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Cruelty to Animals and Our Worst Killers

There are numerous common traits among Australia’s worst killers, which includes a number of serial killers. These things in common include coming from an underprivileged and violent childhood, being adopted at an early age, being sexually molested (usually by a member of the immediate family or a relative), serial arson and cruelty to animals.

It seems as though the most violent offenders practised their torture on animals before they applied the same techniques on humans later on in life. The list is long and terribly sad so I will spare you what they actually did to the helpless animals.

John Raymond Travers, the 18-year-old who led the pack of five killers who abducted, sexually assaulted, tortured and eventually murdered nursing sister Anita Cobby in Sydney’s western suburbs in February 1986, had a long history of extreme cruelty to animals.

Travers had two bull terriers called Arse and Cunt which he beat regularly and viciously. Travers also delighted in killing sheep, pigs, goats, chickens and lambs for the family table after long sessions of torture. Travers would also commit acts of gross indecency to some of the animals as he killed them that defy the imagination. Such as anally penetrating a sheep while holding its neck back and then slitting its throat as he climaxed.

After his gang had had their way with Anita Cobby and left her in a paddock savagely battered and barely alive, Travers went back and killed her in the same fashion he had killed so many animals over the years. Travers will never be released from prison.

Eric Edgar Cooke, the cat burglar, suburban serial arsonist and serial killer who terrorised Perth in the early 1960s and ended up murdering seven people before he was caught, was terribly cruel to the pets of some owners of the houses he burgled.

Unaware that they had even been robbed, often victims woke up in the morning to find their cat or dog tortured and bashed and in a terrible state in the back yard thanks to Cooke. Only then would they discover that their valuables had gone missing.

By way of excuse, Cooke, who had a prominent hare lip and speech impediment, told police that he had been brutally beaten from the day he was born by his drunken father and told that he would never amount to anything because of his looks.

Before he went to the gallows at Fremantle Prison in October 1964, Eric Cooke said that he committed his horrible crimes because he ‘wanted to hurt people’. We can only assume that by this he meant defenceless animals as well.

Leonard John Fraser, the Queensland serial killer who was jailed in 2003 without the possibility of parole for the murders of a 9-year-old girl and three women, had a long and horrible history of cruelty to animals. One neighbour had her dog removed from her back yard after Fraser repeatedly beat the helpless animal and committed acts of indecency such as having sex with the animal in a manner that was too vile to read out in his trial. It was decided that they were things that were best left unsaid.

When describing his crimes to his cellmate – which would be his undoing – Fraser said that he killed his victims as he would an animal and as if they were animals. Described as an ‘untreatable psychopath’, Fraser will never see the outside of a prison to hurt women or animals ever again.

Australia’s most notorious serial killer, Ivan Milat, enjoyed wild pig, goat and kangaroo shooting and finished some of the animals off with his knife. It is recorded that Milat liked shooting and killing birds; but he got more pleasure out of simply wounding them and watching them die in agony.

Arguably one of Australia’s most evil murderers, Paul Charles Denyer, who viciously and senselessly murdered three women in Frankston, Victoria, over a six-week period in 1993 and became notorious as the Frankston Serial Killer, had an appalling history of cruelty to animals dating back to his childhood.

At age 10, and for no apparent reason, Denyer killed the family cat and hung it from a tree in the back yard for all to see. His family did their best to keep him away from other animals but more cruelty happened through his growing years. As a teenager Denyer was sacked from a marine workshop when two pet goats living next door were found with their throats cut. Denyer came under immediate suspicion as he always carried a razor sharp home-made knife and talked about killing animals.

Shortly before he committed his first murder in 1993, Denyer’s neighbours came home to find their apartment ransacked and their beloved cat and its two kittens murdered and disemboweled, with their blood sprayed all over the walls. A message warning the girls who occupied the apartment that they would be next was written on the wall in the cats’ blood. They moved out the next day. Their neighbour, Paul Denyer, helped them to move and suggested that should they be hassled again to not hesitate to give him a call for protection.

Paul Denyer was sentenced to 30 years in jail, but if the families and friends of the victims have anything to do with it he will die behind bars.