Australian Serial Killers - The rage for revenge (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Read Free Book Online

were not even certain that they were connected. Finally, they reasoned that it was just another mugging – there had been many in the area – that had gone very wrong.
    It was ten weeks before Glover killed again. Lady Winifred Ashton had been playing bingo at the social club that Glover also frequented and was walking home when Glover saw her. He again followed her into the foyer of her apartment building where he attacked her with the hammer. She was a frail little old lady who was suffering from cancer at the time, but she put up a fight. However, Glover bashed her head continuously on the concrete floor until she was unconscious. He then removed her pantyhose and, pulling it tight around her thin neck, strangled her. He had established a calling card that would tell police that it was the same man carrying out these horrific crimes. He also arranged her shoes and walking stick neatly at her feet. He found $100 in her purse and returned to the social club to buy drinks with it and play the poker machines to which he was addicted.
    The police now knew they were dealing with a serial killer, a homicidal maniac who was heartless enough to unleash his violence on defenceless old ladies. Although he never had any interest in sexually assaulting the women he killed, he now very strangely started assaulting elderly, bed-ridden women in the nursing homes he visited in his capacity as a pie salesman. He began on 6 June by putting his hand under the nightdress of seventy-seven-year-old Marjorie Moseley at a retirement home in Belrose. When the police were called, she was unable to describe her assailant and they made no connection between these crimes and the murders.
    He did it again on 24 June at another retirement home, when he lifted an elderly lady’s dress and fondled her buttocks, and in the neighbouring room he stroked another woman’s breasts. Staff, alerted by the woman’s shouts, came running and questioned Glover but he left without being held or his identity being established.
    On 8 August, he assaulted Effie Carnie in a back street of Linfield, not far from Mosman, not killing her but stealing her groceries. He impersonated a doctor on 6 October, putting his hand up the dress of a woman patient in a nursing home at Neutral Bay, a harbourside suburb, but again escaped.
    On 18 October he started a conversation with eighty-six-year-old Doris Cox and walked with her into the secluded stairwell of her retirement village. Suddenly, he smashed her face against the wall, using all of his strength. He rummaged in her purse, but finding nothing, left her for dead and went home.
    Unfortunately, Mrs Cox’s description of her attacker had police looking for a considerably younger man than Glover. It was a lucky break for him, especially when police began to think that they were probably looking for a local teenager with a grudge against grandmothers. Police concentrated all their efforts on this and Glover was free to continue his attacks.
    On 2 November, he offered to carry home the groceries of an elderly woman in Lane Cove, about ten miles from Mosman. The woman offered him a cup of tea in return but he declined. On his way back to the main street he passed eighty-five-year-old Margaret Pahud and, turning, hit her on the back of the head with a blunt instrument, probably his hammer. When she collapsed to the ground he struck her again on the side of the head, killing her. He grabbed her handbag and took off after neatly arranging her clothes as usual. Shortly after, he was buying drinks in the social club with the $300 he had found in her purse.
    Twenty-four hours later, eighty-one-year-old Olive Cleveland became his fourth victim. He engaged her in conversation on a bench near her retirement village in Belrose. When she stood up to go home, he grabbed her from behind and pushed her down a ramp onto a secluded lane. He beat her and slammed her head continuously against the concrete until she lost consciousness. He then