Within about two weeks of his release on parole for a string of armed holdups in 1978, Paul Steven Haigh, twenty-one, shot dead Evelyn Adams, fifty-eight, a lottery agency worker in Melbourne, in an armed robbery; some accounts give her surname as Abraham. In another robbery the same year he killed Bruno Cingolani, forty-five, a father of two who ran a pizza shop. He had needed money. What followed in 1979 was about something else: he began killing people he thought knew too much.
Haigh was born on September 5, 1957. His first killing of 1979 was an associate, Wayne Keith Smith, twenty-seven. Then he went after Smith's former girlfriend, Sheryle Gardner, thirty-one, and shot her as she sat in her car. Her son Danny Mitchell, ten, was sitting beside her. Haigh shot him too, so that the boy could never identify the man who had killed his mother.
The last of the six was his own girlfriend, Lisa Brearley, nineteen. He believed she had been sleeping with other men. He allowed another man to rape her at knifepoint and then stabbed her 157 times. He was arrested in 1979, convicted of all six murders and sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
In 1991, in Pentridge prison, he hanged a fellow inmate, Donald George Hatherley, a sex offender, in a cell. He was convicted of murder and given a fifteen-year term on top of the life sentences. He has always said the death was an assisted suicide.
In December 2012, at fifty-four, he went to the Supreme Court of Victoria to ask for a minimum term to be set, the first step toward any release. He read the court a series of his own essays on honesty and redemption, called his crimes abominable, horrendous and evil, and acknowledged a manipulative and brutal past. He told the judge he was "a far cry from the monster of yesteryear." He compared himself to a butterfly that could not shake off having once been an ugly caterpillar: "While I don't claim to be a perfectly formed butterfly, I am not a caterpillar either." He argued that he had borderline personality disorder and deserved a lighter sentence, a claim the court did not accept. The application was rejected on December 13, 2012, and the six life terms without parole stand.