The Sydney Mutilator

When John McCarthy bumped into an old workmate in Sydney’s busy George Street in late 1962 he was deeply shocked, not least because he’d attended the man’s funeral only weeks before.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” were the first words that sprang to mind.

“What do you mean?”

“They found your body underneath your shop at Burwood. We went to the funeral service,” McCarthy incredulously said, before he realised the full implications of this chance meeting. “But if you’re alive, who was the body? And why did you run away?”

Instead of responding, the man once again ran, this time literally, fleeing along the footpath and out of sight. At that point he was using the alias Allan McDonald, though his workmate had known him as Allan Brennan and he’d arrived in Australia calling himself William McDonald. History would come to know him as the “Sydney Mutilator” but that wasn’t his real name either.

He was born Allan Ginsberg in Liverpool, England, in 1924. The defining moment of his life came in 1943 when he joined the army – at the height of the war and the tender age of 19 – only to be raped by a corporal in an air raid shelter and threatened with death if he reported it. The horror of such an event is easy to imagine, yet his shame and humiliation were only heightened by the realisation that he was himself homosexual. From that point onwards his life lurched from one misfortune to another. In 1947 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent six months locked in an asylum where he received daily electroshock therapy. In 1955 he emigrated to Adelaide, adopting the name William McDonald as a sign of how much he wanted to separate himself from the past. However, he didn’t exactly get off to a clean start and was almost immediately placed on a two-year good behaviour bond for propositioning an undercover detective in a public toilet. A subsequent move to Ballarat resulted in him being the victim of a violent gay-bashing.

By the time he moved to Brisbane in 1960 there was a rage building inside McDonald that even he didn’t seem aware of. It surfaced one night in the hotel room of 55-year-old Amos Hurst, an alcoholic he’d befriended and was in the middle of a heavy drinking session with. McDonald was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to kill and wrapped his hands around the other man’s throat, strangling the life out of him. When it was over he stripped Amos naked and put him to bed, then quietly went back to his own room. For days he waited in terror for news of the murder to break. However, when the obituary was finally published it said that Amos had died of a heart attack. McDonald could have safely stopped there but he’d gotten a taste for murder and found that he liked it. The first killing was just a hint of what was to come.

In January 1961 McDonald moved to Sydney and over the next two years he terrorised the city with a murderous rampage the likes of which the nation had never experienced before. His targets were alcoholic derelicts like Alfred Greenfield, a vagrant he befriended on the night of June 4, 1961. They walked together to the Domain baths and drank until Greenfield passed out, at which point McDonald calmly donned a plastic raincoat and stabbed him to death. He then removed the dead man’s pants, took hold of his dick and balls and sliced them off, throwing them in the harbour on the way home. At first police assumed they were looking for a jealous lover but that theory was quickly quashed on November 21, 1961, when Ernest Cobbin was found in a Moore Park public toilet with more than 50 stab wounds and no genitals. This time McDonald took his grisly trophy home with him, carefully washed it and took it to bed with him before throwing it off Sydney Harbour Bridge the next day. He followed a similar pattern when he struck down Frank McLean on March 31, 1962, in Bourke Lane, Darlinghurst. It has long been speculated that the murders – and particularly the ritualistic removal of the genitals – were caused by McDonald’s desire to take revenge on the corporal who had raped him and (to his mind) turned him gay, but there’s an equal possibility that he was just a fucking psychopath.

By November 1962 McDonald was still on the loose, despite the massive £5000 reward being offered for the killer who had become known as the Mutilator. Spurred on by his success so far, he brazenly took his fifth victim, Patrick James Hackett, home to the residence above his shop and stabbed him with such ferocity that afterwards the knife was too blunt and bent for the usual castration.

When McDonald awoke the next morning to find the cold body on his floor he panicked. He stashed it under the building and fled to Brisbane, changing his name once again. It took three weeks for the smell of the rotting corpse to attract the attention of neighbours, by which time it was so badly decomposed it was unidentifiable. Police assumed the body belonged to the missing McDonald and buried it in a pauper’s grave. Some of McDonald’s co-workers, John McCarthy among them, attended the funeral and even threw in money to buy a wreath.

Yet again McDonald had gotten away with murder, although he didn’t realise it until he returned to Sydney and bumped into McCarthy on George Street. Even then his fiendishness wasn’t immediately unravelled. McCarthy went straight to the police and told them he’d met the supposedly dead man, but wasn’t believed. It wasn’t until he went to The Daily Mirror, which printed the story under the famous headline “Case of the walking corpse”, that police began to put the puzzle together. Hackett’s body was exhumed and correctly identified, as were the stab wounds and attempted mutilation marks that had previously been missed. A sketch of McDonald was published and he was soon arrested in Melbourne, finally ending the rampage of Australia’s first serial killer.

During his trial McDonald expressed no remorse and attempted to defend himself on the grounds of insanity. However, the jury was unconvinced and he was found to have been sane at the time of the murders. He was sentenced to life in prison and is still there, as New South Wales’ – and possibly Australia’s – longest-serving inmate. He is currently at Long Bay Correctional Centre.

William, on a recent prison vacation at Bondi Beach.

In 2000 the aging mutilator gave an interview to author Paul Kidd, during which he claimed to have no interest in ever being release from prison. He said he was entirely institutionalised and did not feel he would survive on the outside. “It’s terrible out there,” he said, apparently with no hint of irony, “People aren’t even safe in their own homes.”

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