A baby, only six months old, lay peacefully sleeping. In the next room its parents, the mother only 17 and the father 22, lay clasped in each other’s arms. They were both dead, each shot through the forehead.
A mile or two away a man was sprawled at the side of the road. He, too, was dead, shot in the back of the neck. In an adjoining suburb of Perth, Western Australia, a police sergeant was being placed in an ambulance with a bullet buried in his stomach. And three police officers in commandeered taxis were fighting a running gun battle with a reckless fugitive…
The killer, 22 years old, had already had a police record when at the age of 19 he calmly told a psychiatrist: “I know I am going to hang someday.”
He seemed to accept that as inevitable, and from then on he continued to tread the vicious road that led, three years later, to a night of senseless violence which left three people dead and another seriously wounded…