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The Wales-King Murders

The brutal bashing murders of Margaret Wales-King and her husband Paul in April 2002 were dubbed by the Melbourne press as ‘The Society Murders’, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Admittedly, Paul and Margaret Wales-King had all of the trappings of high society, but besides their wealth and comfortable townhouse in the leafy establishment suburb of Armadale, they were just ordinary people beyond reproach who were much more interested in their children and family life with their 11 grandchildren than any glittering fundraising cocktail party where they could be photographed for the social pages in the Sunday papers. Well off, yes. But A-list society? Never.

At the time of his murder, 70-year-old retired investor Paul King was an invalid due to two strokes and was 68-year-old Margaret Lord’s second husband. She had previously been married to airline pilot Brian Wales, with whom she had five children. When she married Paul King, who was of independent means, the now Margaret Wales-King was substantially wealthy in her own right in that she was estimated to be worth in the vicinity of $5 million, which consisted of her home, car, jewellery and antiques, cash, substantial shareholdings and superannuation. Mrs Wales-King had made out her will, with her husband and five children each getting a sixth of her estate upon her death. But one of the children wasn’t prepared to wait that long.

It was no secret within the family that the youngest son, Matthew, 34, and his mother had been rowing for years over Matthew’s reckless financial affairs and her refusal to keep giving him more money to seemingly throw away. But all seemed to be peaceful on the evening of 5 April when Brian and Margaret Wales-King arrived at Matthew and his Chilean-born wife Maritza’s home for dinner. Nor was there anything odd about the simple meal of vegetable soup and then a homemade risotto. Nothing unusual, that is, except for the handful of potent painkillers and blood pressure pills that had been blended and mixed through the main course.

When Matthew’s mother and stepfather became drowsy at around 9.45pm, Maritza stayed inside the house while Matthew ushered them through the front door to their car, suggesting they best go home, just five minutes away, where they could find medication for their ailments. Then, as they left the Glen Iris townhouse by the front door and headed towards the driveway, Matthew took to them with a 1-metre piece of four-by-two pine he had hidden in the garden, bludgeoning them both severely about the head. First he hit his mother over the back of the head and then he set upon his invalid stepfather until he lay in a bleeding heap at his feet. Then he finished his mother off. There was little doubt that it was premeditated, cold-blooded murder.

Having murdered his parents, Matthew now had the dilemma of what to do with their bodies. As it turned out, his planning to do away with them hadn’t gone past the murder stage. With his wife, who had in no way taken part in the killings, watching on in horror from the kitchen window, Matthew Wales-King dragged the lifeless bodies of her in-laws across the front lawn and concealed them beneath their two-year-old son Dominik’s deflated kiddie’s wading pool.

So, what to do now with his mother’s silver Mercedes, which was parked in the driveway? In a hastily planned scheme to throw any suspicion away from him, Matthew drove his mother’s car to the inner-city bayside suburb of Middle Park, where he parked it in the street, locked it and caught a cab home. Along the way he threw the car keys into a drain.

Back home, Matthew Wales-King still had the problem of what to do with his parents’ bodies. It was obviously something that he had not prepared for. First he used sheets to cover his victims’ faces, obviously, as crime scene investigators would point out later, to hide their incriminating stares as he went about the business of preparing them for burial. He then placed the deflated kiddie pool back over them and covered it with leaves to look like a pile of rubbish until he decided what his next step would be.

A few days later Matthew Wales-King set his bizarre plan in action. He rented a trailer and attached it to his own car. Then he loaded the bodies, which he had wrapped up in doonas, a mattock and new bags of mulch into the trailer and took off through Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, to eventually arrive 20 kilometres past the mountain resort of Marysville, where he drove off on a secluded sidetrack and into the forest. About 20 metres off the side of the track he dug a shallow grave no more than about a metre deep and lay his mother’s body face down, then laid his stepfather on top of her. He then filled in what was left of the hole.

He then drove home to Melbourne, all the while convinced that what he had just done wouldn’t convince anyone that it was anything other than a shallow grave. He would have to return and do it properly. A few days later he returned to the gravesite, where he covered it with rocks he had brought in the trailer, then added more soil and covered it with brand-new mulch, which only made it look more than ever like a new gravesite. On the way home he pulled into a car wash and put the car and the trailer through, giving them a really good scrub. Then he went home and with powerful disinfectant scrubbed everything in his home that could have come in contact with the dead bodies. If ever there was a bloke leaving elephant prints in the snow, it was Matthew King.

In the meantime, other family members had tried repeatedly to get in touch with their parents and eventually notified the police. A week later, when the silver Mercedes was found, it was all over the newspapers, and almost three weeks later, when the bodies were discovered by rangers who noticed car tracks and a mysterious mound in a protected area, it became one the biggest stories in Victorian criminal history.

Nine days after the bodies were discovered, Matthew Wales-King was inconsolable at his mother’s funeral and offered prayers on behalf of the mourners. Two days later he was arrested and charged with double murder, after police had become suspicious on finding blood in his garage and had put him under full-scale investigation.

Confronted with the undeniable mountain of circumstantial evidence, Matthew broke down and confessed to killing his mother and stepfather, saying that initially he only meant to scare them into giving him some money but it had got out of hand. Given that his wife had full knowledge of what had taken place but hadn’t told police for fear of going to jail, she was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Incredibly, for the premeditated bashing murders of his mother and stepfather Matthew Wales-King was sentenced to only 30 years’ imprisonment. His wife Maritza received a two-year jail term, which was suspended.