Paul B Kidd - Never to be Released. Australias Most Vicious Murders, Volume 4

THE HISTORY OF 'NEVER TO BE RELEASED'

Across Australia today the term never to be released is used when sending an offender to jail until they die. In some states it is called life with no recommended fixed parole period, but it means the same thing: life means life. In this book, and in the three previous books I have written on the subject Never To Be Released : Volumes 1 , and I have covered such cases in every state, and in one of the territories, the ACT, where this recommendation has been handed down.

These days, never to be released means exactly that. Except for one man who was released on appeal and in another case where two men had their sentences reduced to manslaughter.(both stories you will find in this book), they are all still in jail. Several of them were released in a black rubber bag with a zipper up the middle having died in jail either by their own hand or old age. But thats the only way out.

There was a time throughout Australia when there was no such prison sentence. Never to be released was merely a recommendation, reserved for the worst possible offenders. Prior to that, the worst of the worst the child killers, the pack rapists/murderers and the serial killers were hanged, and that was the end of that. Many Australians believe that thats the way it still should be. In fact, I believe that it would be fair comment to say that if we woke up one morning to read headlines that Virginia Morses killers, Kevin Crump and Allan Baker; Anita Cobbys murderers, John Travers, Michael Murdoch and the three Murphy brothers; the Bega-schoolgirl killers, Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett; and church elder Robert Arthur Selby Lowe, who murdered six-year-old Sheree Beasley in rural Victoria in 1991, had been taken out of their cells during the night and hanged there would be more rejoicing than public outcry. Australians are a notoriously revengeful lot.

But, unfortunately, that is never likely to happen. The last hanging that of Ronald Ryan who shot a warder during a successful escape occurred in Melbournes Pentridge Prison in 1967. Hanging has since been abolished in every state of Australia. Now we, the taxpayers, have to feed and provide for these heartless killers and many, many more like them until they die because they will remain behind bars forever, never to be released no matter the circumstances.

The first time this recommendation was handed down was to Leonard Keith Lawson, who set the wheels in motion in 1954 when he was sentenced to hang for the rape of two models. The death sentence was reprieved to life imprisonment, then to 14 years and he was eventually released after serving only seven years. Six months later in November 1961, Lawson murdered two teenage girls. He was sentenced to double life imprisonment with the recommendation from the then Minister for Justice, Mr Mannix, that: While appreciating that I cannot bind the hand of any future Executive Government, I am strongly of the view that Leonard Keith Lawson should never be released. Lawson never was. Despite numerous applications for parole over the years, the 76-year-old Lawson died of old age in his cell at Grafton Prison in 2003 after serving 42 years.

Next was the 1963 case of serial killer William the Mutilator MacDonald. He murdered a man in Brisbane before violently killing four Sydney vagrants by stabbing them as many as 57 times and leaving them lying in public places minus their private parts, which he souvenired with the skill of a Macquarie Street surgeon. Although it was obvious that MacDonald was as mad as a cut snake, incredibly the jury found him not only guilty but also sane when he committed the murders. MacDonald was sentenced to life in prison with a strong verbal recommendation from the bench that he never be released, and that his papers be marked likely to offend again.

MacDonald almost did offend again by bashing a fellow inmate half to death with a slops bucket soon after he went to Sydneys Long Bay jail. He was immediately removed to the notorious Ward 21 at Morriset Mental Institution for the criminally insane, where he spent 20 years. In 1983, he was released back into mainstream prison population at Parramatta Gaol, deemed to be normal. At the time of writing, 83-year-old William MacDonald is still in prison having so far served 47 years for his crimes. He will never be released.

In 2000, I found William MacDonald in the Long Bay jail and interviewed him for my book Australias Serial Killers: The Definitive History of Serial Multicide in Australia . At the time, he had been behind bars for 37 years. Instead of the monster who had murdered five men and souvenired most of their cocks and balls, Old Bill as he was affectionately known, was a harmless, stooped, little old Dickensian character with wispy fairy-floss hair and a goatee beard to match. He had animal posters on the wall of his cell and listened to classical music. MacDonald and I became friends and he allowed me to write a best-selling book about his crimes entitled The Knick-knack Man after the nickname they gave him in Parramatta Gaol because he nicked his victims knackers.

But while the crimes of Lawson and MacDonald were terrible and justice has been served, there were three horrendous cases that occurred in New South Wales before truth-in-sentencing legislation became law in 1989. These three pre-1989 crimes were deemed to be among the worst of the worst because they were perpetrated on lone women by more than one assailant. So grave was the nature of these murders that in each case the judge ordered that the killers papers be actually stamped never to be released in the hope that a parole board of the future would deem the case to be as serious as he did and keep the prisoners behind bars forever.

The first of these three landmark New South Wales cases was that of Mrs Virginia Morse. In 1973, Mrs Morse was snatched from her secluded farmhouse at Collarenebri, western New South Wales, by ex-convicts, Allan Baker and Kevin Crump. Over the next 36 hours she was repeatedly raped and eventually murdered in unimaginable circumstances. So shocking was some of the evidence that it was suppressed from the public and only heard in a closed court. Also, the night before, Crump and Baker had shot dead a farm worker, Ian Lamb, as he slept in his car.

Found guilty in a New South Wales court of murdering Ian Lamb and conspiracy to murder Mrs Morse (they actually killed her in Queensland) Crump and Baker who had joked their way through their trial were sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that their papers be marked never be released. This was the first time that a sentencing judge had ever made such a request in Australias criminal history. So profound was Mr Justice Taylors disgust with the giggling pair that he said in summing up:

You have outraged all accepted standards of the behaviour of men. The description of men ill becomes you. You would be more aptly described as animals, and obscene animals at that. I believe you should spend the rest of your lives in jail and there you should die. If ever there was a case where life imprisonment should mean what it says imprisonment for the rest of your lives this is it.

Justice Taylor then added what has become the benchmark for similar cases in the future and for parole boards assessing the perpetrators for release. He said:

If in the future some application is made that you be released on the grounds of clemency or mercy, then I would venture to suggest to those who are entrusted with the task of determining whether you are entitled to it or not, that the measure of your entitlement to either should be the clemency and mercy you extended to this woman when she begged you for her life. You are never to be released.

Crump and Baker will never be released in New South Wales, but if they were, they would find police waiting for them at the prison gates. From there they would be extradited to Queensland in chains where they would be found guilty of the actual murder of Mrs Virginia Morse and locked up with a new lot of hard men who wouldnt approve of what they did. They would then spend the rest of their lives out of their comfortable New South Wales environment and instead be forever looking over their shoulders for fear of becoming a prison trophy for someone with nothing to lose and keen to become a prison hero.