The Chilling Case of John Wayne Glover: The Mosman Granny Killer

Introduction

Mosman sits atop a hill overlooking the water in the Middle Harbour part of Sydney’s most famous waterway. Home to Taronga Zoo and Balmoral Beach, its inhabitants are among the richest in the country. There’s a small cluster of shops, a long strip of expensive boutiques, and widely spaced groups of spacious English style cottages and medium rise luxury apartment buildings. This idyllic insularity was even more marked back in the nineties when much of our story takes place.

Detective Inspector Mike Hagan recalled that crime was “practically non-existent in Mosman at the time”.

It was a rude shock, then, when elderly ladies began dying violent deaths in the streets and retirement homes of Sydney’s most affluent areas. Not just Mosman, but all of Australia at the time, thought of serial killings and drive-by shootings as things which happened exclusively in America, and not in the quiet and sheltered great southern land. The sheer unexpectedness of finding such evil stalking one of Sydney’s safest beauty spots meant that the case of the Mosman Granny Killer, as the press would quickly dub him, gripped the entire nation, putting both the police and media through their paces as they grappled with an entirely new phenomenon, and casting a dark shadow of fear and horror over Australians everywhere.

Thinking the Unthinkable

In the late afternoon of Friday the first of March 1989, eighty-two-year-old Gwendolin Mitchelhill walked past the Mosman RSL and made her way to her apartment building just a couple of blocks up the street. For those who don’t know, the RSL is the Returned Services League, an organisation initially set up for and by veterans, similar to the VFW in America. The Mosman RSL was and is something of a community hub, offering good quality meals at reasonable (for Mosman) prices, and a range of regular social events, as well as serving the basic functions of a pub. Mrs Mitchelhill had been shopping just down the street, and she had to walk past the RSL to get home.

A little while later, Mrs Mitchelhill was found sprawled and bleeding at the front entrance of her apartment block by a couple of schoolkids who’d been visiting relatives in the same building. Police and Ambulance were called, as was normal, and given her age and location, and the fact that it was broad daylight, the overriding opinion was that the poor lady had suffered a nasty fall. It was on this assumption that kindly neighbours cleaned Mrs Mitchelhill’s blood from the scene, thoroughly washing down the front steps and cleaning the splatter from the doors.

Mrs Mitchelhill was taken to hospital, where she died later that night. It was discovered that she was missing her purse, which was known to have contained a reasonable amount of cash, which made police suspicious. Forensic pathologist Dr Johan Duflou also had serious concerns.

Mrs Mitchelhill’s pantihose and underwear were missing – it was pretty unusual for a lady, especially one of that age, to go about bare-legged back in those days, to say nothing of the underwear. In addition, the injuries to her skull were very severe. The well-intentioned people who’d cleaned up the scene had obscured the volume and distribution of blood loss, so it was only on later examination that it became apparent that Mrs Mitchelhill had been severely beaten about the head.

There was too much trauma for a simple fall, and on top of this, there was a fracture on the midline of the back of the skull. This is seriously atypical for a backwards fall, as an automatic reaction to falling backwards is to turn the head, meaning that you’d expect to find damage on either of the parietals rather than dead centre. All these facts put together led police to the appalling conclusion that this respectable elderly lady had been beaten to death for a purse and, presumably, some sort of dark sexual motive, despite there being no evidence of rape.

Detective Sergeant Dennis O’Toole was one of the first to visit the crime scene. The missing underwear, coupled with the lack of any evidence for rape or sexual assault was, in his words, “a little bit baffling for the investigators, initially”. On top of this, there were no witnesses, despite a thorough canvas of the area, no forensic evidence of any value, owing to the kindly neighbours who’d cleaned the scene, and no real indication of motive.

Sure, the lady had been robbed, but robbery didn’t explain the rest of it – the intense violence of the attack and the weird sexual element. The lack of witnesses also puzzled the police, as the attack took place at a busy time of day, less than a minutes’ walk from the main shopping and restaurant strip, and next to a busy construction site.

Later murders would have a similar lack of witnesses, and this is an important detail to remember for later. Now, Mosman detectives don’t get much in the way of murder, this not being Baltimore or Manly, and as we’ve already seen, they also didn’t get much in the way of crime in general, at least not violent crime. But this didn’t mean they were incompetent – far from it.

The police opened an investigation and worked at it diligently and well. This might have been because wealthy areas get better service. It might also have been that they didn’t have much else going on.

But these two hypotheses are deeply unfair. Mosman and the surrounding area may have been quiet, but Sydney was in the grip of an opioid epidemic at the time, as well as struggling with organised crime abetted in part by the corrupt coppers down in my old neck of the woods, just twenty minutes away. As friends of mine in the police say, being a homicide detective is more a test of character than of brilliance.

There’s not much scope for soaring flights of brooding genius, or sudden flashes of divine inspiration – it’s all about always choosing to follow up any and every lead no matter how much you might want to let something slide.

Every lead, every tip, every possibility needs to be doggedly chased down – this tenacity of purpose is the most valuable asset in a homicide investigator, not only in terms of solving cases, but also in ensuring the strongest possible prosecution. And in a refreshing departure from many cases, it seems the police on this one consistently passed that test of character. Diligence only goes so far, though, and they had practically nothing to go on, and despite their best efforts, weren’t too hopeful of being able to solve what they’d concluded was an isolated random stranger murder – one of the toughest kinds of crimes to solve even under the best of circumstances.

The killer, apparently forensically aware, had left no fingerprints or other forensic evidence. There were no witnesses to any sort of suspicious behaviour, and very little in the way of similar crimes in the area, at least as far as the cops knew at the time. The investigation faltered for want of leads.

This was the state of play when, just a month later on the 9th of May, Lady Winfreda Ashton left the Mosman RSL, having had a pleasant afternoon of lunch and bingo, to return to her home just a few minutes’ walk away. Lady Ashton was the eighty-four-year-old widow of Sir John William Ashton, one of Australia’s most important landscape painters. She went back to her apartment block, not far from Mrs Mitchelhill’s, and finding some junk mail in her letter box, went to the garbage room to get rid of it. Here she was brutally attacked, the killer smashing her head against the concrete floor repeatedly.

It was later discovered that Lady Ashton had fought – had, in fact, resisted furiously and very nearly successfully – before being overpowered. Her stockings were removed and used to strangle her so violently that traces of the fabric were embedded in her neck. When police found her, what remained of her stockings were folded neatly near her head.

Her walking stick and shoes were placed, equally neatly, by her feet. Her bright red coat and other clothing was disarranged in a way which suggested sexual display, though there was once again no sign of sexual assault. First responders actually drove past the killer, who was spending the $100 he’d stolen from her at the Mosman RSL and commenting to staff that he hoped the sirens weren’t another robbery turned violent.

Once again, well-meaning residents who’d found her had washed down the crime scene – it seems they too assumed Lady Ashton had suffered a fall. Friends of the victim indicated to police that a bright red purse, matching her coat, was missing from the scene. Once again there were no fingerprints and no witnesses, and Dr Duflou and his team were still nowhere with the murder weapon – blunt object was the best they could do.

Lady Ashton’s red purse was found dumped in Ashton Park, coincidentally named after her late husband, but a search of the park yielded nothing relevant. This time, the police didn’t settle for a normal canvassing area, but instead began a massive doorknocking campaign covering four square kilometres and over two-thousand households – basically the whole of the Mosman precinct. This yielded hundreds of leads, and also led to the identification of a suspect – a young man who’d been spotted by concerned residents.

He was very well described, and an identikit was circulated. Basically, Mosman’s residents had, when asked if they’d seen anyone suspicious in the area, put the finger on a young drug addict they’d seen wandering around their pristine neighbourhood.

Dr Rod Milton, Sydney’s most experienced forensic psychologist, was called in to create a profile. He concluded, contrary to the wandering junkie theory, that the perpetrator was most likely employed and local to – or at least familiar with – the area. Owing to the level of violence as well as the apparent sexual element, he concluded that the murderer must be reasonably young, as indicated by the statistics on crimes of extreme violence.

The killer would likely have had extremely difficult relationships with significant women in his life and would most likely have some priors to do with violence against women. He also suggested that the killer may have spent some time in the military, as even discounting the washing down of the scenes, there seemed to be a reflexive neatness to them which suggested military training.

Police combined this profile with their own thinking on the fact that both murders had been committed at around the same time of day – around four p.m. – and came up with a couple of theories. They combed through the records of HMAS Penguin, a naval base in Mosman, and started interviewing suspects from the Army and Navy. They also looked at the local schools, theorising that the theft, the time of day, and the bizarre sexual element might be explained away by the perpetrator being a school student. They came up with hundreds of suspects and followed every one of them up, even placing some of them under surveillance, but all to no avail.

The press was convinced straight away, with the kind of certainty peculiar to tabloid journalism and TV news, that the murders were linked, and the police weren’t too far behind them. Inspector Mike Hagan told a documentary team that, “A decision was made to link the two murders, which was a very appropriate decision to make”. The police were under an enormous amount of pressure, owing to the bizarre nature of the crimes, the equally bizarre fact of their occurring in Mosman, of all places, and justifiable public outrage at these attacks on some of the most vulnerable people in society. As far as can be told, Lady Ashton’s high profile was pretty incidental to the public’s interest – people were just as incensed about Mrs Mitchelhill as they were about Lady Ashton.

Anyway, under all this pressure, Inspector Hagan recalls that he frequently went for long walks around the crime scenes, “trying to get into the mind of who might be doing this”. The mayor of Mosman, Justice Barry O’Keefe, responded to public fear by mobilising the Rangers – basically parking police – to stop and speak with any elderly ladies they might see. They were instructed to talk to them, calm their fears, and offer them a ride home.

It seems that the fine ladies of Mosman were, at this stage, alert but not alarmed, and generally refused these services. What they did do, however, was attend public talks on enhanced personal safety. You know the kind – vary your routines, lock your doors, don’t talk to strangers, and so on.

And as for the residents of Mosman, they were now compelled to grapple with the previously unthinkable notion that a serial killer was stalking their streets.

An Eyewitness, and a Change of Scenery

Wednesday, October the 18th, just after four o’clock, saw eighty-six-year-old widow, Doris Cox, heading back to her place in a retirement village called The Garrison. The Garrison is on a busy main road and is home to a large population of well-to-do retirees requiring varying levels of care, as well as independent living apartments. The Garrison was mostly famous for its immense expense and the occasional violent feud between residents.

Anyway, Mrs Cox was walking home from the shops, her way taking her through a narrow walled pathway. The Garrison is appropriately named – from the street it looks like a fortress, complete with battlements and crenelated walls, and it’s impossible to see into the grounds from outside. Before she could get back to her apartment, Mrs Cox was attacked from behind, her head slammed repeatedly into a brick wall before she was left for dead. Incredibly, Mrs Cox survived.

Police, upon receiving the report, rushed to the scene, only to find that staff, thinking Mrs Cox had had a fall, had thoroughly washed and scrubbed the area. Detective Sergeant O’Toole, who strikes me as a fairly blunt man, must have struggled to contain his frustration.

Sergeant O’Toole had reason to be hopeful, though, as Mrs Cox’s prognosis looked good, and as soon as she was ready to be interviewed, he was there armed with a notebook and his best bedside manner. Unfortunately, Mrs Cox suffered from chronic dementia, and couldn’t remember anything about the circumstances of the attack, or even that it had taken place. When O’Toole showed her a mirror, presenting her with her incredibly battered reflection and insisting that someone had done this to her, Mrs Cox’s response was to gaze at it and say, “That’s not me”. Stymied yet again, the police were back to square one.

All was not lost, however. The Garrison is on one of the busiest streets in Sydney, and a public appeal for witnesses was broadcast.

Hundreds of tips flooded in, and several eyewitnesses reported seeing a skateboarding teen riding past The Garrison at the time of the attempted murder. Inspector Hagan’s team were able to put together an identikit, and for several weeks, some poor kid was probably hunkering down in his parents’ basement, wondering why an unkind fate had set the dogs of a whole city on his trail. Or perhaps he didn’t notice.

In any case, he never came forward. Now, a kid on a skateboard might seem an improbable suspect, but we have to bear a couple of things in mind. The fact that all these crimes had occurred just after school let out made it seem likely to the police that a student might be involved.

There was also the fact that forensics couldn’t pin down the exact nature of the murder weapon. This frustrated them immensely – NSW police have a good forensic unit which has dealt with some very high profile crimes, and it was unusual that they couldn’t narrow down the weapon.

They were getting a bit desperate, and since they found that they couldn’t rule out the trucks or deck of a skateboard as a potential candidate, this seemed to add weight to what the team was calling “the juvenile hypothesis”. Eventually, Dr Duflou’s team was able to eliminate the skateboard as a potential weapon, but vital resources were spent on looking for the skateboarder for some time afterwards, as he remained a person of interest. It’s also worth noting that skateboarding was definitely a subculture which was often associated with delinquency and criminality in the popular mind at the time, so perhaps this fixation was understandable.

While all this was going on, the killer continued to haunt the streets. Dorothy Beencke, a seventy-eight-year-old resident of the affluent suburb of Lane Cove, about four miles from Mosman, was heading home from the Lane Cove shops, laden with groceries, on Thursday the 2nd of November – just a few weeks after the attack at The Garrison. Along the way, she was approached by a portly man of about sixty years of age with grey hair and a calm and soothing manner.

He offered to help carry her bags and they walked along together, chatting idly of this and that. When they arrived at her home Mrs Beencke, apparently one of the world’s most risk tolerant people, invited him in for a cup of tea. This in spite of the frankly hysterical press coverage of ‘The Granny Killer’ which had been going on for months.

The man refused the cup of tea and wandered off. A little bit later, eighty-five-year-old Margaret Pahud passed the same man in a narrow laneway near her house. The man turned, caved in her skull from behind, removed her underwear and stole her purse, leaving her shoes placed neatly by her body. A schoolgirl returning home came across the body and ran home to get her mother.

Mrs Pahud was still breathing, and the girl and her mother called an ambulance. By this time some neighbours had come out to help and decided between them that Mrs Pahud must have suffered a heavy fall. By the time the ambulance arrived, Mrs Pahud was pronounced dead, and her neighbours washed down the crime scene. This might seem really strange to us, but the Australian public at this time was very forensically unaware and cleaning up after someone who’s suffered an injury was seen as a caring thing to do.

On top of this was the fact that the press had strongly associated these murders with Mosman alone, and Lane Cove was another area of Sydney where this kind of crime was considered unthinkable. It wasn’t unthinkable for the police, though, who swiftly connected this murder with the other three. They went through their usual routine, canvassing the area, interviewing witnesses, and recording what little evidence had been left by the well-intentioned citizens who’d cleaned the scene, but they were seriously hampered by the press coverage, who were all eager to introduce the public to the concept of copycat killings.

The Australian public at large had very little awareness of the tropes and popular beliefs about serial killers at the time, so the press, in its efforts to be an expert, authoritative voice, decided that the change in locale must be the work of a copycat. According to Mike Hagan, the sudden introduction of the copycat idea significantly tainted their potential witness pool. Time and again they would interview potential witnesses who were resistant to the idea of all three murders being linked, which made them argumentative and difficult to interview.

In the meantime, detectives set up an incident room at Lane Cove and proceeded to work through the night and all through the next day. Good police work involves an improbable amount of paperwork as well as pounding the pavement and talking to people, and the police were determined to ensure the highest level of momentum possible in the crucial twenty-four hours period just after a murder. Come the next afternoon, which was a Friday, Inspector Hagan’s team were drooping with fatigue, and he made arrangements to knock them off and hand over to deputy commanders and staff who would keep the incident room running while they got some sleep.

Mike Hagan got as far as a few hundred metres from his house and Sergeant O’Toole was in the process of cracking open a can of beer – a “tinnie” in Australian parlance – when the call came through. There was another body. This one was in a retirement village in Belrose called Wesley Gardens.

Eighty-one-year-old Olive Cleveland was sitting on a park bench in the grounds when she was approached by a middle-aged man with grey hair who engaged her in conversation. Feeling uncomfortable, she moved away, but he followed her to a concrete side path near the main building, where he beat her to the ground before strangling her with her pantyhose. Mrs Cleveland’s body was found by staff members, who promptly washed and scrubbed the area before reporting her death. When police arrived, they were faced once again with a clean crime scene, a complete lack of witnesses, and no viable forensic evidence.

At this point there were about thirty five detectives working the case, following up leads, conducting active surveillance of suspects and passive surveillance of churches, shopping centres, and retirement homes, and generally running themselves ragged trying to track down one of the state’s first known serial killers. With three dead and one attempted murder, and with the murder rhythm and violence level escalating dramatically, the decision was made to form a larger taskforce, and the number of sworn officers working the case jumped to seventy. These new officers came from a variety of different units, and there was even a specialised detachment of undercover surveillance officers, known in the parlance of the time as “the dogs”.

By this time the media coverage was utterly frenzied, which is understandable, and there was a real sense of panic not just in the more affluent parts of the North Shore, but all over Sydney. The public and political pressure on the NSW Police to close this case was higher than ever.

A House Call and ‘Old Man’ Shoes

Muriel Falconer was a strong and independent ninety-three-year-old lady who lived alone in her house in a peaceful, leafy Mosman street set back from the main precinct. Mrs Falconer was determined to be as independent as possible, and despite her partial deafness and failing vision, she was highly successful at this, with a little help from Meals on Wheels and her near neighbours.

In the late afternoon of Friday, the 23rd of November 1989, Mrs Falconer was heading home from the shops. She passed the Buena Vista Hotel, called “the Bew-na” by locals allergic to foreign pronunciations, and popular with workers from the nearby zoo. Sitting at the Buena was a middle-aged man with grey hair who, spotting Mrs Falconer, proceeded to follow her home.

When she was in the process of opening her front door, he struck her repeatedly on the head, threw her to the ground and began removing her pantyhose. Mrs Falconer came to and began struggling and calling out, so he beat her unconscious once more, finished removing her pantyhose, and then strangled her with them. He stole money from her purse, closed and locked the front door and left.

The next morning, Mrs Falconer’s neighbours noticed that her Meals on Wheels lunch was still uncollected on her doorstep. Maggie Hughes, a registered nurse and good friend of Muriel’s, decided to use her spare key to go and check on her. When she opened the door she was confronted with the sight of Mrs Falconer’s prone body, her skull fractured and bloody, a full carton of ice cream on the hallway floor, and her empty purse sitting ransacked on a side table.

Mrs Falconer’s shoes had been placed neatly beside her and Maggie, as a nurse, knew from the smell that her friend had recently died. Maggie Hughes, unlike the generality of the Australian public, knew a crime scene when she saw one, and being aware of the wall to wall media coverage, knew instinctively that this must be the work of the so-called “granny killer”. Making sure to preserve the crime scene, she confirmed her friend was dead and called the police.

When they arrived, they got to work with feverish eagerness as this was the very first pristine crime scene they’d found in this whole series of murders. Maggie was a good witness too, having a retentive memory and a strong eye for detail – a rare and precious commodity in any investigation. Police were able to gather a wealth of forensic evidence in the form of blood samples and distribution patterns – which is how we’re able to know the exact sequence of the crime.

Most excitingly of all, they also found a footprint in a blood stain on the carpet. This section of carpet was cut out for analysis, but the press had gathered in front of the house, and Inspector Mike Hagan was determined to keep his new evidence secret, for fear that the killer might dispose of his shoes if he saw news footage of forensic officers carrying footprint evidence away from the scene.

Hagan and his team quickly hatched a plan. There was a busy construction site adjacent to Mrs Falconer’s house, and forensic officers were ostentatiously sent over to it to take plaster casts of footprints in the mud of the building site. Officers were briefed to tell the waiting press that they had found vital clues in the site next door, and footage was broadcast on the evening news of police taking plaster casts of footprints from the site. This brilliant piece of disinformation was designed to lull the killer into a false sense of security, as he’d be aware that the footprints they were taking couldn’t be his own.

The police canvassed the whole Mosman precinct once again, and information came flooding in, swelling the suspect list to 740. Of these, 739 were individually eliminated. The last one was a twenty-two-year old unemployed man with a history of mental illness and whose relationship with his mother was so bad police had been called to his house multiple times. From the detectives’ point of view, this was a perfect match for their criminal profile.

They promptly put the dogs on him, running twenty four hour covert surveillance, exhausting work which they hoped would catch him in the act.

In the meantime, though, a taskforce detective sergeant called Paul Tuxford had decided to go back to square one, poring through every single witness statement in a thorough and methodical manner, to see if there was anything they’d missed. While doing this, he came across an inconsistency which led him back to Maggie Hughes, who upon being re-interviewed, mentioned that she’d seen a porty middle-aged man in a silver suit (it was the eighties after all) lurking around the area. This was the early days of computing, and people charmingly described as “computer experts” were tasked by Sergeant Tuxford to do a word search of the police database for the keywords “grey”, “haired”, “old”, and “man”. This yielded more than half a dozen hits, all involving violent muggings of elderly ladies in Sydney’s North Shore.

Sergeant Tuxford, now convinced they’d been hunting the wrong profile of suspect all this time, spent a sleepless night waiting for the opportunity to present his new theory at the next morning briefing. At the same time, Dr Duflou and his team had established that the print they’d lifted from Mrs Falconer’s carpet was consistent with a type of shoe worn by older men, and also of a type often favoured by ex-military types. These two new pieces of evidence led the police to drastically reconsider their investigation thus far.

Taskforce detectives realised that “the juvenile theory”, which had been the most prominent, may have fatally skewed their inquiry. The realisation that an erroneous frame of reference may have caused them to consistently ask the wrong questions, prompted them to conduct a full review of their existing materials, as well as re-canvassing every area, and re-interviewing every witness and person of interest, in addition to following up their new leads. First and foremost among these was an assault which the keyword search had turned up.

The victim was one Mrs Margaret Todhunter of Mosman. About two months before the first murder, she had been attacked by a grey-haired man who had punched her in the face and robbed her of $209.

At the time, police had no reason to think that this was anything more than an isolated mugging, so they’d diligently recorded the reports and moved on to other cases. Sergeant Tuxford and team set about tracking Mrs Todhunter down, found that she’d moved to Queensland, and flew up to interview her when they found, to their delight, that this grand old lady had a mind like a steel trap, and was able to provide a sufficiently detailed description for a high confidence identikit. The police finally had the beginnings of a promising case, an accurate description of their prime suspect, and a renewed sense of hope.

The Grey-Haired Man

John Glover was born in 1932 in the north of England. His was a working class family, and Glover later showed signs of resenting the poverty in which he was brought up. What he resented most, however, was his mother Freda. When Freda and his father divorced, Glover began to develop a hatred for his mother, blaming her for the departure of his father, whom he idolised. This hatred intensified when his mother went through a series of relationships, including three marriages.

He began, by his own account, to think of her as a loose woman disrespecting herself and his absent father. Regardless, Glover basically wrote her off as a libertine and began a typical career for a maladjusted teen, committing a range of minor property crimes. Later, when he was doing his national service, it seems he was caught stealing again and discharged. There’s some dispute over this, with some sources reporting that his criminal record being discovered was the reason, but this seems unlikely, as his juvenile records would have been sealed.

In any event, Glover emigrated to Australia in 1956, settling in Melbourne, where he took advantage of the preferential migration programs for white people from English speaking countries which were in place at the time. They don’t seem to have helped him much, though. He drifted between a succession of low paying jobs, as well as racking up a few convictions for larceny and indecent assault, once on a young woman and another time on an elderly lady.

At some point, for obscure reasons, he seems to have changed his name to John Wayne Glover. In 1968, it seemed Glover made an attempt to turn his life around. He met and married a nice young lady named Gay Rolls, and moved with her Sydney, settling first in their own home in Mosman before moving in with Gay’s parents Essie and Jack, who had a large house nearby.

At this time in Australia, class differences mattered much more than they do today, and it seems Essie was not happy about her daughter marrying beneath herself. This seems to have made the relationship between Glover and his mother-in-law extremely difficult. He seems to have expressed a real liking for his father-in-law Jack, which is an exact mirror of his relationship with his own biological parents.

After some initial struggles, Glover eventually landed a steady job as a sales rep for the Four’N’Twenty pie company. Four’N’Twenty pies were and still are an iconic brand in Australia and really don’t need much selling, so Glover was, as the saying goes, on a pretty good wicket.

On top of this, his marriage seemed initially to be going well, despite his problems with his mother-in-law, and the union was blessed with two daughters. Various accounts describe a strained home life, with constant sniping at Glover from Essie, and screaming matches between John’s wife Gay and her mother. Aside from this, though, Glover’s lifestyle seemed an enviable one.

He’d start work early in the morning, doing the rounds of hospitals and retirement homes to take orders for pies, before finishing in the mid to late afternoon, when he’d head to the pub to drink beer and play the pokies – which is what Australians call slot machines. Like many other Australians, Glover seems to have developed an addiction to playing the pokies, as well as a habit of hanging around pubs in the late afternoon, making friends with the local bar flies and occasionally standing them drinks.

Glover’s mother Freda moved to Australia in 1976, thus doubling the number of women involved in his life whom he couldn’t stand, and while Glover continued to associate with them both, it was clear his relationship with these two significant women in his life was seriously fraught. In 1989, Freda died of breast cancer, and shortly after this, Glover himself was diagnosed with the same disease – a very strange coincidence which Glover, in his own mind, put down to the malign influence of his mother. Treatment for this cancer made Glover impotent, but in spite of this he began seeing a sixty-year-old woman called Joan Sinclair.

There’s some confusion about this relationship, with various sources saying either that it was an affair, or that it was a platonic friendship. Either way, Glover was looking for companionship and comfort outside his marriage, which was struggling by this time. Gay had taken their two daughters to New Zealand, and it seems that the marriage wasn’t completely repaired even after she returned.

Now we’re caught up on Glover’s life and crimes, let’s get back to the police investigation, which had been going on for just over a year, with thousands of leads and close to a thousand suspects eliminated. The NSW government had begun offering progressively higher rewards for information leading to the killer’s capture, starting at $200k and going up to a quarter million by 1990. This was serious money in Australia at this time, probably equivalent in purchasing power to nearly a million dollars today.

The cops were still frequently working twenty-hour days, and the dogs were still running surveillance on nursing homes and hospitals. On top of this, they were doing all the recanvassing and re-interviewing which the grey-haired man theory had necessitated.

The Taskforce was also fighting a losing battle to stop the press and the public from calling their perp “the granny killer”, attempting to rebrand him “the north shore murderer”, a far less catchy, if also less offensive sobriquet. Chief among the new follow-ups was a report of an indecent assault on an elderly lady in the Caroline Chisholm Nursing Home in Lane Cove. Armed with their identikit, police followed this lead and found a therapist who had filed a report from, in her own words, “an elderly lady who was quite excited someone had touched her buttocks”.

Of course, she was using the word “excited” in the old-fashioned sense, meaning something more like “agitated”. This nurse, Sister Taylor, had confronted a grey-haired man in the hallway, who had subsequently fled. The police found multiple similar reports, as well as reports of muggings of elderly women and one unfortunate elderly man who’d been wearing a hat and overcoat which made him look like a woman from a distance.

All of this seemed to confirm Sergeant Tuxford’s prime suspect – the grey-haired man. Then on January 11, an elderly lady at the Greenwich Private Hospital called in a nurse to complain that “the doctor” had come into her room, told her she was losing body heat, lifted her gown and touched her genitals. The nurse knew something was wrong straight away as it was a weekend, and there were no doctors on site.

The nurse confronted a man who was walking away, but he ignored her, so she called the police to report an indecent assault. A junior detective constable, Pamela Young, was despatched with her partner to follow up the call.

Detective Constable Young did all the required detective constable things and used the visitor list and the victim’s description to come up with a likely suspect – a meat pie salesman called John Wayne Glover. By the time she’d done the spadework, it was nearly ten p.m., so she decided to leave it until the next day. When she did track Glover down, he exercised his right to silence, and made arrangements to meet the day after with a lawyer present.

The next day came and went, and after six p.m., Constable Young called Glover’s house to find out where he’d got to. John’s wife Gay answered the phone and unloaded a torrent of abuse on the young detective. She informed her that John Glover had been pushed over the edge by their ridiculous allegations and attempted suicide by washing down a bunch of sleeping pills with most of a bottle of Vat 69 whisky.

Glover had been admitted to Royal North Shore Hospital, where the police duly went to interview him.

Once there, they found a doctor who handed them a suicide note scrawled on a used piece of Four’N’Twenty stationery. They went in to interview Glover but found him still refusing to cooperate. Somehow, Pam Young managed to convince Glover that taking a polaroid of him would help to eliminate him as a suspect, so they snapped a picture and left for Greenwich Hospital, where Sister Taylor, the nurse, identified him as the man she’d confronted.

And then, because the police are as burdened by bureaucracy as much as any other government organisation, the polaroid and suicide note were filed away as Pam Young was forced to go on a two week training course. When she got back, however, she picked the inquiry right back up, taking a closer look at the suicide note.

It was more a collection of fragmentary phrases, barely legible, saying things like “sell up + piss off”, “Gay, don’t try to understand”, “Essie started it”, and “No More Grannies”. The note also revealed that Glover had become impotent as a side effect of his cancer treatment. Detective Young realised the significance of what she had and took it to the North Shore Murders Taskforce.

Constable Young recalls being quite nervous about the whole thing. Here she was, a young female detective constable, taking a tip to a squad of all the highest fliers and biggest names in homicide investigation in the whole state. Once the taskforce had seen the note, they sprang into action, immediately setting aside resources to follow up what looked to be a case breaking lead.

Detectives were sent to canvas retirement homes and hospitals all across the North Shore, showing copies of the polaroid and asking about any incidents of violence or sexually inappropriate behaviour. They interpreted the note as being part explanation for his behaviour, instructions to his family to realise their assets and leave, and a vague reference to his crimes. They also set the dogs on him, abandoning their previous surveillance targets to monitor Glover’s movements in search of anything in his pattern of life which might link him more definitively to the murders. Glover seems to have spotted them pretty quickly, and began employing counter-surveillance techniques, which led the cops to covertly fit a tracker to his car.

Endgame

From our perspective, it might look like an open and shut case, but from the police’s point of view there wasn’t nearly enough of a solid case. The sexual assaults, the profile, even the note, didn’t add up to anything more than thin circumstantial evidence. The cops themselves were completely convinced in a way they hadn’t been with any other subject to date, but they knew they didn’t have even nearly enough to persuade the Department of Public Prosecutions to take their case to trial.

And given his social status, his legal reputation, and their assessment of his character, their biggest fear would be that they’d arrest him and he’d simply refuse to talk. In such a circumstance, with the evidence they had so far, they’d have tipped their hands and ended up absolutely nowhere.

Mike Hagan and the taskforce detectives knew that what they needed was to either catch him red-handed, establish a conclusively incriminating pattern of life, or somehow get a confession. They’d been following their man for nearly six weeks, however, and apart from his obvious but effective efforts at counter-surveillance, there wasn’t a whisper of anything suspicious. In the meantime, John Wayne Glover had convinced his wife that the accusations against him were baseless, so she retained a criminal defence attorney, Don Wakeling, to help her husband get clear of what he described as “these scurrilous accusations”. Wakeling, a man who looks exactly like the sort of person who’d play a defence attorney in a gritty Australian noir film, duly took the job, believing at the time that Glover was innocent.

The police, in the meantime, were furiously active tying up loose ends in their own investigation, and co-ordinating and supplementing the 24hr surveillance being maintained on Glover. Near the end of their list of follow-up investigations was a visit to the James Milson Retirement Village in Milson’s Point, a suburb right at the northern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and only minutes away from Mosman. Detective Constable Kim Mackay was detailed to go to the Milson Retirement Home, where she showed the receptionist the polaroid and went through the routine questions. Their very wide canvas of aged care facilities and hospitals had turned up a few incidences of indecent assault already, so hopes were high despite the grinding nature of the job.

When the receptionist looked at the picture and asked if they were looking for John Wayne Glover who worked for Four’N’Twenty pies, Mackay thought she’d hit the jackpot – a positive ID from a witness – and asked how the receptionist knew him. “I’m his wife,” the receptionist replied. This absolutely floored the detective, and she desperately tried to appeal to Gay Glover not to reveal her visit.

This raises a small point – it seems the taskforce either hadn’t completed a human network map, where known associates are identified and basic information about them is gathered, or if they had, this data hadn’t been passed round the whole taskforce. This isn’t a cardinal sin, necessarily, though it would be in an organised crime case, but it does show that the investigation wasn’t by any means perfect. By the standards of Australia in the eighties it was stellar, and even by today’s standards, it was excellent work.

But crime of this kind was a significant teaching moment for the NSW Police Force, and even though the taskforce detectives rose to the challenge admirably, there were still some rough spots here and there, stumbling over your prime suspect’s wife during a canvas being quite a glaring one.

Unsurprisingly, Gay Glover went straight to her husband to tell him about Detective Mackay’s visit, as she not only had no reason to believe her husband was the infamous Granny Killer, it seems likely she had every reason not to want to believe it either. Glover’s home life seems to have been almost completely unremarkable. Sure, he was drunk most of the time, and had a slight gambling problem, if you can call throwing money down to the bottomless pit of the pokies “gambling”, but this was 1990 and the past was the worst.

By 1990 standards, none of Glover’s known foibles precluded him from being a pillar of the community. Glover himself, however, knew what he was, and his wife’s news sent him into a tailspin.

John Glover wasn’t exactly mentally well at this point – besides being a compulsive sexually motivated murderer, he had also recently attempted suicide, and had a persecution complex, correctly believing himself to be under surveillance, to boot. So a few days after his wife had confirmed his worst suspicions – that the cops were hot on his trail and likely to catch him, Glover called his work and excused himself for the day, citing a legal appointment. He left his house at the usual time in the morning, tried unsuccessfully to shake off the dogs, before driving to a liquor store and purchasing a bottle of VAT 69 whisky.

This done, he drove to a house in Beauty Point, a suburb which is essentially a part of Mosman, where he parked, got out of his car, took off his tie and carefully combed his hair. Once he was spruced up to his own satisfaction, police watched him walk to a house across the road and knock on the door. The door opened and Glover was warmly welcomed inside.

The dogs settled down to wait. Hours passed, then hours more, and Sergeant O’Toole, who was on the comm back at headquarters, began to get concerned. A reverse directory search on the address revealed that the house belonged to sixty-year-old Joan Sinclair, a woman with whom Glover had been having some kind of close relationship with for some time. This would seem to explain the long visit, but there was a sense of disquiet among the taskforce detectives, and O’Toole took a team over to sit near the surveillance post and monitor the situation in person.

The day wore on until schoolchildren began straggling home in the late afternoon – the Granny Killer’s preferred hunting time. One pair of homeward bound schoolkids knocked at Joan Sinclair’s front door and received no answer. The surveillance teams also noted that two dogs, which seemed to be either in or behind her house, had begun barking incessantly. And their prime suspect in the murders of numerous elderly ladies had been alone in a house with a sixty-year-old lady for nearly eight hours.

All of this put together finally made the police anxious enough to take action.

Not wanting to compromise the identity of the surveillance team, Sergeant O’Toole called in a nearby uniformed patrol to follow up a fictional noise complaint. The officers reported no movement in the house, which was seriously disquieting. At this point the detectives decided to go in.

Detective Sergeant O’Toole and three of his colleagues from the taskforce breached the door and performed a room to room clearance. In one room, they found the body of Joan Sinclair, sprawled on the ground near to a bloodied hammer. In the bathroom, they found John Wayne Glover.

He was in the bathtub, lying unconscious with his mouth and nose just above the waterline, blood and vomit mixed liberally with the bathwater, and the detritus of another attempt at self-destruction scattered around him. There was an empty bottle of Vat 69 whisky, a scattering of sleeping pills, and a broken whisky glass he’d used to slash his left wrist.

The detectives called in an ambulance as well as reporting what they’d found to Mike Hagan, and despite their deep disgust of the man, still made feverish efforts to keep Glover alive until the ambulance arrived. The sheer amount of whisky Glover had consumed appears to have saved his life, as he’d drunk so much he wasn’t able to keep the sleeping pills down, and the slash on his wrist was too ineptly executed to result in death. The ambulance rushed Glover to Royal North Shore Hospital, at which point the taskforce began the work of processing this new crime scene.

In the meantime, the taskforce was busy explaining to various levels of command how they’d come to let a murder suspect beat an innocent woman to death literally under their noses. I’m not sure they can be blamed for this – and officially they weren’t – but it did look pretty damn bad. Now, common sense and all the other equipment of the armchair critic seem to make it pretty obvious that they should have rushed into the house and arrested him as soon as they became uneasy, but there are strong arguments against this.

Firstly, they’d been watching Glover for a month and a half without any sign he was stalking a new target or contemplating violence. On top of this, there was nothing at all to suggest that, even if he was their killer, that he was anything other than a stranger killer. There just wasn’t any reason to believe Glover would break his pattern and murder someone known to him.

And lastly, their main priority was to build and preserve their practically non-existent case. As soon as they started kicking down doors and slapping on cuffs, the fear was that Glover would clam up, and they didn’t have anywhere near enough for a prosecution, much less a conviction.

To many, including media and commentators at the time, this didn’t seem like a strong set of arguments, and there are quite a few folks to this day who think the death of Joan Sinclair was the single greatest bungle made by the NSW Police to date. But for many people who know their way around a murder investigation, it’s pretty persuasive. The public was scathing about this last murder, but both the coroner and the state government found the police to be blameless here, and from the reading of the parliamentary questions tabled in the New South Wales House of Commons, it’s difficult to hold this one against them. Sergeant O’Toole and Inspector Hagan have said repeatedly that the death of Joan Sinclair weighed heavily on them, as well it might, but they themselves are convinced they didn’t do anything wrong.

Glover was stabilised quite quickly, and one of the taskforce went to visit him in his hospital room and place him under arrest. Glover’s first words to police were to wonder how “all of this” would affect his family. The detective told him he should be focused on his own situation, at which point Glover basically confessed to the murder of Joan Sinclair.

O’Toole and another detective were called in, and they conducted an interview, in the presence of Glover’s attorney, at first focused on the Sinclair murder, and then moving onto the rest. Glover asked if the detectives had noticed how similar all his victims were to his mother-in-law Essie. His manner was detached, and he seemed to want to compare notes on what the police had determined about his crimes.

He described, in a matter-of-fact way, how he’d stalked his victims at random, using the fact his pie salesman job took him all over the North Shore. How he would carry gardening gloves, a hammer, and towel in his trunk. He’d conceal the hammer in his waistband and attack his targeted women from behind. He talked about his victims, including Lady Ashton, commenting that she’d come close to overpowering him.

If only she’d succeeded, this would be a much happier story. He claimed there was no sexual motive – that the sexually humiliating posing of the bodies was a deliberate red herring to throw the police off his scent – neither the police nor the forensic psych believed this, and neither do I.

Dr Duflou, the forensic pathologist, described his chagrin at finding out that the murder weapon – the nature of which had been one of the most enduring mysteries of the case – had turned out to simply be a hammer. The fact is that Glover’s wrapping of the hammer in a piece of towelling had disguised the signature marks that hammers leave in bone. This, combined with the eradication of splatter patterns by kindly, well-meaning people who had cleaned up almost all of the crime scenes, had made it impossible to positively identify what was normally one of the easiest murder weapons to spot.

Glover talked about how he’d go to his local pubs, especially the Mosman RSL and the Buena Vista, in order to spend the money he stole from his victims on poker machines. He’d also buy drinks for elderly female acquaintances he knew at these venues, his sick mind finding the irony of this darkly amusing. He talked about how he’d wash the hammer with hydrochloric acid after each killing, and described his crimes, in the words of one of the detectives, “as if he was talking about making a cup of tea”. This interview was recorded in a police notebook, each page of which Glover willingly initialled.

When he came to trial, however, he pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity – basically a diminished responsibility defence. He tried, somewhat clumsily, to present a kind of split personality account of his offending, claiming that a persona he called “Evil John” would take control of his actions from time to time, before “Good John” would come back as he went about the rest of his life. The prosecutor, Queen’s Counsel Wendy Robinson, recalled that the general assumption among the public at the time was that someone who went around hitting elderly ladies with a hammer must necessarily be insane.

This is of course untrue – it’s perfectly possible to be evil enough to commit these acts without being sufficiently insane to meet the legal standard. The worry was, though, that with public opinion being that he must be crazy, that it would be difficult to persuade a jury that he wasn’t.

Glover had also hired a couple of psychologists as expert witnesses who insisted that his relationship with his mother and mother-in-law were prime factors in disturbing the balance of his mind. His experts contended that he harboured a deep desire to kill his mother, and that since her death his mother-in-law Essie had become a proxy for this desire. Once Essie died, went the theory, Glover had moved the focus of his rage against random women who resembled her.

The police forensic psychologist, Dr Rod Milton, didn’t disagree with any of this. What he did disagree with, however, was the contention that any of this meant Glover wasn’t responsible for his actions. He pointed out the meticulous nature of the crimes – in particular the preparation and clean-up phases.

He asked Glover exactly when “Good John” took over – was it, for instance, before or after he cleaned the blood off the hammer? Did “Bad John” pack murder equipment in the car before he went to work, and then leave him alone for the rest of the day? Through questioning like this, Dr Milton was able to show clear premeditation, which scuppers an insanity plea in Australian law.

It did in practice too, with the jury coming back after barely two hours and finding Glover guilty on all counts.

Justice James Woods, who also conducted some of the country’s most famous Royal Commissions – including the one into police corruption – sentenced Glover to be imprisoned for the term of his natural life – a very rare sentence in Australia. In a long and detailed opinion, Justice Woods explained that a man who committed crimes of this nature could never expect to be rehabilitated, or to cease to represent a danger to the public. Glover attempted to appeal this sentence several times, but ultimately died in prison in 2005.

How Many Murders?

When we see the random sexual assaults and muggings Glover committed prior to the killing of Mrs Mitchelhill, Glover’s first known victim, there seems to be a neat pattern of escalation which fits the arc of most serial murderers. There are several serious problems with this, though, not least of which is that the murders began when he was fifty-eight. The majority of experts in this field, as well as many of the investigating officers, believe that he must have started killing well before this.

It’s highly unusual for a serial murderer to begin their ‘career’, so to speak, in their late fifties, and the degree of violence used strongly suggests that it probably escalated to that point over time. But with no recorded murders before Mrs Mitchelhill, what was he escalating from?

It’s highly unusual for someone to go straight from groping and punching people in the face to caving in the heads of random innocent victims with a hammer. It’s not impossible, of course – just highly unusual. Added to this is a host of disturbing facts.

After his mother Freda came to Australia, she eventually ended up in a facility on the Central Coast – a stretch of beaches north of Sydney where retirees, commuters driven out of the city by Sydney’s dystopian housing market, and longstanding locals live in breathtakingly beautiful surroundings. Glover would frequently travel to Umina, an area of the Central Coast, to visit his half-sister and mother. While there, he sexually assaulted residents at his mother’s care facility, but that’s not all – two women, one seventy-three and the other eighty, were sexually assaulted and killed with a hammer five years before his Mosman spree and on dates corresponding with his visits.

And during the time he lived in Melbourne as a young immigrant, there were four other murders, all very similar, which many in the taskforce suspect to be Glover’s handiwork. The treatment of the bodies and MO are nearly identical – as nearly identical as the six known murders are to each other – and police and criminological experts are convinced to “a very high level of confidence”, that Glover committed these killings.

Glover was already serving his life sentence when investigators started making connections to these other crimes, but Glover himself remained tight-lipped. His line was that, should the police bring him strong enough evidence he’d confess to other crimes. This sounds weird because it is. Glover had nothing to lose, there being no death penalty in Australia, and there was no possibility of parole for him to endanger.

The best he could hope for was to contract some debilitating disease and get a compassionate release so he could die outside. So why play this cat and mouse game with the cops?

Well, basically because he was a narcissistic psychopath. Sergeant Dennis O’Toole was Glover’s most frequent and, towards the end, only visitor, and he believes he got to know the man quite well. He said Glover’s chief pleasure in life was to play mind games with him, dangling hints and suggestions and then clamming up and going coy whenever Dennis would push.

I don’t want to give you the idea that Glover was some kind of Hannibal Lecter type, cunningly manipulating his interrogators with elegance and erudition. It was more like an elephant trying to dance a ballet, or a toddler trying to wheedle an iced lolly out of an indulgent aunt.

But given that all he had to do was avoid saying anything meaningful, it didn’t really matter how good or bad he was at mind games – short of accidentally confessing, there wasn’t really any impediment to him continuing to string the police along indefinitely. It seems Glover enjoyed the feeling of power and importance it gave him, in between bouts of blaming his mother and mother-in-law for everything that had gone wrong in his life, to have Sergeant O’Toole hanging on his every word whenever he came to visit.

It also seems that these visits were Glover’s chief, if not only, reason to keep going. One day, when Sergeant O’Toole informed Glover that his visits would end soon, as he was about to retire from the police force, Glover tried to give him a sketch he’d drawn and, although the detective initially refused, Glover insisted. The sketch was of a park in a place called Medlow Bath – a suburb in the Blue Mountains, about two hours west of Sydney. Glover pointed out a pair of pine trees in the picture – in the middle of one of the trees was the number nine.

Nobody really knows what this means.

Was he confessing to the total number of his murders? Indicating how many unsolved murders he’d committed? Suggesting he killed another nine in the Blue Mountains? Or was this just another silly mind game? Nobody was ever able to ask him. Shortly after this last visit, on the 10th of September 2005, John Wayne Glover hanged himself in his cell. He wasn’t a well man and, presumably, the end of his final contact with the outside world was a factor in his giving up on life.

For all that can be made out, John Wayne Glover was autonomous in his evil, for all his excuses about being bullied by elderly women, and it’s difficult to see anyone regretting his demise. If there’s anything to be got from this story, it’s actually the sterling work of the NSW Police Force. This is an organisation not always rated very highly, but learning about the way they conducted this investigation, dealing with what was, for them, a brand new phenomenon and repeatedly rising to the occasion, has been a revelation.

Aftermath

We should spare a thought for Glover’s wife and two daughters. During the period of his final killing spree, they were all living together, and it’s very clear they had absolutely no idea what their husband and father was up to. While his behaviour doesn’t seem to suggest the perfect family man, they were still devastated at finding out about the murders and sexual assaults.

They were particularly disturbed by the fact that, when they were all watching the news together as a family, Glover would avidly watch coverage of his own murders and laugh and joke about how he (the murderer) was too smart for the police. They still get pestered by media and others from time to time, and the hope is they can move past this if they’re just left alone.

Beyond criminology specialists, these killings do seem to have generated strong international interest. Interest in Australia has never really faded either. In fact, one of Australia’s major free to air channels has finally sniffed out increasing interest in true crime and brought back one of its crime investigation shows, and its grand premiere was an episode about John Wayne Glover.

When last checked, Detective Inspector Mike Hagan had retired as a superintendent and, despite having lost most of the hair on his head, is still doing media appearances and the occasional lecture, justly proud of his part in bringing John Wayne Glover to justice.

Key Takeaways

• John Wayne Glover murdered six elderly women in Sydney’s affluent North Shore in 1989-1990, attacking them with a hammer and strangling them with their own stockings.
• Well-meaning neighbors repeatedly cleaned crime scenes, believing victims had fallen, which destroyed crucial forensic evidence and hampered the investigation.
• Police initially pursued incorrect theories about a young suspect before Detective Paul Tuxford’s database search and a bloody footprint shifted focus to a middle-aged man.
• Glover’s suicide note containing the phrase ‘No More Grannies’ and Detective Pamela Young’s persistence provided the breakthrough that identified him as the killer.
• Despite surveillance, Glover murdered his companion Joan Sinclair before attempting suicide; he later confessed and was sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in 2005.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was John Wayne Glover’s occupation during the time of the murders?

John Wayne Glover worked as a sales representative for the Four’N’Twenty pie company, making rounds of hospitals and retirement homes to take orders for pies.

Why was the murder weapon difficult for forensic experts to identify?

The murder weapon was difficult to identify because Glover wrapped the hammer in a piece of towelling, which disguised the signature marks that hammers normally leave in bone. Additionally, well-meaning people who found the victims had cleaned up almost all of the crime scenes, eradicating splatter patterns that could have helped identify the weapon.

What led police to reconsider their ‘juvenile theory’ about the killer’s identity?

Police reconsidered the juvenile theory when Detective Sergeant Paul Tuxford found witness statements describing a ‘grey-haired’ man, and Dr Duflou’s team determined that a footprint found at Muriel Falconer’s crime scene was consistent with a type of shoe worn by older men, often favored by ex-military types. A computer search of police databases for keywords like ‘grey,’ ‘haired,’ ‘old,’ and ‘man’ yielded multiple hits involving violent muggings of elderly women.

How did John Wayne Glover attempt to mislead police about the sexual nature of his crimes?

Glover claimed during his confession that the sexually humiliating posing of his victims’ bodies was a deliberate red herring to throw police off his scent. However, neither the police nor the forensic psychologist believed this claim.

What was the significance of the suicide note Glover wrote after being questioned by Detective Constable Pamela Young?

The suicide note contained fragmentary phrases including ‘No More Grannies’ and revealed that Glover had become impotent as a side effect of his cancer treatment. Detective Young recognized its significance and brought it to the North Shore Murders Taskforce, who then treated Glover as a case-breaking lead.

Why did police use disinformation about footprint evidence from Muriel Falconer’s crime scene?

Inspector Mike Hagan and his team sent forensic officers to a nearby construction site to take plaster casts of footprints in the mud, briefing officers to tell the press they had found vital clues there. This was designed to lull the killer into a false sense of security, as he would know those footprints couldn’t be his own, preventing him from disposing of his actual shoes.

What was John Wayne Glover’s defense at trial?

Glover pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, presenting a split personality account claiming that a persona he called ‘Evil John’ would take control of his actions, before ‘Good John’ would return. The jury rejected this defense and found him guilty after barely two hours of deliberation.

How did the press coverage of the murders negatively impact the police investigation?

The press strongly associated the murders with Mosman alone, leading Lane Cove residents to believe a murder there must be a copycat killing. According to Mike Hagan, this ‘copycat’ idea significantly tainted the potential witness pool, making witnesses resistant to the idea that all murders were linked and therefore argumentative and difficult to interview.

What happened during police surveillance that led to Joan Sinclair’s death?

Police had been conducting 24-hour surveillance on Glover for nearly six weeks. When he visited Joan Sinclair’s house for nearly eight hours, police became concerned but delayed entering because they had no reason to believe he would break his pattern of killing strangers, and feared compromising their weak case. They eventually sent uniformed officers for a fictional noise complaint, then breached the door to find Sinclair beaten to death with a hammer and Glover unconscious in the bathtub from a suicide attempt.

What evidence suggests Glover may have committed murders before his known spree?

Several factors suggest earlier murders: two women in Umina on the Central Coast were sexually assaulted and killed with a hammer five years before his Mosman spree on dates corresponding with his visits to his mother; and four similar murders in Melbourne during his time there as a young immigrant. The treatment of the bodies and MO were nearly identical to his known murders, and police and experts are convinced to ‘a very high level of confidence’ that he committed these killings.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: The Chilling Case of John Wayne Glover: The Mosman Granny Killer
• Hero image source by J Bar / openverse, by.

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