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The Lesbian Vampire Murder

It made headlines around the world and sold lots of newspapers. But while the reality of what became known as the Lesbian Vampire Murder was indeed a horrific, bloodthirsty homicide, it couldn’t be any further removed from Transylvania, Count Dracula and his beautiful vampire brides.

The victim – a 47-year-old Brisbane Council worker so drunk that he could hardly stand up – was set upon and murdered by a 6 ft (183 centimetres) tall, tattooed, foul-mouthed lesbian in size 28 jeans and her band of dim-witted sycophants. Then the victim’s head was almost torn from his shoulders and the leader of the pack feasted upon his blood.

Or so they would have us believe.

The ‘vampire’, Tracey Avril Wigginton, a 24-year-old factory worker, claimed to have been abused by her grandfather between the ages of 8 and 11 and brought up in a family environment that was deeply into the occult. She also claimed to have four different personalities. One was an attention seeker. Another was that of a bull-dyke lesbian. Another was an aggressive murderer named Bobby. The fourth was a vampire.

Wigginton claimed that she craved human blood, could not eat solid food, bought pigs’ blood from the butcher to drink and avoided sunlight and mirrors. Not surprisingly, she also worshipped Satan.

Wigginton allegedly drank the blood of her girlfriend of one week, Lisa Ptaschinski, by putting a tourniquet around the woman’s wrist, pumping up the vein then nicking it with a knife. As soon as the blood flowed she wrapped her mouth around it and drank until it was dry. ‘If you are going out with someone, you do whatever you can to please them,’ the besotted Ptaschinski would later tell police.

It was all just too stupid to be true. But sadly, some of it was true.

Apparently not fulfilled by feeding on her lover – who had a weak heart as well as a weak brain – Wigginton supposedly used mind control to persuade Ptaschinski and two other lesbians, 25-year-old Kim Jervis and 23-year-old Tracey Waugh (Waugh had earlier been Wigginton’s lover, for eight months) to help her murder someone so she could feed on the blood.

Late one night in October 1989, Edward Baldock, a 47-year-old father of five and a grandfather, clung to a lamp post waiting for a taxi. He had been in a long drinking session with his mates at the Caledonian Club in the inner Brisbane suburb of Kangaroo Point, and he wanted to get home. Baldock would not have had any idea that he was being stalked by four young women in a car. He was far too drunk to notice.

Wigginton, Jervis, Waugh and Ptaschinski had been drinking champagne at a lesbian nightclub, Lewmors, in Fortitude Valley, also in Brisbane, and at 11.30 pm they had decided it would be a good idea to go hunting for a more desirable drink for their insatiable vampire leader.

Baldock must have thought it was his lucky night when the car full of young women pulled up and offered him a lift home. He was driven to a park near his home in West End, then lured out of the car and escorted towards the deserted South Brisbane Sailing Club on the banks of the Brisbane River.

Here he was set upon, first from the rear by Lisa Ptaschinski with a small butterfly knife, and then by Wigginton, who was armed with a large hunting knife. When Ptaschinski couldn’t go on with the attack and fled, Wigginton went on alone, and repeatedly stabbed and slashed Mr Baldock until he lay dead on the ground.

So savage was the attack that by the time the burly lesbian – she was the size of a front row forward – had inflicted the last of the 15 wounds to his face and neck, Baldock’s head was hanging by a thread.

Although none of the other women actually saw her do it, Wigginton claimed that she then buried her face in the bloody mess and drank to her heart’s content. Waugh said later that she smelled blood on Wigginton’s breath. And when asked later by one of her gang if ‘she had been fed’, Wigginton apparently nodded her head that she had.

The following morning, police looked at the corpse of Edward Baldock (whose blood alcohol level was 0.31, more than six times the legal driving limit) and wondered who on earth would do such a thing. They couldn’t believe their luck when they found Tracey Wigginton’s bankcard in one of Baldock’s shoes.

At 10 am Wigginton was arrested. She didn’t waste any time spilling the beans.

Tracey Wigginton pleaded guilty to the murder of Edward Baldock and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Lisa Ptaschinski was convicted of murder and also sentenced to life imprisonment. Kim Jervis was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 years. Tracey Waugh was acquitted of being an accessory.

Due to the unusual nature of the case, it got headlines all over the world as the Lesbian Vampire Murder. But it was far from the stuff that legends are made of. Bram Stoker would be pounding on the lid of his coffin; this was merely a bunch of women who were idiotic enough to aid and abet murder at the behest of someone who fancied herself a vampire. Any intelligent person would have run away at a million miles an hour.

It seems almost too absurd to have happened. What a terrible, pointless waste of life.