Crimes That Shook Australia

The Snowtown murders were so barbaric and shocking, the Australian community still struggle to come to terms with what happened. Between August 1992 and May 1999 John Bunting and Robert Wagner tortured and murdered twelve people in South Australia—disposing of their bodies in barrels.

In 1997, Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett abducted two teenagers: 14-year-old Lauren Barry and 16-year-old Nichole Collins. Over the next nine hours the girls were raped and tortured before being murdered. Their deaths and the investigation that caught their killers still shock Australia to this day.

On December 8, 1987, Frank Viktovic entered the HQ of Auspost at 191 Queen Street in Melbourne. 17 minutes later, eight innocent people lay dead, killed by a deranged loner.

In November 2010, David Auchterlonie was brutally murdered by Matthew Milat and Cohen Klein in the Belanglo State Forest. Milat wanted to follow in the footsteps of his great uncle, the infamous serial killer, Ivan Milat.

In 1997, 25-year-old Law student Anu Singh invited a group of friends to join her two dinner parties where she told them that a terrible crime would be committed. The twisted plot left boyfriend Joe Cinque dead and became notorious for its bizarre cruelty and tragic outcome.

Morgan Huxley was murdered in his own apartment in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay in September 2013. His killer was a complete stranger—a kitchen worker called Daniel Kelsall who followed him home.

In 1966, two teenagers, Garry Heywood and Abina Madill, went missing in Shepparton, Victoria. Their bodies were found days later. The murders would remain unsolved for over two decades when a chance discovery of a set of fingerprints to connect the murders and a brutal set of unsolved rapes to one man—Raymond Edmunds.

Dubbed the ‘Black Widow’, Patricia Byers effectively stripped her lovers before killing or trying to kill them to cover her crimes. Only diligent detective work would lead to her eventual imprisonment.

On September 22, 2012, Melbourne woman Jill Meagher was abducted and murdered by convicted sexual predator Adrian Bayley. Tragically Bayley had breached the terms of his parole and should have been locked up when he killed Jill.