17

Not Your Normal Tourist

Josef Schwab was known to have a fondness for guns and violence from an early age, and had developed a reputation as a troublemaker in the small German village of Pocking even before he came to Australia in 1987. An active member of a local criminal gang in his home town, the 23-year-old was believed to be responsible for as many as 30 car thefts and numerous house burglaries in his village.

A police informant later told authorities that Schwab had carried a pistol from the age of 16. The informant believed that Schwab wouldn’t hesitate to use the weapon if the situation came up. The informant also believed that Schwab had entered Australia as a tourist when he did because of increasing heat on him in Pocking.

Schwab arrived in Australia on a tourist visa on 18 April 1987. Before long he had checked into Brisbane’s Atcherley Hotel, on Queen Street. He also defrauded the ANZ bank, conning them into believing he’d had his traveller’s cheques stolen during the flight to Australia. He was issued with replacements worth $1000.

Five days after his arrival in this country, Schwab cashed his ill-gotten cheques at two separate Brisbane banks. He then went to Fiveways Firearms Store in the suburb of Woolloongabba and bought a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun, three rifles, a Ruger 223, a Sako .308 and a Bruno .22. He loaded his deadly cache into a Toyota 4Runner he had hired from the Avis depot at Brisbane airport and headed towards the Northern Territory.

Authorities who later tracked his movements know that Schwab bought petrol at the Shire of Diamantina on 6 May, and was given a parking ticket at Mt Isa on 9 May. He was in Darwin getting the front end of the Toyota repaired on 20 May. He was then spotted northeast of Darwin, at Carmon Plains, Point Stuart, on 4 June. It’s believed he did some buffalo shooting there, as 10 sets of buffalo horns were later found in the back of the rented Toyota.

Then, on 9 June at Timber Creek in the Northern Territory, Schwab shot and killed the first human victims of his senseless murder spree – 70-year-old Marcus Bullen and his 42-year-old son Lance. The Bullens, from Western Australia, were on a camping and fishing holiday when Schwab shot them both in the back. He then buried the two men in shallow graves and set fire to their vehicle.

On 15 June, almost a week after the murder of the two men, Schwab came across three campers at a picnic area on the Pentecost River, south of Wyndham in north Western Australia. Julie Anne Warren, 25, her husband Phillip Charles Walkemeyer, 26, and Terry Kent Bolt were all from the Kimberley district. After shooting them in the back, Schwab stripped them, and left their naked bodies to flow down the river. The corpses were carried away by the strong tide. One of the victims was found in shallow water about three kilometres downstream from the burnt-out 4WD, which contained their clothes. Not long after that, another was found four kilometres further down from the Pentecost Creek crossing. The last body was found on rocks in shallow water nearby.

Due to the similarity of the murders, authorities had no trouble linking them to the same serial killer, despite the fact that they took place hundreds of kilometres apart. The problem was that the police had no idea which direction the heartless murderer had headed after the second group of murders. And the man they were after had a 24-hour head start. In the vast Kimberley region, that meant he could turn up anywhere – and could randomly murder again at any time.

Members of the police’s elite Tactical Response Group (TRG) were flown in to join what had become the biggest manhunt in Western Australian history. On 19 June, local helicopter pilot Peter Leutenegger reported spotting a vehicle camouflaged in the scrub about 10 kilometres west of Fitzroy Crossing. Seven members of the TRG were driven to the scene. Local police surrounded the area. Police aircraft kept up surveillance on the vehicle. Camouflaged, and armed with high-powered rifles, police marksmen moved in on foot. They positioned themselves in scrub behind tall anthills about 50 metres from the vehicle. The police aircraft then flew in low to flush out anyone inside the car. A shirtless man wearing camouflage trousers suddenly appeared and started shooting at the aircraft with a rifle. He missed. The leader of the TRG shouted, ‘Police. Stop shooting.’ The man turned his rifle in the direction of the voice and opened fire. ‘He’s shooting at us – engage him,’ was the TRG leader’s response to the hail of bullets. Police returned fire. Schwab was hit on the left thumb, the bullet splintering the stock of the deadly .308 rifle he was armed with.

Schwab raced back to his vehicle and climbed in. Authorities bombarded him with tear gas grenades in an effort to flush him out peacefully, but the grenades sparked a scrub fire. Schwab left the vehicle and fled through the mounting flames, still firing at police as he tried to escape. Ammunition he had left scattered on the ground exploded in the heat as the fire spread quickly through the dry scrub, and Schwab disappeared through the smoke and flames.

Authorities could find no trace of the murderer until the light aircraft spotted him lying face down in nearby undergrowth. A single bullet wound to the heart had killed him; there were also bullet wounds to his shoulder and right buttock.

Police proceeded to search the rented Toyota. Inside they found a toolbox, credit cards, fishing rods, and bank books which had belonged to the Kimberley trio Schwab had recently murdered.

It wasn’t until the next day that authorities identified missing German tourist Josef Schwab as the vicious serial killer they had been forced to gun down. Police still had no idea why he had turned on his five innocent victims. The most accepted theory is simple robbery. The fact that he stole the victims’ possessions and tried to cover his tracks by stripping them and burning their clothes in their cars seems to support this idea; so do his methods of disposing the bodies. Schwab buried his first two victims, and threw the next three into a tidal river, perhaps believing the region’s vicious saltwater crocodiles would eat the evidence.