In August 1973 Archibald Beattie McCafferty came back from his son's grave convinced the boy was speaking to him. Craig had died at six weeks old, and McCafferty, twenty-four, believed his wife had killed him on purpose. The voice, he said, told him to kill seven people, and the child would be born again. On August 24, with a small band of followers, he found George Anson, fifty, drunk and staggering along a street, choked him and stabbed him repeatedly after he was dead. The Australian press would call McCafferty Mad Dog and his group a Manson family of the Sydney suburbs.
He had been born in Glasgow in 1949 and brought to Australia by his family when he was ten; his parents lived at Blacktown, in Sydney's west. The followers were young and damaged. Carol Howes was a mother of three; Julie Todd, sixteen, had been a psychiatric patient; the others were Michael "Mick" Meredith, Richard "Dick" Whittington and Donald "Rick" Webster.
After Anson came Ronald Neil Cox, forty-two, a father of seven. Todd and Meredith posed as hitchhikers, and when Cox stopped for them they held him at gunpoint and had him drive to the cemetery where McCafferty was waiting. He was forced to the ground and shot in the back of the head. The pair used the same trick to take Evangelos Kollias, twenty-four, who was also shot. The group was heading for Liverpool, where McCafferty's wife and her family lived, when the killing stopped.
At his trial in 1974 McCafferty said he had heard his son's voice. "I believe in my own mind that my wife murdered him on purpose and that is why I killed these men, for the revenge of my son's death," he told the court. The jury decided he was not insane and convicted him on all counts, and he was sentenced to three terms of life. Meredith and Whittington were convicted of murdering Cox and Kollias and got eighteen years each. Webster was convicted of Cox's manslaughter and got four. Julie Todd was convicted of both murders and sentenced to ten years; on May 20, 1974, she was found hanged in a bathroom at the Silverwater Detention Centre, just seventeen. Carol Howes was acquitted. Eight months pregnant with McCafferty's child, she called out from the dock that she would wait for him.
In prison at Tamworth he killed a fellow inmate, Edward James Lloyd. He denied it but received a further fourteen years. He later gave evidence about corrupt prison officers. On May 1, 1997, after twenty-three years inside, he was paroled and deported to Scotland.
There he changed his name to James Lok, worked as a painter and later a toymaker, and helped out in his partner's dress shop in Edinburgh. A trip to New Zealand ended in deportation for failing to declare his record. He died in Edinburgh in 2024, aged seventy-four, after a fall, suffering at the time from COVID-19, COPD, pneumonia and acute kidney failure. His death was not reported until July 2025.