In the Kings Cross area of Sydney, at the end of November 1998, a man telephoned a woman in Wagga Wagga and told her he had killed Ronald Galvin and left him at Uranquinty. Galvin was already on the books in Wagga as a missing man. Detective Rod Smith, later a New South Wales Police superintendent, said years afterward that it was that single call that put the investigation on its course. Within hours the caller, Matthew James Harris, had been found unconscious from a heroin overdose in a Sydney park, and by the end of the next day he had confessed to three murders, two of which nobody knew had been committed.
Harris was born on June 30, 1968 and was adopted at about ten months old. He learned it when he was ten, and by his own account and the assessments later put before the court, the discovery curdled into a resentment that never left him. He had behavioral problems in his early teens and left home at about fifteen to live on the streets of Sydney, where he worked as a male prostitute. In 1991 he was sentenced to penal servitude with a minimum of two and a half years for the armed robbery of a client. He told police later that as a child he had thought about killing his family, and that on the streets he had fantasized about killing clients and held back.
The one steady relationship in his adult life was with Elaine de Jong, whom he met through the Adoption Triangle organization while he was searching for his birth parents. She helped him trace his natural mother, who rejected him. She took him into her home for six or seven months while he came off heroin, and he went on to residential rehabilitation. By 1998 he lived in a rented unit in Wagga Wagga, was not in paid work, and drove as a volunteer for the local Community Transport service, which took elderly and disabled residents to appointments and shops.
The first violence on the record came that June. On the evening of June 20, 1998, Harris and Kenneth Scott Frazier, both carrying large kitchen knives and wearing baseball caps, knocked on the door of Trang Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, in Nordlingen Drive, said they were police, and pushed their way in when she resisted. She was alone with her three young children. They held knives to her throat and demanded her bank card and PIN, which she did not have, took about fifty-five dollars from her purse and roughly three more in coins, and ripped the telephone from the wall. On the way out Frazier drove his knife through the screen door and told her not to call the police. Harris spent his share on alcohol. Frazier, tried separately, was sentenced to fifty-four months with a minimum of thirty-nine.
Peter Wennerbom, sixty-two, was Elaine de Jong's brother. He had had a stroke, lived alone in a flat and kept cash there, and Harris knew all of it. On October 1 he got inside, by one account by asking for a glass of water and by another by forcing his way in, and strangled him. There was nothing to it, he told police: an old man, no resistance at all, and he had total control over the situation. He later described the killing as the start of something, and the fact that nobody suspected a thing as the discovery that made the others possible.
Yvonne Ford was thirty-three and had a mild intellectual disability. She lived alone, and Harris had come to know her through his driving. He said he had befriended her, could see she was lonely, and on October 17 went to her house only to say hello, and that the thought of killing her entered his head while he was there. He made a sexual advance that she turned aside, then suggested they share a bath, and in the bath he strangled her and held her head under the water for three or four minutes. It could have been anybody, he said; she was just unlucky, and he had thought she would be an easy target. Asked how he felt afterward, he said powerful, and angry, and that the anger was not at her but at the world, built up from the day he was adopted.
Ronald Galvin lived next door to Harris in Joyes Place. Published accounts give his age as fifty-three and as sixty-two. On November 3 he invited Harris in for a beer, and Harris attacked him from behind and strangled him; he said later that Galvin's small build had made him easy to control. The next evening he borrowed Elaine de Jong's car and drove the body about twenty kilometers out to Uranquinty, where he left it in a roadside table drain. His only explanation was that it had been a lot of anger he was getting rid of, and that it had been projected onto Galvin.
The killings stopped because Harris started to come apart. A few days after Galvin's death he overdosed on heroin, the first of two overdoses before his arrest, and he told de Jong about it, saying he needed to get something off his chest. He also saw a doctor in Wagga for depression. On November 30 he rang her repeatedly from Sydney, said he had killed Galvin and Ford, and said he was going to overdose to end it all. She took it to the Wagga Wagga police. That evening he was found unconscious in Embarkation Park at Potts Point and taken to St Vincent's Hospital. When he was discharged, at about three in the morning on December 1, Senior Constable Peter Hugh Clarke interviewed and arrested him, and he was taken to the Sydney Police Centre. Galvin's body was recovered from the drain at Uranquinty the same day.
The recorded interviews that day went victim by victim. He began with Galvin. At 5:02 p.m. he gave the Ford interview, and later he admitted Wennerbom, a killing that had never been treated as a murder. On December 7, with his solicitor present, he walked detectives through each scene and repeated the details: Wennerbom's solitary life and the cash, Ford's loneliness as the reason he chose her, Galvin's size. The pathologist, Dr. Paul Bottrill, found manual strangulation in all three deaths. Rod Smith remembered walking through Harris's unit and seeing shelves of books on true crime and serial killers, and Harris remarking that he wanted a book written about himself. In the interviews Harris said that to murder and keep murdering and get away with it was an achievement, and that he would still be going if he had not been caught.
He pleaded guilty to the three murders on December 3, 1999, and to the Nguyen robbery on March 24, 2000; some accounts date both pleas to the December hearing. Before sentence the court had reports from two psychologists, Ms. Matsuo and Ms. Barrier, who described schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder with avoidant and depressive traits, rooted in emotional deprivation, the adoption, his mother's rejection, the streets, prostitution and addiction. They recorded remorse, most of all for Yvonne Ford, a capacity for compassion and some motivation to change, while assessing him as a continuing risk. On April 7, 2000, Justice Virginia Bell of the Supreme Court of New South Wales weighed his early pleas and the fact that he had disclosed two killings no one knew about, found special circumstances, and imposed three concurrent terms of forty years with twenty-five-year non-parole periods, dated from his arrest, and three years for the robbery. He would have been eligible for parole on November 30, 2023.
The sentences drew protest almost at once. A notice of motion on the Legislative Assembly paper quoted his words about murder as an achievement and called the penalties far too lenient; published accounts date it to May 2 and to August 15, 2000. The Director of Public Prosecutions appealed. On December 20, 2000 the Court of Criminal Appeal allowed the appeal in part. James Wood, Chief Judge at Common Law, held that Harris's criminality and the level of his dangerousness were such that the court had to intervene, quashed the sentences for the murders of Yvonne Ford and Ronald Galvin, and imposed life imprisonment for each. The forty-year term for Wennerbom's murder stood, concurrent with them.
Life in New South Wales means the rest of his life, and at thirty-two Harris was among the youngest people in the state ever to receive it. The 2023 parole date attached to the Wennerbom sentence passed without effect, because the two life terms leave nothing to be paroled into. No release or death has been reported.