Matthew James Harris was born on June 30, 1968 and lived at Wagga Wagga in southern New South Wales. He was adopted.
On June 20, 1998 he and another man forced their way into a woman's house, threatened her with a knife in front of her three children, and robbed her of fifty-eight dollars, which they spent on alcohol.
On October 1 he forced his way into the house of Peter Wennerbom, sixty-two, the brother of a friend of his, and strangled him. He told police afterwards that Wennerbom was an old man, that there was no resistance at all, that he had total control of the situation and the man could do nothing.
On October 17 he went to the house of Yvonne Ford, thirty-three, who had a mild intellectual disability. He said he had struck up a friendship with her by driving her around, could tell she was lonely, and had not gone there for sex or for anything but to say hello. And that then the thoughts started entering his head that he wanted to kill her. As they sat in the bath together he strangled her and held her under the water for three or four minutes. It could have been her or anybody, he said; she was just unlucky, and he had thought she would be easy to target and relatively easy to kill. Asked how he felt afterwards he said powerful, and angry: pure anger, not at her, but at the world, built up from the day he was adopted.
On November 3 he strangled his neighbour, Ronald Galvin. The next evening he borrowed a friend's car and drove the body out to Uranquinty. His only account of that killing was that it was a lot of anger he was getting rid of, projected on to Galvin.
He overdosed on heroin twice: a few days after the last killing, and in the early hours of December 1, 1998, the day he was arrested.
He pleaded guilty to the three murders in December 1999 and to the robbery the following March. Justice Virginia Bell sentenced him in April 2000 to three concurrent terms of forty years with non-parole periods of twenty-five years, and three years for the robbery, making him eligible for parole on November 30, 2023.
In May 2000 the case was raised in the New South Wales Parliament, where it was noted that in his police interview he had said that to murder and to keep murdering and to get away with it was an achievement, and that he would still be going if he had not been caught. The sentences were described there as far too lenient.
The Director of Public Prosecutions appealed. On December 20, 2000 the Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the appeal, quashed the sentences for the murders of Ford and Galvin, and substituted life imprisonment. Chief Justice Wood said that the respondent's criminality and the level of his dangerousness were such that it was necessary for the court to intervene.
An earlier version of this entry recorded only the April 2000 sentence and reasoned from its non-parole period that he would become eligible for parole in the mid-2020s. That was wrong: the appeal removed it. Two of the three sentences are now life, and the parole date the old entry inferred no longer exists.