3 cases tagged “Australian true crime”
Convicted: Tracey Avril Wigginton
The police found her bank card tucked inside the dead man's shoe. His clothes had been folded neatly nearby, as though someone had taken great care with them, though no such care had been taken with Edward Baldock himself. He lay on the grass at Orleigh Park, stabbed twenty-seven times, his head nearly severed from his body. It was October 1989, and Brisbane was about to reckon with one of the most disturbing murders in its history. The woman whose card was found in that shoe was Tracey Wigginton, a 24-year-old who stood six feet tall and moved through the city's occult underground with quiet intensity. She had, by her own account and the accounts of her associates, been working toward this night for some time. She wanted to drink a human being's blood. When police caught up with her, she told them she had felt nothing while stabbing Baldock, that she had sat down afterward to smoke a cigarette and watched him die. At sentencing, she faced the cameras and said: "It's hard to be famous, isn't it? A legend in my own mind." This is the story of Tracey Wigginton: a troubled child from Rockhampton who became the most notorious female killer in modern Australian history, and the questions her case still provokes today about justice, rehabilitation, and the darkness that can take root inside a human being.
Convicted: Judith Maryanne Moran
On the morning of June 15, 2009, a small deli on Union Road in Ascot Vale erupted in gunfire. Desmond 'Tuppence' Moran, 68, was shot seven times as he reached for his wallet to pay for lunch. He was dead before ambulances arrived. Within minutes, a woman appeared at the scene, wailing his name over and over: 'Dessie, Dessie.' That woman was Judy Moran, his sister-in-law. Police would later allege she had driven the hitman to the cafe herself. Judy Moran was already one of the most recognizable figures in Australian criminal history. She had buried a husband, two sons, and a former partner, all victims of the Melbourne gangland war that consumed more than thirty lives between 1998 and 2010. She had written a memoir, given interviews, become something close to a tabloid fixture. And according to a Supreme Court jury, she had decided that grief was no longer enough, that the time had come to collect what she believed she was owed, in blood and in cash. This is the story of a woman who survived everything Melbourne's underworld could throw at her, only to become its instrument at last.
Convicted: Katherine Mary Knight
The dinner plates were already set when police broke down the back door of 84 St Andrews Street in Aberdeen, New South Wales, on the morning of 1 March 2000. Two place settings, two handwritten notes, two names: the children of John Price, a local miner who had not shown up for his shift. The food was still warm. So was what was in the pot on the stove, which turned out to be John Price's head, simmered with vegetables and seasoned with care. In the hallway, Price's skin hung from a meat hook his killer had recently installed in the living room ceiling. He had been stabbed at least 37 times. Katherine Mary Knight, a former abattoir worker with a decades-long history of escalating violence against the men in her life, was found unconscious at the scene from a drug overdose. She was 44 years old. On 8 November 2001, she became the first woman in Australian history sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. She remains at Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre today, aged 69, banned from access to knives and assessed as too dangerous to share a cell. This is her story.
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