Highly Commended: Non-Fiction, Greg Tuchin
Greg Tuchin
I am a writer and a teacher living on the beautiful South Coast of NSW. My love of crime stories comes from the tales my father told me growing up in Sydney. My father was a policeman for 37 years, ten of them as a police photographer for the Scientific Investigation Bureau of the NSW Police Force.
I have spent many years cross-checking his information with official records and his former colleagues to bring these stories to life. They tell about a by-gone era, before DNA and computers, where old-fashioned legwork solved crimes. Many of the villains and heroes are long gone, however I hope my stories brings back their memories.
Ironically, I too, found myself in a visual career in hospitals, where I occasionally assisted in the identification of victims of crime through video-superimposition.
I am honoured to receive the Highly Commended award in the New England Thunderbolt Prize for Non- Fiction Crime , after winning the same category last year. These two stories, as well as many others, appear in my novel The Garbage Man of Tragic Lives which is available through Amazon Kindle.
I am a writer and a teacher living on the beautiful South Coast of NSW. My love of crime stories comes from the tales my father told me growing up in Sydney. My father was a policeman for 37 years, ten of them as a police photographer for the Scientific Investigation Bureau of the NSW Police Force.
I have spent many years cross-checking his information with official records and his former colleagues to bring these stories to life. They tell about a by-gone era, before DNA and computers, where old-fashioned legwork solved crimes. Many of the villains and heroes are long gone, however I hope my stories brings back their memories.
Ironically, I too, found myself in a visual career in hospitals, where I occasionally assisted in the identification of victims of crime through video-superimposition.
I am honoured to receive the Highly Commended award in the New England Thunderbolt Prize for Non- Fiction Crime , after winning the same category last year. These two stories, as well as many others, appear in my novel The Garbage Man of Tragic Lives which is available through Amazon Kindle.
The Kingsgrove Slasher
In the 1950s the suburb of Kingsgrove, in Sydney’s south west, was about as suburban as you could get. It was layered with rows and rows of modest, single storey brick bungalows, on sprawling blocks. It was so quiet that no one locked their doors at night, everyone knew all their neighbours and at night all you could hear was birds. But that was all about to change.
On the 8th of March 1956, a sleeping housewife awoke with a sharp pain on her left breast. When she opened her eyes there was a man standing over her. She screamed the man bolted through an open window. It was then she noticed the blood on her pyjama top. The man had slashed her breast and it was bleeding. This was the start of a crime wave which would terrorise the women of southern Sydney so much that they could not sleep, they would not go out at night and would fastidiously lock all their doors and windows.
My father Wally had been working in the Scientific Investigation Bureau for a few years when one of the detectives on the case brought in an old army overcoat and asked him to photograph it. It was the most unusual piece of clothing from a crime scene that he had ever been asked to photograph. Through the middle of the coat was a series of fine cuts, about a dozen of them, eighteen inches long and only about a quarter of an inch apart. They were all perfectly parallel.
‘So what happened here?’ Wally asked as he lined up the shot with his trusty Speedgraphic camera.
‘Well, the crim got in through a bedroom window, and while a woman was sleeping with the great coat on top of her, the crim cut the coat up like this.’
‘In the dark?’
‘Yeap. She never even woke up, not until the last one went right through and cut her breast. Then she screamed and the crim took off.’
‘Wally marvelled at the surgical precision of the slices. Just then Inspector Clarke, head of the SIB came into the studio. ‘Wally, can you accompany these detectives out to Beverly Hills and take some photos of the window where the suspect got in? The fingerprint boys have already got their prints.’
‘Sure thing boss.’
It was the start of a long association between the Police, the SIB and the Kingsgrove Slasher.
At the crime scene Wally took photos of the wound on Margaret Campbell’s left breast, the window where the perpetrator had entered, and the bedroom where the attack to place. Then he went outside and made a plaster of Paris cast of the man’s footprint where he landed after jumping from the window. For Wally is was a straightforward job, although a bit bizarre.
Strange as it was, the police thought little of the petty crime until it happened again about two weeks later. This time the victim was a ten-year-old girl. She woke up before the intruder did anything. Once again, Wally was called out to take photos of the window where the intruder gained entry and the bedroom where the attempted attack took place. What intrigued Wally the most about this crime scene was the six-foot fence the slasher had jumped in one leap, in order to get away. He must be some athlete, Wally thought. The cast he took of this footprint looked like an athletic, running shoe. That made sense!
Then a series of attacks took place on women around the Beverly Hills and Kingsgrove areas. The afternoon tabloids, the Sydney Sun and The Mirror got onto the story, christening the perpetrator as The Kingsgrove Slasher, after the suburb where the first attack was committed. Wally was again called out to take a photo. This time the Slasher had slashed the woman’s bedclothes and some bras taken from her drawer. He had slashed away until she woke up and screamed in terror.
Police were worried that the attacks were becoming more vicious and more regular. They feared it was only a matter of time before the Slasher would possibly rape or even kill an innocent woman.
In the next incident the Slasher got into the house through a closed, but not locked, window and while Valerie Thompson was sleeping in bed, beside her husband, the Slasher cut the buttons of her pyjamas, the pyjama cord, the arms off her pyjama coat, and when she still did not wake up, he jabbed a pen-knife into her breast.
For Wally and the others of the SIB, the Kingsgrove Slasher was taking up a lot of their time. Inspector Clarke started sharing the jobs amongst the whole team. Soon everyone on the team was familiar with catching the train to Kingsgrove or Beverley Hills. In those days the men of the SIB had no access to police vehicles, except and old Indian motorcycle with a side care. For the officers – and there were many- who couldn’t ride a motorcycle, public transport was the only way to get to the crime scene.
The Slasher did not just limit himself to attacking women in their houses. He was an opportunist as well. One night he came across a couple making love in a car. He reached in through the car window and slashed the woman’s breasts with his knife. The woman reported that she did not even feel it until she noticed all her clothing was covered in blood.
When 19-year-old Rosalie Meyer woke up with the Slasher in her room she bravely tried to fight back with a pair of scissors, which were near her bed, but the Slasher picked up a nearby lump of wood and hit the teenager over the head with it before running away.
Whipped up by hysteria from the front page reports in the Sun and the Mirror, local communities organised teams of vigilantes, men and boys who would patrol the St George area every night armed with rifles, and lumps of four-by-two’s. It was little comfort to the women of Sydney. Now they felt that nowhere was safe.
The next attack on another young girl was entirely out of the district, in Lavender Bay, on the lower North Shore of Sydney Harbour. Police were baffled why the Slasher had moved his attacks away from the area he usually worked in. They guessed that things had got too hot around Kingsgrove and perhaps the Slasher was scared of the teams of vigilantes patrolling the streets of Kingsgrove.
A week later the Slasher was back to his old hunting ground, slashing a woman in Turrella, about five miles away from Kingsgrove. This was the eleventh attack in nine months. Under severe criticism form the media over a lack of results, the Commissioner allocated Kingsgrove its first patrol car, and upgraded Kingsgrove Police station from a police call box to a functioning station.
Then suddenly the attacks stopped. No one knew why, especially the police. The women of Sydney drew a sigh of relief. People started sleeping with open windows during that hot summer of 1957. Women even started going out at night again.
Throughout the investigation the police had interviewed about 700 men. They mainly focussed on single men, itinerant workers, tradesmen and blue-collar workers. In 1957 there was no such thing as criminal profiling, however the police thought that the perpetrator must be some kind of athlete so they made inquiries with local district athletic clubs for any single men showing unusual behaviour.
Then, just as strangely as the attacks had ceased, they started again. On March 19th, 1958, after a break of two years, the Slasher was back, this time the victim was a fifteen-year-old girl in Greenwich, on the lower North Shore. Even though it was not in the Kingsgrove district, the attack had all the trademarks of the Slasher. It seemed like he was moving about to frustrate the police. Once again Sydney was thrown into a panic, as the tabloids warned that the Slasher is back.
The police were being criticised roundly. Yet they were so under resourced that they had little chance of catching the Slasher. The Commissioner acted decisively, appointing Detective Sgt Brian Doyle to head up the investigation and a Task Force of 100 police, the largest ever in police history.
Doyle was an impressive detective who had a knack of getting results. The so called ‘Slasher Patrol’ was formed, made up of athletic, young men from 21 Division (the tough flying squad of the time), and the Vice Squad.
Doyle rostered his men in patrols of two, patrolling around the Kingsgrove, Beverly Hills and Turrella districts every night, in the hope of catching the Slasher in the act. After 3 months nothing had happened. Doyle was under pressure to reduce his patrols, which were costing the Police Dept a small fortune.
Then in November 1958 he attacked a 56-year-old woman, Marguerite Austin, in Turrella. She struggled with the Slasher before he slashed her stomach and ran off.
In the stifling Summer nights, women slept with their windows closed, and locked. My own mother-in- law, who was living in the Undercliff, the scene of the Slasher’s 9th attack, remembers locking all the windows in the house but still being too afraid to get to sleep.
Doyle became obsessed with capturing this man. He spent most of his day sifting through evidence of the attacks, answering calls about suspected sightings of the Slasher, and dealing with scores of neurotic women who were staging the own Slasher attacks, some even slashing themselves.
One night there was a sighting of a man running in the dark. Nervous residents alerted the vigilantes. By the time Doyle had arrived on the scene there were about 2000 men and boys, searching the streets of Turrella, armed with four by twos, and even rifles. But no one was found.
Then in January 1959 a woman was startled by a hand reaching through her window. She screamed and the hand disappeared. Within half an hour Doyle had more than 100 police roaming the area on foot, as well as 30 taxi cab drivers keeping an eye out on the roads, but they found no one.
A week later he attacked again. This time it was an 11-year-old girl in Arncliffe. Some police thought the Slasher was a kind of child-molester, but Doyle argued that it was more about opportunity, that he chose younger girls because they were usually sleeping alone in their room, away from their parents.
Doyle desperately looked for a pattern in these crimes. He plotted all the crime scenes on a map, especially his recent crimes, and there was one area that constantly showed up, Wolli Creek. Doyle developed a theory that the Slasher was using the Wolli Creek bushland as a way to enter and escape the crime scenes. Doyle recruited a man called Eardley, an ardent bird watcher who knew the district intimately, and whose daughter was another Slasher victim. Doyle concentrated his patrols around the Goat’s Gully and Wolli Creek area and developed a capture plan.
In the meantime, to speed up his capture, the NSW Premier, Cahill announced a £1,000 reward, ‘for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person who has become known as The Kingsgrove Slasher.’ £1,000 was the equivalent of buying a house in Kingsgrove, which seemed incredible for the petty crimes the Slasher had committed.
In order to catch the Slasher, Doyle moved out of his house, went on permanent night duty, and bought a Television for his wife to keep her company while he was away. He spent every night for the next six months rostering Slasher Patrols, his ears glued to the police radio.
Nothing happened for the next two months, except that the weather turned wet, as it sometimes does in Sydney in March. The patrolmen all got soaked and eaten alive by mosquitoes. The Slasher Patrol became one of the worst jobs on the Force. While the men at SIB waited for their next Slasher job, The Slasher became a source of intrigue and speculation.
Then finally a breakthrough came, in April 1959. A man was spotted as he tried to open the window of an Earlwood house. The woman screamed to scare him off, then she notified the police. Doyle’s Nanny Goat Hill plan was put into action. The running Slasher was funnelled along the Wolli Creek valley from Earlwood, towards Turrella, straight into the waiting arms of two of Doyle’s team.
Surprisingly, when he was confronted by two policemen, the Slasher simply held up his hands and confessed immediately, ‘I’m your man. I’m the Slasher.’
His capture of David Joseph Scanlan, aka the Kingsgrove Slasher, made headlines in all the Australian newspapers, and even in the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Throughout his interrogation and his trial it emerged that the Slasher was a superior athlete, competing for the St George Amateur Athletic Club and was also a keen tennis player. Doyle was pleased with his profiling effort, however, Doyle was wrong on many aspects. Scanlon was no surgeon or skilled with knives. He was a quiet mannered office clerk, who had been married for a little over two years. His break from crimes occurred when he got married and moved out of the district to the lower North Shore. When he moved back to the Kingsgrove district he started up his attacks again. His wife knew nothing about his night time adventures, nor even suspected.
So why did he do it? Well according to Scanlon it was for the thrill of being chased by the police, or better still, the husbands or fathers of the women. He would gloat when he read about himself in the papers or laugh to himself when his fellow tennis players would put in their own theories about the identity of the Slasher.
Psychologists believed that the crimes were sexual in nature: they were all committed on women and girls, and usually involved their breasts. They argued that although he was sane, he was a sex perverted psycho-neurotic.
At his trial Scanlon confessed to eighteen crimes in all. Police suspect that many more went unreported. But Scanlon’s punishment did not really fit the crime. For the terror that he had inflicted on the women of Sydney, Scanlon could possibly serve only three years, for commit grievous bodily harm. So the Police prosecutor argued for a maximum sentence and was successful. Scanlon was sentenced to 18 years in prison and Sydney went back to its life as a big, peaceful, country town. My father Wally went back to photographing routine crimes: murders, rapes and suicides.
Even in prison, Scanlon kept up his athletics. He hekd the prison record for running the mile right up to his release in 1970. The Kingsgrove Slasher, the man who terrorised Sydney, has never been heard of since.
On the 8th of March 1956, a sleeping housewife awoke with a sharp pain on her left breast. When she opened her eyes there was a man standing over her. She screamed the man bolted through an open window. It was then she noticed the blood on her pyjama top. The man had slashed her breast and it was bleeding. This was the start of a crime wave which would terrorise the women of southern Sydney so much that they could not sleep, they would not go out at night and would fastidiously lock all their doors and windows.
My father Wally had been working in the Scientific Investigation Bureau for a few years when one of the detectives on the case brought in an old army overcoat and asked him to photograph it. It was the most unusual piece of clothing from a crime scene that he had ever been asked to photograph. Through the middle of the coat was a series of fine cuts, about a dozen of them, eighteen inches long and only about a quarter of an inch apart. They were all perfectly parallel.
‘So what happened here?’ Wally asked as he lined up the shot with his trusty Speedgraphic camera.
‘Well, the crim got in through a bedroom window, and while a woman was sleeping with the great coat on top of her, the crim cut the coat up like this.’
‘In the dark?’
‘Yeap. She never even woke up, not until the last one went right through and cut her breast. Then she screamed and the crim took off.’
‘Wally marvelled at the surgical precision of the slices. Just then Inspector Clarke, head of the SIB came into the studio. ‘Wally, can you accompany these detectives out to Beverly Hills and take some photos of the window where the suspect got in? The fingerprint boys have already got their prints.’
‘Sure thing boss.’
It was the start of a long association between the Police, the SIB and the Kingsgrove Slasher.
At the crime scene Wally took photos of the wound on Margaret Campbell’s left breast, the window where the perpetrator had entered, and the bedroom where the attack to place. Then he went outside and made a plaster of Paris cast of the man’s footprint where he landed after jumping from the window. For Wally is was a straightforward job, although a bit bizarre.
Strange as it was, the police thought little of the petty crime until it happened again about two weeks later. This time the victim was a ten-year-old girl. She woke up before the intruder did anything. Once again, Wally was called out to take photos of the window where the intruder gained entry and the bedroom where the attempted attack took place. What intrigued Wally the most about this crime scene was the six-foot fence the slasher had jumped in one leap, in order to get away. He must be some athlete, Wally thought. The cast he took of this footprint looked like an athletic, running shoe. That made sense!
Then a series of attacks took place on women around the Beverly Hills and Kingsgrove areas. The afternoon tabloids, the Sydney Sun and The Mirror got onto the story, christening the perpetrator as The Kingsgrove Slasher, after the suburb where the first attack was committed. Wally was again called out to take a photo. This time the Slasher had slashed the woman’s bedclothes and some bras taken from her drawer. He had slashed away until she woke up and screamed in terror.
Police were worried that the attacks were becoming more vicious and more regular. They feared it was only a matter of time before the Slasher would possibly rape or even kill an innocent woman.
In the next incident the Slasher got into the house through a closed, but not locked, window and while Valerie Thompson was sleeping in bed, beside her husband, the Slasher cut the buttons of her pyjamas, the pyjama cord, the arms off her pyjama coat, and when she still did not wake up, he jabbed a pen-knife into her breast.
For Wally and the others of the SIB, the Kingsgrove Slasher was taking up a lot of their time. Inspector Clarke started sharing the jobs amongst the whole team. Soon everyone on the team was familiar with catching the train to Kingsgrove or Beverley Hills. In those days the men of the SIB had no access to police vehicles, except and old Indian motorcycle with a side care. For the officers – and there were many- who couldn’t ride a motorcycle, public transport was the only way to get to the crime scene.
The Slasher did not just limit himself to attacking women in their houses. He was an opportunist as well. One night he came across a couple making love in a car. He reached in through the car window and slashed the woman’s breasts with his knife. The woman reported that she did not even feel it until she noticed all her clothing was covered in blood.
When 19-year-old Rosalie Meyer woke up with the Slasher in her room she bravely tried to fight back with a pair of scissors, which were near her bed, but the Slasher picked up a nearby lump of wood and hit the teenager over the head with it before running away.
Whipped up by hysteria from the front page reports in the Sun and the Mirror, local communities organised teams of vigilantes, men and boys who would patrol the St George area every night armed with rifles, and lumps of four-by-two’s. It was little comfort to the women of Sydney. Now they felt that nowhere was safe.
The next attack on another young girl was entirely out of the district, in Lavender Bay, on the lower North Shore of Sydney Harbour. Police were baffled why the Slasher had moved his attacks away from the area he usually worked in. They guessed that things had got too hot around Kingsgrove and perhaps the Slasher was scared of the teams of vigilantes patrolling the streets of Kingsgrove.
A week later the Slasher was back to his old hunting ground, slashing a woman in Turrella, about five miles away from Kingsgrove. This was the eleventh attack in nine months. Under severe criticism form the media over a lack of results, the Commissioner allocated Kingsgrove its first patrol car, and upgraded Kingsgrove Police station from a police call box to a functioning station.
Then suddenly the attacks stopped. No one knew why, especially the police. The women of Sydney drew a sigh of relief. People started sleeping with open windows during that hot summer of 1957. Women even started going out at night again.
Throughout the investigation the police had interviewed about 700 men. They mainly focussed on single men, itinerant workers, tradesmen and blue-collar workers. In 1957 there was no such thing as criminal profiling, however the police thought that the perpetrator must be some kind of athlete so they made inquiries with local district athletic clubs for any single men showing unusual behaviour.
Then, just as strangely as the attacks had ceased, they started again. On March 19th, 1958, after a break of two years, the Slasher was back, this time the victim was a fifteen-year-old girl in Greenwich, on the lower North Shore. Even though it was not in the Kingsgrove district, the attack had all the trademarks of the Slasher. It seemed like he was moving about to frustrate the police. Once again Sydney was thrown into a panic, as the tabloids warned that the Slasher is back.
The police were being criticised roundly. Yet they were so under resourced that they had little chance of catching the Slasher. The Commissioner acted decisively, appointing Detective Sgt Brian Doyle to head up the investigation and a Task Force of 100 police, the largest ever in police history.
Doyle was an impressive detective who had a knack of getting results. The so called ‘Slasher Patrol’ was formed, made up of athletic, young men from 21 Division (the tough flying squad of the time), and the Vice Squad.
Doyle rostered his men in patrols of two, patrolling around the Kingsgrove, Beverly Hills and Turrella districts every night, in the hope of catching the Slasher in the act. After 3 months nothing had happened. Doyle was under pressure to reduce his patrols, which were costing the Police Dept a small fortune.
Then in November 1958 he attacked a 56-year-old woman, Marguerite Austin, in Turrella. She struggled with the Slasher before he slashed her stomach and ran off.
In the stifling Summer nights, women slept with their windows closed, and locked. My own mother-in- law, who was living in the Undercliff, the scene of the Slasher’s 9th attack, remembers locking all the windows in the house but still being too afraid to get to sleep.
Doyle became obsessed with capturing this man. He spent most of his day sifting through evidence of the attacks, answering calls about suspected sightings of the Slasher, and dealing with scores of neurotic women who were staging the own Slasher attacks, some even slashing themselves.
One night there was a sighting of a man running in the dark. Nervous residents alerted the vigilantes. By the time Doyle had arrived on the scene there were about 2000 men and boys, searching the streets of Turrella, armed with four by twos, and even rifles. But no one was found.
Then in January 1959 a woman was startled by a hand reaching through her window. She screamed and the hand disappeared. Within half an hour Doyle had more than 100 police roaming the area on foot, as well as 30 taxi cab drivers keeping an eye out on the roads, but they found no one.
A week later he attacked again. This time it was an 11-year-old girl in Arncliffe. Some police thought the Slasher was a kind of child-molester, but Doyle argued that it was more about opportunity, that he chose younger girls because they were usually sleeping alone in their room, away from their parents.
Doyle desperately looked for a pattern in these crimes. He plotted all the crime scenes on a map, especially his recent crimes, and there was one area that constantly showed up, Wolli Creek. Doyle developed a theory that the Slasher was using the Wolli Creek bushland as a way to enter and escape the crime scenes. Doyle recruited a man called Eardley, an ardent bird watcher who knew the district intimately, and whose daughter was another Slasher victim. Doyle concentrated his patrols around the Goat’s Gully and Wolli Creek area and developed a capture plan.
In the meantime, to speed up his capture, the NSW Premier, Cahill announced a £1,000 reward, ‘for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person who has become known as The Kingsgrove Slasher.’ £1,000 was the equivalent of buying a house in Kingsgrove, which seemed incredible for the petty crimes the Slasher had committed.
In order to catch the Slasher, Doyle moved out of his house, went on permanent night duty, and bought a Television for his wife to keep her company while he was away. He spent every night for the next six months rostering Slasher Patrols, his ears glued to the police radio.
Nothing happened for the next two months, except that the weather turned wet, as it sometimes does in Sydney in March. The patrolmen all got soaked and eaten alive by mosquitoes. The Slasher Patrol became one of the worst jobs on the Force. While the men at SIB waited for their next Slasher job, The Slasher became a source of intrigue and speculation.
Then finally a breakthrough came, in April 1959. A man was spotted as he tried to open the window of an Earlwood house. The woman screamed to scare him off, then she notified the police. Doyle’s Nanny Goat Hill plan was put into action. The running Slasher was funnelled along the Wolli Creek valley from Earlwood, towards Turrella, straight into the waiting arms of two of Doyle’s team.
Surprisingly, when he was confronted by two policemen, the Slasher simply held up his hands and confessed immediately, ‘I’m your man. I’m the Slasher.’
His capture of David Joseph Scanlan, aka the Kingsgrove Slasher, made headlines in all the Australian newspapers, and even in the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Throughout his interrogation and his trial it emerged that the Slasher was a superior athlete, competing for the St George Amateur Athletic Club and was also a keen tennis player. Doyle was pleased with his profiling effort, however, Doyle was wrong on many aspects. Scanlon was no surgeon or skilled with knives. He was a quiet mannered office clerk, who had been married for a little over two years. His break from crimes occurred when he got married and moved out of the district to the lower North Shore. When he moved back to the Kingsgrove district he started up his attacks again. His wife knew nothing about his night time adventures, nor even suspected.
So why did he do it? Well according to Scanlon it was for the thrill of being chased by the police, or better still, the husbands or fathers of the women. He would gloat when he read about himself in the papers or laugh to himself when his fellow tennis players would put in their own theories about the identity of the Slasher.
Psychologists believed that the crimes were sexual in nature: they were all committed on women and girls, and usually involved their breasts. They argued that although he was sane, he was a sex perverted psycho-neurotic.
At his trial Scanlon confessed to eighteen crimes in all. Police suspect that many more went unreported. But Scanlon’s punishment did not really fit the crime. For the terror that he had inflicted on the women of Sydney, Scanlon could possibly serve only three years, for commit grievous bodily harm. So the Police prosecutor argued for a maximum sentence and was successful. Scanlon was sentenced to 18 years in prison and Sydney went back to its life as a big, peaceful, country town. My father Wally went back to photographing routine crimes: murders, rapes and suicides.
Even in prison, Scanlon kept up his athletics. He hekd the prison record for running the mile right up to his release in 1970. The Kingsgrove Slasher, the man who terrorised Sydney, has never been heard of since.
