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The Wagga Serial Murders

There were emotional scenes in the Wagga Wagga Local Court on 7 December 1998 as the man accused of the murders of three local residents appeared in the dock. A relative of one of the victims drew his finger across his throat in a grim warning to the accused, 30-year-old local bus driver Matthew James Harris.

Police officers were strategically positioned around the packed courtroom in the event of trouble. Emotions were running high. Serial murder had come to Wagga and the locals didn’t like it one bit.

The accused, dressed in a white shirt and dark pants, sat quietly while a distraught female friend tried to catch his eye as she mouthed the words ‘I love you’ to him. But the prisoner’s head was down; he only looked up when the police prosecutor told the magistrate that the prisoner had admitted to the three murders.

Harris, a regular heroin user, had confessed to the strangling murders of his 62-year-old neighbour, Peter Wennerbom, on 4 October 1998, a 30-year-old bus passenger, Yvonne Ford, on 17 October, and another neighbour, Ronald Edward Galvin, who went missing on Melbourne Cup Day. All the victims were disabled pensioners.

The court heard that Yvonne Ford’s body was found in the bath of her premises. Mr Galvin’s badly decomposed body was found in bushland by a man walking his dog – this happened on the day Harris was arrested – and Mr Wennerbom’s remains were found in his home, a few hundred metres from where Harris lived.

All the victims were known to Harris: he drove the bus for the Wagga Community Transport Service for incapacitated and disabled local residents, and they were all passengers.

Harris was arrested in Sydney, at 4.35 am on 1 December 1998, in Kings Cross, after he made a phone call to a local Wagga resident and confessed to her that he had murdered the three victims for money to buy drugs. The woman he had confessed to went to the Wagga police, who notified Sydney detectives – they soon located him.

Harris was remanded to stand trial in the NSW Supreme Court. At the trial, which was held in March 2000, Harris pleaded guilty to three counts of murder. A chilled hush fell over the court as he explained his reasons for strangling his helpless victims.

 

Harris: To me, I think of it as an achievement, because I have achieved absolutely nothing in my lifetime. And to murder, and to keep murdering and to get away with it, was an achievement. But at the point of killing these people I didn’t care.

I just thought I’d keep going and going and obviously I was going to get caught – and I was caught – but I just kept going.

 

In sentencing Harris to a minimum of 25 years’ imprisonment, Justice Bell said that the prisoner’s admissions were significant, and he was not entirely without hope of rehabilitation.

But the locals were not happy with the judge’s decision. It worked out at only 8.3 years for a human life, and many thought that wasn’t enough. Along with the families of the victims, citizens of Wagga campaigned long and hard to have Justice Bell’s sentence overthrown and a longer sentence imposed. They wanted the maximum – life without parole.

Bowing to strong public opinion, the Crown appealed against the leniency of the sentence.

On 21 December 2000, the appeal was upheld after the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal unanimously ruled that the sentencing judge failed to give due recognition to the degree of heinousness involved in the murders.

One of the Appeal Court Judges, Justice James Wood, noted that the victims were aged and disadvantaged, or physically slight, and easy prey for Harris.

 

Justice Wood: [Harris had] carried out the second and third murders for satisfaction, as an exercise of power and to exact revenge on society.

Each killing involved considerable callousness and was such that [Harris] could not have attached any value to the lives of those he had killed.

 

Matthew James Harris was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.