Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know

Paul Taylor

Description

This anthology of true crime stories written by Paul Taylor will satisfy the appetite of all true crime enthusiasts. The thirty-one chapters comprise notorious and fascinating cases, and shed light on chilling criminal personalities many of whom are known around the world. Readers will recognise local names such as Martin Bryant, Ivan Milat and Mark 'Chopper' Read, and immerse themselves in international events that involved Oscar Pistorius, the infamous duo Bonnie and Clyde and last but not least O.J. Simpson. By the time readers reach the end of this book, they will have no doubt uncovered which criminals were mad, bad or dangerous to know.

Sujets

• True Crime

Informations

• Publié par: Lake Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780655229018
• Langue: English

Extrait

Lake Press Pty Ltd
5 Burwood Road
Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia
www.lakepress.com.au
Copyright ©Lake Press Pty Ltd, 2022
Text ©Paul Taylor, 2022
Front cover image under license from Shutterstock.com
All rights reserved.
Some of these stories have been previously published.
This edition first published 2022
ISBN: 9780655229025 (pb) ISBN: 9780655229018 (eBook)



For Helen, who is lovely to know. My anchor, my angel.


Contents
Introduction
MAD
1 The Misfit Millionaire Mass Murderer
2 The Hearth Has Its Secrets
3 Killing Them with Kindness
4 The Monty Python Murderer
5 A Killing in Perugia
BAD
6 Nightmare in the Forest
7 The Dark and Bloody Trail of Bonnie and Clyde
8 The Glove That Didn’t Fit O.J. – and the Jury That Wore It
9 The Honeymoon Killer
10 The Blade Runner Topples From His Pedestal
11 Squizzy Taylor and the Law of the Jungle
12 On the Waterfront
13 The Kangaroo Gang’s London Capers
14 The Great Bookie Robbery and the Wolf Pack’s End
15 The Melbourne Gangland Wars
16 Chopper. Enough Said.
17 The Family That Slays Together
DANGEROUS TO KNOW
18 The Long, Winding and Bloody Road
19 Mind the Gap
20 When Clarrie Met Lionel
21 A Very Rum Business
22 Sydney’s Perfect Storm of Crime
23 Roger Rogerson’s Walk on the Wild Side
24 Give a Dog a Bad Name
25 The Lady Killers
26 Razor Wars and Wild, Wild Women
27 You Always Hurt the One You Love
28 Sweet Nell of Tooth’s Brewery
29 Fall Out in the Shadow of the Gallows
30 Capital Punishment’s Grim Post-mortem
CREDITS
About the author
Introduction
L ady Caroline Lamb’s description of her lover George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron – ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – was a little inaccurate and, to be fair, unkind. The darkly handsome dasher Lord Byron, England’s great Romantic poet of the nineteenth century, is almost forgotten now. Outside a few university cloisters, his poetry certainly is. But his libido lives on. It is remembered today, and will forever be remembered, by the delicious epithet given to him by Lady Caroline.
Byron wasn’t really, as Lady Caroline said, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, though it rang true in his day. Yes, he may have had an incestuous affair with his half-sister. Yes, he may have bedded numerous men and women apart from Lady Caroline. But today, we know that doesn’t make a man or a woman mad or bad, or dangerous to know … not while we’re talking about some of the men and women who are the subjects of this book.
Martin Bryant, for instance, was unquestionably mad – though psychiatrists said he wasn’t. Common sense tells us otherwise. A millionaire in his twenties with everything to live for, he slaughtered thirty-five innocent people and planned to kill 150 simply because he had a grudge against the world. Bryant, who’s still with us, was mad – no argument. Another serial killer, cuddly granny Caroline Grills, bumped off close friends and relatives with increasing relish. She was bonkers and certainly dangerous to know. So, too, were the nineteenth-century serial killers Frederick Deeming and his near contemporary, the loony dentist Louis Bertrand.
Almost all of the subjects in this book were bad, and many were prepared to kill – mostly for money, but sometimes for derisory reasons. For instance, Oscar Pistorius, ‘the Blade Runner’ who thrilled the world at the London Olympics, had money galore but mercilessly shot his trapped girlfriend – again and again – out of juvenile jealousy: ‘I was upset that you just left me after we got food to go talk to a guy and I was standing right behind you watching you touch his arm and ignore me.’ Gabe Watson, the ‘Honeymoon Killer’, was summarily found not guilty of murder by an impetuous and testy judge – the kind that America’s Deep South seems to cultivate. But there is no question that Watson was bad to the bone: cold-blooded, callous, and staggeringly indifferent to the sickening death of his wife. You’d want to steer clear of Bonnie and Clyde, too.
And dangerous to know? Were Juanita Nielsen alive, she would say Abe Saffron. If Sallie-Anne Huckstepp had not been found strangled in a Centennial Park pond, she might say Neddy Smith. Others would point the finger at the archetype crooked cop Roger Rogerson, who moved in circles where people had a habit of falling down dead. And others, like ‘Foxy Knoxy’ and Gordon Wood, were found innocent of murder but had the misfortune of finding themselves in the wrong company.
Some stories here have appeared in other books I have written. In this anthology, I have either updated, revised or rewritten those classic stories. To have left them out, I believe, would be akin to leaving out Ned Kelly from an account of our bushranging past, or omitting Bradman and Warnie from The Bumper Book of Great Australian Cricketers.


M A D


Chapter One
The Misfit Millionaire Mass Murderer
M artin Bryant was a bad seed from birth. True, he came into the world trouble free. He was born less than two hours after his mother, Carleen, went into labour, on 7 May 1967. His father, Maurice, a Hobart waterside worker, was there and summed it up with a birth notice in Hobart’s Mercur y : ‘To Carleen and Maurice. A bouncing boy. Thanks to doctor and staff.’
What the birth notice didn’t say and what no one knew – at first – was that Martin had an intellectual disability. It manifested itself in curious ways. His speech was slow to develop, he rejected breast feeding and physical affection and, within eighteen months, was unusually hyperactive: running, climbing, and escaping. Distraught, Carleen and Maurice would hunt him down and find him on top of next door’s chook house or playing by himself in a park.
Carleen took to restraining the toddler on the veranda of their home. She couldn’t cope unless she knew where he was at all times. It was tiring, emotionally and physically. Maurice, however, was determined to raise his son as if he was unlike any other child. By the time he was three, Martin’s problems were apparent even to his doting dad. Maurice devoted the rest of his life – until he took it – to helping Martin, restraining him when he could and encouraging him always.
The Bryants enrolled Martin at Hobart’s Quaker school, Friends, where Martin made few. He was disruptive, annoying and bullying. Maurice and Carleen had to take him away and enrol him at New Town Primary. There, he was dubbed ‘Silly Martin’ for his irritating, unpredictable antics that made him an outcast, a loner, weird and possibly dangerous. ‘He used to walk around with his face all squinted up, as if the sun was too bright,’ one former classmate recalled. A teacher remembered him unwilling or unable to relate to other boys. He’d swear at them, fix them with an angry glare, flail his arms or jump on them unexpectedly. On the other hand, he was bullied and mocked. ‘No one wanted to be my friend,’ he told a psychiatrist years later. He did have one friend, Greg Lahey, until the day he put a speargun to the boy’s head. He also used to point an unloaded air rifle at Greg’s head and pull the trigger.
Martin had just turned eleven when he was first suspended by the school. At home, he was just as bad. He bullied his little sister and at times was sexually aggressive towards her. He also showed an alarming tendency to torture animals.
The Byrants had a holiday home in Carnarvon Bay and Martin scuba-dived for crays with his father. He loved his speargun, but when Maurice gave him an air rifle for his fourteenth birthday, it gave Martin a new passion. He discovered the power of guns.
He took the rifle everywhere with him and used it at all hours of the day. At night he’d fire into Carnarvon Bay and at wildlife in the bush. By day, he’d shoot birds and when they fell, pump pellets into their heads. He liked to hide and fire at tourists who stopped at a roadside fruit stall. He hung about Port Arthur’s Broad Arrow Cafe, where his sister and her friends earned money during school holidays, firing at visiting cars and spitting at their occupants.
In 1983, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, his parents took him to a renowned Hobart clinical psychiatrist, Dr Eric Cunningham Dax. They hoped he’d recommend Martin go on a disability pension. Martin quickly revealed why. He was unemployable, Dr Dax concluded. He couldn’t concentrate. He would upset and annoy people so that he would always be in trouble. ‘Cannot read or write,’ Dr Dax recorded. ‘Does a bit of gardening and watches TV. Only his parents’ efforts that prevented further deterioration. Could be a schizophrenic and parents face a bleak future with him.’
Dr Dax duly recommended that Martin be on a disability pension.
Under the constant care and vigilance of Maurice, Bryant passed the next three years uneventfully. Then he met 54-year-old heiress Helen Mary Elizabeth Harvey, whose grandfather, David Hastie Harvey, had been general manager to George Adams, creator of the colossal Tattersall’s gambling empire.
Encouraged by his father, Martin had started a lawn mowing business and was walking past Helen Harvey’s imposing family home, Wibruna, at 30 Clare Street, New Town in early 1987. Run down and decrepit, its garden overgrown and out of control, the house mirrored its occupants. Martin saw an opportunity and knocked on the door.
It was opened by a squat, overweight woman missing her front teeth and with a strong odour that indicated she was also missing her daily ablutions. Helen Harvey lived with her mother Hilza, seventy-six, in squalor, although both had inherited a fortune. The women occupied the upstairs of the once grand house while fourteen dogs and dozens of cats had the run of the house downstairs.
Helen and Martin may hav