On the morning of Monday, March 19, 1990, detectives watching a man in a suit and tie saw him knock at a house in Beauty Point, in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, and saw the woman who answered welcome him in. She was Joan Sinclair, sixty, a divorcee who played bridge with him, and they had a close but platonic friendship. The man was John Wayne Glover, fifty-seven, a salesman on his rounds for the Four'n Twenty pie company, and by then the police's main suspect in the killings of five elderly women. He went in at about ten. By one o'clock nothing had moved. At six the police went in and saw, through a rear glass door, a hammer lying in a pool of dried blood. Joan Sinclair was dead in the hallway, her head wrapped in blood-soaked towels and her pantyhose tied around her neck. Glover was in the bath, unconscious, having swallowed sedatives and whisky and cut his wrist.
He was born in Wolverhampton, England, on November 26, 1932, and emigrated to Australia in 1956 or 1957 by different accounts. In 1968 he married Gay Rolls, and they raised two daughters on the North Shore. He sold pies to shops, hospitals and nursing homes, and was well liked on his route.
The killings began on March 1, 1989, when Gwendoline Mitchelhill, eighty-two, was beaten to death in Mosman. On May 9 Winifreda, Lady Ashton, widow of the painter Sir Will Ashton, was killed; accounts give her age as eighty-four or eighty-two. Margaret Pahud, eighty-five, died on November 2, and Olive Cleveland, eighty-one, the next day. On November 23 Muriel Falconer, ninety-three, was killed in her own home in Mosman. Glover's method was the same each time: he came up behind the women, struck them with a claw hammer, strangled them with their own pantyhose and took their bags. He also attacked elderly women who survived, among them Margaret Todhunter, eighty-four, beaten and robbed of $2,000 in January 1989, and he indecently assaulted women in the hospitals and nursing homes he visited. The press called him the Granny Killer.
The North Shore was frightened for more than a year. A task force of some eighty or ninety detectives worked through more than seven hundred suspects. The Falconer killing, in a private house, left a bloody footprint and a neighbor's description of a gray-haired, middle-aged man. The break came on January 11, 1990, when an elderly patient at Greenwich Hospital reported being sexually assaulted, and police contacted a pie salesman who had been at the hospital on business at the time. Before they could interview him, Glover tried to kill himself, leaving a note that read "no more grannies." He survived, was discharged, and was put under surveillance, and it was the surveillance team that watched him walk into Joan Sinclair's house.
He pleaded not guilty on the ground of diminished responsibility. The jury rejected it, and in November 1991 he was convicted on six counts of murder and sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment, with the recommendation that he never be released. His file was marked accordingly.
He was suspected in other deaths. The lead detective on the case, Dennis O'Toole, has said he had no doubt that Glover also killed the designer Florence Broadhurst in her Paddington studio in 1977, a case that remains officially unsolved. In prison Glover gave interviews to writers and psychiatrists and talked about a hatred of older women; his wife, who did not divorce him, and his family stopped visiting.
He hanged himself at Lithgow Correctional Centre on September 9, 2005, at seventy-two.