[Andrew Rule (1957-) is an opinionated columnist and associate editor for the politically conservative Herald-Sun newspaper in Melbourne (formerly in 1987 purely ‘The Herald’ Melbourne newspaper before the 1990 media merger). Rule holds a long obsession with crime writing and of serious criminals. He has alffiliations to the Victorian Liberals, the political party’s whose Premier Denis Napthine on 20th November 2013 enacted legislation to overturn Knights 27 year non-parole sentence design to keep Julian Knight in prison until his death.]
15 June 2019: ‘Before the massacre’
Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule | True Crime Australia.
When Julian Knight opened fire on passers-by at Hoddle St in 1987, it would go down in Australian history as our first American-style mass-shooting. Andrew Rule looks at the mind of the man who caused the carnage. Read Keith Moor’s account of meeting Knight.
“But, there’s always a bit..
The Hoddle Street massacre has a backstory. It’s a story that the Army and by extension the Defence Department and possibly some political operators
have undoubtedly covered up; back from when the first urgent telephone calls woke people in Canberra in the hours after innocent blood was spilt at Clifton Hill in Hoddle Street.
No wonder that the Army and others moved to diminish their apparent responsibility in what happened with Julian Knight.
They could have a bit to answer for; such as the implication that Knight was an extreme product of an institutionalised form of cruelty
and thuggery and sex offending that has screwed up dozens and may be hundreds of patriotic young Australians who thought that
getting into Duntroon was the start of something special; that they would become Army officers and ‘officers and gentlemen’.
And in fact that many of them went by the wayside because of what happened to them at Duntroon…”
[by Andrew Rule]
18th May 2019: ‘Meeting monsters: Andrew Rule interviews crime writer, Keith Moor’
Life and Crimes (True Crime Australia), Herald-Sun
SOURCE: https://omny.fm/shows/life-and-crimes-with-andrew-rule/meeting-monsters
[WARNING: Disturbing content. From interviewing mass murderer Julian Knight to literally being chased out of town, journalist and author Keith Moor has unearthed some of the biggest crime stories in Australia. He sits down with Andrew to talk about his new book, Mugshots 3. More on Mugshots 3]
Click image to link to audio at OMNY.FM:
- Book by Keith Moor: ‘Mugshots 3‘
- Retail Price: $29.99
- Format: Paperback
- Country of Publication: Australia
- Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 138mm, Spine: 1mm
- ISBN: 9781925642322
- ISBN 10: 1925642321
- Publication Date: 01 May 2018
Abstract:
Thrilling collection of true crime from one of the top crime writers in Australia
Cases covered include the Hoddle Street killer, Julian Knight, the tragic murder of Kylie Maybury, and the terror cell formed by Muslim cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika In the third book in the best-selling series, Mugshots 3 takes the reader inside the sinister world of Australian crime and reveals the truth behind the stories that shocked a nation.
There have been gruesome murders, serial killings, terrorist plots, horrendous rapes and world record drug busts in Victoria during the 25 years since the Herald Sun was formed in 1990. Keith Moor has been an investigative journalist for almost 40 years — with more than 30 of them being with The Herald and the Herald Sun — and in Mugshots 3 he details 25 of some of the worst crimes committed in Victoria since the fi rst copy of the Herald Sun rolled off the presses on October 8, 1990.
About the Author:
KEITH MOOR is Insight Editor of the Herald Sun.
He studied journalism at the West Australian Institute of Technology before starting a cadetship with the Perth Daily News in 1979.
Keith won Australia’s top journalism award, the Walkley Award for news reporting, in 1986. He won the coveted award for his coverage of the kidnap of two Victorian aid workers in Pakistan. Keith travelled into war-torn Afghanistan to find the couple.
He became the Herald Sun’s first Chief of Staff when the paper was formed in 1990, later progressing to become its News Editor and then Managing Editor (News) in 1995.
Keith is the head of the Herald Sun’s investigative unit, having been appointed Insight Editor in November 1996.
24th January 2015: ‘Dark trail of brutality that led to Hoddle St’
(by Andrew Rule, Herald-Sun (Sunday edition), https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/andrew-rule/dark-trail-of-brutality-that-led-to-hoddle-st/news-story/74c08cd6d38424eb7be11637033fc648)
‘The massacre in Hoddle St still casts a long shadow but there is something troubling about the background to Julian Knight’s bloody rampage. If you want to be instantly unpopular in these parts, one guaranteed way is to say something even vaguely in favour of Julian Knight.
There is no need to explain who Knight is — his name is burned into the memories of two generations of Australians because of the barbaric crime he committed on August 9, 1987, when he shot dead seven people and wounded 19 more.
A high-powered rifle in the hands of any stray lunatic will do that sort of damage, a nasty thought given the present high alert against “lone wolf” terrorism. A fear apparently not shared by warm and fuzzy magistrate Jelena Popovic, but that’s another story.
Shooting unarmed, unsuspecting civilians at relatively close range doesn’t take much skill beyond loading and pointing — as proven by the moronic Martin Bryant at Port Arthur. What it takes is to be mentally unhinged. Knight shouldn’t kid himself he was some sort of antihero, sniper figure. He was, as a fellow Pentridge prisoner once said, “just a kid who flipped out”.
Now Knight is a middle-aged man faced with being locked up forever (or until he’s very old) because it would be political suicide to treat him like some lesser-known killers. No one from the premier’s office to the prison bosses to the parole board wants to risk showing the Beast of Hoddle Street anything that could be mistaken for mercy. Unless, of course, they take a leaf from the Popovic playbook.
And yet. There’s something troubling about the Knight case. None of us should imagine that the skinny teenager with the bum-fluff moustache “just happened”, like a lightning strike or an earthquake, or even like Martin Bryant.
Like the Kelly Outbreak of the late 1870s, the Hoddle Street Massacre has a backstory. A story the army (and, by extension, the Defence Department) has undoubtedly covered up from when the first urgent telephone calls woke people in Canberra in the hours after innocent blood was spilt in Clifton Hill.
No wonder they’ve covered it up. They have a bit to answer for. Such as the sinister implication that Julian Knight was an extreme product of an institutionalised form of cruelty and thuggery and offending that has screwed up dozens — maybe hundreds — of patriotic young Australians who thought “getting into Duntroon” was the start of something special.
Instead, what they got was something between a Dickensian boarding school and a prison farm where the commandants let favoured inmates rule the younger and weaker by turning a blind eye to brutality, mental as well as physical.
Without chasing every rat down every hole in the Defence Department, or the Victorian Justice Department, or even the Victoria Police, it’s fair to say there’s mounting evidence that lawyers and others acted ruthlessly to quarantine the army from the fallout from Knight’s rampage. In much the same way lawyers shielded the Catholic Church and other institutions lately exposed as rats’ nests of abuse.
A few volunteer investigators, mostly former members of the armed services, have set out to probe the extent, and effects, of bastardisation and sex abuse in the armed forces.
They paint a picture of what happened to Knight at Duntroon in the months before the psychological meltdown that led to the massacre. It’s a picture that tallies with the statement forensic psychiatrist Tim Watson-Munro made at a conference a year after the shooting.
He said Knight had suffered bastardisation from senior cadets, persecution that Knight blamed on his not coming from a private school background: “It was relentless … he was constantly singled out for victimisation, which included assaults and acts of forced subordination,” Watson-Munro said, commenting on his interviews with Knight.
This week, a former Canberra nurse has spoken out after a 27-year silence. Kim McKenzie says she was surprised and is now aghast at how the army abandoned Knight, effectively leaving a trained soldier in a highly unstable psychological state.
Knight, a jailhouse lawyer and serial litigant, is using the Canberra courts to allege the Commonwealth was responsible for bastardisation, bashings and bullying he suffered at Duntroon. There is not much doubt the bastardisation happened. It had been happening in some form ever since the 1930s, when a distant relative of mine passed through Duntroon before serving in World War II.
The former officer confirmed that when his grandson left Duntroon (with several other traumatised cadets) after being bastardised in early 1983, an event that became a national scandal but which did not end the culture of abuse at Duntroon.
Ms McKenzie has gone public because of what she saw while nursing Knight after a fight between him and senior cadets at a Canberra nightclub just weeks before Hoddle Street. Contemporaries say Knight was by that month the only “survivor” of five juniors targeted by senior cadets and knew he was probably going to be kicked out of Duntroon, although (he believed) not out of the army altogether. (He was later “double crossed” and prevented from resuming his spot in the Army Reserve after leaving Duntroon.)
Knight and another junior cadet, “Peter”, had gone to the bar to meet girls despite knowing their presence would upset senior cadets who had forbidden juniors to be there that night. But whereas “Peter” had decided to leave to avoid a confrontation, when Knight was assaulted he responded by stabbing his cadet Sergeant Major with a pocket knife. One investigator believes Knight was so sure he was going to be badly beaten with a baseball bat if he returned to Duntroon that night that he got himself arrested so he would be in the relative safety of a jail cell.
“Peter” has never gone public with his memories of Knight, whom he associated with at Duntroon because he also resented the way the “Old School” types treated those who didn’t share their relatively-privileged backgrounds.
“I remember it as if it was yesterday,” he said this week. “Knight was a little bloke my size but no good at sport, which made it harder for him. He would have made a fair soldier but was a terrible officer cadet. There was a lot of class distinction then … and he didn’t show any discretion.”
“Peter” became an officer. He corresponded with Knight and once tried to visit him in prison but was sent away by the authorities. He believes the bastardisation sent Knight over the edge, but that it was the army’s fault for recruiting someone doomed to fail the Duntroon course. The army, he says, was not clever enough to screen out candidates who were psychologically unfit to be trained killers — whereas Knight was clever enough to hide “his narcissist tendencies”.
Some police who interviewed Knight believe that if he was released he would still be a risk to society. “Peter” also reckons Knight would be a “a 50-50 chance” to reoffend on the outside. The one he was more worried about was another cadet who was sacked “because all he wanted to do was kill people”.’
COMMENT: According to Julian Knight’s Personal Account p.63 submitted to DART dated 26th November 2013, those fellow Duntroon 3rd Class (junior) staff cadets who had been with Julian Knight on the night of 30th May 1987 at the Ainslie Hotel to celebrate Julian’s friend’s birthday were:
- Julian Knight
- Craig Smith
- Simon Macks
- Matt Carrodous
- Sean Rapley
- Peter Buckley
2nd April, 1983: ‘Duntroon probe over sadism claims
by Andrew Rule, The Age, (Fairfax Media), https://www.smh.com.au/national/act/from-the-archives-1983-duntroon-probe-over-sadism-claims-20200323-p54d52.html
[images added]
The Minister for Defence, Mr. Scoles, has ordered a full report on detailed allegations of sadism and brutality among cadets at the Royal Military College, Duntroon.
His action follows information given to ‘The Age’ by three cadets who resigned from Duntroon after their five week initial training period. Mr. Scoles said yesterday that he would seek an immediate report from the college commandant on the allegations, which involve the cruel and humiliating treatment of junior cadets by senior cadets. He said an inquiry would be called if the report substantiated the allegations, which ‘The Age’ publishes in Saturday Extra today.
The latest allegations come 14 years after a judicial inquiry into the practice of ‘bastardisation’, which had become ingrained in the college’s training system. Punishments levied on cadets before 1969 included being ordered to climb the college flagpole at night if they were unable to give its correct height – 75 feet 6 ½ inches.
The cadets wish to remain anonymous because of possible repercussions. They have breached military law (Defence Force Discipline Act 1982) and RMC’s Code of Silence to make their allegations public. They say that intermittent violence punctuates constant humiliation and persecution of junior cadets which begins on the first day of training (Day 1).
They allege that as many as four cadets were admitted to the college hospital in February because of injuries inflicted by senior cadets. One of the cadets suffered a fractured jaw and another was kicked in the groin. They further allege that in the first week of training a junior cadet fainted with fear after having a loaded SLR rifle pointed at his head.
They also claim that on 30 January (1983) some senior cadets clapped and cheered after one of them announced that it was the 50th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power, and that on another occasion a junior cadet was forced to say that he like to wear sadomasochistic clothing.
First-year cadets found it difficult to maintain the stringent physical and academic training standards because of harassment by senior cadets who have the authority to punish, they said.
The harassment (bastardisation), described by one cadet as “psychological warfare”, included:
- Taunting junior cadets with offensive suggestions about photographs of their female relatives and friends
- Forcing junior cadets to run pointless errands at meal times to prevent them from eating for more than a few minutes, if at all
- Ensuring that junior cadets had little sleep by wasting their free time with punishments for petty misdemeanors so that they had to prepare uniforms for the next day after lights out
- Ordering junior cadets into cupboards full of smoke from burning toast, pouring cups of coffee over them, and smearing them with buttered toast
- Ordering junior cadets to “leopard-crawl” along the ground on their stomachs
- Gang bursting into junior cadets’ bedroom at any time (usually after midnight), waking them by kicking them or throwing buckets of water over them, or using a fire hose (‘bishing’).
Mr. Scoles said after reading the allegations at his Geelong office yesterday:
“I will be asking for a report from the commandant immediately but there would probably be great difficult in preparing any reports before Tuesday. There will obviously be a fair few people to be interviewed. If these allegations are true than obviously the procedures put in place previously are not working. If the report verifies the allegations new procedures will be put in place.”
Mr. Scoles said any decision to call an inquiry into the allegations would depend on the Commandant’s report.
The college commandant, Major-General H. G. (John) Coates, told ‘The Age’ last night:
“I have already put a Press statement through Army public relations. I think at this stage of the game that’s all I can do.”
An Army public relations officer, Colonel Murray Taylor, said:
“Bastardisation or any excessive behavior of any kind is not tolerated at the Royal Military College. The commandant’s policy is clear, is enforced by the staff and has been restated to the Corps of Staff Cadets by the commanding officer of the corps. Any suggestion of bastardisation is investigated thoroughly until found to be groundless.”
