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The Strathfield Massacre

Unable to cope with what most of us consider the hardships of everyday life, Wade Frankum was a human time bomb, ticking away waiting to explode in the worst possible way. And, in August 1991, when he did, he did it in a fashion that would be remembered for a long, long time. But it was, sadly, for all the wrong reasons. When Frankum went, he took seven innocent bystanders with him. And, as is often the way of the cowards who go out in a blaze of infamy, he turned the gun on himself to save the humiliation of a trial.

Born in Sydney in 1958, Wade Frankum’s childhood was an unhappy one brought about by parents who strictly monitored the way he dressed and who he associated with. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the other kids at the exclusive Newington College he attended nicknamed him ‘Piggy’ because of his chubby face. Frankum became shy and withdrawn and no one was surprised when he was expelled at 16 for regular truancy. He completed his education at nearby Homebush Boys’ High.

Frankum maintained work in the retail clothing industry, dressed neatly and conducted as busy a social life as he could, given his shy nature. His father died in 1987 and in 1990 his mother gassed herself in her car. Who is to say if that was the catalyst for the events that lay ahead? But having to cope with his mother’s death, and a broken engagement the year before, seemed to be more than Wade Frankum could cope with.

Soon after his mother’s death Frankum quit his job at a Bondi store and began work as a casual taxi driver. He shaved his head, stacked on the weight and dressed in sloppy clothes. He spent most of his time hanging around Kings Cross spending his inheritance on prostitutes. It was as if he was living a real-life existence straight out of the Robert De Niro movie Taxi Driver. His actions and dramatic change in character indicated to his friends and family that he was going off the rails.

On the advice of friends, in 1991 Frankum went to see a psychologist and told him he was depressed about his mother’s suicide. Diagnosis revealed that Frankum was emotionally insecure and abnormally dependent on his mother, although he despised her and felt she did not love him. For these reasons he was unable to form a normal relationship with a woman. Obviously unimpressed with the diagnosis, Frankum stopped going after just four visits.

Later that month Frankum bought an assault rifle and a large Bowie knife at a Sydney gun store, explaining to the shop assistant that he was going pig hunting. When he returned home to the family unit, which he shared with his sister and her boyfriend, he said that it was his intention to use the gun to ‘protect himself’ and if need be to ‘wipe people out’. With that he put the gun away until that horrible day seven months later.

Wearing a denim outfit and a grey beanie over his shaved head, at around 2pm on the afternoon of Saturday, 17 August 1991, Wade Frankum boarded a train for Strathfield in Sydney’s inner-western suburbs. In a black bag over his shoulder was a large Bowie knife in a leather sheath, a fully loaded Chinese-made SKK semiautomatic military rifle and a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 classic Crime and Punishment.

From Strathfield station Frankum made his way to the busy Strathfield Plaza shopping centre, where he sat down at the Coffee Pot coffee lounge and ordered a coffee. He looked like any other shopper taking a breather and relaxing before getting on with the rest of the shopping.

At about 3.30pm Frankum got up as if to leave and, as he did, he produced the huge knife from his bag. Laughing, he plunged it into the back of 15-year-old Bo Armstrong, who was sitting in the booth behind him. The pretty young lady, who seconds earlier had been laughing with her friend, was killed instantly.

Taking the assault rifle from his bag, Frankum shot and killed 61-year-old Joyce Nixon and her daughter, 37-year-old Patricia Rowe, both of whom stood in the way of the gunman and Mrs Rowe’s children, 14-year-old Kevin and eight-year-old Nathan. They would surely have been killed if the women hadn’t sacrificed their lives.

Hearing the shots from the kitchen, the Coffee Pot’s owner, George Mavis, ran to see what was happening and was shot dead. Next to die was 17-year-old Rachelle Milburn, shot at close range in the head. Carole Dickinson, 47, jumped over a table and grabbed her daughter Belinda by the hair and dragged her out of the way, at the same time putting herself between her daughter and the gunman, who shot her in the stomach. She died later in hospital. Belinda fled with Frankum in hot pursuit, shooting at her as she ran. She took several bullets, but escaped serious injury.

Shoppers fled as Frankum walked through the mall shooting at anything that moved. As 53-year-old accountant Robertson Kan Hock Voon walked out of a photographic store and made his way to the escalator, unaware of what was going on, he was shot dead in his tracks.

Frankum made his way to the ramp in the car park, shooting at anything as he went. He stopped Catherine Noyes, who was driving her car down the exit ramp and had no idea what was going on. Frankum jumped in beside her and aimed the gun at her head and demanded that she drive him to nearby Enfield. ‘Don’t panic,’ Frankum told the petrified woman. When he said ‘I’m sorry’, while Catherine Noyes was looking into the barrel of his gun, she thought he was apologising for what he was going to do next – kill her.

Instead Frankum ordered her to stop the car and he got out. As she drove off still in fear for her life, Catherine Noyes watched in the rear-view mirror as Wade Frankum put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. More than 50 bullets had been fired. Eight people, including Frankum, lay dead. Six others were wounded and would recover.

So was Wade Frankum insane? If so, then surely there could be some logic to such a pointless waste of life. Incredibly, that does not appear to be the case. In his book profiling Wade Frankum titled Profile of a Mass Killer, leading Australian forensic psychiatrist Dr Rod Milton concluded:

 

Taking Wade Frankum as a whole, I would not regard him as being seriously outside the ‘normal’ range of persons, apart from the act of killing. Had he survived and stood trial, he would not have qualified for an insanity defence or for the defence of diminished responsibility.