Brazel was born in 1954 in Victoria, Australia, and had an extensive record of armed robbery and arson before any of the killings; he is known as Bluey.
In 1982 he shot Mildred Hanmer, fifty-one, a shopkeeper, during a robbery. In 1990 he killed two women working as prostitutes, Sharon Taylor and Roslyn Hayward, and buried their bodies.
He was convicted and received three consecutive life sentences.
He has been in continuous custody since 1990 and has become known in Victoria for the volume of his litigation and complaints from inside, over conditions, over food, over medical treatment, and for hunger strikes. He has also given information to authorities about other matters, and his statements have been used and questioned in other proceedings.
The pattern is the one this archive records for several career criminals who killed: the murders arose out of robbery and out of the disposability, to him, of the women involved, rather than from any of the patterns that usually organise a serial case.