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Released to Kill…Again

Some of Australia’s worst homicides have been committed by repeat offenders. These are the criminals who have served a prison term for murder (in some cases more than one) and then convinced a parole board that they have either found God or been sufficiently rehabilitated to be paroled back into the community. Then they have killed again.

These cases are used by death penalty advocates when they argue for the reintroduction of legal executions: their logic is that if these murderers had been executed in the first place, they could never have committed murder again.

Eric Thomas Turner

Australia’s longest-serving prisoner – and the only living jail inmate to have escaped the hangman’s noose – is four-time killer Eric Thomas Turner, who, in two separate terms, has spent more than 50 years behind bars. And that is where he will die.

Turner was sentenced to death in 1948 for a double homicide but escaped the gallows – his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Released in 1970, Turner stayed out of trouble for three years, but committed another double murder in 1973.

Turner has been eligible for parole since 1993, and has applied numerous times, but he has been behind bars for so long that the authorities have deemed him ‘institutionalised’; he will stay in jail for the rest of his life.

Eric Turner was a 20-year-old process worker when he strangled his 15-year-old girlfriend, Claire Sullivan, as she lay on the settee at her home at Liverpool, in Sydney’s southwest, on 23 October 1948. He then took an axe from a wood box and bludgeoned her father, 43-year-old Frank Sullivan, to death with it.

Turner’s only excuse was that he was drunk. At his trial, Turner told the court that he murdered Frank Sullivan ‘for breaking me up with Claire’.

On 24 August 1973, having been out of jail for three years, a drunken Turner took to his 60-year-old mother-in-law, Harriet Field, with a carving knife and hacked her to death in her boarding house in the inner-western Sydney suburb of St Peters. He also turned the knife on his 11-year-old stepson, John Pilz, stabbing the lad to death as he attempted to save his grandmother.

At his trial, Turner’s only defence was again that he had been drinking. These murders, too, were retribution, he said: his wife, Mrs Field’s daughter, had left him shortly after they were married.

Eric Turner was sentenced to another two terms of life imprisonment.

 

>Author’s note: While Eric Turner has served more years than anyone else in the Australian prison system (his terms add up to more than 50 years – 22 years the first time, and from 1973 and still going), he does not hold the record for the longest consecutive (without a break) prison term.

That dubious honour belongs to William ‘the Mutilator’ MacDonald, who has been in jail since 13 May 1963 for the serial murders and mutilation of four men in Sydney in the early 1960s. Like Turner, MacDonald has been in prison so long he is considered ‘institutionalised’, and will never be released.

The previous longest-serving prisoner was Leonard Keith Lawson, who died in Grafton Gaol in November 2003. Lawson had been in jail for 42 years for the murders of two teenage girls in Sydney in November 1961.

Articles on Lennie Lawson and William MacDonald are in this book.

Barry Gordon Hadlow

On 24 November 1962, 5-year-old Sandra Dorothy Bacon was brutally murdered at Townsville, Queensland. The young child had been sexually assaulted before being strangled and stabbed to death with a hunting knife.

The youngest of five children, Sandra came from a working-class family. Uncles, grandparents, aunts and cousins all lived in the same neighbourhood. On weekends they would gather for lunch. It was while her grandparents were preparing a roast for such a meal that Sandra disappeared.

She was fetching her sister when 21-year-old labourer Barry Hadlow called her from the porch of a neighbouring house, where he had rented a room for the past three months. ‘I’m looking for my sister,’ the little girl replied. ‘Well, when you find her, could you give her these?’ Hadlow called back, holding out some comics.

Hadlow then lured Sandra into his bedroom. They were alone. He grabbed the little girl and started to undress her. He held a hand over her mouth while he sexually assaulted her, but panicked when she started to scream. Wrapping his hands around her tiny neck, he attempted to block her windpipe with his thumbs. He pressed as hard as he could but Sandra didn’t die. She lay motionless on the bed, still conscious. Hadlow then stabbed her through the heart with a hunting knife.

Police were called when Sandra didn’t return for lunch. A search party was organised. At one stage more than 300 volunteers were looking for the little girl. During the search, Hadlow approached the Bacons with some information. Sandra’s mother Eunice Bacon recalled, ‘I didn’t pay too much attention. I just thought it was nice of him to help out when he didn’t know us.’ Hadlow also spoke to the girl’s father, David Bacon. ‘I can sympathise with you,’ he told him. ‘Once my brother went missing for four days.’ Hadlow offered David his theories: Sandra may have fallen in the river and been eaten by sharks or she may have been snatched by a childless couple. He also had a third theory – that Sandra had been murdered and her body hidden in the boot of a car.

Two days after her disappearance, Sandra’s body was found in a sack in the boot of a car at the house where Hadlow lived. Hadlow had already fled but police picked him up later that day. He wasn’t surprised when he was apprehended. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Yes, I killed her.’ Hadlow later complained that his thumbs were still sore from pressing on the girl’s throat.

Back at Townsville police station, he made a full confession. It read in part: ‘I sat on the bed wondering what to do with her. She was out of it but not dead. She did not look like dying quick enough so I got my Bowie knife and stabbed her in the heart to finish her off.’ After he had hidden the body, Hadlow took some neighbourhood children to the movies.

At his trial, the prosecution read to the court a psychiatrist’s report that said in part, ‘There is no treatment for Hadlow’s condition and further aggressive sexual offences will occur if he is not kept in a place of safety.’ Police told the court Hadlow’s path in life had been set when he was a youth. He had been picked on as a child. At all the schools he attended, he was the overweight dunce and bully. Hadlow was charged with his first serious crime when he was 16.

Hadlow pleaded guilty to murdering Sandra Bacon and was sentenced to life imprisonment. During his first years of incarceration, he was always in trouble with other prisoners, due to the nature of his crime. Eventually the other inmates left him alone. He settled down, becoming a model prisoner and a devout Christian. He was released on parole in 1985 and soon met and married Leonie Moodie. The new Mrs Hadlow had eight children, including twin 6-year-old girls, from a previous marriage. Hadlow told his wife of his past. She was convinced they could make a fresh start. The family eventually settled in Roma, a few hundred kilometres south of Townsville. Hadlow got a job at the local supermarket. He would often get drunk and tell stories of his prison background. Those listening were never sure whether or not he was telling the truth.

Janet Tracey chose to move to Roma from Surfers Paradise to give her daughters, Stacey-Ann and Elizabeth, aged 9 and 7, a better life. Believing the Gold Coast was becoming too dangerous, Mrs Tracey, who had recently remarried, decided the family should lead their lives in the safety of a small country town. They had been in Roma a month when Stacey-Ann disappeared, on 2 May 1990. The girl was last seen walking her younger sister to school. When she couldn’t be found by the afternoon, a team of detectives flew in from Brisbane, 400 kilometres away. At first they feared the girl had been abducted, but with no evidence to back up that theory, they concentrated on searching the local area. As he had done 28 years earlier, Hadlow volunteered to help. He told police the missing girl had told him she was unhappy with her home life and that she intended running away from her stepfather. Police became suspicious when locals told them of Hadlow’s prison stories. They kept him under surveillance.

Four days after her disappearance, Stacey-Ann’s body was found in scrub alongside Bungil Creek, outside Roma. She had been partially wrapped in a green plastic garbage bag. An autopsy revealed that she had been subjected to sexual acts before she was murdered. There was a torn piece of paper caught on her leg. Detectives brought Hadlow in for questioning. They searched his flat and found a piece of paper that matched the one taken from the dead girl’s body. Hadlow was charged with murder and taken to Brisbane. In Brisbane, Hadlow professed his innocence, maintaining to the end that the police had framed him because of his previous conviction.

At his 18-day trial in March 1991, Hadlow pleaded not guilty. The jury heard from 69 witnesses and viewed more than 100 exhibits. It was alleged that he had lured Stacey-Ann into his car, sexually assaulted her in his family residence and then driven the partially wrapped body around in the boot of his car looking for a hiding place. Even when the jury returned a guilty verdict after 66 hours of deliberation, the 48-year-old remained impassive. But when it was revealed that he had committed a similar crime almost three decades earlier, Hadlow leapt to his feet. ‘My life is at stake,’ he screamed.

‘Yes, your life is at stake,’ the judge replied, ‘and as far as I’m concerned you will spend the rest of that time behind prison bars.’

Throughout the trial the jurors had had no idea that he had been given a life sentence 28 years earlier for an almost identical crime. When they heard that Hadlow had murdered a child in similar circumstances in 1962, several gasped in disbelief.

The judge then addressed the prisoner, saying, ‘It is quite apparent that a dreadful mistake was made in releasing you from prison in 1985 … It seems fairly obvious that you must have led prison authorities to believe that you were safe to be released. But I suspect that probably one of your weaknesses is small girls, and despite having given the impression that you were a model prisoner, it would be fair to say that as small girls are not in prison, any weakness you had was not going to be exposed. I just cannot understand how anyone who had the opportunity of seeing the psychiatric report following the Townsville murder could ever have allowed you to be released in 1985. It is my recommendation that you never be released from custody.’

As the van drove Hadlow from the court to prison, Stacey-Ann’s mother screamed, ‘I hope you rot forever in Hell, you evil, evil bastard.’

Reginald Kenneth Arthurell

Arthurell was 28 when he stabbed his stepfather, Thomas Thornton, 49, to death with a carving knife in New South Wales in 1974. On the run throughout Queensland and the Northern Territory, Arthurell, a powerfully built 163 centimetre ‘cowboy’, frequented rodeos and teamed up with Neil Buckley. Together Arthurell and Buckley robbed and savagely killed 19-year-old naval rating Ross Browning at Tennant Creek in what police who worked on the case described as ‘the most vicious’ murder they had ever investigated.

The pair was eventually arrested, and after two aborted trials the charge of murdering Ross Browning was reduced to manslaughter. Arthurell was convicted, and sentenced to 12 years’ jail. He served only six years, and on his release was extradited to Sydney to be tried for the murder of his stepfather.

Arthurell testified that his stepfather had sexually assaulted him from an early age and that Arthurell was very drunk at the time of the killing. Again the charge was reduced to manslaughter, this time due to ‘circumstances attending the crime’. That – and the fact that Arthurell had found God while in jail in Darwin, and had been baptised and spent his time ministering to young Aboriginal prisoners – saw to it that he was given a non-parole sentence of just four years and was out in just 23 months, after time allowed for good behaviour. In 1991 Arthurell was released into the care of a Prison Fellowship Christian, Venet Raylee Mulhall, 50. Ms Mulhall had been an important factor in his rehabilitation and early release. Married at 22, and soon the mother of four young children, at the age of 34 Mulhall’s face was permanently disfigured as a result of an operation to remove a tumour sitting next to her brain. A year later she was divorced.

She spent the next 10 years on her own before corresponding with Arthurell through the Prison Fellowship; it was this association that helped the reformed and now God-fearing Arthurell get out long before his sentence was completed. Together they moved into her Coonabarabran home – his living there was one of the conditions of his early release.

Three years and 10 months later, in February 1995, the then 49-year-old Arthurell savagely bashed Ms Mulhall to death. This time there were no ‘attending circumstances’: in October 1997, Arthurell was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in jail. It seems unlikely that he will get an early release.

Rodney Francis Cameron

Serial killer Rodney Francis Cameron was born in Kew, Victoria, in 1955. His father died shortly after, before Cameron knew him. Cameron’s most vivid memory of growing up was his mother dropping dead in front of him in the kitchen as she baked a cake. The 7-year-old was adopted out. When he was caught placing cardboard boxes on a railway line in the way of an oncoming train, he was placed in an institution. When it made the decision to do this, the Children’s Court heard from a psychiatrist who considered there was ‘no therapy available that would be of use to him’.

When he was only 10, and back out on the streets, Cameron viciously assaulted a little girl and tried to strangle her. His adoptive family rejected him when he tried to strangle an elderly woman in the street. In his teenage years he attempted to throttle a girlfriend. By the time he was 18, Cameron was drinking heavily and taking heroin and morphine. He experimented with the occult, devil worship and demonology. He rejected people who showed him kindness, returning their compassion with aggression. He attempted suicide on numerous occasions.

In 1973, 18-year-old Cameron married Brenda. She was five years older and already had a young son. In 1974 Cameron was working as a trainee nurse in the Queen Victoria Nursing Home at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. He was befriended by nursing sister Florence Edith Jackson, 49, and was often a guest in her home. Jackson was a kind woman who went out of her way to be friendly. On 31 January 1974, the 19-year-old repaid the kindness by strangling her into unconsciousness, then raping her, then continuing the strangling until she was dead. Jackson was left lying on her back beside the bed with a towel stuffed down her throat. Cameron then fled.

A week later 19-year-old bank clerk Francesco Ciliberto picked up Cameron as he was hitchhiking towards Victoria. Cameron bashed Ciliberto with a boulder and then strangled him with a football sock and threw his body off a cliff. A shirt had been stuffed down Ciliberto’s throat. Cameron then took the victim’s car and headed north. He was eventually arrested in Queensland on 21 February 1974, after abducting a mother and daughter. Cameron told arresting detectives he ‘had to kill three’.

At the trial for the murder of Florence Jackson, a Sydney psychiatrist said, ‘I consider there is more than sufficient evidence to support the diagnosis of a personality disorder of the antisocial type. In his case, I think this takes an extreme form and some observers would certainly call him a psychopathic personality.’

Cameron was found guilty of murder and served nine years in NSW prisons. When he was released in 1983 he was arrested and taken back to Victoria to face the charge of murdering Francesco Ciliberto. Diagnosed as a ‘psychopath not fit to be in society’, Cameron was sentenced to life with the recommendation he should remain in jail ‘for the term of his natural life’. But on 12 March 1990 Cameron was released after a successful appeal against the length of his sentence. It was believed he had been fully rehabilitated.

While in jail Cameron had been divorced by his first wife and had married an old friend, Anne. She had known him throughout his youth, but had married someone else. When her marriage fell apart in 1982 Anne was lonely and lacking in self-confidence. She was advised by a therapist to talk to an old friend. Anne searched for Cameron. When she found him in a Victorian jail in December 1984 she sent a Christmas card. Cameron replied. In 1986 they married in jail.

On his release, Anne and Cameron settled down to an apparently quiet life in Sunbury, northwest of Melbourne. Then, on the evening of 26 May 1990, Cameron called a lonely hearts program on radio station 3AW. He described himself as a teetotaller marine biologist from Castlemaine. He added that he was a Gemini who played squash and basketball, had no hang-ups and was searching for a soulmate ‘willing to share his happiness and enjoy a good, quiet life’. Maria Goeliner was one of the nine women who rang the program expressing an interest in meeting Cameron. She was described by those who knew her as a loving, trusting person who was looking for someone she could settle down with.

On 23 June 1990, at the Sky Rider Motor Inn at Katoomba, New South Wales, not far from where Cameron had murdered Edith Jackson 16 years earlier, the 44-year-old Melbourne woman was found lying on her back with pair of pantyhose wrapped around her neck. A handkerchief had been stuffed in her mouth and yellow carnations were scattered over her body. Maria Goeliner had died of asphyxiation, having choked on her own blood after being repeatedly bashed over the head with a blunt instrument.

The couple had arrived two days earlier and paid for two days’ accommodation in advance. They requested a ‘do not disturb’ sign. About lunchtime on Friday, 22 June, motel staff had seen Maria and Cameron together. The next day the woman’s body was discovered on the floor in the bathroom. In the room was a note from Cameron to his wife, which read in part, ‘Anne, I am sorry. Had I not done what happened, my life would have been destroyed. Love eternally, Rodney.’

A week after the murder, Cameron, now dubbed ‘the Lonely Hearts Killer’ by the Sydney press, gave himself up to police at Deniliquin, NSW. His trial was held in Sydney in August 1992. It took the jury only three hours to find Rodney Francis Cameron guilty of the murder of Maria Goeliner. In sentencing Cameron to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he is ‘never to be released’, the judge said that only ‘old age or infirmity’ would stop Cameron from carrying out his ‘homicidal desires’.

On 20 April 1993, police charged Cameron with the brutal murder of 79-year-old pensioner Sarah McKenzie almost two decades earlier. On 6 February 1974, Mrs McKenzie had phoned police from her home in North Sydney to report that she had been bashed. But when police arrived, the house was locked. They returned two days later and broke in to find Mrs McKenzie’s body in the hallway with 30 knife wounds to her chest, a knife embedded in her neck and a mattock buried in her skull.

Police had discovered that while on the run after murdering Francesco Ciliberto in 1974, Cameron had been booked for speeding in Ciliberto’s car in southern New South Wales. The car had also been reported by a highway patrol officer at North Sydney about the same time Mrs McKenzie was believed to have been bashed to death: the officer had found Cameron asleep in the car on the expressway.

Police had reopened the McKenzie murder file after hearing from jail informers that Cameron had been boasting of his past crimes. Cameron strongly denied the allegations, and three days before the trial was to begin in early 1994, it was no-billed by the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions. (This means that the DPP decides not to pursue a case because it considers the evidence available insufficient to win a conviction.)

Then, on 3 October 1997, the now 42-year-old Cameron asked, through prison officials, to speak to police. In a videotaped confession he said that he did in fact kill Mrs McKenzie, and he supplied details only the killer could have known.

Later that year, he confessed to murdering two women in separate knife attacks in Victoria in 1990. He also confessed to murdering a man by bashing his skull in with a brick in South Australia in 1974, and to the strangulation murder of a woman in New South Wales the same year.

Rodney Francis Cameron is in Lithgow maximum security prison. His papers are marked ‘never to be released’.

Robert Theo Sievers

In 1992, 51-year-old Robert Sievers had been released from prison on parole after serving more than 12 years of a redetermined life sentence for the shooting murder of his estranged wife, Dianna Sievers, in Newcastle, on the NSW coast north of Sydney, in 1980. Sievers had managed to convince Justice James Wood and parole board psychologists of his rehabilitation and his newfound religious belief. (A redetermined sentence is a sentence that has been changed from ‘life’ to a particular number of years: prisoners who were sentenced to ‘life’ before the NSW truth-in-sentencing legislation was passed, which was in 1989, can ask for a redetermination.)

Eight years later, on 4 July 2000, Sievers repeatedly stabbed his 33-year-old girlfriend of six weeks, Michelle Campbell – a mother of three children – with a carving knife during a violent argument at her home in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Lakemba. Sievers put Michelle’s body in the boot of his car and drove around for several days before dumping it at Kempsey, near Newcastle, where it was discovered a month later.

Pointing to the similarities in the killings at Sievers’s trials, Justice Brian Sully said that they were both committed in situations of extreme emotional stress. The court had heard that Sievers had a personality disorder which manifested itself in extreme physical violence.

The court also heard that over the years women were not Sievers’s only victims. In 1967 Sievers was convicted of maliciously wounding his brother. Police considered him a vicious hood, but he was shown leniency by the courts and allowed to serve only six months of a two-year sentence by impressing the judge with his apparent rehabilitation.

On 18 December 2002 Sievers was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in the NSW Supreme Court by Justice Sully for the murder of Michelle Campbell. Justice Sully labelled the case troubling and distressing, and said he was reluctant to jail someone of Sievers’s age – 59 – for life, depriving him of any hope of release. But, he said, in the public interest and for the protection of women, particularly vulnerable women, he had no choice but to send Sievers away for good.

Les Campbell, the father of Michelle Campbell, the woman Sievers had so heartlessly murdered, was not worried about it at all. ‘He was driving around for days with Michelle’s body in the boot while he drew money from her bank account,’ Mr Campbell told reporters. ‘He’s had so many chances. It’s about time he was given no more.’

And this time, that will happen. Under the 1989 NSW truth-in-sentencing legislation ‘life means life’, so Robert Sievers will never be freed to kill again.