The last man hanged in Western Australia, in October 1964, had confessed to eight killings and been tried for one. It took the state’s courts another forty years to deal with what he had left behind. Serial cases in Australia and New Zealand have rarely ended at the verdict. Some left a statute: New Zealand’s licensing of paid infant care came two years before the execution of the woman it was written about. Some left a correction, as when two men convicted in Perth in the early 1960s were cleared in 2002 and 2005. Some left a law aimed at a single prisoner, as in Victoria in 2023, or a prison population that outlived its record, or released papers and a parliamentary inquiry more than thirty years after an arrest. Nine cases, taken in the order of their crimes, show what police, courts and legislatures in each state were left to answer.
Williamina Dean, known all her adult life as Minnie, was hanged at Invercargill gaol on the morning of August 12, 1895. She was 50. From about 1889 she had taken in other people’s babies for money at a house called The Larches outside Winton, a farming town in Southland. A Supreme Court jury convicted her on June 21, 1895 of the murder of one of them, Dorothy Edith Carter, an infant girl. She is the only woman ever executed in New Zealand.
The trade was called baby farming. Unmarried mothers were shunned, contraception was unreliable and organized childcare hardly existed, so a woman who could not keep a child often paid someone else to take it, sometimes for good, in what amounted to informal adoption. Dean advertised discreetly. Her biographer Lynley Hood records fees of five to eight shillings a week, or lump sums of 10 to 30 pounds for an adoption, and NZHistory says she sometimes had as many as nine children under three at The Larches. Court cases in Britain and Australia in the 1880s had made New Zealanders alert to baby farmers who neglected children or hid their deaths. Infant mortality among European children was estimated at 80 to 100 deaths in every 1,000 live births, so some deaths among so many very young children were to be expected.
The police had watched her for years, but the law gave them little to use. Before 1893 they could not enter or inspect her property, and she was not required to keep records. That year Parliament passed the Infant Life Protection Act 1893, which required any house paid to look after infants under two for more than three days in a row to be licensed and open to police inspection. Dean did not register.
She was arrested at Winton in May 1895 after the grandmother of another infant, Eva Hornsby, went to the police. Her husband was arrested too, and the magistrate discharged him because there was no evidence he knew what his wife had done. Three inquests followed before local juries. The jury in Dorothy Carter’s case concluded she had died of poison given by Dean. The jury in Eva Hornsby’s case returned a finding of wilful murder without naming anyone. In the third, about a child believed to be Willie Phelan, the jury could not determine the cause, time or place of death. Sophie Davis, who studied the case in 2015, concluded that the inquests were procedurally valid by the rules of the time, and noted Hood’s view that they presented Dean to the public as a multiple murderer before any trial had begun.
The magistrate heard the case for three days from June 6, 1895, and committed her for trial. Her counsel, Alfred Hanlon, a young Dunedin barrister, held his defense back for the higher court. After the verdict the charge concerning Eva Hornsby did not go ahead. Leave to appeal was refused in R v Dean (1895) 14 NZLR 272, and the Executive Council declined to commute the sentence. More than a century later, historians and lawyers still argue about whether she was a calculating killer or a desperate and negligent caregiver, and whether her trial was fair by the standards of its own day.
Eric Edgar Cooke was hanged at Fremantle Prison at 8 a.m. on October 26, 1964. He was 33, a married father of seven from the Perth suburb of Rivervale. A jury had convicted him of a single wilful murder: John Sturkey, an 18-year-old student, one of the people shot in Cottesloe and Nedlands on the night of Australia Day, 1963, a night that left three people dead and two wounded. Cooke told police he had killed eight people and tried to kill 14 others between 1959 and 1963, and that he had committed more than 250 break-ins, ABC News reported in 2017. The state held him responsible for two other murders, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The rest of his confessions were never tested by a court.
Born at Victoria Park on February 25, 1931, he came into the world with a cleft lip and palate and was bullied at school for the disfigurement. His father drank and was violent. At the time of his arrest on September 1, 1963, he had six earlier convictions, all for minor crimes, and police knew him as a prowler and thief. He was charged that month with the murder of Shirley McLeod, 18, but was tried only for Sturkey’s. At his trial, which began on November 25, 1963, his counsel argued insanity and cited an abusive father, repeated head injuries and time in an asylum. Dr. A. S. Ellis, the state’s director of mental health services, rejected the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and no other specialist was allowed to examine him. He was sentenced to death on November 27.
What he left behind was two men already in prison. J.B., then 19, had been convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, 17; he had confessed in police interviews without his parents or a lawyer present, and a jury in May 1963 returned manslaughter instead of wilful murder. He served five and a half years of ten and was paroled in December 1967. D.B., a deaf young man, had been convicted of wilful murder in 1961 in the death of Jillian Brewer, 22, and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life. Cooke confessed to both deaths, and detectives rejected the confessions. About a quarter of an hour before he was hanged he reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed both women.
Nothing changed for the two men in his lifetime. The Western Australian Court of Criminal Appeal quashed J.B.'s conviction on February 25, 2002, after a journalist spent years reassembling the record of Cooke’s crimes, and D.B.'s on April 1, 2005. The state paid J.B. 460,000 dollars in 2003 and made an ex gratia payment of more than 400,000 dollars to D.B. in 2011. Cooke’s name now belongs to two histories, that of the last hanging in Western Australia and that of two convictions the state later set aside.
William MacDonald was sentenced in the Supreme Court of New South Wales on September 24, 1963 on four charges of murder, according to the findings of the coroner who examined his death. The four men had been killed in Sydney in 1961 and 1962. MacDonald also confessed to killing a man in Brisbane before the Sydney killings, a death that rests on his confession and not on a conviction. ABC News reported at his death that he was widely regarded as Australia’s first serial killer.
Born on June 17, 1924, in Liverpool, England, he arrived in Brisbane in 1954. He lived in several Australian cities under the name Alan Edward Brennan, went to New Zealand in 1959 and returned in 1961 to work for the Postmaster-General’s Department in Sydney. A doctor who saw him then described a schizoid personality. After the 1963 sentence of life in penal servitude he was certified insane and held at Callan Park Mental Hospital, and from 1964 at Morisset Hospital. He entered the prison system itself in 1976.
His case changed nothing in law. What it left was length. He was in custody for more than fifty years. When he died on May 12, 2015, at Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, aged 90, he was the oldest inmate in New South Wales and, ABC News reported, the state’s longest-serving prisoner. Police could find no next of kin. Deputy State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan held on June 9, 2016 that he had died of natural causes, that the State had met its duty of care and that the death was not suspicious.
David Birnie and his partner, Catherine Birnie, murdered four women in Perth in October and November 1986. Mary Nielson was 22, Susanna Candy 15, Noelene Patterson 31 and Denise Brown 21, the names and ages given by ABC News in 2005. The killings ended in November 1986 when a 17-year-old girl whom the couple had held in Perth got away and went to the police. Both pleaded guilty and both were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. In sentencing David Birnie, Justice Wallace said he should never be released.
Graeme Scott, who prosecuted the couple and later retired as a judge of the Supreme Court, said in 2005 that the case changed Western Australia. He compared the public’s apprehension at the time to fears of terrorist bombings and said that, apart from the case of Eric Edgar Cooke, it was probably the first time in the state’s history the public had been so unsettled. The guilty pleas meant that no jury heard the evidence and that far less of the case is on the public record than in cases decided at trial.
David Birnie died in Casuarina Prison on October 7, 2005, aged 54; the Department of Justice confirmed he had taken his own life. An inquest before Deputy State Coroner Evelyn Vicker, held in December 2007 and April 2008, with findings released on June 18, 2008, heard that he had gone three days without his antidepressant medication because of a paperwork error. The coroner concluded that the missed medication contributed to his decision, though she would not say it caused his death. A psychologist who had counselled him for years called him a chronic suicide risk who had never expected release. The girl who had escaped said through a statement read on ABC television the day after his death that her family now had closure.
The case that Western Australia kept debating was his partner’s. Catherine Birnie received a life sentence with a minimum term of 20 years, and her parole applications became a recurring public question: refused in 2007 and 2010, quashed in 2016, and in February 2017 AAP reported the premier of the day rejecting a parole call built on her case. In October 2018 the state government announced legislation, the Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill 2018, aimed at stopping parole for the worst multiple killers. In November 2024 the attorney-general was still delaying parole for three of the state’s worst killers.
Ivan Milat was convicted in 1996 of murdering seven young travelers between December 1989 and April 1992. Two were from Victoria, three from Germany and two from Britain. Deborah Everist and James Gibson were 19; Simone Schmidl was 21 and Anja Habschied 20, Gabor Neugebauer 21; Joanne Walters was 22 and Caroline Clarke 21. Their deaths came to light in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales between September 1992 and November 1993. The jury also convicted him of detaining a British backpacker, then 24, who had escaped in January 1990 and who reported the incident to police the same day.
Milat was a road worker from Sydney’s south-west. That backpacker gave police a description of the man who had picked him up, and four years later, after the deaths of the seven were linked, he identified Milat from 13 photographs. A task force, Task Force Air, was formed under Superintendent Clive Small on October 8, 1993. The reward for information was raised from 100,000 dollars to 500,000 dollars on November 5, matching the highest earlier reward in the state. Police kept Milat under surveillance for about two months. He was arrested in Sydney on May 22, 1994, aged 49, and charged first with the armed robbery of the backpacker and, at the end of May, with the murders.
The trial in the Supreme Court of New South Wales began on March 26, 1996 before Justice David Hunt, with Mark Tedeschi QC prosecuting and Terry Martin for the defense. The prosecutor told the jury that up to 40 features of Milat matched the backpacker’s description, and that there was "only one person in the whole of Australia who matches all of those descriptions." On July 27, 1996 Justice Hunt sentenced him to life imprisonment on each murder count, reported as seven consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole. An appeal was dismissed on February 26, 1998, a special leave application failed in 2004, and applications for an inquiry into the convictions were refused. He never admitted any killing. He died of cancer in the prison hospital at Long Bay on October 27, 2019, aged 74, still protesting his innocence.
What Milat changed is the part still unfinished. A coroner, John Abernethy, held in 2001 that three young people missing from the Newcastle area in 1978 and 1979 had been murdered by persons unknown, and named Milat among six persons of interest; no one has been charged. In 2025 the New South Wales government released papers from its files, and AAP reported a list of 58 missing-persons cases that investigators had reviewed in connection with him. A parliamentary inquiry into whether he had further victims began hearing from families in June 2026. Families told it of police failures in cold cases. None of this is a finding against him.
John Justin Bunting led a small group of men in Adelaide’s northern suburbs who killed at least 11 people between August 1992 and May 1999. A jury in the Supreme Court of South Australia convicted him of 11 murders on September 8, 2003; it could not agree on a twelfth, the death of Suzanne Allen, and prosecutors did not seek a retrial. On October 29, 2003, Justice Brian Martin sentenced him to life on each count and declined to fix a non-parole period. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal on May 24, 2005; he represented himself.
The case takes its name from a town that had almost nothing to do with it. In May 1999 police looking for Elizabeth Haydon opened a disused bank at Snowtown, a farming town about 140 kilometres north of Adelaide, and the deaths of eight people came to light there. None of the victims or the killers came from Snowtown, and only one victim died there. The rest of the killings took place in public housing suburbs north of Adelaide and at Murray Bridge. Nearly all the victims were relatives, friends, partners or neighbors of the men who killed them. South Australia Police described the group as one that "preyed on itself." Bunting, Robert Wagner and Mark Haydon were arrested the day after the bank was opened; James Vlassakis was taken into custody in June 1999.
The convictions were divided. Wagner was convicted of 10 murders, three on guilty pleas and seven by jury verdict. Vlassakis, who was 18 when he took part in his first killing, pleaded guilty to four in 2001 and became the main prosecution witness. Haydon, whose wife was among the dead, was convicted of seven counts of assisting offenders, not of murder. The group claimed the victims' welfare benefits after their deaths, about 95,000 dollars in all, AAP reported. The trial of Bunting and Wagner was the longest criminal trial in South Australia’s history, and the cases produced more than 200 suppression orders, one of which, on evidence given in court, was not lifted until September 19, 2005.
The public effects have lasted. Wagner’s bid for a non-parole date was refused in May 2019. Haydon was set for prison release in February 2024, and a supervision order followed in May. In May 2026 a suppression order on Vlassakis’s image lifted after 25 years, and AAP reported on October 8, 2026 that he had been released on parole. Bunting is serving life without parole.
In the winter of 1993, over seven weeks, three young women were killed in the bayside suburbs around Frankston, on the south-eastern edge of Melbourne. Elizabeth Stevens was 18. Debbie Fream was 22 and had given birth to her first child 12 days before she died. Natalie Russell was 17 and still at school. In the same weeks a fourth woman, aged 41, was kidnapped near Seaford and escaped. The man responsible, Paul Charles Denyer, was 21. He lived locally and did not know any of the women.
Denyer pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and to the kidnapping. On December 20, 1993, Justice Frank Vincent of the Supreme Court of Victoria sentenced him to life imprisonment for each murder, eight years for the kidnapping, and declined to set a non-parole period. His remarks, quoted in Parliament thirty years later, called the crimes "almost beyond comprehension." He told Denyer: "For many, you are the fear that quickens their steps as they walk alone." He said he would not "abrogate my responsibility to some distant Parole Board." In July 1994 the Court of Appeal, by a majority, set a minimum of 30 years. Psychologists who assessed him for the court diagnosed a sadistic personality disorder and did not find him legally insane.
Frankston did not forget. Members of the Victorian Parliament who lived in the area in 2023 recalled that young women stopped going out alone and that families checked their locks two and three times. A walking track in Frankston North was renamed Nat’s Track, and in 2021 the council approved 87,000 dollars for lighting, landscaping and a memorial mural. The minimum term expired in 2023. The Adult Parole Board of Victoria refused his application, and families were told on May 10, 2023. A bill introduced in the Legislative Council that month did not pass in June. The government then introduced the Corrections Amendment (Parole Reform) Bill 2023 on November 1, and it passed the Legislative Council on November 28. The resulting Act, known as Nat’s Law, bars his release on parole unless he is in imminent danger of dying or is seriously incapacitated. Thirty years after a judge refused to leave his release to a distant board, the law that decides it carries his name.
Peter Dupas is serving three sentences of life imprisonment, each with no minimum term, for the murders of three women in Melbourne. Margaret Maher, 40, died in October 1997. Mersina Halvagis, 25, died on November 1, 1997. Nicole Patterson, a psychotherapist, died in April 1999. The convictions came in the order the cases were solved, not the order of the deaths: a jury convicted him of the Patterson murder in August 2000 and of the Maher murder in August 2004. Applications for leave to appeal were refused in both.
The Halvagis case took longest. A jury convicted him on August 9, 2007. The prosecution case was circumstantial, resting on three witnesses who identified him and on an alleged confession to a fellow prisoner, Andrew Fraser, a former criminal lawyer jailed after pleading guilty to helping import cocaine. The two had shared a cell at Port Phillip Prison in 2005. Paul Coghlan, a former Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions, said: "Without Fraser’s evidence of Dupas' confession, there would not have been a prosecution." The Court of Appeal quashed that verdict, two to one, in September 2009. A second jury convicted him in November 2010, and a five-judge appeal bench rejected his last challenge in December 2012. He did not seek a third appeal. The Halvagis family waited about fifteen years from the death to the end of the legal process.
His record before 1997 was not a secret to the courts. He was convicted of rape in 1974 and sentenced to nine years, of which he served five. In 1980 he received a sentence with a five-year minimum for three counts of assault with intent to rape and for malicious wounding, and a report prepared that year called him "an extremely disturbed, immature, and dangerous man." He was released in February 1985.
A fourth case was never tried. In February 2018, while serving his life sentences, he was charged with the murder of Kathleen Downes, 95, a resident of an aged-care facility in Brunswick who died on December 31, 1997. The prosecution was discontinued in October 2019 when the key witness became too ill to give evidence. That is not an acquittal. Coroner Ian Gray had held in 2015, in findings published in July 2020, that her death was a result of Dupas’s actions. AAP also reported in 2020 that he was suspected, and never charged, in the earlier deaths of two other women.
Leonard John Fraser was convicted of killing a nine-year-old girl and three women in and around Rockhampton, a city on the coast of central Queensland, between 1998 and 1999. When a jury in Brisbane returned its verdicts on May 9, 2003, ABC News reported that he had become the state’s first convicted serial killer. He was a meat worker, born in Ingham on June 27, 1951, who had been a prisoner for 19 of the last 21 years of his life, according to the State Coroner. He had been picked up by police on the night Keyra Steinhardt, nine, was killed on April 22, 1999, and was convicted of her murder.
Keyra’s death led police to look again at other cases. They had little physical evidence in the women’s cases, CBS News reported, so they turned to an informer. A cellmate with a long record of fraud, working with police from 1999, wore a concealed recording device. The Crown told the jury that over two years Fraser told him many details of the deaths of Julie Turner, 39, Beverly Leggo, 37, and Sylvia Benedetti, 19. The trial began in the Supreme Court of Queensland in Brisbane on March 31, 2003, before Justice Brian Ambrose, and Fraser pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder. The fourth was that of a girl of 14.
In April 2003, days into the trial, police acting on a tip located that girl, now 18, alive in Rockhampton. The murder count was dropped, and the prosecutor told the court Fraser was not guilty of it. Justice Ambrose told the jury that the media coverage was "extremely unfortunate" and directed them to disregard commentary on whether the Crown should rely on confessions and admissions. The defense put the informer’s fraud convictions to him and suggested he had helped police for a reduced sentence; he denied it and said he had given up early parole to keep working on the case.
The jury convicted Fraser of the murders of Beverly Leggo and Sylvia Benedetti and of the manslaughter of Julie Turner. On June 13, 2003, Justice Ambrose imposed three indefinite sentences. Fraser died of a heart attack in the secure unit of the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane on January 1, 2007. The case changed what Queensland police and prosecutors were willing to stake on recorded admissions made inside a prison, and it changed the memory of one town: ABC News was still reporting in 2009 on how the case affected Rockhampton.
None of these cases settled what the public first assumed it had. A confession in Perth was ignored for forty years because two men were already in prison. A conviction in Victoria came from a cellmate’s account, was quashed once and won again. A series in Queensland rested on a man who had been recorded in prison, and one of its four victims turned up alive. Where the law changed, it changed late and narrowly, and in places for one prisoner only: a licensing act in Wellington that Dean never obeyed, a parole statute in Melbourne that names one prisoner, a Western Australian bill for the worst multiple killers. Where it did not change, the record was left to coroners and parliamentary committees, who are still reading it.
• 1889 to 1895: Minnie Dean takes in infants for payment at Winton, Southland.
• 1893: New Zealand’s Infant Life Protection Act 1893 requires licensing of paid infant care.
• May 1895: Minnie Dean arrested at Winton; June 21, 1895: convicted of murder; August 12, 1895: hanged at Invercargill.
• January 27, 1963: the Australia Day shootings in Perth that left three people dead.
• September 1, 1963: Eric Edgar Cooke arrested; November 27, 1963: sentenced to death.
• September 24, 1963: William MacDonald sentenced in Sydney on four counts of murder.
• October 26, 1964: Cooke hanged at Fremantle, the last execution in Western Australia.
• October and November 1986: the four murders for which David Birnie and Catherine Birnie pleaded guilty; sentenced to life in 1987.
• December 1989 to April 1992: the seven murders for which Ivan Milat was convicted.
• June to July 1993: the three murders for which Paul Denyer pleaded guilty; December 20, 1993: life sentences.
• May 22, 1994: Milat arrested; July 27, 1996: sentenced to life on each murder count.
• August 1992 to May 1999: the murders in the Snowtown case; May 20, 1999: Snowtown bank opened by police.
• October 1997 to April 1999: the murders for which Peter Dupas was convicted; August 2000, August 2004 and November 2010: convictions.
• April 22, 1999: Keyra Steinhardt killed; May 9, 2003: Leonard Fraser convicted of two murders and one manslaughter.
• February 25, 2002 and April 1, 2005: the two convictions linked to Cooke’s confessions are quashed.
• September 8, 2003: John Bunting convicted of 11 murders; October 29, 2003: no non-parole period fixed.
• October 7, 2005: David Birnie dies in Casuarina Prison.
• January 1, 2007: Fraser dies in hospital in Brisbane.
• May 12, 2015: MacDonald dies in custody, aged 90.
• October 27, 2019: Milat dies; February 2018 to October 2019: the fourth murder charge against Dupas is brought and discontinued.
• May 10, 2023 and November 28, 2023: Denyer refused parole; Parliament of Victoria passes the Parole Reform Bill.
• March 2025 to June 2026: papers on Milat released and a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry begins.
• October 8, 2026: James Vlassakis reported released on parole.