Allan Baker and Kevin Crump met in a New South Wales prison, serving time for breaking and entering and larceny. They went back to each other on release, and in November 1973 they killed two people ten days apart.
Ian James Lamb, forty-three, was asleep in his car near Narrabri on November 3, saving the cost of a room while he looked for seasonal work. They did not know him. They shot him with a rifle and took thirty dollars, some clothes and the gasoline out of his car.
Ten days later they went to a property near Collarenebri where Baker had once worked. They took Virginia Gai Morse, thirty-four, a mother of three, from her family’s farm. She was held for some twenty-two hours, raped repeatedly, and killed across the Queensland border.
That border decided the charges. The Supreme Court of New South Wales had no jurisdiction over a death in Queensland, so both men were tried for the murder of Ian Lamb and for CONSPIRACY to murder Virginia Morse, alongside counts of maliciously wounding a police officer and shooting at police. The jury took under two hours. The trial judge said they were obscene criminals who should die in prison, and both were sentenced to life with thirty years hard labor.
The case then changed Australian sentencing law. Crump won a redetermination in 1997 setting a minimum of thirty years, due to expire in November 2003, which would have released him. In 2001 New South Wales legislated so that he and nine other named prisoners could never be released, and in 2004 the High Court of Australia upheld that law against Baker’s challenge to it.
So a judge’s remark from 1974 became statute twenty-seven years later, and it held. Crump died in custody on November 23, 2023, aged seventy-four, after fifty years inside. Baker remains in prison in New South Wales.