By Joshua Laing
In a country where everything is vicious and wants to kill you, it seems only fitting that the killers are all equally as vicious. There are certainly some killers from Australia with great notoriety, like Ivan Milat and the Brownout Murderer. But there is a great number of truly evil people that the public knows nothing of.
Leonard Fraser, nicknamed ‘Lenny the Lunatic’ before his murder spree began, was Queensland’s first serial killer. Born in north Queensland, raised in Mount Druitt, Fraser led a troublesome youth. He left school at the age of 14, and when he turned 15 he spent 12 months at the Gosford Boys Home after being caught stealing. The next several years saw Fraser existing exclusively on the wrong side of the law. From assault, grand theft auto and robbery, through to prostituting women, each of his fingers were buried to the knuckle in a multitude of despicable pies.
Leading up to his imprisonment for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl, he spent 20 out of 22 years imprisoned for raping a horrid number of women across New South Wales and Queensland. Included in his ream of victims was a terminally ill cancer patient. She died from her illness just six months after Fraser raped her in a hospital chapel.
On the 22nd of April, 1999, Fraser stalked 9-year-old Keyra Steinhardt on her way home from school. Waiting until she entered a vacant parking lot, he raped and murdered her in front of a female witness. The witness delayed notifying the police and despite a hasty arrest of Fraser, it took weeks for them to discern the location of the young girl’s corpse. Fraser withheld the location When Fraser finally told police the location, they found that her throat had been brutally slashed. Fraser’s delay had been because he believed DNA evidence only lasted 2 weeks.
Fraser received a life sentence with no chance of parole. He later confessed to a further three murders and led police to their corpses of Sylvia Benedett, Beverley Leggo and Julie Turner. His sentence was increased to five life imprisonments. One of his confessed victims, who’s body had not been recovered, was eventually found to be living with her boyfriend after being missing for half a decade.
Fraser died of a heart attack in the Princess Alexandra Hospital on the 1st of January, 2007. The Rockhampton Police Station now stands where Keyra Steinhardt’s body was recovered. He leaves behind a mystery destined to remain unsolved, however: 3 ponytails were found when police raided Fraser’s house, and despite the FBI’s assistance, it is still unknown who they belong to.
Pop culture often finds itself at the centre of controversy when atrocious events are committed. In the case of Snowy Rowles and the Murchison murders, Rowles found himself at the end of the noose after imitating the body disposal method outlined in the then unpublished book ‘The Sands of Windee.’
On October 5th, 1929, at the Camel Station Homestead in Western Australia, a gathering of men engaged in discussion. One of them, author Arthur Upfield, talked about the murder method he intended on using in his upcoming book. The method was intended to be flawless, leaving police no physical evidence to use in prosecution. The killer was to burn the body of the victim and the body of a large animal in the same pit. Any metal fragments were to then be sifted from the ashes and dissolved in acid. Once that was complete, any bone fragments were to be pounded and ground until only dust remained. Anything left after this would be fine enough to simply be thrown to the wind.
Rowles was enticed by this idea. He left the Camel Station on December 8, 1929. Shortly after, a gentleman of the name Louis Carron arrived in the area. On the 30th of May, 1930, Carron left his job and went off with Rowles. Soon after that, Rowles cashed Carron’s pay check in the town of Paynesville.
Carron’s friends, used to receiving regular letters and telegrams from Carron, were shocked to find he suddenly stopped responding to them. Detectives began to investigate, and discovered that alongside Carron, two other men last seen in the company of Rowles had gone missing. The detectives were tipped off to the body disposal method in Upfield’s upcoming novel, and it wasn’t long before they located human remains at a hut along the rabbit proof fence. Amongst the bones and ash was Carron’s wedding ring. The ring had a distinctively coloured seam from a jeweller using the wrong soldering iron during a resizing, making it instantly identifiable.
Rowles was arrested and found to be using an alias. He was actually a man by the name of John Thomas Smith, an escaped convict living under a false name. After a trial, a jury found Rowles guilty of all three murders in less than two hours. On the 13th of June, 1932, Rowles was hanged for murder at the Freemantle Prison.
If Rowles had followed the final instruction put forth in Upfield’s novel and dissolved the remaining metal in acid, he may well have escaped all conviction. Instead, he left out the most crucial step and found himself swinging in the breeze.
In the space of just 4 years, between 1959 and 1963, Perth found itself in the grips of a terrifying mass murderer. Eric Edgar Cooke, aged 28 at the time he began killing, slaughtered 8 people, and attempted to kill another 14. Cooke was the oldest of 3, raised in a violent household that frequently rocked with the abuse of his alcoholic father.
School was no easier for him. Born with a severe cleft palate, he found himself bullied relentlessly. Surgery to fix this didn’t help, as it left him with a twisted mouth and noticeable scar. As he grew older, he suffered tremendously as he would try to protect his mother from vicious beatings. He was hospitalised on multiple occasions and it is suspected that he suffered brain damage as a result of his father’s actions. He spent time in orphanages, foster homes and, at one point, even an asylum as he grew up.
He spent 18 months in jail for burning down a church in response to his rejection as a choirboy. His crimes escalated from there. He quickly turned to theft, breaking and entering into as many houses he could. He took pride in his work and kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his crimes. He spent 3 years in prison at the age of 18 for many of these crimes.
After marrying and starting a family at the age of 22, his crimes continued. From grand theft auto to peeping, it seemed there was no shortage of minor offences for him to commit. But, like many before him and countless after, he began to commit more violent crimes.
Across four years he killed 8 people in erratic, unrelated attacks. Knives and scissors were used to stab some of his victims to death, and a vast array of different guns were used to shoot others. Cooke also began stealing cars, which he would use to run people down, before returning them from where they were stolen and leaving the vehicle owners unawares of the crimes committed. The public lived in fear of the killer, not knowing who would be struck next.
One particular victim was subjected to an extremely brutal death, which saw them strangled with a cord in their bed. Cooke subsequently engaged in necrophilia with them, before dragging them to a neighbouring properties lawn and violating it with a whiskey bottle.
Cooke’s arrest came after more than 30,000 men aged over 12 were fingerprinted, more than 60,000 guns test fired, and two wrongly convicted men – one who was hanged for the crime he didn’t commit. Police located a hidden weapon in a bush on the roadside in Mount Pleasant that matched the weapon used in one of Cooke’s earlier murders. They quickly rendered it inoperable and began round the clock surveillance on it. He was arrested when he returned to pick the weapon up.
Despite pleas of insanity and schizophrenia, Cooke was sentenced to death by hanging and became the last person to be hanged in West Australia. His body was buried in the same grave as Martha Rendell, the last woman hanged in West Australia.
John and Sarah Makin hold their own amongst the most despicable of couple-killers across the world. After John suffered an injury whilst working as a drayman at a local brewery that left him unable to work, the couple began the practice of baby farming – caring for illegitimate or unwanted babies for payment – to pay the bills.
The conniving couple took new babies in regularly. Each child earned them approximately 3 pounds per payment. The Makins would promise the mothers that not only could they see their children at pre-arranged visits while they were with them, but that the visits would be allowed to continue once the children were permanently settled. But, since the couple failed to remain in one place for long, the parents would often turn up to the address provided and find that the Makins were gone.
Moving through 15 addresses in 20 years, it was one of their final addresses that brought them undone. After failing to pay rent for a property on Burren Street, Macdonaldtown, they bailed in the middle of the night to nearby suburb Chippendale. Their landlords moved back into the property and began to renovate. When they came to a blockage in the pipes, a man named James Hanoney came across two bundles of material wedged in tight. He ignored the horrid stench and pulled them out.
To his horror, what he had removed were the bundled corpses of two babies.
The police tore up the Burren Street yard, along with the yard of their previous few addresses. Sources vary, but there was a minimum of 12 murdered babies and potentially as many as 15 recovered. Also recovered were long, gunk covered needles. Physicians believed that the children had all been killed by having their hearts and spines pierced with the needles.
Both John and Sarah found themselves sentenced to death at the end of a trial that saw streets overflowing with people eager to see the monsters hanged. John was hanged at the Darlinghurst Gaol on August 15, 1893, but Sarah had her sentence commuted to life in prison. She spent 19 years at the Long Bay Gaol State Reformatory for Women. A campaign by her daughters saw her released from prison despite her heinous crimes.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Three figures in it do not match this archive's record and the reader should have them. Leonard Fraser is recorded here at four convictions, one in 2000 for Keyra Steinhardt and three in 2003, with a further count left undecided by the jury; the article's five life sentences overstates that, and it is right that one woman he confessed to killing was later found alive. Sarah Makin was convicted of the murder of one infant, Horace Murray, and the other twelve bodies were led at trial as evidence of system rather than charged, so the article's twelve to fifteen murdered babies is what was found and not what was proved. Her death sentence was commuted; John Makin was hanged. Eric Edgar Cooke is in this archive at eight and was the last man hanged in Western Australia, but the article is wrong on the wrongful convictions his case produced. Two men were convicted of killings Cooke committed, Darryl Beamish and John Button, and neither was hanged: Beamish's death sentence was commuted and both were cleared decades later. Cooke killed eight people over four years in separate attacks, which makes him a serial killer rather than the mass murderer the article calls him. Snowy Rowles, who was John Thomas Smith, has no entry in this archive; the Rowles it does hold is Paul Rowles, an unrelated man convicted in Florida.