In April 1997, twenty-three years after he was sentenced to life, Kevin Garry Crump persuaded the Supreme Court of New South Wales to convert his sentence into a fixed minimum. Justice Peter McInerney set it at thirty years, which meant that from November 2003 Crump would have some prospect, however slight, of parole. The response came from Parliament rather than the courts. Over the next four years New South Wales passed two laws aimed at him and a handful of others, and the man who had fired the shot that killed Virginia Morse died in prison fifty years after his arrest.
Crump was born on October 1, 1949. He met Allan Baker in prison, where both were serving time for breaking and entering and larceny, and after their release they took up robbery together. On November 3, 1973, Baker shot Ian James Lamb, forty-three, a stranger asleep in his car near Narrabri while he looked for seasonal work, and they took his thirty dollars, clothes and gasoline. Days later they watched the farm of Brian and Virginia Morse outside Collarenebri, where Baker had once worked, and when her husband and three children were away they abducted Virginia Morse, thirty-four.
They drove her toward Queensland by back roads, raped her south of the border and again beside the Weir River near Moonie, where on November 8 Crump shot her between the eyes with a .222 rifle. In his statement to police after their capture he blamed Baker: "I was forced to kill Mrs. Morse by Baker because he wanted me to be in as deep as him. He said he was going to kill me if I didn't." He admitted he had been prepared to kidnap her. The two were arrested on November 13 after a high-speed chase from Maitland in which a police officer, Senior Constable Bill Millward, was shot in the face, and a manhunt that ended with them in a river near Woodville.
Because Morse had been killed in Queensland, New South Wales could not try Crump for her murder, though the evidence that he had shot her was compelling. He and Baker were convicted in 1974 of Lamb's murder, conspiracy to murder Morse, maliciously wounding a police officer and shooting at police, after a jury deliberated for an hour and forty-five minutes; Crump stared at the floor and shook. Justice Robert Taylor gave each two life terms and said that if mercy were ever asked for them, it should be measured by the mercy they had shown Virginia Morse when she begged for her life.
After the 1997 redetermination, Parliament passed legislation naming ten prisoners, Crump and Baker among them, and requiring parole authorities to give substantial weight to the original judge's remarks. In 2001 it went further, providing that such prisoners could be released only if dying or so incapacitated that they posed no risk. In 2003 the Parole Board refused Crump parole on that basis. He took the 2001 law to the High Court, which rejected his challenge in May 2012, and in February 2016 the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his attempt to appeal the 1997 determination; Bill Millward was among those who campaigned against his release. Crump died in custody at Wellington Correctional Centre on November 23, 2023, at seventy-four.