The Walking Corpse article
Below, I have included a version of the article that is easier to read.
They began with the weird killing of Albert Reginald Greenfield on 3 June 1960. Greenfield, who was also known as Albert Thomas, was a blacksmith. Aged forty-one, he lived in a room in East Sydney.
His body was found in the picturesque and peaceful Sydney Domain, out in a spot that was an eyesore in the pleasant surroundings. It had been pushed under a rat-infested old shed alongside the Domain Baths.
Although the body had been dumped there, it was evident that the murder had been committed somewhere else in the Domain.
Greenfield's trousers and shoes were missing, and police were appalled at the condition of the corpse. The face and neck were a mass of stab wounds — more than thirty of them were counted later.
But the sadism and savagery had not ended with the stabbings. Part of his body was missing.
The murder weapon was nowhere to be found, and police naturally assumed that it would have been in such a bloodied condition that the murderer would not risk carrying it far.
They presumed it had been thrown into the waters of the nearby harbour and police skin-divers made an immediate search. But although they failed to find the weapon, they made a gruesome discovery — the missing portion of Greenfield's body.
The absence of trousers and shoes together with the mutilation suggested a sex motive; that this was a killing inspired by jealousy, that Greenfield had been in the company of a woman and was slain by an enraged husband or lover who had gone berserk with a knife or razor.
...of a woman and was slain by an enraged husband or lover who had gone berserk with a knife or razor.
Under the direction of Detective-Inspectors Freeman and Gray, detectives began the task of tracing Greenfield's movements the previous evening.
At this stage they did not anticipate much delay in apprehending a suspect. It seemed reasonable to expect that any woman involved would betray the murderer out of fear for her own safety, if not from revenge or a desire to see justice done.
No woman came forward. Police found where Greenfield had lived in rooms in Cathedral Street and Bourke Street with his wife, but she was unable to help them.
The murder had occurred either late on Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday morning. On the Saturday evening, Greenfield had been seen drinking in an hotel in Taylor Square, and he had left the hotel shortly after ten o'clock closing time.
No one reported seeing him as he made his way to the Domain, and so few people came forward with information about that period that police issued a general description of Greenfield, including a reference to a winged heart tattooed on the back of his left hand.
The results of their appeals for information were not encouraging, nor did they learn anything of value from interrogation of the scores of drifters who wandered into the Domain at night to drink cheap liquor and sleep off its effects there.
Greenfield was reported to have been a good worker at his trade as a blacksmith, but would occasionally go on drinking bouts, during which he frequented flop houses and the Domain.
This sadistic crime could not be permitted to remain unsolved and unpunished, and after two weeks of fruitless investigation, the Government announced a reward of 1,000 pounds for information that would lead to the apprehension of the killer.
It was understandable that the gruesome nature of the mutilation led police to believe that this murder had been actuated by jealousy, but it was a theory they were to abandon abruptly on 21 November — roughly five months after the killing of Greenfield — when the mutilator murderer presented them with another victim.
It was 5.30 am when police headquarters received a telephone call.
A man's voice said hoarsely, "There's a murdered man in the toilet in Moore Park opposite the Bat and Ball Hotel."
Before he could be questioned or the call could be traced, he had hung up.
The message was broadcast over the police radio and cars converged on the park toilet. First on the scene were Sergeants Pearce and Constable Furey, of Redfern, and they were joined a couple of minutes later by Detective-Sergeant Rankin and members of the Eastern Wireless Patrol.
They found a man's body on the floor and he was a ghastly sight. He had a deep slash in the left arm, indicating that he had tried to fend off his attacker, but it was the profusion of stab wounds to the neck that jolted the detectives into immediate comparison between this slaying and the murder of Albert Greenfield.
As they bent closer over the body their suspicions were confirmed.
The victim had been mutilated in the same manner.
The police now realised that the murderer was a pervert who selected his victims carefully in isolated places, probably taking them by complete surprise and totally unprepared for his sudden onslaught. Here was a psychopath on the loose, certain to strike again at the first opportunity.
At Police Headquarters and the CIB, urgent conferences were held and every possible channel of investigation planned and organised. Psychiatrists and the medical profession generally were asked to consult their records for a possible lead to the type of unbalanced patient who might be responsible for murders with mutilation. Interpol was requested by cable to check its worldwide files for any similar record.
The second victim was Ernest William Cobbin. He was forty-one years old, married with two children. He had been living in the suburb of Redfern, but at the time of the murder was living apart from his family.
Police established that Cobbin had listened to the broadcast of a fight on the Monday night in the Subway Hotel, Devonshire Street, East Sydney. He had sat quietly by the radio lingering over a glass of beer; he had said good evening pleasantly to the barmaid and had then gone out.
As in the case of Greenfield, detectives appealed in vain for information from anyone who had seen Cobbin after he had left the hotel.
The derelicts who haunted the park benches and their favourite sheltered sleeping spots in the Domain became a nervous fraternity. They were warned by detectives that the murderer would certainly strike again at the first opportunity.
Who and what type of man was he?
Police studied various theories — that he was a man of advanced medical or anatomical knowledge, perhaps a doctor or medical student. But the nature of the mutilations suggested that they could have been made by a butcher or a carcass cutter.
The CIB issued an official warning:
"We believe police pressure is forcing this murderer into the open and he could now strike anywhere at any time. We feel that any man who is alone in a lonely street or park for more than ten minutes could be murdered and mutilated by this maniac. We believe he is a homosexual psychopath who is killing to satisfy some twisted urge."
Throughout the metropolitan area, police maintained unceasing vigilance from darkness to dawn. Inquiries proceeded and occasionally they were deflected by hoaxes, but all their efforts were without reward, although by the end of the following March hundreds of people had been interviewed.
No crimes had so excited the public interest as the two mutilation murders, and that interest was still at its height when the murderer struck again.
On 31 March — a Saturday — Frank Gladstone McLean left a hotel in Surry Hills to walk to his home in Albion Street, not far away. It was after closing time and McLean, a tall, thinly-built war pensioner, was carrying a bottle of wine.
He was seen turning into Little Bourke Street at about 10.35 pm by three trainee nurses of nearby St Margaret's Hospital. At 10.50 pm he was found dying in the gutter by Mr and Mrs Cornish.
As they walked into the street their baby was crying and Cornish told police that this may have warned the murderer of their approach. He vanished into the shadows unseen, leaving his victim behind.
The horrified couple called for help. Police were so organised that within minutes thirty detectives were at the scene.
Police knew something of McLean. He had a string of minor convictions under different names, but they regarded him as harmless enough. Their chief interest was that he had claimed to have known Greenfield, and had once said, "I'll have to watch my drinking habits or I'll finish up like poor old Albie."
What he had said in jest was to result in grim irony.
Police found that he had been stabbed in the neck a number of times and his body had also been mutilated.
Again police failed to find the murder weapon, although they cordoned off the area, prised up manholes, and delved into stormwater channels.
One result of the third mutilation murder was the panic it caused among Sydney's deadbeats and drifters. Nervous after the first two killings, the third one had alarmed them to such an extent that they all left their usual haunts in city parks and doorways. The hostels and night refuges conducted by charitable organisations were unable to cope with the sudden influx.
Meanwhile the police dossier on the crimes had reached enormous proportions. It included a report from Interpol of an almost identical murder in Munich, Germany, in 1945.
The victim of the Munich murder was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, Wilhelm Heiber, who had been killed and mutilated in exactly the same way as the three Sydney victims. A United States soldier had been charged with the boy's murder but had been released after a second trial. Interpol notified police that it had asked the United States authorities to trace this soldier.
The soldier was traced, but he was still in the United States and could not be associated with the Sydney killings.
Within a week of the third killing, police were hopeful that the mystery murderer had been apprehended. In Melbourne, detectives had detained a twenty-three-year-old German migrant from the liner Patris. The man was...
The man was taken to Russell Street Police Headquarters late in the afternoon of 5 April, and was held for questioning by top Sydney detectives, headed by Inspector Freeman, who flew to Melbourne to carry out the interrogation.
When the Patris sailed at midday the next day, the young German was aboard.
Whatever his actions might have done to excite the suspicion of Victorian detectives, Freeman was satisfied that he was not the psychopath being hunted in Sydney.
Three days later investigations took a new turn when a former Melbourne medical student who had been living in East Sydney, not far from where McLean had been struck down in the street, was reported missing from his rooming house.
Suspicious neighbours told police that the young man had seldom left his room. He was traced, but again it was a dead-end.
Then, on the night of 14 April, a fourth attack by the mutilator was reported.
In this case a young airman, Patrick Royan, told police that he had been attacked in Goulburn Street, in the inner city. He said that a man had leapt from a ten-foot fence, wielding a knife in his left hand. Without speaking, but making a hissing noise, he lunged at Royan's throat, but missed.
Royan told a graphic story of a frenzied struggle for his life.
"The attacker seemed to come from nowhere. He was on me like a tiger. A knife about ten inches long aimed at my throat and missed me by about an inch."
Royan gave detectives a detailed description of the attempted killer — between thirty and forty years old, 5ft 10in to 6ft tall, slightly foreign looking, solidly built, olive complexion, big mouth, noticeably big teeth, and wearing a light-coloured suit or sports clothes.
The description was widely broadcast, but it was a false story.
Shortly afterwards Royan admitted that he had made up the story and his wounds were self-inflicted.
He was charged with having caused a public mischief and in court his counsel submitted on Royan's behalf that the young airman was an alcoholic and had undergone psychiatric treatment.
In sentencing him to eighteen months imprisonment, Judge Amsberg said:
"I have seen some liars in my time, but never have I seen such a ready, resolute, and cunning one. You gave a vivid description of a man wanted by the police and you later identified him from hundreds of police photographs, leading police to believe they had a significant and vital lead from which an Australia-wide search was set in progress."
Royan was not the only one to mislead the police.
A truck driver reported at Paddington Police Station that he had been attacked with a knife by a man he believed to be the mutilator. He showed Detective-Sergeant Douglas stab wounds and scratches on his neck, shoulder, and ribs and signed a statement giving details of the attack, but the next morning he admitted that he had inflicted the wounds on himself.
As police investigations failed to uncover the murderer, the Government increased the reward to 5,000 pounds.
And inquiries were still at a dead-end when this amazing series of crimes suddenly took a most unexpected turn.
A man was found dead under a shop in the suburb of Concord. His body was badly decomposed. It was identified as that of Alan Edward Brennan and, as no friends or relatives came forward on behalf of the dead man, the body was buried under that name in a pauper's grave in the Field of Mars Cemetery.
The Parramatta Coroner, Mr F. E. Cox, did not appear entirely satisfied with the police investigations made in the case.
Sergeant F. L. Ferris, of Strathfield, gave evidence that the body was naked except for a pair of socks, but said there was nothing to arouse suspicion of foul play. He told the coroner that fingerprints had been taken and forwarded to the Fingerprint Branch and that he had been told by Sergeant Robertson of the CIB that there was no record of the dead man's prints at the bureau.
Dr Irwin Smith, a Government Medical Officer, said he had been called to examine the body and had found it badly decomposed, but he also considered there was no evidence of foul play, as the skull and facial bones did not show any signs of fracture.
He confirmed the opinion that death had occurred two weeks or more before his examination.
The sensation was to come.
After the body had been buried under the name of Alan Edward Brennan, Brennan himself was reported to have been seen alive.
It is a serious reflection on the excellent record of the New South Wales police that valuable clues which could have led to the earlier identification of the mutilator were missed at the inquest on the body found under the Concord shop.
And five months went by before they served their purpose.
That the clues were missed even in the lower levels of police investigation was as fantastic as it was regrettable.
A shirt and a singlet were under the body and a coat and pair of trousers were beside it. Apparently none of the police noticed anything unusual about the shirt, which is difficult to understand, as it was later found to have been pierced with forty-one knife cuts in the chest, shoulder and sleeve.
No scientific investigation, it seems, was sought regarding the garment, nor was any significance attached to bloodstains on the kitchen floor of the shop and on a mattress found upstairs.
In the coroner's opinion the identification of the body as that of Brennan had rested on very flimsy evidence indeed.
And when returning an open verdict he 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 singlet.
"He was clad only in his socks, with his coat and trousers alongside him.
"Nothing was found that would indicate with 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 should have gone underneath the house to commit an act which would result in his death.
"It could have been that the deceased was the victim of foul play, although the police report said there was nothing to suggest foul play."
Still troubled, Mr Cox added:
"But I cannot altogether exclude that possibility."
As it was to transpire, the coroner's misgivings were only too well founded.
On 22 April a post office employee, John McCarthy, who had worked with Brennan, told police he had seen Brennan alive after his reported death.
He told police:
"I not only saw him in George Street in the city, but I spoke to him."
At this stage there was no suspicion that Brennan was the mutilator, but this could not excuse the slowness with which police went into action on McCarthy's report.
But their investigations were rapidly accelerated when newspapers began to publish reports from other people who claimed positively that Brennan was still alive.
One man told the newspapers:
"I know Brennan well. I saw him in the street and I said to him, 'Hey! You're supposed to be dead!'"
He added that Brennan looked at him, said, "Forget it!" and walked away.
Immediately he was dubbed by the newspapers, "The Walking Corpse."
The mystery became more intriguing when the newspaper disclosures failed to induce Brennan to appear.
If he were alive, as now seemed beyond doubt, whose body was buried in his name? And how did the other man die?
The query recalled the coroner's uneasiness that he could not exclude the possibility of foul play.
On 30 April police officials admitted that they accepted as a fact that the man they had buried at the Field of Mars Cemetery as a pauper was not Brennan, and Brennan himself was alive.
They began a continent-wide search for him.
But Brennan had completely disappeared.
In the meantime, the clothes found beside the dead man were identified from prison markings at Long Bay Penitentiary as those issued to a man who had served a short term as Patrick Joseph Hackett — an identification that should have been made earlier as a matter of routine investigation.
On the inside of a coat sleeve the number 1262 was written in indelible pencil and the same number was marked on a pocket of the trousers.
The suit had belonged to a company director named William Homer, who lived in the fashionable suburb of Vaucluse.
He told police that he had given the suit to the City Night Refuge in August 1962.
From the Refuge it had been passed out to Patrick Joseph Hackett, and a Long Bay Jail official had put the indelible pencil markings on the clothing when it had been sent to be dry-cleaned before being re-issued to Hackett on his discharge.
Hackett had been serving ten days in jail on a conviction for indecent language and had been discharged on 27 October.
Newspapers as well as police were still receiving reports confirming that Brennan was alive.
In addition to two PMG employees who were certain they had seen Brennan, a garage owner, Philip Treglown, whose business was next door to the shop where the body of Hackett was found, was also positive that he had seen Brennan and another man inside the shop the evening before Brennan disappeared.
The next day there was a sign in the shop saying that the owner had cut his hand and would be gone for three weeks.
The fact that the real Brennan chose to remain in obscurity was sufficient to connect him with the death of the man whose body was found and buried in his name.
The now intensive police inquiries revealed that Brennan was an English immigrant who had arrived in Australia about two years before.
But records in the Immigration Department were strangely uninformative.
He had apparently arrived in Australia under another name and had adopted the name of Alan Edward Brennan later.
Extensive inquiries were made in Liverpool, England, which was believed to be his home city.
As a postal employee in Sydney, he had given Liverpool as the place of his birth and had also stated that he had worked for twelve years for the British Aluminium Company at Laichford, near Liverpool.
That company's officials could find no record of Brennan ever having worked there, and Liverpool police could not trace him in their files, nor was there any record of the registration of his birth as Alan Edward Brennan in the records of Somerset House.
Frustrated along all obvious channels, British police checked shipping company records, taxation files, the records of the National Health Scheme, and motor registrations.
All drew a blank.
Police were handicapped by having no photograph of the man they were seeking. With the cooperation of postal employees who had worked with him, and other persons who claimed they knew him, a picture was evolved by the police Identikit process, and this was widely circulated. It was to lead to the apprehension of the wanted man on 13 May 1963.
Under the name of William MacDonald he was working as a porter at Spencer Street Station, Melbourne, when two of his workmates recognised him from a copy of the Identikit picture published in Melbourne newspapers. Robert Neil Morrison and Harold Convers Darcy thought there was sufficient similarity between MacDonald and the picture to justify reporting their suspicions to the head of their section prior to telephoning police. Once more, police investigations were threatened with a breakdown.
Morrison was to tell newspapers later, "We went to one of the section heads and said we thought the porter working at the station was wanted by police. The head told us we had been watching too much television and to forget the whole thing. We watched MacDonald for another week and then phoned the police."
A further bizarre touch to this strange case was added by Morrison: "A few days later we were called before another section head and told about a certain regulation which forbade employees in the railways to give evidence to police or other authorities without permission of the Railways Commissioner."
As a result of "the way they were treated", Morrison said, he and Darcy had left the Railways Department for other employment.
The charge they had made against the railways startled the Victorian Minister for Transport, Mr Meagher, who said, "The regulation Morrison referred to probably covers only confidential railway matters. I do not think it would forbid them giving information to the police. It is the duty of every citizen to assist the police, especially in cases such as this."
When he was arrested, MacDonald claimed that his correct name was William MacDonald, that his age was thirty-nine, and that he was an English migrant.
When he appeared before the Chief Stipendiary Magistrate, Mr J. W. Marwick, in the Melbourne City Court, he spoke only a few words in a deep north country accent.
When he was asked by Mr Marwick if he intended to oppose an order for his extradition to New South Wales on a warrant charging him with the murder of Frank Gladstone McLean in Little Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, on 31 March the previous year, MacDonald stared woodenly before him and said, "No, sir, no," and then added, "No, sir, I do not."
The inquest was reopened and at this inquiry Sergeant Ferris, the chief police witness on the third occasion, was closely questioned by Police-Sergeant Bush, assisting the coroner.
Ferris agreed that in his report for the coroner he had said that sufficient fingerprints were available from the body to establish that the prints were not on record at the Central Fingerprint Bureau at the Sydney CIB.
Ferris also agreed that in another report to the coroner on the same day he had stated that although Sergeant Robertson did not have a complete set of prints, there were sufficient for him to say there was no record of the dead man's prints at the bureau.
In the light of subsequent happenings, he now knew that Sergeant Robertson had established the identity of the dead man from the fingerprints obtained.
Ferris said that it seemed he had made a mistake in a telephone conversation with Sergeant Robertson. He told the coroner that he had made no specific inquiries on whether there had been any progress in identification of the fingerprints before submitting his report.
The coroner: "On 20 February you told me that the body was buried by employees from the Postmaster-General's Department. Was that the position?"
Sergeant Ferris: "As far as I know."
At this second coronial inquiry, Dr Irwin Smith repeated his previous evidence to the effect that he had noticed no stab wounds, and added that this could have been because of the state of the body and its partial destruction by vermin.
Questioned on whether he had found evidence of mutilation, Dr Smith said that the decomposed condition of the body would have prevented any such discovery and that he had found no evidence of foul play.
While awaiting his trial, MacDonald was allotted a cell to himself in Long Bay Jail where other prisoners slept two to a cell. At his trial the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming. The jury rejected the opinion of three psychiatrists that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and found him guilty of the murder charge.
The convicted man added some bizarre touches of his own. He said that he was guilty of having killed a taxi driver named Peter Banham in New Zealand by knifing and strangling him on 20 February 1963, a murder for which another man was convicted. Investigations proved that it was impossible for MacDonald to have been in New Zealand at that time.
He also claimed that he had killed a man named Amos Hurst in March 1960 in Brisbane. The body of Hurst had been found wrapped in a rug and there was a possibility of death by strangulation. The post-mortem revealed that he had died of heart failure.
At his trial, although he was charged with the murders of Greenfield, Cobbin, McLean, and Hackett, the Crown elected to proceed with the charge of the murder of Patrick Joseph Hackett at Concord on 3 November 1962.
After a brief period under observation in Long Bay Jail and Callan Park Mental Hospital, MacDonald was moved to Morisset Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum security institution.
MacDonald resisted the psychiatrists' efforts to probe into his past. He blanketed it with lies, half-truths, evasions, and fanciful invention. But he persisted that his mental condition had begun to deteriorate when, as a young guardsman in London, he was sexually assaulted. He claimed that the indecent assault on him had been made by a corporal and that the attack had inspired in him a smouldering desire for revenge on members of his own sex.
"When it became too strong for me," he said, "I killed and mutilated."
In Morisset he settled down quietly, giving the guards no trouble, but showing no inclination to fraternise with other inmates. Understandably, the other inmates showed no desire for his companionship.
