The shoes and cane were found neatly placed in a corner of the room as the woman lay face down in a large pool of blood. When investigators moved her body they discovered tightly wrapped pantyhose around her neck: a sign of strangulation identical to the one found a week earlier on another victim of a similar age. That froze their blood. They knew it was the signature of the same murderer.
Over the next year, the police tried to hunt down this sadistic criminal as he continued to rob and hammer to death little old ladies on his way home. The difficulty in identifying the person known as The Granny Killer lies in the fact that this individual camouflaged those perverse drives under the guise of a good neighbor and exemplary family man. In fact, when they caught him, they ran into an affable meatloaf rep named John Wayne Glover.
Our protagonist, of English roots, was born on November 26, 1932 in the city of Wolverhampton, where he remained until well into his twenties. Until that moment, John lived through the traumatic separation of his parents and the birth of a staunch hatred towards his mother.
The little boy blamed his mother for his depraved sexual impulses because, as he would explain years later, he not only witnessed the woman’s multiple intimate relationships with different men, but also the pornographic photographs in which she starred. Such was the impact it generated on the minor, that her victims were found in the same position as her, an unequivocal sign of her fervent maternal aversion.
During those early years of adolescence and youth, John began his criminal career as a thief of bags and women’s clothing, crimes for which he was convicted. However, this criminal record did not prevent the young man from emigrating to Australia in 1956 to get away from his mother.
There he continued with the thefts in different parts of the country, in addition to perpetrating two sexual assaults, two other indecent assaults and a violent attack. Despite the seriousness of these charges – they were extremely savage and violent attacks – John was sentenced to three years probation.
From then on and for the next 25 years, John remained criminally inactive: he married Jacqueline Gail Rolls, they had two daughters, and they went to live with their in-laws in Mosman, a suburb of Sydney. However, his ongoing run-ins with Essie Rolls, the mother of his wife, led to a bitter family conflict.
So much tension and tyranny on the part of Essie aroused in John the same feeling of revulsion that he had towards his mother. In fact, that anger intensified the day his mother showed up in Mosman to live with them. Having the two women he most hated living under the same roof drove him crazy.
Even so, John managed to keep these violent impulses at bay for thirteen years. Of course, once both women died -his mother died in October 1988 and her mother-in-law, in January 1989-, the weight of those deaths was a kind of catalyst for the start of the murders. His sexual obsession with older women increased, as did the need to show his anger. Everything he never dared to do with his mother and his mother-in-law, he did with innocent victims.
That attentive meatloaf manager, volunteer for the Senior Citizens’ Society and friendly neighbor and doting family man that no one was afraid of, became the worst nightmare of the old ladies in the area.
“He seemed capable of seducing people and fitting into the environments in which he had to fit, and that is usually his protection, that they are not exposed for who they really are,” the detective on the case, Gary Jubelin, once explained.
Days after his mother-in-law’s death, John began a round of nursing home visits, assaulting the most vulnerable residents. His only objective: to touch their breasts, buttocks, or thighs, and that this provoked in them an obvious sensation of anguish. He wanted to terrify them.
After those exciting initial emotions, the fifty-year-old wanted to go one step further and commit his first assaults in the middle of the street. Margaret Todhunter, 84, ended up on the ground after being severely beaten by this individual. Before running away from her, John stole her purse with just over $200.
A couple of months later, on March 1, 1989, the killer killed 82-year-old Gwendolin Mitchelhill, his first fatality. He chose her at random, noticing her as he was walking to the car. John then took a hammer from the trunk, followed her to her doorway, and once inside her, hit her on the back of the head. He didn’t stop doing it until he smashed in her face and ribs. When he believed the old woman lay dead, he stole her purse with $100, but not before strangling her with her own stockings.
Given the lack of sexual evidence on the body -she had not been raped- and the absence of the bag, the police ruled that it was a case of robbery with violence resulting in death. It wasn’t until the second body was found under the same circumstances that investigators realized they were dealing with a possible serial killer.
On the afternoon of May 9, the police found the lifeless body of Lady Winfreda Ashton, 84, in the lobby of her building. She had been beaten with a blunt object and strangled with her pantyhose. The disposition of her body, the viciousness in the execution of the blows, the presence of a stocking cutting the neck and the age of the victims set off the alarms.
From the beginning of June to the middle of October, John attacked five other old women, some of them in the retirement home where they lived and others in the middle of the street. This was the case of Effie Carnie, who received a strong blow to the head after feeling someone touch her breast.
The resistance exerted by the woman made the assailant not continue with the aggression and only stole her bag with 70 dollars. None of these women was able to give a detailed description of the assailant.
On Thursday, November 2, and before his third crime, John helped a 78-year-old widow, Dorothy Beencke, with shopping bags. But that chivalrous gesture turned bloody when John hammered 85-year-old Margaret Pahud to death that same afternoon. Before leaving, she stole her bag.
A day later he killed Olive Cleveland and, in the months after, 92-year-old Muriel Falconer and 60-year-old Joan Violet Sinclair. In all cases, John used the same criminal procedure. It was undeniable that behind that sadism was the hand and the signature of the baptized as The Granny Killer (the killer of grandmothers).
John’s depraved impulses made him make several mistakes and leave evidence in some of the scenes, such as his bloody shoe prints. Added to this was the testimony of a neighbor who was able to describe him as a stout, gray-haired, middle-aged man, in addition to the statement of an elderly woman attacked in a hospital whose screams alerted a nurse, who wrote down the license plate of her car and identified to John.
However, at the time, the police did not link this apparently isolated event to the crimes of the old women, so they simply contacted the murderer who was summoned to the police station the next day. But he didn’t show up.
The investigators, somewhat surprised, called the seller’s home again and discovered that he had been admitted urgently for a suicide attempt. They immediately went to visit him, but the medical personnel prevented the agents from entering, although they first delivered a message from John: a page from a local newspaper with two phrases “no more grandmothers… grandmothers” and “Essie [her mother-in-law] started it.â€
Despite the evidence collected so far, the investigators preferred to tread carefully and not act quickly: they wanted to catch him red-handed. To do this, they launched a surveillance operation with an automatic tracking device, but they could not prevent John from carrying out the latest murder of him.
On March 19, 1990, the killer killed Joan Sinclair, a divorced sixty-year-old with whom he had a platonic relationship, while the police surveillance team was outside the building.
After eight hours of waiting, the agents finally broke into the house with a court order and found the victim murdered with several hammer blows, and the perpetrator unconscious in the bathtub. John had attempted suicide by taking Valium and cutting his left wrist.
On March 28, 1990, the Glebe Coroner’s Court began the trial of John Wayne Glover, accused of a total of fourteen crimes: six counts of first degree murder, one count of attempted murder, one count of robbery with injuries, another robbery, four counts of indecent assault and one last for assault on a woman.
The defendant pleaded not guilty, alleging non-imputation for diminished responsibility, that is, for having altered his faculties at the time of the crimes. However, the psychiatrist who analyzed his case confirmed that the accumulated hostility towards his mother and then towards his mother-in-law led the murderer to unload that aggression on another person. And therefore he was sane in the context of the murders. In fact, his addiction to poker machines contributed to some extent to his having a second motive: stealing to have more money to spend.
The court found the defendant guilty on all charges and the presiding magistrate made it clear that they were dealing with an “extremely dangerous personâ€. He then went on to detail the reasons: “He is able to choose when to attack and when to stop his hand. He is cunning and able to cover his tracks. It is clear that he has chosen his moments with care. Although the crimes have been opportunistic, he has not gone into where the risks were overwhelming.”
On November 29, The Granny Killer was sentenced to life in prison without parole. “He should never be released,” said the magistrate at the end of the reading of the verdict and before John’s impassivity and little emotion.
The prisoner was transferred to the maximum security prison in Lithgow, in the center-west of New South Wales, where he spent the next fifteen years. During this time, John attempted suicide twice until, on September 10, 2005, officials found him dead in his cell. He had hanged himself on the shower rod. He was 72 years old.
Recently and thanks to the television program Under Investigation, Brian Collis, a retired homicide detective who participated in the case of the murderer of grandmothers, confirmed his suspicions: John Wayne Glover would have murdered nine other victims between 1984 and 1986, a few years before of the crimes for which he was tried and convicted.
The agent has no doubt: “The modus operandi, the placement of the bodies, the method of death, everything fit perfectly.” In fact, a few days before John’s suicide, he drew a sketch with two palm trees and, between them, the number nine. It seems that this would be the number of women that he would have additionally killed and whose cases are still unsolved.
