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

removed her pantyhose, wrapped it around her neck and strangled her. Having tidily rearranged her walking stick and clothing, he removed $60 from her handbag and headed for the club. An increasingly worried state government increased the reward they were offering for information from $200,000 to $250,000.
    Although they were not yet being linked to the murders, on 11 January 1990 there was a significant breakthrough in the investigations into the molestations of the elderly women in nursing homes. Glover had visited the Greenwich Hospital that day in his work outfit. With an official-looking clipboard in his hand, he entered the hospital’s palliative care ward which was occupied at the time by four elderly women. He pulled up the nightdress of one of them and touched her indecently. When she screamed for help, a hospital sister arrived and found Glover. He ran out of the ward, but she managed to get the registration number of his vehicle and the police were called.
    Glover was identified as the attacker and he was asked to come to the police station to answer some questions. When he failed to appear, they called his house to be told that he had tried to take his own life and was in the Royal North Shore Hospital. He refused to answer any questions but handed staff of the hospital a note saying, ‘no more grannies ... grannies’ and ‘Essie started it’.
    When the note was passed to the squad investigating the Granny Killings, they knew they had their man. But they did not have any evidence and unless he talked, he would have to be allowed to go free. They decided not to alert him to their suspicions and put him under surveillance.
    He still managed to kill one last time. On 19 March, he visited sixty-year-old divorcee Joan Sinclair, a friend of his. Police officers watched him enter the house at around ten o’clock but by one o’clock there was no sign of him leaving and there appeared to be no movement inside the building. Increasingly concerned, at six o’clock they entered the building where they found Sinclair’s battered body, naked from the waist down and with the tell-tale pantyhose tied around her neck. Glover’s hammer lay in a pool of blood on a mat. Glover was found unconscious in the bath, which had been filled with water. He had washed down a handful of Valium with a bottle of whisky and had then slashed his wrists.
    Glover survived and at his trial pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, blaming his action on the aggression he felt towards first his mother and then his mother-in-law. However, the prosecution argued successfully that Glover had been well aware of what he was doing and had tried to trick the police into believing they were dealing with a sexually motivated murderer. In fact, it was claimed, Glover needed his victims’ money to feed his addiction to the poker machines at the social club he attended.
    Sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, he hanged himself in his cell on 9 September 2005.
    Just days before he killed himself, Glover handed a sketch to his last visitor. It was a drawing of a park and in amongst the palm trees was the number nine. This figure is believed to represent the number of murders that he had committed but had never been charged with.

Peter Dupas
     
     
     
     
    According to friends, twenty-eight-year-old Nicole Patterson was one of the nicest people you could meet. A consulting psychotherapist who dedicated much of her time to helping disadvantaged young people, especially those with drug problems, she had turned the bedroom of her home into a consulting room and had placed adverts in the local papers, looking for clients. Unfortunately, one of those who read the advert was a man called Peter Dupas, a serial sex offender who had also turned killer.
    Dupas’s record stretched back to 1968 when he was just fifteen. He had been born in Sydney into a normal family in 1953, the youngest of three children. However, he had arrived many