The judge who sentenced Allan Baker in June 1974 told him he should spend the rest of his life in prison and die there. "If ever there was a case where life imprisonment should mean what it says, imprisonment for the whole of your lives, this is it," Justice Robert Taylor said, and he added that if anyone ever asked for mercy on Baker's behalf, the measure of it should be the mercy he had shown the woman who begged him for her life. More than twenty years later the Parliament of New South Wales turned that remark into law, twice, and Baker's own challenge to it went to the High Court of Australia and failed.
Baker, born on January 16, 1948, and Kevin Crump met in prison while serving time for breaking and entering and larceny, and on their release they went back to each other and to robbery. Ian James Lamb, forty-three, was asleep in his car beside the road near Narrabri on November 3, 1973, saving the cost of a room while he looked for seasonal work. Neither man knew him. From a stolen car Baker shot him with a .308 rifle. They took thirty dollars, some clothes and the gasoline, and moved his car. Later writers called it a thrill killing.
Three days later they camped near the property of Brian and Virginia Morse outside Collarenebri, where Baker had once worked as a farm laborer. They watched the house for two days, and when her husband and three children went out they took Virginia Gai Morse, thirty-four, filling their tank at the farm's pump and taking thirty dollars from the house. They drove her north by back roads, mostly at night, while she sobbed and pleaded with them. South of the Queensland border they tied her to a tree and raped her; beside the Weir River near Moonie, over the border, on November 8, they raped and tortured her again before Crump shot her between the eyes with a .222 rifle. They put her body in the river and burned her clothes.
The end came on November 13, when a burglary attempt near Maitland in the Hunter Region went wrong. Police chased their stolen car at high speed; the fugitives rammed one patrol car off the road, and when a second took up the chase they shot Senior Constable Bill Millward in the face. At a roadblock at Woodville they ran into the bush firing at police, and after a ground and air search they were found three hours later in a river.
Because Virginia Morse had died in Queensland, the Supreme Court of New South Wales could not try them for her murder. Before Justice Taylor they were charged with murdering Ian Lamb, conspiring to murder Virginia Morse, maliciously wounding a police officer and shooting at police to prevent their arrest. They pleaded not guilty. The jury convicted them on every count in an hour and forty-five minutes; Baker showed no emotion. The details of Morse's torture were suppressed at the trial as too disturbing to publish. Each man received two life terms, for the murder and the conspiracy, and fifteen years on each wounding count.
When Crump won a redetermination of his sentence in 1997, Parliament passed a law naming ten prisoners, Baker and Crump among them, and requiring the parole authorities to give substantial weight to what the original sentencing judge had said. Baker challenged that law as incompatible with the independence of the courts; in October 2004 the High Court rejected his challenge. A second law, in 2001, allowed prisoners like him to be released only if they were dying or so incapacitated they posed no danger. Crump died in custody in November 2023. Baker was held at Clarence Correctional Centre near Grafton, maximum security.