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His name is William MacDonald, and he savagely killed five men from 1961 up until his arrest in May of 1963. The Serial Killer podcast now has well over 8 million downloads. I'm humbled by this, and to be honest, I never thought the show would grow so large. However, even though I know tens of thousands listen in every Monday, only 59 patrons support the show on Patreon.
It is actually quite expensive to run a weekly podcast, and even though I have my lovely sponsors, the support from my patrons is invaluable. The show is free of charge to listen to, but if you would consider supporting me with the amount similar to that of a regular black cup of coffee, I would be very grateful. Go to theserialkillerpodcast.com for all details, or visit my Facebook page at facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or go to Patreon directly at patreon.com slash theserialkillerpodcast. Sydney, the early 1960s.
Australia's largest city was under siege. A serial killer was on the loose. A homicidal maniac was luring his victims into dark places, violently stabbing them dozens of times about the head and neck, with a long bladed knife, and then ripping and mutilating their bodies. Investigating police had no trouble in linking the murders to the same unknown psychopath, now dubbed the mutilator.
The warped killer's crimes were easily recognized. His victims were always derelict, downtrodden men. All had been violently stabbed to death in a public place. And in classic serial killer fashion, their assassin had left his gruesome calling card.
All of his victims had had their genitals cut completely off. The serial killer who would become known as the mutilator was born Alan Ginsberg, the middle of three children in Liverpool, England, in 1924. He proved to be an unusual child, prone to taking long walks at night by himself, and on many occasions his mother had to call the police to go and search for him. He never sought company and remained friendless all of his life.
Probably he was also extensively bullied. Psychiatrists also diagnosed the young Ginsberg as being schizophrenic. However, in 1943, at age of 19, he joined the army, and was transferred to the Lancashire Fusiliers, where he was raped in an air raid shelter by a corporal, who threatened him with death if he told anyone. At first, young Private Ginsberg felt bad about what had happened, but as time went by, he realized he had enjoyed the physical experience, and believed this was the start of his life as a homosexual, a life that would bring him nothing but misery and humiliation.
When he came out of the army in 1947, psychiatrists again diagnosed him as schizophrenic, and his brother had been committed to a mental asylum in Scotland that was straight out of the Dark Ages. The cells were crammed full of screaming, rambling people, whose minds often were completely lost, and it was freezing cold. He received shock treatment every day. After six months, his mother got him out and took him home.
As he grew older, Ginsberg became an active homosexual, openly soliciting men in public toilets and bars. His obvious homosexuality made life difficult in those conservative times, and he moved from job to job as the taunts and ridicule became too much for him to cope with. Allen Ginsberg consulted a psychiatrist in 1947 about his mental condition, complaining that the persecution was causing illusions and strange noises in his head. That a psychiatrist's recommendation he spent the next three months in another mental institution.
But it changed nothing. Disillusioned and convinced that his surroundings were to blame for his unstable mental condition, Ginsberg emigrated to Canada in 1949, and then to Australia in 1955, where he decided to start a new life completely, and changed his name to William MacDonald. But, new name or not, old habits die hard, and shortly after his arrival, he was charged with indecent assault when he touched a detective on the penis in a public toilet in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. MacDonald was placed on a two-year good behavior bond.
He moved to Ballarat, in the neighboring state of Victoria, but his life always seemed to be dogged with trouble. While he was working on a construction site, his workmates gave him a hiding for being a so-called poofter. He retaliated by buying a very sharp knife, and slashing the tires of their bicycles. MacDonald held jobs, only until the taunts became so strong that he had to move on from state to state, and all of the time the urge to kill his tormentors was building up inside of him.
Fact or paranoia, it seemed that no matter where he went, people would talk about him, and make fun of him behind his back, and the corporal who had raped him, and in his mind, the source of their amusement was never far from his mind. William MacDonald's career as a murderer started in Brisbane, the capital of the northern Australian state of Queensland. In 1960, when he befriended 55-year-old Amos Hurst, outside the Roma Street railway station, they had a long drinking session together, in a nearby hotel, and went back to Hurst's hotel room, where they sat on the bed, and drank beer. The aging alcoholic was so drunk, that he probably had no idea, that MacDonald was strangling him, until it was too late.
Later, MacDonald would claim, that he had no intentions of murdering Hurst, when they went back to his room, but the urge to kill, it came over him so suddenly, and he squeezed his hands tightly, around Hurst's neck. As he was being strangled, Amos Hurst hemorrhaged, and blood spurted from his mouth, all over MacDonald's hands. MacDonald punched him in the face, and Hurst fell to the floor, dying. MacDonald then undressed Hurst, and putting into bed, he washed the blood from his arms, quietly left the building, and returned to his lodgings, in South Brisbane.
Terrified, that any minute, there would be a knock on his door, from the police, William MacDonald looked in the papers, every day, for the story, of the murder, of Amos Hurst. But no story appeared. Five days later, when he found Hurst's name, in the obituary column, he couldn't believe his eyes. It said the man had died suddenly, of a heart attack.
What the papers didn't say, was that while Amos Hurst's post-mortem, showed that he had died of a heart attack, it also revealed, that from the severe bruising on his neck, that there was a possibility, of death by strangulation. But, under the circumstances, it could have been bruising, from a fight, or some other drunken misadventure. The case was closed. Unaware of his close scrape, with retribution, MacDonald went about his newfound career, as a murderer, with added enthusiasm, and bought a sheath knife, and went looking around the wine bars, and sleazy hotels of Brisbane, for another easy victim to kill.
In a wine saloon, full of down-and-outs, MacDonald met a man, named Bill, and the more they drank, the more Bill looked like the corporal, who had raped him, all those years before. At closing time, the pair took a couple of bottles of sherry, to the nearby park for a drink. MacDonald's urge to kill, was strong, but he waited, until his drinking partner, passed out drunk on the grass. Then, taking the knife from its sheath, he was just about to plunge the blade, into Bill's neck, when the urge left him.
He sat on the man's chest, with the knife raised, but the desire to commit murder, had gone. He put the knife, back in its sheath, and went home, leaving the world's luckiest derelict, to sleep it off. Moving to Sydney, in January of 1961, William MacDonald, found accommodation in East Sydney, and took a job as a Leicester Sorter, with the postal department, under the assumed name of, Alan Edward Brennan. Before long, he was well known, around the parks and public toilets, that were the meeting places, for Sydney's homosexuals.
It wasn't long, before the voices in MacDonald's head, were back, urging him to kill. Then, on the night of Saturday, the 4th of June, 1961, his career, as the mutilator, began in earnest, when he struck up a conversation, with 41-year-old vagrant, Alfred Reginald Greenfield, as he had sat on a bench in Green Park, opposite St. Vincent Hospital, in the inner-city Sydney suburb, of Darlinghurst. MacDonald offered Greenfield, a homeless unemployed blacksmith, a drink from his bottle, and leered him to the nearby Domain Baths, on the pretext that he had more bottles in his bag.
But there was more than bear in the bag. MacDonald had bought a brand new, long-bladed eraser-sharp knife, especially for this very occasion. By day, the Domain Baths, was a popular swimming spot, situated on Sydney Harbour. By night, the Domain St.
Vions, were the haunt of derelicts. There were many alcoves, to concealed drinkers from the winter chill. MacDonald and Greenfield chatted away, as they shared another bottle of beer, on the half-hour walk to the Domain, where they settled into a secluded corner. The need to kill Alfred Greenfield, had by now become overwhelming, but MacDonald controlled his urge, until the man had drunk all of the beer, and then fall asleep on the grass.
William MacDonald removed the knife, from its sheath, as he knelt over the sleeping derelict. He brought it down swiftly, and buried the blade deep, into his victim's neck. He lifted and plunged the knife, again and again, until Alfred Greenfield, lay still. The ferocity of the attack, had severed the arteries in Greenfield's neck.
Blood was everywhere. But his killer had come prepared. He had brought a light plastic raincoat in his bag, and then put it on, before he attacked the unsuspecting Greenfield. The mutilator removed his victim's trousers, and underpants, lifted the testicles and penis, and sliced them off, and to scrotum, with his knife.
The mutilator then threw Alfred Greenfield's genitals, into the harbour, wrapped his knife in his raincoat, and put it in his bag. He stopped along the way home, and washed his hands and face under a tap. Nobody seemed to have noticed him, as he walked home on that showery, dark night. If they did, they didn't remember him.
There was no way that William MacDonald wouldn't read about this murder in the paper. The following day, it was all over the front pages of the evening press. They called it the work of a maniac. They dubbed the maniac the mutilator.
The press weren't allowed to print the full extent of Alfred Greenfield's injuries, but the rumours spread like wildfire. The press did say that he had been violently stabbed at least 30 times, and certain parts of his anatomy were found in the harbour by police drivers who were searching for the murder burn. However, the police were at a loss to come up with the slightest motive why anyone would want to murder a harmless vagrant, let alone cut off his genitals and throw them in the harbour. A couple of months later and Sydney had all but forgotten about the mutilator.
Police wound down their investigations and the savage murder of Alfred Greenfield became yet another unsolved crime. But when another derelict turned up dead six months later and the similarities between the murders were unmistakable, police then knew there was a serial killer on the loose. One morning of Saturday, the 21st of November 1961, William MacDonald had purchased a knife with a six-inch blade from Mick Simmons' sports store in Sydney's Haymarket district. He told the man behind the counter that he was going fishing, but he really wanted to commit murder.
The urges to kill were back and they were stronger than ever. That night, MacDonald was walking down South Dowling Street in East Sydney when he saw 41-year-old Ernest William Cobbin staggering towards him. MacDonald lured Cobbin to nearby Moore Park where they sat in the public toilets and drank beer. Cobbin made no comment when his new friend put on a raincoat from his bag.
Ernest Cobbin was sitting on the toilet seat when the first blow from the knife struck him in the throat, severing his jugular vein. The mutilator had brought the knife up in a sweeping motion, the same way that a fighter delivers an uppercut. And it had the desired effect. Ernest Cobbin's blood sprayed everywhere, all over the mutilator's arms, face, and the raincoat.
Severely wounded and most likely in shock, Cobbin instinctively lifted his arm to defend himself as the mutilator kept stabbing, repeatedly wounding him on the arms, neck, face, and chest. Even when Ernest Cobbin fell strong dead from the toilet seat, the mutilator kept up the frenzied attack until blood was spattered all over the toilet's cubicle. The mutilator pulled Ernest Cobbin's pants and underpants down to his knees, lifted his penis and testicles, sliced them off with his knife, and put them in the plastic bag he had brought with him. When he had finished, the mutilator calmly took off his raincoat, wrapped his knife and the plastic bag in it, put them in his bag, and walked out of the toilet.
He stopped along the way to wash his hands under a tap. Back at his lodgings, the mutilator washed the bloody contents of the plastic bag in warm water, put them in a clean plastic bag, and took them to bed with him. The following day, the mutilator wrapped the plastic bag and its gristly contents, the knife, and the brick, in newspaper, tied them with a string, and threw them from Sydney Harbour Bridge into the deepest part of the harbour. This time there would be no evidence left lying around for the police to find.
On Monday morning, Macdonald went back to his job of sorting letters under his alias of Alan Brennan, as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile the headlines in the newspapers blazed, Mutilator strikes again. The police had received a phone call at 5.30 am, and a hoarse man's voice had said, There's a murdered man in the toilet in Moore Park, opposite the Bat and Ball Hotel, and hung up, never to be identified. The horror that the police confronted was hard to imagine.
Ernest Cobbin had been stabbed about fifty times. His private parts, his testicles and penis, were missing. They had been sliced off, as if by a surgeon. The toilet was awash with blood.
In the minds of Sydney's toughest detectives, there were no doubt that if anyone had walked in on the Mutilator as he went about his business, they too would have been stabbed to death. A madman was on the loose. No one safe. Again the police couldn't find a clue.
There were no fingerprints, not even on the beer bottle. The Mutilator had wiped it clean. No one had seen a thing. The victim was married with two children, and had been living in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern.
It was living apart from his family at a time, off the killing, and had apparently taken into the bottle. Outside of his mysterious assailant, Ernie Cobbin didn't have an enemy in the world. After he murdered Ernest Cobbin, William Macdonald's rage had subsided, and he went about his life as usual. He read every newspaper story about his exploits, but had great difficulty in understanding that he was reading about himself.
It was as if another person was doing these dreadful things, and Macdonald was merely an onlooker. It frightened him. He joined in with his workmates in discussions about the Mysterious Mutilator, and listened to their theories of what type of person he was. Macdonald would secretly get upset when they referred to the mystery murderer as a queer and a sexual deviate.
For a time, Macdonald thought his workmates suspected him of being a mutilator, but it was only his own paranoia. The thought of giving himself up to police also crossed his mind, but he had to admit to himself that he enjoyed the killing too much to do anything as silly as that. As the months went by, the urge to kill again became overwhelming. On the morning of Saturday, the 31st of March, 1962, William Macdonald purchased another long-bladed, razor-sharp sheath knife from Mick Simmons' sports store.
He packed it in his bag with his raincoat and the plastic bag. It was raining slightly that night, and William Macdonald was wearing his raincoat. At 10 p.m., he left the Oxford Hotel in Darlinghurst and followed Frank Gladstone MacLean down Bork Street and past the Darlinghurst police station. Macdonald struck up a conversation with the drunken MacLean and suggested that they turn into Bork Lane and have a drink.
As they rounded the unlit corner, the mutilator plunged a knife into MacLean's throat. Frank MacLean was a tall, thin man, well over six feet tall, and could have made mincemeats out of the much smaller Macdonald had he not been so drunk. MacLean felt the extreme, cold pain of the knife sinking deep into his throat and started to resist. The mutilator stabbed him again in the face, and as MacLean fell about trying to protect himself, the mutilator punched him in the face, forcing him off balance.
As MacLean fell to the ground, the mutilator was on him. He stabbed MacLean about head, neck, throat, face, and chest, until he was dead. Saturated in Frank MacLean's blood, the mutilator dragged the body a few meters further into the lane, lowering his victim's trousers, and, slicing the knife from bottom, in an upward stroke, sliced off Frank MacLean's genitals. For the first time, the mutilator was frightened that he would be caught in the act.
He had committed the murder only a few yards from the busy Bork Street. As he put the genitals in his plastic bag, he feared that someone may see him. He had heard voices and a baby crying as people walked past the entrance to the laneway. In his paranoia, he expected the police car to pull up any minute, but his luck it held.
The mutilator peeked around the laneway and, satisfied that no one was coming, wrapped his knife and the plastic bag in the raincoat, put it in his bag, and strolled down Bork Street. He also took a bottle of sweet sherry that he and MacLean had been drinking, as it was covered in fingerprints. He passed several people along Bork Street, but they paid him no attention. Back at his room, the mutilator washed the contents of the plastic bag in the sink, and put them in a clean plastic bag.
In morning, he threw the incriminating evidence off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Frank MacLean's murder took place as Sydney was still in the grip of mutilator mania from the previous murder just a few months earlier. And this one had happened within meters of a main thoroughfare. MacLean, a war pensioner, had left the Surry Hills Hotel earlier in the evening, carrying a bottle of wine to walk to his room in Albion Street, not far away.
He was seen turning into Little Bork Street at about 10.35 pm by three trainee nurses of nearby St Margaret's Hospital. At 10.50 pm, he was found lying dying in the gutter by a Mr. and Mrs. Cornish, who believed that the crying of their baby in a pram may have warned of the murderer of their approach, and in turn, may have saved theirs and their baby's lives.
The police were so organized in their hunt for the mutilator at the time of Frank MacLean's death, that within minutes there were thirty detectives at the murder scene. But again, the mutilator had fled without a trace. A special police task force was set up to track down the killer and was causing the police so much embarrassment. Teams of detectives worked around the clock, checking out every possible lead, and there were plenty of possible leads.
Police phones ran hot. Houses were raided on the slightest suspicion that a mutilator might be hiding there. Night shelters and hostels were checked and rechecked. Nothing.
By now, the police dossier on the mutilator was inches thick. They were prepared to try anything, which included sending the details to Interpol, in hope that a killer may be identified by similar crimes overseas. This led to them investigating the whereabouts of an American soldier, who had been charged with the murder of a thirteen-year-old boy in Germany, in almost identical fashion to the mutilator murders. And the detaining in Melbourne of a twenty-three-year-old German immigrant on the liner Patris, who was questioned at Russell Street Police headquarters in an unrelated incident.
Both Interpol leads proved fruitless. The reward for information leading to the arrest of the mutilator was increased to five thousand pounds, a staggering amount of money for the early 1960s. On the fourteenth of April, a young airman, Patrick Royan, informed the police that he had been attacked by the mutilator in Goulbourne Street not far from where Frank McLean was murdered. Royan said that his attacker scaled a high fence and lunged at him with a long-bladed knife, but missed, nicking him only slightly.
He said that a mysterious assailant was hissing as he attacked. He was described as being tall and solid, of foreign appearance, between thirty and forty years old, and wearing a light-coloured suit. Nothing came of this, as it was discovered that Royan was an alcoholic, undergoing psychiatric treatment, and had cut himself and made the story up to get a bit of attention. An unsympathetic judge gave him eighteen months in prison.
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In the meantime, things were not going quite so well for William MacDonald in his private life. In totally unrelated incidents, he had a severe falling out with his landlord, and in the same week he got the sack from his mail-sorting job at the postal department. MacDonald had saved a lot of money over the years, and he decided to go into business for himself. Still using the assumed name of Alan Edward Brennan, he paid five hundred and sixty pounds for a mixed business in Burwood, an inner western suburb of Sydney.
In his little shop, he made sandwiches and sold a variety of small goods. The shop was also an agency for a dry cleaning company. MacDonald loved it. He had no landlord standing over him, and he didn't have to answer to anyone at work.
He lived in the residence above the business, and for the first time in his life, he was left alone. So, when the urge to kill came on him again, the mutilator didn't have to worry about the risk of being caught doing his thing in a public place. He could bring his victims home and have his way with them. The urges to murder and mutilate came again, stronger than ever before, and one night, early in November of 1962, William MacDonald went to a wine saloon called the Wine Palace, opposite the People's Palace in Pitt Street in the heart of downtown Sydney, looking for a victim.
Here he met forty-two-year-old James Hackett, a petty thief and derelict who had only been out of jail for a couple of weeks. MacDonald took Hackett back to his new residence and continued drinking until Hackett passed out on the floor. The mutilator used a knife from his delicatessen to stab the sleeping Hackett. On the first plunge, the long knife went straight through Hackett's neck.
But, due to the severe pain of having a knife deep in his neck, Hackett woke up and shielded the next blow with his arm, thus diverting the knife into the mutilator's other hand, cutting it badly. With blood pouring from the wound in his hand, the mutilator unleashed a renewed homicidal rage on Hackett. He brought a knife down with both hands and plunged it through Hackett's heart, killing him almost instantly. The floor was awash with blood.
But still the mutilator attacked Hackett's body with the knife until he had to stop for breath. He sat in pools of blood beside the body, puffing and panting. There was blood everywhere. It was splattered all over the walls and the ceiling, and he sat collected in big puddles on the floor.
He bandaged his hand with a dirty dishcloth and set about removing Hackett's genitals. But the knife was now blunt and bent from the ferocity of the attack. Too exhausted to go down to the shop to get another one, the mutilator sat covered from head to foot in blood, hacking away at Hackett's crotum with a blunt and bent blade. He stabbed the penis a few times, and made some cuts around the testicles before finally giving up and falling asleep where he sat.
In the morning the mutilator woke to find himself covered in sticky, drying blood. He was lying next to the victim Hackett. The pools of blood had soaked through the floorboards, and threatened to drip onto the counters of his shop. The mutilator had a bath, cleaned himself up, and went to the hospital where he had some stitches put on his hands.
He told the doctor that he had cut himself in his shop. It took MacDonald the best part of the day to clean up the mess. The huge pools of blood on the linoleum couldn't be scrubbed out. He had to tear it up, break it into bits, and throw it out.
He also removed all of Hackett's blooded clothing, leaving only the socks. MacDonald dragged the dead and naked Hackett underneath his shop, and left him there. Every few hours he went back to the body, and dragged it a little bit further into the foundations of the building, until it was jammed into a remote corner of the brickwork. Out of view, and almost impossible to see.
MacDonald left all of Hackett's blooded clothing with the corpse. He panicked, and finally sat down, and thought about what he had done. He thought that the police would come looking for Hackett. Only a few of the bloodstains had come off the walls, and there was blood all over the floorboards.
If the police even came to ask him questions, he would be caught. And then there was the cam driver who had driven them to the shop on the night of the murder. He would remember them. Paranoid and terrified, William MacDonald packed his bags, and caught a train to Brisbane, where he moved into a boarding house, dyed his greying hair black, drew a moustache, and assumed the name of Alan MacDonald.
Every day he bought to Sydney newspapers, expecting to read of the murder of Hackett, and how police were looking for a man named Brennan, in connection with the mutilator murders. But as the days turned into weeks and months, there was no mention of any corpse, or any search for the missing Brennan. MacDonald was beside himself with a worry, and police found the body and set a trap for him. Would they knock on his door at any minute?
The mystery of it all was driving him crazy. However, although he didn't know it, William MacDonald didn't have a worry in the world. He had been declared dead, and no one was looking for a dead man. A few days after MacDonald left for Brisbane, customers wanting to pick up their dry-cleaning had become concerned, and no one was at the shop.
Neighbors assumed that Niceneister Brennan had left without telling anyone. After three weeks, a putrefying smell was coming from the vicinity of the empty shop. After a month, the smell was so overwhelming that the neighbors called the Health Department, who, in turn, called the police to break the door in. The smell in the shop was hideous.
It led the police to the rotting body of Hackett. The corpse was so badly decomposed and mauled by rats that it was impossible to identify. The police bundled it into an ambulance and sent it off to the morgue at nearby Rydalmare Hospital, where the body was found to be so putrid that the mortician carried out the autopsy in a shed in the hospital grounds. The only thing they could determine was that it was a male aged about forty, the same age as the missing Brennan.
At this stage, police assumed it was the body of the missing shop proprietor, Alan Brennan, but crawled under his shop for reasons not only to him, and Elector cutied himself. Police had no reason to suspect foul play. Everything was normal. It looked like an accidental death.
The body was buried in a porpoise grave at a Field of Mar Cemetery, right, under the name of Alan Edward Brennan. The only person who wasn't completely satisfied with the police investigations into the death was the coroner, Mr. F. E.
Cox, who quizzed the police. police thoroughly before he handed down his decision. Mr. Cox listened as police told him that the body was naked, except for a pair of socks, and that there was no reason why they should suspect foul play.
Police told Mr. Cox that fingerprints had been taken and they failed to match up with anyone on record. The government medical officer testified that there were no broken bones, and that death had occurred at least a fortnight before he examined it. What Mr.
Cox wasn't told was that the police didn't find it unusual that a singlet found alongside the body had dozens of knife cuts in it, and that there were large bloodstains on the floor and on a mattress in the apartment above the shop. Even without the knowledge of these incredible police oversights, Mr. Cox wasn't convinced and returned an open verdict and said it seems extraordinary that the body of Mr. Brennan should have been found in the position and in the condition in which it was found.
According to the evidence, the deceased had neither his trousers nor his boots or shoes or a singlet arm. He was clad only in his socks, with his coat and trousers alongside him. Nothing was found to indicate to any degree of certainty that the deceased had taken his own life, even if it were his intention to do so. It seems to me an extraordinary thing that the deceased could have gone under the house to commit an act that would result in his death.
Could have been that the deceased was a victim of foul play, although the police report said there was nothing to indicate foul play, but I cannot altogether exclude that possibility. End quote. When his workmates at the PMG read of the unfortunate demise of their old workmate in the death notices, they collected for Overeath and attended the small memorial service conducted by a local funeral director. In arguably the most extraordinary circumstances in Australian criminal history, William MacDonald, the man who had committed five atrocious murders, was a free man, if only he had known it.
And if he had never gone back to Sydney, he may well have been a free man to this very day. Unaware that he was supposedly dead and buried, MacDonald stayed for a short time in Brisbane, before going to New Zealand, still in the belief that the police would be looking for him. But the urge to kill was still with him, and it was getting stronger every day. He had to kill again, and for reasons not only to him, he had to return to Sydney to do so.
Mr. Cox's suspicions of a sloppy police investigation became a reality about six months after the death of Alan Brennan, when one of MacDonald's old workmates, John McCarthy, bumped head-on into the quote-unquote dead Brennan, as he was walking down crowded George Street in the heart of Sydney. McCarthy nearly died of shock. As he had no idea that a murdered Hackett had been buried as a missing Brennan, MacDonald was surprised when his old work friend was so stunned to see him.
You're supposed to be dead, McCarthy told MacDonald. What do you mean? the puzzled MacDonald asked. They found your body underneath your shop and Burwood.
We went to your funeral service. McCarthy replied, But if you're alive, who was the body under your shop, and why did you run away? As it dawned on MacDonald what had happened, he ran away down the street. That night, he was on a train to Melbourne.
John McCarthy went to the police, but they didn't believe him when he told them that he had just had a drink with a dead man. The desk sergeant told him to go home and sleep it off. And the desk sergeant didn't believe him the following day when he went back and told them the same story. They said he was crazy, and in desperation, John McCarthy rang the Daily Mirror and spoke to renowned crime reporter Joe Morris.
I listened to the story before interviewing him. He didn't sound crazy to me, recalled Morris. The Mirror ran the story and the legendary headline, Case of the Walking Corpse, came about. As a direct result of John McCarthy's sightings of a dead man and the intense media interest in the bizarre case, police were forced to reopen the investigation.
Closer scrutiny of the clothes found beside the dead man revealed that a number in a 1262 written in indelible ink on the inside of the coat sleeves were stats of a garment supplied to a Patrick Joseph Hackett on his release from Long Bay Jail on the 27th of October, 1962, after serving a 10-day term for indecent language. An embarrassed police commissioner was forced to exhume the corpse, and closer examination revealed the stem wounds and the mutilation to Hackett's penis and testicles. From a much closer examination of what was left of the fingerprints, they discovered that the body was that of a petty thief, Hackett, and not the mild-mannered shopkeeper, Alan Brennan. After the Walking Corpse headline appeared in papers across the nation, other witnesses came forward, which included a man whose business was next door to Brennan's shop, who said that he was certain he had seen Brennan, and another man, in the shop on the evening before Brennan disappeared.
Police felt sure that at last, if not belatedly, they were on to the mutilator. John McAfee supplied an extremely lifelike identikit of the missing Brennan, and it was circulated on the front page of every paper across the nation. Meanwhile, William MacDonald had taken a job on the railways in Melbourne, and even though he had dyed his hair and had a light moustache, there was no mistaking that he was a missing Brennan. Brennan's new workmates were on to him in a flash, and as he asked the stationmaster for his pay for the three days that he had worked, the police swooped on the meek and mild-mannered little man, who had brought Australia's biggest city to its knees, and took him to Russell Street for questioning.
William MacDonald didn't oppose his extradition to Sydney to face murder charges, and the crowd was at Sydney Airport to greet the two detectives and get the first glimpses of one of Australia's most grotesque and notorious serial killers. They were to be disappointed. The thin, short, shy MacDonald was nothing like the beast that they imagined was capable of such unimaginable crimes. William MacDonald confessed to everything.
Charged with four counts of murder, he pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity. His trial, held in September of 1963, was one of the most sensational the country had ever seen, and the public hung on to every word of horror that fell from the mutilator's mouth. When he testified how he stabbed one of his victims in the neck thirty times, and then removed the man's testicles and penis with the same knife, the woman in the jury fainted. Justice McLennan stopped the proceedings and excused the juror from the rest of the grisly evidence.
He then ordered MacDonald to continue. The gallery listened in awe as the mutilator told of the killings in great detail, explained how the blood had sprayed all over his raincoat as he castrated his victims, put their private parts in a plastic bag, and took them home. The jury was repulsed when he explained what he did with the genitals when he arrived back at his lodgings. The jury didn't take long to find William MacDonald guilty of four counts of murder.
As everyone thought that the mutilator was crazy, there was yet another sensation when the jury chose not to go with public opinion, but found him to have been sane at the time of the murders. Before passing sentence, Mr. Justice McLennan said that it was the most barbaric case of murder and total disregard for human life that had come before him in his many years on the bench. William MacDonald had shown no signs of remorse, and had made it quite clear that if he were free, he would go hard killing, as often as the urges came upon him.
William MacDonald was sentenced to prison for life, and his papers were marked likely to offend again. Shortly after his incarceration, he bashed another prisoner almost to death with a slop's bucket in Long Bay Jail, and as a result was declared insane by a panel of doctors. MacDonald spent the next 16 years at the Morissette Psychiatric Center for the Criminally Insane on the New South Wales Central Coast. In 1980, William MacDonald was found sane enough to be released back into mainstream prison society, and has since been in the protective custody section of Cessnock Prison, about a two-hour drive, west from Sydney.
He requested to live in this section of the jail because it was quieter, and he would not be disturbed by the prison louts. Here he lived out his days, in a reclusive existence, reading and listening to classical music, and was simply known as Old Bill. In these later years, he had no desire to live outside of prison. MacDonald didn't mind the occasional day trip out of Cessnock Prison to the nearby city of Newcastle, but what he saw there, he didn't particularly like.
In May of 2000, interview with author Paul B. Kidd, William, the mutilator MacDonald, the most feared serial killer in Australia's history, who held the nation's largest city under siege, said without the slightest hint of irony, it's terrible out there. People aren't even safe in their own homes. MacDonald died on May 12, 2015, aged 90, while still imprisoned.
At the time of his death, MacDonald was the oldest and longest-serving prisoner in custody in New South Wales. And so ends the tale of the mutilator. Next week I bring you back to London Town, where we will start to take a closer look at some of the more peculiar details surrounding Jack the Ripper. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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