Mildred Hanmer's murder went unsolved for eighteen years. She was fifty-one, a triple-certificate nurse who had opened a hardware and gift store in Mordialloc, on Melbourne's bayside, with her husband, an engineer. They had agreed that if they were ever robbed they would hand over what was asked and not risk their lives. On September 20, 1982, a gunman robbing the shop shot her in the chest, and she died of the wound at the Alfred Hospital. Police interviewed more than 1,500 people and had no one to charge until August 18, 2000, when a prisoner at Port Phillip Prison asked to see detectives and told them he had done it.
The prisoner was Gregory John Brazel, known as Bluey, by then ten years into sentences for killing two other women. He did not give the confession away. Before he would make a statement he sought an undertaking from police that no life term would be imposed, and at the plea hearing, which opened on February 14, 2003, and resumed on March 14, the Crown did not ask for life and told the court he remained a prisoner for whom a minimum term should be fixed. He was sentenced to life for the Hanmer murder, with a non-parole period reported as twenty-seven years.
The two 1990 killings were committed while he was out on early release. Sharon Taylor, a sex worker, was killed on May 28, 1990, and her body was found on September 23 in a shallow grave at Barongarook, south of Colac. Roslyn Hayward, also a sex worker, was killed at Sorrento, on the Mornington Peninsula, on September 13, ten days before Taylor was found, and her body was not recovered until October 1. Detectives later said they believed he knew he was under investigation for the first murder when he committed the second. He was arrested on September 26, 1990.
Each murder went to its own trial. A Supreme Court of Victoria jury convicted him of killing Taylor in August 1992, and his twenty-year sentence was cut to seventeen on appeal. In May 1993 a second jury convicted him of killing Hayward, and the two terms together came to thirty years with a minimum of twenty-five. He is often described as serving three consecutive life sentences, but the court history shows fixed terms for the 1990 murders and life only for Hanmer.
His record ran back to the army. Born in Blacktown, New South Wales, on November 17, 1954, he enlisted in 1974, trained at Kapooka and that September was posted to the Army Medical Training School at Healesville. In 1976, during a medical corps exercise there, he took five privates hostage; shots were fired before he was talked into releasing them, and he was dishonorably discharged. Between March 1983 and August 2000 he was convicted of thirty-seven offenses across fifteen court appearances, among them armed robbery and arson. In 2000 he was estimated to be worth more than A$500,000.
Prison did not settle him. In November 1991, told he was being moved to Pentridge, he took a staff member hostage at the Melbourne Assessment Prison. Other inmates beat him badly in 1998, and he was assessed as one of the state's highest-risk prisoners and kept in the top-security Acacia Unit at Barwon. In May 2001 he was attacked with a broken bottle at Port Phillip, and in 2006 the state settled his claim for A$12,000; that October he was caught gathering personal details about senior prison staff.
His later years have been spent in court as a plaintiff. After another assault in Barwon's high-security unit he won access, on appeal, to a prison map and an incident report so he could sue the state for failing to protect him. He sued over a chemical agent used to subdue him at the Metropolitan Remand Centre in May 2013, and after mediation in 2023 accepted A$22,100 toward future medical costs, some legal costs, and continued access to a blender, a kettle and a sandwich press for his diet. In 2022 he accused officers of opening his legal mail and destroying a USB drive that he said held nearly all his legal papers. In January 2025, aged seventy, in poor health and held at Barwon, he lost a Court of Appeal bid to reopen the 2023 settlement, which he said he had been bullied into, and to force the prison to give him an in-cell frypan. That report said he would first become eligible for parole at the end of March 2025; earlier reports had put his eligibility in 2020.