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The Case of the Smiling Arsonist

There was a time in Sydney in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s when a crime reporter covering a case for a newspaper could be as big a celebrity as the high-profile detectives looking for the villains. And, on more than one occasion, it was the crime reporter who solved a baffling murder case after being approached with information that they passed on to police.

Possibly the most famous of these cases was what became known as the Case of the Walking Corpse when, in 1963, a man walked into the Daily Mirror building in Sydney and told crime reporter Joe Morris that he had just seen a dead man, whose funeral he had attended six months earlier, walking down George Street. And not only had he seen the walking corpse but he had stopped and had a conversation with the man before he ran off into the crowd.

Police investigations revealed that the man was Allan Edward Brennan, who had been buried in Sydney six months earlier after his unrecognisable, decomposed remains had been found beneath his smallgoods shop. Police assumed that Brennan had been electrocuted and after a quick autopsy he was laid to rest. The man who had recognised him in the street, and a few of his old workmates, attended the funeral and laid a wreath.

The remains of Allan Brennan were exhumed and closer examination revealed that it was instead the body of habitual criminal Patrick Joseph Hackett. It looked as if they had found another victim of a serial killer who operated throughout Sydney. The victims, who were all vagrants, were stabbed up to 60 times and had their genitals removed with the skill of a Macquarie Street surgeon. This fiend had been dubbed the Mutilator by the press.

This led to the capture of the mysterious Allan Brennan – real name William Macdonald – who was, in fact, the Mutilator murderer. He was found guilty of the murders and sent to prison forever where he remains to this day, the longest serving prisoner in Australia. The reporter Joe Morris was given full credit for instigating the capture of the Mutilator.

Another horrific Sydney crime that was solved directly by information given to the police by a reporter became known as the Case of the Smiling Arsonist. The journalist was another Daily Mirror legend, Bondi Bill Jenkings. At about 12.30am on Friday, 21 June 1968, a ferocious blaze broke out in a block of flats on Campbell Parade, directly opposite Bondi Beach. Before long the building was completely ablaze and Daily Mirror photographer John Gasparotto was on the spot to capture graphic images of police and firemen carrying survivors from the burning building.

But while 30 of the residents escaped the inferno thanks to the brave efforts of rescuers, four others, 36-year-old Sydney barrister Paul Francis Walshe and his wife Jean, 28, and English migrants William Simpson and his 21-year-old bride Cheryl, perished in the fire.

The two couples died from asphyxiation as they slept on the third floor of the five-storey building and inhaled the deadly carbon monoxide fumes. The Simpsons had only been living in the block for a few weeks, having arrived recently from England. Paul and Jean Walshe had only been married a short time.

They apparently died in each other’s arms. The Daily Mirror reported that rescuers heard the young bride scream: ‘Paul, Paul, I love you,’ before she and her husband were enveloped in flames.

Police established that the blaze had emanated from the lift spread quickly through the wooden structure of the lift well and into the apartments.

The deceased hadn’t stood a chance and it was a miracle that so many had escaped. What was also of enormous concern to police was that there had recently been a spate of arson attacks in and around Sydney, but this was the first time anyone had been killed. Could this be the same arsonist? If so, they dreaded what could happen next.

The following evening photographer John Gasparotto’s images appeared all over the front pages of the Daily Mirror and newspapers across the country. They were graphic in the extreme showing survivors being carried from the burning building and the full extent of the blaze. The pictures also captured images of bystanders looking on as the drama unfolded. It was one of these pictures that would be the undoing of the arsonist.

Reporter Bill Jenkings was assigned to cover the case for the Mirror and it wasn’t long after the fire that he was sitting in a Bondi hotel when two of his clandestine ‘contacts’ sat at the bar beside him. One pointed to a photo on the front page of the Mirror and said, ‘That’s the bloke you’re after.’ He then finished his beer and left. Jenkings was astonished. Among the devastation was a young man looking at the camera with a smile on his face.

By showing the photo around to residents of the building, police tracked the young man down to factory in suburban Sydney where he worked as a sales clerk. He was a 25-year-old Scottish migrant named James Alexander Sorenson who had recently moved to the western suburbs of Sydney but had once lived in the Campbell Parade units.

After questioning, Sorenson was charged with the four murders and also charged with maliciously setting fire to a house in Bondi while the owner was asleep inside.

At his trial in the Central Criminal Court the Crown alleged that Sorenson had been drinking heavily on the night of the fire and at around midnight he had arrived at the fourth floor of the block of units, where he was staying with friends. As he vacated the lift he threw in some burning newspapers and sent the lift to the basement. He then went to bed and waited to see what would happen.

In his defence Sorenson said that he was very, very drunk on the night of the fire, that he was deeply sorry for what had happened and was shocked that anyone was hurt. With that he asked the jury to find him guilty of manslaughter but not murder. But the jury would have none of it and it took them just an hour to find him guilty of four counts of murder.

In summing up before sentencing the prisoner, Mr Justice Maguire said that there was a frightening side to Sorenson’s character that had not been revealed to the jury. He then sent James Sorenson to four counts of life imprisonment. That would be enough to wipe the smile off anyone’s face. To this day, the man who pointed out the killer to reporter Bill Jenkings has never been identified. But whoever he was, he deserves a medal.