There is no question that the shooting spree that Julian Knight committed was wrong, completely unjustified, evil and unforgiveable. He had intended to try and kill himself with a pre-packed suicide bullet in his jeans, but as ran out of ammunition and was about to be caught by police, he had lost the round and so surrendered. He immediately confessed his sole culpable guilt unconditionally to police upon arrest. He was still intoxicated during questioning by homicide detectives that night and into the early hours of Sunday at the St Kilda Police Complex on 10th August 1987. He then accepted that he would receive a long prison sentence for his multiple murders and attempted murders.
He then negotiated later with the Crown prosecutors before his sentence so as not to connect Duntroon’s systemic bastardisation of him to this shooting spree during his plea hearing.
Julian Knight’s temporal psychotic state of mind on the night of 9th August 1987 from the Clifton Hill Royal Hotel to Hoddle Street is still to be clarified.
What is documented is that at the time he was clearly intoxicated, depressed, angry, despondent, and arguably seeking revenge for how he had been relentlessly tormented and abused by the seniors cadets at Duntroon over the recent previous five months, and then condemned and rejected by the Army Brass and bureaucracy.
Knight was seeking revenge for what had happened to him. He wanted to vent his rage. His drunken state triggered his irrational thought processsing – reacting to his drunken psychotic imaginary “vision” of attacking enemy soldiers to ambush.
That he chose to shoot unknown passers by (civilians) suggested that he had irrantionally processed on the spur of the moment to take out his rage on general society. The combination of his psychotic state, his rage, his desire for revenge, and his warped delirious perception of propping in the shadows street-side to play a shooting gallery on live targets – he had become a momentary powder keg.
He was exponentially more dangerous given his ready access to his collection of powerful rifles with ammunition.
Spontaneous Proximity to Home
Of note, the distance between Knight’s mother’s house (where he was living) and where he chose spontaneously to set up in Army ambush attack position was only about 70 metres away. Knight propped with his firearms and ammunition behind a boulder under the dark cover of foliage by the railway corridor alongside busy night-time 4-laned Hoddle Street. In Army terms, it was a ‘Defensive Fighting Position’.
Knight’s gun-pit location was not pre-planned, but triggered by a spontaneous and convenient dark gun-pit for a trained soldier to deliver an ambush – in a psychotic mental state of complex depression, delirium, extreme intoxication, driving a temporal rage for vengeful payback upon his perceived rejectful society.