“Kill seven. Kill seven. Kill, kill, kill…â€, a voice from beyond the grave whispered before brandishing a large knife at the back and neck of his victim. Archie, covered in blood and under the watchful eye of his young disciples, thus began a bloody hunt to fulfill the alleged request of his recently deceased son.
The one baptized by the press as Mad Dog (mad dog) was a kind of Australian Charles Manson, leader of a sect of adolescent acolytes, who perpetrated bloody murders under orders that were only in his head. When asked why he did it, the murderer only managed to say: “I couldn’t help it.”
Archibald Beattie McCafferty was born in 1949 in the Scottish city of Glasgow, but at the age of ten he emigrated with his family to Australia where a better life supposedly awaited them. After a time in Melbourne, the McCaffertys finally settled in Bass Hill, a western suburb of Sydney.
Archie was a very troubled and rebellious boy from adolescence. At just twelve years old he had committed so many robberies that he was committed to a reformatory up to five times, and at eighteen he had already been classified as an “irremediable juvenile delinquent.” One of the detectives who followed his case defined him as “the toughest boy I’ve ever met.”
The criminal history of our protagonist, at barely 24 years old, included breaking and entering, robbery, vehicle theft, theft, assault, vagrancy and receipt of stolen goods. A total of 35 convictions. Therefore, Archie was one of the regulars in the jail, which he was constantly in and out of. Despite everything, the officials never described the boy as violent.
Aggression was unloaded against all kinds of animals, dogs, cats and chickens, which he strangled. That was only the prelude to what would happen shortly after after a personal tragedy: the loss of her son.
In April 1972 Archie married Janice Redington, but after six weeks he gave her such a beating that the young man was admitted to a mental hospital. From there, he began taking alcohol-laced sedatives and taking his anger out on his wife. An aggressiveness that overturned while she was pregnant. He just “wanted to kill her,” he went on to explain to her psychiatrist.
Their firstborn, Craig Archibald, was born on February 4, 1973, but died six weeks later while Janice was nursing him. The woman fell asleep with the little one in her arms and she accidentally crushed him. The forensic investigation confirmed these facts and her mother was exonerated of any guilt. However, Archie blamed his wife for her terrible loss, and so he began to plot revenge against Janice and her family.
His violent attitude and continuous persecution led him to enter a psychiatric hospital again: his head was playing tricks on him and Archie fervently believed that Janice had murdered his son. His love for his offspring was such that he had saved a space on his chest to tattoo something special. He was a fan of tattoos and had almost all his skin covered except for that one spot.
After his third psychiatric admission, the first thing Archie did when he got out was to go to his trusted tattoo artist, who engraved him with a cross-shaped tombstone embedded in a blood-red rose. The inscription reads: “In memory of Craig.” Weeks later, he included another drawing, the number 7. The reason: it was his lucky number and seven people had to die to avenge the death of his little one.
A few weeks before the first murder, Archie abandoned Janice and enlisted four teenagers and a grown woman to help him on his mission. The young man wanted to form his own band, although in reality that was more like a sect. The first disciples to fall into his manipulation networks were Carol Ellen Howes, 26, and Julie Ann Todd, 16, whom he met during one of his admissions to the psychiatric hospital.
The bond between the three was so strong that they moved into a flat in the suburb of Earlwood together. They were later joined by Michael John (Mick) Meredith, Richard William (Dick) Whittington and Donald Richard (Rick) Webster, all 17 years old.
Under Archie’s guidance, the gang chose their first victim: 50-year-old George Anson, a World War II veteran and newsboy, who ended up drunk every night at a hotel bar. On August 24, 1973, just at closing time, the killer and his entourage stalked his future victim from inside a stolen car as he staggered toward his home.
At one point, the group got out of the vehicle: the youths dragged the man into an alley and there Archie began to beat him violently until his son’s voice implored him to kill seven times. Here the criminal picked up a knife and plunged it into George’s back and neck seven times. Immediately afterwards, the gang fled and went to eat some hamburgers to celebrate.
When Julie asked Archie why he had stabbed the victim, he replied: “I couldn’t help it. A voice…it was Craig’s voice…he told me to kill, kill, kill.†Three days later, the band performed again after visiting the little boy’s grave. For the second time, the son’s voice whispered to his father again: “Kill seven.”
Faced with this new request, Archie devised the following plan in collusion with his disciples: Julie and Mick would pose as hitchhikers and, as soon as the first vehicle stopped, they would force its driver to go to the cemetery where the rest of the gang would be waiting for them. . Once there, they would steal all of his belongings. But Archie had other plans.
The good deed of Ronald Neil Cox, 42, led to his death. After driving to the graveyard, as ordered by the teens at gunpoint, Archie knocked him to the ground, beat him up, and then asked Mick to shoot him. Suddenly, the victim begged for mercy: he was the father of seven children.
The number echoed in Archie’s head: it was a signal. So the leader reached for another weapon, he gestured to his acolyte and both in unison pulled the trigger. Their feat done, they went home to drink beer and watch TV.
However, Archie kept hearing voices in his head, so he ordered Julie and Dick to find another victim using the same modus operandi. Evangelos Kollias, 24, was killed hours later by Dick. That’s what his leader had ordered him to do: unlock an accurate shot at him. The young man died instantly and his body appeared in the middle of a street.
This was not going to be the last murder of the night. Archie intended to kill her wife, her mother-in-law, and her boyfriend. And finally, one of his henchmen, Rick. The ringleader believed that the young man was going to betray him to the police. And so it was. Thanks to the teenager’s confession, the authorities managed to arrest Archie before he carried out his next murders. Also, luck made him run out of gas on the way. Once on the way to the police station, the murderer assured the agents: “he would kill again.”
During the preliminary trial hearing, in February 1974, Archie pleaded not guilty to insanity to three counts of murder, as did the other five co-defendants. In the fourth session of the hearing and exceptionally, the defendant asked to testify. His words left those present frozen.
“Excuse me, Your Honor, before court starts, for the last four days I have sat here and listened to Mr. Bannon [counsel for one of the co-defendants] criticize me for things I’ve done. I’ve been meaning to say this for a long time, and I’m going to say it this morning. Mr. Bannon, if he’s listening, I’d like to chop off his head,” he said.
Faced with the threats made, the authorities administered powerful tranquilizers to the detainee to control his violent outbursts, but Archie had a high tolerance for these drugs and they barely had an effect.
The Mad Dog or Australia’s Charles Manson, as he was dubbed by the press, was amused by the spectacle around him. He was even about to kill another inmate who was in the same preventive prison as him. The only way to calm Archie down was with sedatives.
On the day of the trial and when it was his turn to speak, Archie declared that he had acted as a prisoner of revenge after the death of his son and had made him “completely crazy”. In addition, he not only admitted that he had tried to kill his wife, but that he would kill again if given a new opportunity. The reason was very simple, he argued: “I have to kill seven people, and I have only killed three, which means I have four left, and that is how I feel in my mind.”
The defendant at no time regretted the acts committed and left it up to the courts to declare him inimputable. Ultimately, the jury ruled that Archie McCafferty had perpetrated the crimes fully lucid and with his cognitive and volitional abilities unaltered. And therefore he was guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to three terms of life in prison.
For their part, Mick and Dick were sentenced to 18 years in prison for the murders of Ronald Cox and Evangelos Kollias, while Rick was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of Ronald Cox and jailed for four years.
As for Julie, she was sentenced to 10 years for the murders of the first two victims, but she hanged herself in her cell a year later. The only one found not guilty was Carol, pregnant with Archie, who made an emotional promise to him. “I’ll wait for you, Archie. Whatever happens, I will always be waiting for you with our son, â€she yelled at him.
The following years, Archie was listed as the worst prisoner in Australia requiring continuous jail transfers due to his violent behavior and committing a new murder. This meant 14 more years of grief. He even tried to escape by loosening the bricks of his cell. Fortunately, the guards thwarted his escape.
In late August 1993, a judge granted the prisoner’s request for parole after twenty years of rejected requests, and on April 19, 1997, the prison board agreed that Archie was no longer a danger to society. He was granted parole, albeit on one condition: he would be deported from Australia and sent back to Scotland. “I have come out of the system a good person. A changed person. I believe that people change, â€he declared in an interview for the Australian television program Witness.
Thereafter, the Australian Charles Manson was arrested for threatening to kill two police officers, as well as for driving without a license or insurance, for refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test and for disorderly conduct.
On the other hand, the murderer rebuilt his sentimental life and secretly married Mandy Queen, a follower with whom he corresponded while in prison. One of the latest news about our protagonist was published in 2012, when Archie faced a media outlet that assaulted him at the doors of a clothing store.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” he yelled at them while doing a comb on camera. “I want my privacy, especially from the fucking media. I have served my sentence, â€he blurted out angrily. All he wanted is to be left alone.
