On November 20, 1962, after neighbors complained of a putrid smell, police found a body under a mixed-business shop on Burwood Road in Concord, in Sydney, so decomposed it could not be identified. It was taken to be the shop's new owner, a man named Alan Edward Brennan, and his former workmates at the post office read the notice in the obituary column and went to the funeral. Some time later one of them, John McCarthy, ran into Brennan on a Sydney street. "I believed you had died," he said. "Leave me alone," the man answered, and ran. The police told McCarthy he had been drinking and he was crazy. He went to the Daily Mirror, whose crime reporter Joe Morris ran the story as the case of the walking corpse, and the publicity forced the police to exhume the body. The fingerprints were those of Patrick Joseph Hackett, and the body bore stab wounds and the mutilation of the notorious Mutilator. Brennan was William MacDonald.
He was born Allen Ginsberg in Liverpool, England, on June 17, 1924, the second of three children in a well-to-do Jewish family, and was regarded as antisocial and emotionally neglected. Called up in 1943 and posted to the Lancashire Fusiliers, he was raped one night in an air-raid shelter by a corporal, an experience that preyed on him for the rest of his life. After his discharge in 1947 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent months in an asylum receiving electroconvulsive therapy. He changed his name, went to Canada in 1949 and to Australia in 1955, where soon after arriving he was put on a two-year good behavior bond in Adelaide for touching a detective in a public toilet. He moved to Ballarat and then in 1961 to Sydney as a construction worker, and became known in the parks and public toilets of East Sydney where gay men met in secret.
The killings began in Brisbane in 1961, when he befriended Amos Hugh Hurst, sixty-three, outside Roma Street railway station, drank with him, and in Hurst's apartment strangled and punched him to death, then tucked the sheets over his head and left. On June 4, 1961, police were called to the Domain Baths in Sydney, where Alfred Reginald Greenfield, forty-one, lay naked, stabbed about thirty times, his genitals cut off; MacDonald had offered him a drink on a bench in Green Park and waited until he fell asleep. Ernest William Cobbin, about thirty-seven, was stabbed and mutilated in a public toilet at Moore Park, MacDonald wearing a plastic raincoat against the blood. On March 31, 1962, in Bourke Lane in Darlinghurst, he stabbed Frank Gladstone McLean, was interrupted by a young family, then came back to finish him. The precision of the mutilation led police for a time to suspect a surgeon.
On June 6, 1962, working as Brennan, he met Hackett, thirty-seven, a derelict just out of prison, at a wine saloon on Pitt Street and took him back to the shop. He stabbed him with a boning knife until he had to stop for breath, cutting his own hand badly, and fell asleep beside the body when the blunted knife would not do the rest. In the morning he had his hand stitched at a hospital, dragged the corpse under the shop and fled to Brisbane, and then New Zealand, before returning to Sydney, where McCarthy saw him. An identikit picture ran in every newspaper in the country, and though he had dyed his hair and grown a moustache, his workmates on the Melbourne railways, where he was employed as David Allan, recognized him. Police arrested him on May 13, 1963, at Spencer Street station as he collected his pay.
He readily admitted the killings and blamed an irresistible urge; the voices in his head, he said, told him his victims were the corporal who had raped him. Charged with five murders, he pleaded not guilty on the ground of insanity at a sensational trial in September 1963 and described the killings in such detail that some jurors fainted. The jury convicted him despite strong evidence of insanity, and Justice McLennan, calling it the most barbaric case to come before him, sentenced him to five consecutive life terms with a strong recommendation that he never be released. He was soon certified insane and moved to a secure mental hospital. Known inside simply as Bill, he became the longest continuously serving inmate in the New South Wales system. "I have no desire to go and live on the outside," he said in 2003. "I wouldn't last five minutes." He died of a gastrointestinal blockage on May 12, 2015, at ninety, the oldest and longest-serving prisoner in New South Wales.