[Tess Lawrence is a Melbourne-based opinion columnist holding a degree in communications and of the Greens-Left political persuasion. Previously of the Herald-Sun newspaper in Melbourne and more recently writing/blogging for Independent Australia (a Leftist media outlet), Lawrence is not into objectivity and is not a qualified journalist, as her following hate-riddled, sexist 2-part blog about Julian Knight reveals.]
7th August 2012: ‘The Dark Knight Rises on the Viagra of violence’ (Parts 1 & 2)
[This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License]
[Part 1]
‘On Thursday, it will be 25 years since the infamous Hoddle Street massacre in Melbourne. Contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence’s series of prison interviews with the infamous mass murderer, Julian Knight, are chilling accounts of evil.
THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that on Thursday, gutless murderer Julian Knight will get out the pornographic material that has reportedly been returned to him in his cell in Barwon Prison and mentally masturbate over that bloody night of infamy in 1987, when his dysfunctional manhood achieved erection only by fixing it to the barrel of a gun. Several guns. Such was his need for the Viagra of violence.
The gormless punk responsible for what is rightly called the Hoddle St Massacre was due for parole consideration next year.
It is no small judicial mercy for victims, survivors, family members, friends, ambo drivers, paramedics, helpers, residents, shopkeepers, police, medical and hospital staff, road sweepers, tow truckers, onlookers, forensic staff, the Crown and journalists, among others, that the Parole Board decided Knight would not be released.
There was an almost collective audible, but nervous, sigh of relief around the State at the Board’s decision.
Whilst the question of Knight’s oft debated prospect of rehabilitation and an apparent lack of remorse has been instrumental in the decision to keep him incarcerated, it is as much for his own personal safety, as well as ours. And as galling as it might be, that is how it should be.
Several people among the many whose lives have been irreparably damaged by Knight, have made it clear to me that should he ever be released, they would consider it an honour to “take him out” without fear of the personal consequences.
“I couldn’t care less if I spend the rest of my life in prison for killing him. It would be a small price to pay for all the lives he took and all the suffering he caused us all. And tell you what; I reckon I’d get an endless stream of visitors who would all feel the same way I do,” said someone still close to one of the dead in his heart and in his nightmares.
The hurt, even after the quarter century since the murders, is still raw and palpable. Knight’s seemingly constant Court appearances throughout, keeps reopening the wounds.
Age journalist Aja Styles wrote last month:
“The policeman responsible for locking up mass murderer Julian Knight has applauded a Parole Board decision that will keep the man behind the infamous Hoddle Street massacre behind bars…”
She wrote that Knight
“…was due to be considered for parole on 8 May next year, but the board moved swiftly to extinguish those hopes after a meeting last Friday ruled unanimously that he should not be released” – the Herald Sun has reported.
Knight, who is being held at Port Phillip Prison, is a notorious troublemaker in jail. In 2004, he was declared a vexatious litigant by the Supreme Court.”
In an interview with Radio 3AW [shock jock Neil Mitchell] quoted by Styles, the officer who arrested Knight, Sgt John Delahunty voiced what many of us fear:
‘He said he had “no doubt” that Knight would do the same again if he was ever released.
“Knowing what I do know about him, he has such a grudge against society and he’s so selfish in his own thoughts you can’t safely predict that he wouldn’t go out and cause some other harm later on,” he said.
“I think people deserve justice. He needs to stay in jail for the rest of his life and I think the parole board has done the right thing on this occasion.
…Sergeant Delahunty said it was important that future generations not forget the scar that the massacre left on the Melbourne landscape.’
He is right.
Out of deference to the victims and survivors, friends and families and all of us who make up this scar that still suppurates in our shared memory and history, Independent Australia today publishes the first part of an article that originally appeared in the Good Weekend, based on a series of interviews I did with Julian Knight.
The article has been referred to in a number of journals and academic articles and several books. I have chosen, in this instance, to remove the names of Knight’s brother and sister from the original text. I have also elected not to use any photos of Knight. There have been enough body shrouds drenched in blood because of Knight, and enough pillows drenched in tears. I do not wish to be responsible for his prison sheets to be stained with the seed of his self-gratification.
It is St Valentine’s Day. The massacre is still not over though we have long buried our dead. Julian Knight, the Grim Reaper of Hoddle St sits opposite me.
In the stark fibro visitor’s shed at Pentridge Prison’s Maximum Security H Division, we take tea in polystyrene cups. Knight clings to the rim of the laminex table like a piece of discarded offal on a plate now bereft of the feast.
He has supped well on the flesh of others. Even now, their carcasses hang neatly hooked and numbered in the well-ordered abattoir of his psyche.
The ‘Use by’ dates on the corpses read: August 9, 1987. On that morning, seven innocents arose from their beds with the mark of death on their foreheads.
By mid-evening, six were dead, including a young mother nursing her baby. The seventh was to die 11 days later. Nineteen others were wounded and a bleeding city was left chanting a mantra of mourning and disbelief.
It was Knight’s mother’s birthday. Clutching a metal bouquet that included a semi-automatic rifle, a pump action shotgun, an M14 and a gutful of hate, Knight took his private wars to a public place and opened fire on the world and its civilians. The party was over.
But, in a more insidious sense, for the urban Rambo of Ramsden St, the real celebration was about to begin. He had extinguished the candles on the cakes of strangers. His trigger finger had beckoned him from obscurity. Man, he’s a fuckin’ living headline. He’s somebody now. Everbody’s dancing for him; for his blood, for his neck, for his exclusive story, for his views on law and order and gun control, for the social implications of his acts of carnage, for his repentance. Even for his forgiveness, that our society could spawn such an exterminator.
He’s loving it. Every bloody coagulated moment. He’s as cosy as a kid sitting in a bath of his own warm pee.
Clifton Hill became the killing field for this failed soldier, forced to endure a bolt-action retreat from Duntroon Royal Military College.
Looking at him now, there is little evidence of the instinctive militarist he professes to be. He is still a boy, with a shy manhood that may never manifest on his face — except for a scrawny moustache that hovers like a child’s soft toothbrush, above the corrugated vermilion of a gormless mouth. He still harvests acne crops. A mole on the side of his face has been removed since his incarceration. Do not suppose that a killer has not his vanities. He used to nick the mole while shaving. It used to bleed like buggery and hurt like hell.
Tell me about it Julian. The bleeding and the hurting.
He maintains the demeanour of an unarmed punk. Weak chin. Big hands. Dangling like weights on the ends of simian limbs. Against the curved vertebrae that is his backbone, nestles a concave chest lazing on its bony hammock.
His is a manipulative intelligence.
He is weaning greedily on the milks of notoriety and media attention. A heady mixture for a calculating predator who, now relieved of his lethal weaponry, has embarked on a well-drafted battle plan to establish himself as an analytical, dispassionate investigator of his own misdeeds.
His seemingly academic interest in his own state of mind and the state of the victims’ bodies is more than obsessive.
Julian Knight is starring in his own movie.
He is handling the media with the same dexterity he handled the M14 on Bloody Sunday.
I have watched him during the months. From time to time, I visited him in Pentridge — gathering research for a documentary, monitoring his mood changes, his thoughts, his relationship with the public, and the sometimes indecent courting procedure that took place between Knight and the media.
As well, I monitored my own reactions to dialogue with the murderer.
As I watched him, so he watched me. What I write now is sourced in the marginalia of those meetings and I write not in the lexicon of explanation, but as one whose pen is motivated by the emotion at the time and the record of interview.
For hours I have listened to his rapid-fire delivery. His sense of self far eclipses his physical presence. It encircles him like the cloud of a Medium’s ectoplasm. He speaks neither in voices nor in tongues but in dialects of apparent logic and rationale.
These dialects leave him when he talks of the business of killing. In their stead, he blisters with a fervour that is orgasmic in its enthusiasm and single-minded intensity. Therein lies a glimpse of that godless August night and his orgy of death-making.
All the while he talks, his mouth provides a favoured holster for the cigarette he habitually fingers and uses as a pointing stick.
His hands, clumsy as a sawn-off shotgun, are shaking beyond his control, belying the steady marksman we know him to be. He denies he’s on the hard stuff — prescribed or otherwise. He is lying.
On this day, in another part of the fibro shed, a female visitor sits side-straddle in the lap of another prisoner. In a frenzied and heated embrace, their tongues snake into one another’s mouths, exchanging kisses and, most likely, drugs.
They make muted noises of intimacy. Husky whisperings. Giggles and gurgles. Her provocative dress, like her make-up, is designed more for an evening of frenetic disco, rather than an afternoon at L’Hotel Penal. She is here to distract as well as seduce.
I notice that one of her high-heeled slingbacks is half-off the foot that teases her captive suitor’s leg. Aroused, and with his own part to play, his hands slide around her buttocks, igniting the static electricity coursing between her cheap nylon party dress and her panty-hose.
Knight casts a cursory glance. The prison guards affect diffidence. Later, she and I will both be escorted back up to the prison gates and the reception area.
She is streetwise, cheery and well versed in prison life and its vernacular.
It is a long walk from the main bluestone torso of Pentridge to the fibro shed, over an unfinished and sometimes muddy track.
Regular visitors learn that stiletto heels are liable to impale the earth. She is a regular visitor.
A muse with a ruse. As she totters and trips on the stones, her mask of jocularity dislodges, revealing the desperation underneath that disfigures so many of the visitors to H Division.
On another day in a city courtroom I will catch a glimpse, not of the same mask, but of a similar disfigurement on the face of another woman — Julian Knight’s mother, Pamela.
Not long after we first meet, Knight assures me he is much sought after by the media. He wants to know about payment. Where my article will be placed. What sort of angle I’d go for. How much did I know about THE night. How much did I REALLY know about the night. Have I seen the pictures. ALL the pictures. You know THOSE pictures. Pictures of the victims. Did I have any pictures. Did I have any newspaper clippings. Could he see those pictures. Could I send them to him. Could I please send him the clippings. Everything I’ve got. The reason being he says, is that he wants to make sure I don’t get anything wrong. Some wrong things about him have been written.
The media are fuckin’ incompetent. Some of that stuff they put down is shit, Tess. Why do you all write shit. You’re like the police. Fuckwits.
What sort of documentary did I want to make. Would it be dramatised. Would it have news footage from the night. Would I be speaking to the victims’ families. See, you don’t understand Tess, how could you. You’re say, what — a middle class journalist. What do you know about the Army. You journalists are mostly all middle-class. You come from comfortable to well-off socio-economic groups, what would you know about this sort of thing. What do you know about combat. What do you know about guns. Do you mind if I smoke, he asks. By the way, don’t call me killer … I haven’t pleaded yet.
Another thing is — you’re a woman. No offence. Just that I think a man would be more understanding of what happened. Are you familiar with my sort of phenomena. You see, I’m not just a straight out killer. Have you read about Son of Sam, have you read about the McDonald’s massacre. I’d like you to read up on them before you get back to me, so you have more of an understanding, so we can more thoroughly discuss this type of killing process.
Uhm, you might think I was an ordinary killer, but you would be wrong. I’ll explain it all to you next time. I’m not like these guys (he tilts his head towards the other prisoners and their visitors).
No way. Don’t even put them in the same class. These guys are low life. Know what I mean. Habitual criminals. Soon as they’re out they’ll be back in again. They can’t help themselves. I’ll tell you a joke, something that will make you laugh.
One day I was waiting to make a phone call and one of the Russell Street bombers was on the phone talking to his mother. Well, Tess, he was gabbling on an’ I was getting impatient. She was asking him how he was and all that and I heard him say he was fine and okay and everything and then he goes, guess what Mum, I’m in here with the guy that done the Hoddle St massacre. Well, you don’t reckon that the shit hit the fan. She did her block. She was screaming out to him to go and speak to the Governor, so he could get moved to another part of the prison away from me. She was worried about his safety. What a joke. She was telling him, I want you to get away from that murderer, heaven knows what he might do to you. The joke is Tess, I’m nothing like those guys. Nothing. They’ve got nothing to be afraid of, not from me. They’re the criminals not me.
I’m the one whose life is in danger in here. I’ll tell you something. I don’t know how long I’ll survive in here because the truth is most of these guys are professional killers and I’m not.
The truth is, that in here…in here, I’m the dolphin among the sharks.
The quote is part of the rhetoric he uses to romanticize his persona in the eyes of onlookers. It has much to do with how he wishes himself documented by the press, the judiciary, criminologists and scholars of the mind.
Not once, in all the hours spent together, did he ever express interest in anything that did not directly concern him. He has busied himself during these past sixteen months preparing extensive and pragmatic portfolios concerning the legal and other aspects of his case.
Further, he has prepared maps and all manner of illustrations. Many of these folders he has despatched to various editors and media chiefs. Apart from the occasional spelling error, he remains erudite and lucid on paper. His copy is neat and would put the offerings of some professional journalists to shame. All the pages I have seen so far are originals, typed on a manual typewriter.
He obviously spends hours on his correspondence.
Occasionally, he has drawn cartoons for popular and in-house publications. When letters are published, his credibility as an authoritative spokesman on law and order and the human condition is affirmed.
During the understandably emotive public debate about guns before the last Victoria State election in October, Knight wrote to the major newspapers offering his expert opinion.
Some newspapers published his letters and their content was widely debated.
So too, was the issue of publishing Knight’s letters in the first place. Both legally, morally, and in deference to the families of victims, was it fair?
As he points out, he has rights, and, he asserts, some constructive advice for society. From the telescopic sights of he who pulled the trigger.
Now, about payment for the interview. You know Tess, that new bloke on Sixty Minutes wants to interview me. About a piece he’s doing on Australian prisons. And the ABC wants to talk to me, their social history department’s been onto me. I don’t know who I’m gonna do it with. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be paid for the interview. How would I go about that. You know, obviously I can’t get paid, the Tax Department would be right onto me. But couldn’t the money be channelled through my family? I told Knight there was no way I’d be paying a killer a cent. Moreover, what had happened to his philanthropic ideology that led him to believe he had some contribution to make to public debate on the seemingly increasing level of violence in the community.
That stuff’s fair enough, he says. but you guys are gonna make money out of me. Why shouldn’t I get my share. You say you won’t pay me because you don’t believe a mass murderer should make money out of his crimes. Fair enough. But you’ll get paid, won’t you. You’ll get paid and paid well for the documentary. You’ll get paid if you do an interview. You don’t mind making money out of a mass murderer, do you. Fair enough. I agree. It stinks. But if anyone is going to make any money, I want a share in it.
I warned Knight to beware of journalists promising financial inducement and that any such transaction would relegate him to the realms of entertainer – a puppet – who was expected to perform to deliver the goods per value of the dollars paid.
It would place great strain on his earnestness to present himself as a candidate for rehabilitation, especially if his tongue were loosened by the rattle of small change. But the thrill of public exposure is too intoxicating for Knight. And, in this instance, those who offer such incentive are just as guilty as he who accepts it.
He wants to write a book. Would I be interested in doing a book. What sort of royalties would he get. How come it would be so little an amount, if it was his book, about him. Hey, no-one can just go ahead and do a documentary or a film about me, can they. You’re kidding, Tess — how can they do that when I’m still alive… but they couldn’t put words in my mouth, could they. They wouldn’t know what I was thinking. They wouldn’t know what was in my head. They wouldn’t know what made me react. They just can’t make up the conversation. Can they.
How far can I go in my book. For example, there’s this girl that I used to go with. My old girlfriend. She’s married now. Can I put in all the stuff about her and me and everything, before she got married, like. Would I have to change her name. Could I keep their names, or would I have to change them.
On another day, he talks of a girl he’s been trying to contact since he was in prison. An old girlfriend. I am unclear whether it’s the same girl.
She won’t have anything to do with me. I wrote to her, but she won’t write back. I asked her to visit me in prison. The bloody fuckin’ bitch. It really shits me off.
Why do people do that. I mean, what can I do to her in here. What is she scared of. People don’t have any reason to be scared of me. What am I going to do, just sit in here for about 20 years, and then what — what sort of life will I have. How will I go, moving back into society.
Where could I hide. Even if I changed my name, there is always somebody who finds out about you. Always. Who’s going to marry me and settle down and have kids. Would you. Could you marry somebody like me. Would you. It would be very difficult, wouldn’t it, for anyone to take me on.
Then you have to decide if you’ll have children. How do you tell children that your father is a mass murderer. Tell me that, Tess. So what is everyone afraid of. Well, you didn’t answer me, could you marry someone like me.
[Part 2]
‘Tomorrow, it will be 25 years since the infamous Hoddle Street massacre in Melbourne. Contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence’s series of prison interviews with the infamous mass murderer, Julian Knight, are chilling accounts of evil.
Julian Knight is a renowned media whore.
I am no psychologist, and have not seen Knight in person for decades, but some of those who have attest that he continues to relish the notoriety his cowardly murders have brought to his prison door.
To say he is self-obsessed is an understatement.
Even when being interviewed about Knight, as I was on Fran Kelly’s ABC Breakfast (Radio National) some years ago, on the anniversary of the massacre, I remain mindful of the continued hurting of our community.
I understand that some survivors still have to wrestle with bureaucracy in terms of medical and financial support and compensation. So many lives have been derailed.
Some feel Knight has forfeited any rights to privileges — even redemption and rehabilitation. That he is beyond forgiveness.
But Justice has to stand between him and vengeance.
Knight’s manipulative powers are persistent. He has played certain media groups off against one another – individual journalists as well – presuming them beholden, after he grants an audience. Some of them have been providing a convenient extension to Knights own PR machine.
You got to remember, Tess, I was a kid when I did Hoddle St. I was only nineteen. I’d led a really sheltered life. Always been in institutions. Family, School, La Trobe Uni, Duntroon. Always been protected. Insulated. What chance had I ever had in life. I’m never going to even get the chance to live. What sort of life is this. I’ve never really lived out there in the real world. I’ve never had a taste of real living.
Maybe not, but Julian Knight had a taste for death. His personal profile, presented both inside and out of the courtroom, presents us with the spectre of an extremely disturbed young man.
I’ve sat opposite him in prison and I’ve sat opposite him in Court and I have wondered if somewhere in the mental DNA of Julian Knight, his destiny was pre-ordained — or was he simply a child of society’s own making? The living manifestation of certain chancres. Did we create him in our own image and likeness?
Knight senior was a career soldier, later promoted to Major. There were two other children. The family was posted throughout Asia and Australia.
Julian idolised his father; wanted so much to be like him. To please him. To be a high achiever. A good soldier.
Julian was twelve years old when his parents separated. He never recovered from what he deemed an emotional severance from the person whose love and respect he most craved.
Major Knight left the family home, later remarried and now lives in Townsville. Julian’s obsessive interest in guns and all things military accelerates.
His transition from child to teenager is not a happy one. He has difficulty communicating with others. He feels socially inept. He is. He suffers from poor esteem. He joins the Army cadets, the Army Reserves, and eventually, after a stint at uni, Duntroon…all the while, waging war on himself.
He drinks and fights a lot.
One of his contemporaries at Duntroon says of him:
“The thing is, Julian was never going to be a good soldier. He didn’t have the leadership qualities or the discipline. He couldn’t hack it.”
He had this image of his father that he had to live up to. And he had this chip on his shoulder, like we thought he wasn’t good enough, and frankly, he wasn’t. You couldn’t go out and die for this man. You just wouldn’t trust his judgement.
He knew all the technical stuff, but there’s more to being a good soldier and a leader than that.
He wasn’t the sort of bloke who could command others. Other blokes just couldn’t look up to him. He was a wimp. A big man when he had a big gun in his hand. He was a Rambo soldier, you know, the type you see on the screen — one man against the world sort of thing.
I’ll tell you something, he was a coward. That’s why he was picked on. Scared shitless he was.
We gave him hell, but then we give a lot of the blokes hell and they don’t go around killing people on street corners.
He was always going on about his father being a Major, as if that gave him special privileges.
So what. A lot of us have high ranking relatives…another thing was, he just didn’t have that certain polish, or social awareness. He wouldn’t know crystal from glass, d’you know what I’m saying.
He didn’t know about etiquette and he was out of his depth at some of the social ‘do’s’ in Canberra. He never looked the part, even in uniform; looked more like a boilermaker or a fitter and turner, which he should have been. Trouble was, he was looking for a war. He was always saying he wished one would start in Australia. Well, he started his own war. The thing is, he fought a coward’s war, didn’t he. Civvie street is no war zone. I reckon his shit would have turned yellow if he’d been in a real war, in say, ‘Nam, fighting real soldiers.
What he did was a terrible thing. Don’t you believe all that shit he tells you about the Army training you to kill.
I know he says he went into a killing mode that night, and that’s shit. The last thing Duntroon does is teach you that sort of thing. And I want to tell you something anyway: that wasn’t killing — that was murder. The Army might teach us to kill, but it doesn’t teach us to murder. There is a difference. And every soldier will know what I’m getting at.
Not one of us were surprised when we found out it was Knight. He was a real sicko and he was one of our worst mistakes. I’d say our worst to date. He should never have had access to any guns. I read that he was keeping one last bullet for himself. I don’t believe that.
That guy would never hurt himself. He thinks he’s top gun. He was always trying to pretend he was something he wasn’t. He’d try and shove all these theories he had about soldiering down our throats. He only ever had influence over people who were not as intelligent as most. If he’d stayed in civvie street, he’d be hanging around with the local riff-raff, the losers.
You couldn’t really get near to him. There wasn’t any warmth about the man. He had only one dimension to him, and he was full of hate … maybe not hate, but bitterness. Yes, bitterness. And he was hopeless with the sheilas. Wouldn’t know which was was up. A couple of his girlfriends were real scrubbers, you know what I’m saying. He did get a bit of a hard time over that.
As for the bastardisation, well, we all go through it, to varying degrees, I must admit; but the way he’s gone on about it, you’d think he went through it every day. Notice how he won’t come out and say what actually used to go on. Because all the blokes would fall about laughing. He’s using it as a bloody excuse to get sympathy. I wish there was some way we could court martial him. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to him about the stabbing episode … if the Army will follow it up, now that he’s got 27 years.”
About two months before the Hoddle St massacre, Knight was cited in an incident at a Canberra nightclub. Knight allegedly stabbed a Sergeant Major. On that evening, Julian had been confined to barracks, but had been ‘ sprung’ at the disco by his superiors.
At a subsequent Army investigation, Knight acquiesced to pressure to resign. It is understood that the police charges over the incident still stand.
This inglorious exit from the Army left Knight humiliated and determined to redeem himself.
Seventy one days later, the redemption of Julian Knight took place in a baptism of gunfire in a lazily trendy suburban alcove known as Clifton Hill.
The Battle of Clifton Hill was Julian Knight’s Last Stand. It confirmed his aspiration as a one-man war machine and it ricocheted him from self-loathing and obscurity to the realm of killer-celebrity.
Just before 9.42pm that night, he took up a kneeling position, both to pay his final respects to society and to stabilise his aim.
How many times it has been said of our kind, that we care not for one another — that you could drop dead from a heart attack, on the pavement, and people would step over you. Not that night, they didn’t.
Within ten minutes, he had executed six people and wounded nineteen others – pausing for a smoko – bringing them down at the rate of 2.6 per minute, alternating three weapons and discharging about 125 rounds of ammunition.
The air was filled with the wails of police and ambulance sirens — and of the dying and the wounded and those who gathered around them.
Bodies lay strewn all over the place. Truly, it was the slaughter of the innocents, as people rounded the bend into Hoddle St and unwittingly into the killer’s sights.
On this night, everyone stopped to help. As they did, Knight struck them down. Before the clock struck ten, he had tattooed his name in bullet holes into Victoria’s tragically murderous history with a velocity from which we have yet to recover.
Overhead, spotlights and flashing lights ignited the sky like a false galaxy and moon. Above us, the police chopper shred the night, searching for one or more snipers. Knight was to bring the chopper down with a 40 cent bullet. He still gloats about that one. Police, media and onlookers converged to the war zone.
On the ashpalt floor of this urban jungle lurked the most dangerous enemy of our species — one of our own kind. He said it all when he pumped six bullets into the flesh of his first victim. Melbourne was on red alert. Television and radio programmes kept blitzing news flashes, many of them contradictory.
We didn’t know what was going on and we’re still wondering why the earth opened up. Within the hour, the police had captured Knight.
That’s a fuckin’ lie he tells me later in prison. He surrendered. He misplaced the bullet he was saving for himself. This is what shits him about the police, he tells me.
They’ve always got to be the tough guys, so he’s telling me, right here and now, he gave himself up.
Get that?
I don’t believe Knight had serious intent to kill himself.
The aftermath is part of his Grand Vision. I have seen him intoxicated with the recollection of his performance that night.
He was great. He shoved it up the Army. He shoved it up the police. And that bloke that touched up his girlfriend’s tits. He shoved it up society and every bastard that had ever done him wrong.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the killing machine. And all because he’d had a bad day.
His girlfriend rejected him, his car broke down, and he’d never been breastfed as a baby.
Later, Julian Knight will ridicule the police for not killing him stone dead. From the sanctity of his prison walls, he despatched all manner of theses to all manner of people.
Dossiers of death. Ruthless in their criticism of authority and the lack of military countenance of the constabulary and the special operations group personnel. Not even between the lines is there any real explanation for his actions, or any compassion for those he killed and maimed for life.
He even details the name and address of one of his girlfriends for possible interview. Like his conversation, his written words move no further than the radius of his blind ego.
Nor did the killing stop with Knight’s arrest. He boasted of the copycat killings he inspired.
A few days after Hoddle St, a 16 year old St Albans kid killed a taxi driver.
Then, in a sleepy postcard of a village in England, called Hungerford, a killer with a mental profile not dissimilar to Knight liquidated 16 people in what was Britain’s worse mass murder.
The terminator’s name was Mike Ryan and Knight speaks of him as if he is an old friend; or a pupil who learnt well from the Master Blaster.
But there is one copycat killer who Knight despises. His face curdles when he mentions his name. Less than five months after Hoddle St, an angry young man called Frank Vitkovic took a gun into the Australia Post building on Queen St.
Seventeen minutes later, he hurled himself out of an 11th floor window.
By then, he’d shot dead eight people, wounded and terrorised so many others.
Knight’s bloody sphere of influence now totalled 32 dead, dozens wounded and countless shattered families.
Melbourne was starting to smell of decayed corpses.
Remember we were still grieving from the Russell St bombing where a young policewoman, Angela Taylor later died from horrendous injuries.
You shouldn’t count Frank Vitkovic, says Knight. The guy was an amateur, know what I mean. What did he know about guns. Just walked in and got one over the counter. Wasn’t trained. It was a fluke he took out eight.
A real fluke. Had to be.
Knight’s credibility as a professional soldier is compromised by the success of this amateur.
Sure, Frank took out one extra than Knight, remember, he took longer to do the job. Vitkovic wasn’t in the same league and don’t let anyone try and bluff you that he was.
Inside Knight’s mean belly, the jealousy he feels over Vitkovic is gnawing at his stomach lining.
Frank, you see, had so much more publicity, especially at the inquest and the pictures that were subsequently released for publication.
Knight is outraged that the fuckin’ media has given so much space to the amateur.
He fights to get his inquest reopened so that he can make a play for equal airtime.
Why do you reckon, Tess, that the public feels more sympathy towards Vitkovic than me.
Is it because he’s dead, and they can’t get an explanation out of him. Is it because there’s no one they can blame.
You know, like with me, they’ve got someone to point out.
One day, Knight tells me about the nightmares he got when he was coming off prescribed anti-depressants.
When I first came in here, I made the mistake of saying I wish I was dead. It was an off the cuff remark. I was having a down day. They thought I was going to do myself in.
So they shovelled the stuff in me.
One day, he tells me, he was taking heavy sedation for about six weeks. Another time he says it was for six months.
At the moment, he’s wide eyed and wide mouthed.
You know, Tess, I reckon I’d go all right out there. (He points to the world.)
I don’t think so, Julian, I never want you on the streets again. I don’t care if imprisonment does involve rehabilitation.
When you’re 47 years old, I don’t care to get on the same bus with you or want you anywhere in the local supermarket. I don’t care if you can offer a contribution. Save it. I’m not interested in assertions that you have a high IQ.
Whilst sociologists ponder why Melbourne seems to have a proliferation of mass killers, and some suggest the answer lies in our traditional conservatism — there is no doubt there is a disturbing melancholia in our midst.
Our streets have become signposts to murder; roadmaps of mayhem. Place crosses at all of these; Russell St, Queen St, and more recently Walsh St, where two young rooky policemen were executed.
Justice George Hampel, in passing sentence, jailed Knight for life for each of the seven murders with a fixed minimum term of 27 tears.
Knight had pleaded guilty to all charges, including 46 charges of attempted murder.
On that day, Knight’s feral appearance faltered only occasionally. He was determined to remain expressionless.
Each time, the courtroom door opened — and he looked around as if expecting someone. His breathing was shallow. His hands clasped in front of his pelvis. Now and again his Adam’s Apple would signal his discomfort at the judge’s words.
In his green prison tracksuit, he monitored every face in the room.
The 27 years minimum pleased him. Worked out to about 3.85 years per corpse.
Pamela Knight and (another son) sat in the court. She wore a bright white and yellow suit.
A face hued in sorrow, but without concession to emotion. Among the innocents and the casualties, she must be allowed a place.
Though he was the seed not of her womb, but of her heart, he betrayed her. He maimed her with another kind of gun and used another kind of bullet. Hers remains the courage of universal motherhood.
You little punk, Julian Knight. Your war games will continue. You will find succour in your imprisonment and shelter from your own impotence. It was you who surrendered, but it is we who remain prisoners of the war.
SELECTED COMMENTS:
Andrew McIntosh, 10 years ago
“This is Independent Australia going for a tabloid faux-outrage market. I understand that Lawrence genuinely hates the man – you can hardly miss it – but it’s cynical in the extreme to take her feelings and put them forward in the public interest in the same manner as Bolt, Jones, Hinch and the rest of muck rakers.
And as for the standard of writing – jeez, “the grim reaper of Hoddle St”? “…the urban Rambo of Ramsden St”? “…as cosy as a kid sitting a bath of his own warm pee” for god’s sake?! And that was just for starters. You’d be heartless not to smirk.”
[Andrew McIntosh was Victorian State Corrections Minister in the Napthine Liberal Government in 2012. He was in charge of the prison system incarcerating Julian Knight at the time the Adult Parole Board rejected Knight’s application for parole. McIntosh claims “The decision of the Adult Parole Board was made independently of the Government” (July 2012). Well, pigs fly! McIntosh politically interfered with the Board’s decision. Within a year, McIntosh as chair of the Victorian Parliament’s Privileges Committee misused his position to leak sensitive agenda committee content to a journalist as a political lobbying way to get his own agenda out in the public domain. Exposed, McIntosh was forced to resign from all such committees, from ministerial cabinet and a year later from politics altogether. He was dodgy. It was McIntosh who kept Knight in prison using standover tactics opn the Adult Parole Board.]
TESS LAWRENCE (in 2021)
“Dear ANDREW MCINTOSH, are you the politician of the same name ?
Thank you so much for your contribution to the public discourse on this matter.
And thank you for putting me in such illustrious literary company, though I feel that BOLT, JONES, HINCH and the rest of the MUCKRAKERS will be outraged that you dare to mention me in the same breath!
Keep smirking Andrew, while some of us struggle to find words to try to make some sense of the indefensible.
Let me make this quite clear Andrew McIntosh, do not put your words into my mouth. I do not hate the man. Get that.”
[no reply from McIntosh]
takesonetwoknowone (2021)
“Dear Tess,
I’m not a regular commenter, this being my first on IA, so I’m a little confused?
Does Tess Lawrence have a son?
Please don’t take offense Tess, none is intended, i’m still working through similar issues that Julian suffers from and need to comment here in an attempt to exorcise still more demons…
I don’t have a son, but my daughter is unconditionally loved by me, and often i ponder along the same lines as Tess has done here, but somehow come to different conclusions…
My conclusions are born from my past, they are about forgiveness…
But enough about me, my daughter, Tess’ son, or lack there-of; this article is about Julian Knight, or is it?
I’ve never followed any of Knights exploits, i was a little busy way back then surviving a childhood that stemmed into early adult life, possibly something Tess is not familiar with – surviving ones childhood, or early adult life…
Interviewing one of Knights contemporaries at Duntroon, Tess reveals allot of the dogma of that “world”, and in that italicised section alone, brought me to forgiving Knight; was this your intent, Tess?
I don’t quite grasp the intent of this article, Tess, or what qualifies you to judge Knight as you seem to do?
Perhaps if you had of interviewed one of Knights lesser contemporaries, that treated him as an equal or better, i might hate as much as you, this twisted, bitter, human semblance of the depths of our bourgeoisie society…You do seem to forget that Knight is human, and always a very present part of our society…
Dogs that kill get shot and their owners fined, would you have been happier seeing Knight shot and his mother fined? It reads like you are doing just that Tess…
What criminal, judged and prosecuted, jailed, rehabilitated and then released would you forgive or even accommodate being released, Tess?
At what point do you draw the line and why?What have YOU learnt from Knights incarceration stemming from his crime?
What has our society learnt?
How has society changed, adapted, and stamped out what this criminal describes as his motivation for enacting such a heinous crime?
Is it only the purpose of the criminal in being incarcerated to be rehabilitated, or can society find it in itself to adopt the same rehabilitation that removes the conditions that drive criminal behaviour of this type to the fore?
As a child I dreamt of becoming an ASIO agent, being slightly autistic in childhood, i knew access to ASIO would be through the ARMY, my intent was to avenge and rescue the children I’d spent time with, captured within the confines of a house at Eildon, children held captive under the auspices of a now highly publicised cult…
If i had of gone down that path and attempted this in my early adult life, killing several people in the process, would you write a similarly scathing article of me Tess?
I didn’t but am not overly proud of how i expressed anger in my early life, predominantly rising to spates of vigilante behaviour, though never anything criminal, a history of black-outs brought on through blind rage were recorded through my childhood and early adult life, the result was usually some bully being physically accosted by me without my having any recollection of the event; where is Knights psychological profile reports Tess, in this your assessment of the human being, Julian Knight?
Anyone who takes the time to drive beyond my many facades is astounded i have not spent time “inside”, as I’ve heard a few times, so not many… Needless to say i have sorted through allot of painful memories and worked hard at quelling my desire to vindicate myself or my fellow captives.
I simply avoid situations where i might be brought to anger, it’s not easy at all in this modern society of ours, and here i am Tess, wondering why you edge toward almost promoting the bullying of Julian Knight, and do i really need to defend him from the likes of you and all that came before you in his life?
I’m not sure how much you truly understand the human condition or what your life experiences are…
Forgiveness is a hard mistress to seduce; well worth the effort though…
Peace sister, i reckon you need it more than Julian or I…”