseful, and claimed he had done it as a dare to impress his friends. It wasn’t the last time he was referred for counselling. But, to those who knew him casually, he kept up a mask that covered deepening depression and anger.
Later, his sister was to give evidence that painted him as a normal young man. He was witty, intelligent and good company. He cracked jokes, did impersonations of politicians and teachers, could twist his mouth a funny way and make a sound like a tennis ball being hit. He was a passionate Collingwood supporter and liked pizza and McDonald’s fast food. He also loved classic horror films like King Kong and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. But, then again, a lot of people do.
There was another, more intense, side to Vitkovic. Unlike most young males in that time and place, he had a social conscience, and did charity work for the Australian Birthright Movement. He felt for the underprivileged, and agonised about the sufferings of people in Ethiopia. He sometimes said that if he had a lot of money, he would give it to the hungry. He was awkward with girls, and subtly cut off from his male schoolmates by his self-imposed discipline.
Friends marvelled at his freakish ability to recall facts and figures – especially football statistics. Sometimes they called him ‘the stats man’. They also called him ‘Viko’ and ‘Vik the Dick’. Like most nicknames, it had a double edge. There was the faint inference that some of his friends laughed at him behind his back.
Vitkovic was ambitious and, as he grew older, his ambition had an increasingly obsessive edge. By the time he studied HSC, he was a perfectionist who hated to lose, and this fuelled his relentless study and practice at tennis and snooker. He scored outstanding marks – three As and two Bs – and won a place in the Melbourne University law course in 1984.
It’s tempting to speculate, in light of later events, that Vitkovic was the victim of his own supercharged, over-reaching ambition. If he had failed or done poorly, he would have been bitterly disappointed and ashamed at letting his family down. But, ironically, by doing so well, he got into a tough course in which he may well have felt constantly under pressure and, maybe, subtly out of place.
Fellow law students were to recall him turning up at university on the first day with his father, wearing a collar and tie. They also remember that, in first year, he studied long and hard. And that he displayed a fierce will to win in the two games he excelled at, snooker and tennis.
ONE friend remembers finding him at Lindrum’s pool rooms in Flinders Street, practising alone. Others recall that he trained as if he hoped to play professional tennis. If he lost at either, which wasn’t often, he would become strangely quiet. It was, looking back, verging on odd behavior.
He occasionally chatted to Mary Cooke, the kindly head receptionist who fielded inquiries in the university union house.
Once, she remarked to him that he ‘must have come from a Catholic college’. Vitkovic said he was and asked how she knew. She told him that ‘all the quiet ones came from Catholic colleges’.
Vitkovic passed first-year law well. But, towards the end of the year, a small thing happened that was to assume huge proportions in his mind. He hurt his right knee while running, an injury he later aggravated at tennis.
At first, doctors could find nothing obviously wrong with the knee. But they weren’t so sure about the patient’s mind. Ben Davie, who referred him to another orthopaedic surgeon, Ian Jones, wrote a letter describing Vitkovic as ‘a most peculiar young man’.
Surgery found the cause of the knee problem – a damaged cartilage – but failed to fix it. At least, Vitkovic kept complaining of pain. The injury depressed him. He couldn’t play tennis, which made him unhappy and unfit. He even found it hard to play snooker.
The clean-cut first-year law student changed in second year. He began to put on weight, grew his hair longer, often went unshaven and saw less of his friends. Significantly, he began to lose interest in studying so hard.
The various effects of the knee injury were enough to fracture his already fragile self-esteem. He became introspective and brooding. He was teetering on the edge of a precipice only he could see.
The crunch came in the second term of 1986, when he deferred his law studies. He told everyone it was the knee injury that had forced him to leave. He was suspended from the law faculty at the end of that year, and switched to arts. This followed a bizarre essay he handed in after a contract law examination.
The essay was a rambling diatribe advocating capital punishment for civil libertarians, and had no relevance to the question set. It read in part: The reforms I would make to the present laws are to reintroduce capital punishment for all civil libertarians. The present criminal laws are a farce. One person has lost all his civil rights (i.e. has been murdered) whilst the son of a bitch who killed him is entitled, according to ‘civil libertarian philosophy’, to have his future considered, his reform considered, his state of mind considered, the stress he was under, the so-called provocation of the deceased … the fact that he only meant to scare the deceased, the gun just “went off” …’
There was much more in this vein, broken up with a strange cross-heading that read ‘Warning: prophetic – St Paul’. Vitkovic was referred to the university counselling service by the sub-dean of the Law Faculty. The first appointment was on 5 December, 1986.
The counsellor, a psychologist called Malcolm Morgan, noted that Vitkovic had ‘many problems’ and was ‘distressed by violent fantasies which focused on damage to himself and others’. His knee injury meant he ‘felt that since he could no longer play any sport his life was virtually meaningless’.
Vitkovic claimed that his father was a ‘bit crazy and violent’. He said he would kill anyone who tried to burgle his family’s home, and said there were plenty of guns there. He complained that his friends were deserting him. The second appointment was four days later. This time Vitkovic guiltily recanted his previous complaints about his family. He was guarded, and said he was ‘unworthy’. He agreed to a third appointment on 16 December. But on the morning of that day, he telephoned to cancel it.
Meanwhile, the psychologist discussed Vitkovic at a case conference, and agreed that a psychiatric assessment, medication and even hospitalisation might be in order. But when Vitkovic broke the appointment, he did not insist on referring him to a psychiatrist. He thought it would be a breach of ethics. It was a voluntary counselling service, after all, and patients had a right to decline treatment. In the circumstances there wasn’t a lot the psychologist could do. He didn’t have a crystal ball, and neither did anyone else.
Vitkovic often dropped into the university in 1987, but he didn’t take up the offered arts course. He sometimes stopped to chat to Mary Cooke. He worked at occasional part-time jobs, but spent most of his time at home.
His mental condition was eroding. He was now far heavier than he had been when playing tennis. In October, he was treated for mild hypertension, and was given tranquillisers. He complained of tension headaches, and took a CAT scan, which revealed nothing physically wrong.
The same month, he saw another doctor and told him he was under stress at university and had split up with his girlfriend. He was not studying, and had never had a regular girlfriend, but he got the drugs.
Other things happened that month. He took a ‘personality test’ carried out by the Church of Scientology. The volunteer who took the test was not a trained psychologist, but her assessment was no less useful than those of the professionals who had treated Vitkovic. She said later he was extremely depressed.
Here, brooding alone, was a perfectionist who had failed to meet his own high standards. A favored only son, and baby of the family, of whom much had been made but much expected. A spoiled and guilt-ridden child inside a man’s body, angry with himself and with the world, and with only one fantasy left. Someone was going to pay.
The last time Michael O’Riordan spoke to his old schoolfriend Frank Vitkovic was at the twenty-first birthday party of a mutual friend, David Fennessy, in November, 1986. They had known each other since primary school. At first Vitkovic seemed happy, but he became more depressed, telling O’Riordan that his knee injury had ruined his tennis, and that he couldn’t study any more.
‘Frank told me he had nothing to live for. I think he thought he was a failure in his dad’s eyes. I don’t think he had much contact with females,’ he was to tell the coroner’s court later.
One thing stuck in O’Riordan’s mind. ‘He made the comment, ‘you know, sometimes I could get a gun and end it’.
‘When Frank mentioned ending it all, I replied jokingly, “Oh, come on, it can’t be all that bad.” Frank replied again to the effect that life was pretty bad.’
O’Riordan didn’t see him again until late the following year. ‘I saw him walking down Gilbert Road whilst (I was) driving. He was walking in a funny bobbing motion and he was talking to himself. I had never seen him do that before.’
Another friend, Con Margelis, had met Frank Vitkovic in fourth form at Reddan College. Others described them as best friends. They played tennis and snooker together, and had been out to discos occasionally with other friends after leaving school.
When Vitkovic went to university, Margelis had taken a job as a credit officer with the Telecom Credit Union. At first they kept in touch, but saw less of each other as time went on.
In 1987, Vitkovic channelled his swelling anger into a towering hatred of Margelis. In October, Margelis telephoned his old friend to see how he was going. Vitkovic said to leave him alone. It was a warning of what lay ahead.
On 8 October Vitkovic applied for a shooter’s permit, which would allow him to buy and use any firearm except pistols or machine guns. He wrote on the application form that he had ‘a desire to go hunting’. On 16 October he paid a deposit on an Ml carbine at Precision Guns and Ammunition, in Victoria Street, West Melbourne. He returned on 21 October to pay the balance of the $250 purchase price. He also bought ten rifle magazines and 250 rounds of ammunition.
No-one in his family knew about the weapon, which he hid in his room. He’d shown no previous interest in guns, although had gone once to the university rifle range with a fellow law student, Eric Tesarch, who was to recall how clumsy he had been with the single-shot .22 target rifles.
IT was hot, and there was a train strike. About 2.30pm on 8 December 1987 when Mary Cooke looked up from her desk at the university. The student she called ‘Viko’ was there. She had seen him the previous week, when he had become angry with her assistant. This time he looked sad. She noted he was untidy, was wearing his glasses, and hadn’t shaved. She asked him if anything was wrong.
He told her he had failed three subjects, which wasn’t true. He was no longer enrolled. She sympathised, and he replied: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go to see the bureaucrats.’ She offered to get him a counsellor, but he said, ‘I don’t think so’.
He told her he had ‘a job at the post office to do’. Then he added: ‘You’re always a lovely lady to me,’ and grabbed her hands, adding ‘but I hate your assistant’.
She noticed he kept looking down at a brown bag he was carrying, as if he was worried about something in it.
No-one knows what Vitkovic did for the next hour and a half, but at some time before 4.15pm he entered the Australia Post building at 191 Queen Street. Con Margelis worked in the credit union on the fifth floor. At 4.17 Vitkovic walked in and asked to see him. Then, without warning, he pulled the sawn-off carbine from under his jacket, pointed it at his friend and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. He hadn’t cocked it properly. Margelis ran back into the office and warned other staff. Vitkovic climbed over the counter and started shooting wildly. Margelis escaped and hid in the toilets. Judith Morris, 19, and newly engaged, wasn’t so lucky. She was shot dead. The security alarm started at 4.17 and thirty seconds.
After firing more shots, Vitkovic went to the twelfth floor. It was a random choice. He knew no-one in the entire office block except Margelis.
John Dyrac helpfully opened the security door to let Vitkovic into the Philatelic Bureau. He was shot, but survived. Staff cowered behind desks and doors as he stalked up and down, shooting. Dead: Julie McBean, 20; Nancy Avignone, 18; Warren Spencer, 30.
He walked down the stairs to the eleventh floor. Michael McGuire met him at the door and was shot dead. Terrified staff scrambled for cover as he sprayed the room with bullets. Marianne Van Ewk, 38, and Catherine Dowling 28, were shot dead hiding under their desks. Rodney Brown, 32, died soon after. Five others were wounded. One of them was Frank Carmody, who took a bullet in the back and suffered four other wounds. He watched as the gunman turned his back on a fellow worker, Tony Gioia.
Gioia, a quiet father of four, and much smaller than the gunman, took his chance. He jumped on Vitkovic from behind, pinning his arms. Carmody ignored his wounds and jumped up to help. He wrestled the rifle from Vitkovic and handed it to a female worker, who hid it in a refrigerator.
Disarmed, but not overpowered, Vitkovic lunged at a window, already broken by gunfire. Gioia hung on to his legs as long as he could. Then Vitkovic kicked clear, and fell to his death on the footpath below, as armed police stared up at his plunging body.
Until that afternoon, when circumstances brought them together, no-one knew Frank Vitkovic or Tony had it in them. One a crazed killer. The other an unassuming hero. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.