Town note
The Johnston family of nearby Oakbank founded the town in the 1850s to improve their brewery business.
about 0:10:21The story
Woodside, South Australia, is a town of about 1,842 people, 37 kilometres from Adelaide. The Johnston family of nearby Oakbank laid it out in the 1850s to find outlets for their brewery, and the Woodside Inn, now the Woodside Hotel, has been open since 1857. A railway ran through from 1918 to 1953, and since July 1st, 1990 the Melba chocolate factory has occupied the old Farmers Union cheese factory. Violent crime is very low and the main complaint is graffiti; median household income is about $50,000 a year.
He had driven into Adelaide from interstate in 1976 and placed a lonely hearts advertisement in the Advertiser: '33 year old guy wants to start a new life in SA'. Sandra Holland, a mother of three recently separated from her husband, answered it. Her sons Scott and Craig were 11 and nine, and she had a five-year-old daughter.
Through early 1977 he grew controlling, quarrelling about where she had been. On July 12th, 1977 she told him not to call or come around again. That night he went to her house, they argued, and he hit her unconscious and strangled her on the floor. Her nine-year-old son Craig came in and asked why he was choking his mother.
He stole two televisions and carried them to his flat on West Street in Hectorville, telling the two teenage girls there that he had found the goods at the end of a dirt road. He kept Sandra's daughter overnight, then asked the girls to mind her, and the next day left her with Rosalind Stein, another woman from the advertisements who loved him and wanted to marry him.
Stein telephoned police, who collected the child and went looking for the rest of the family. Craig was hidden under the floorboards of a derelict house next door to his flat. Sandra and Scott were put under a pile of vegetation at a dump site in Woodside due to be burned. Sandra's car was taken to another town, stripped of its wheels, windows and motor, and set alight.
A few days later Craig's body was found under the floorboards and Sandra's burnt-out car was found at the dump. The autopsy showed bruising consistent with Craig being held under the water and struck against the bath. Sandra and Scott were not found until August, when a worker preparing to burn the vegetation noticed Sandra's foot.
The evidence included his boot footprints at the derelict house, a chip of wood in his Ford Falcon matching a missing floorboard, a bloodstain on his jeans that was not his, and his fingerprint on glass from a broken plate.
That August the unit had day release for a display at Riverton and he wandered off. Dozens of police, horses and helicopters searched, and the public was warned not to approach him. On August 28th, 1982 he was found asleep under a tree about 70 kilometres outside Renmark.
In 1985 he married an American woman, Barbara Beauregard, whom he met through a penpal programme, and took her surname. He campaigned for release, calling the murders an aberration. A forensic psychologist said it was the optimal time to release him, and his lawyer warned he risked becoming institutionalised. On November 10th, 1992 he received 12 months extra for the escape. There was a public outcry and victims' relatives called the release ridiculous.
He claimed she was a paid sex worker and a heroin addict in withdrawal.
A prosecutor, Mike Ran, said there was zero chance of him signing a release, and a relative of Sandra Holland said she lived under a changed name and silent numbers, terrified of a diagnosed psychopath. Psychiatrists warned he remained a danger, especially to women.