David Joseph Scanlon, who became known as the Kingsgrove Slasher, was "a peeping tom, who graduated to sadism, cruelty and perversion", according to the detective who led the hunt that finally caught him.
Writer Peter Doyle provided an insight into the perpetrator of the sensational 1950s crimes in a 2016 article, headed Stranger in the House, in the Sydney Review of Books.
Doyle delved into the private files of his uncle Detective-Sergeant Brian Doyle, who also cracked many other top cases and went on to become Senior Assistant Police Commissioner.
Ironically, the detective and his family lived in Kingsgrove a short distance from where Scanlon grew up.
Scanlon, 29, a mild-mannered married clerk, terrorised St George between 1956 and 1959.
He crept into homes by slashing flyscreens to enter windows, and through unlocked doors, to watch and attack women while they slept.
He didn't sexually assault his victims, but several received serious knife wounds.
Scanlon pleaded guilty to 18 offences and was sentenced in September, 1959, to 18 years jail.
His activities extended from Beverly Hills to Earlwood, Undercliffe, Turrella, Arncliffe and Banksia to as far away as Lavender Bay and Greenwich on the North Shore.
On leaving prison, he changed his name and was never heard of again.
"The Slasher case begun in early 1956, when a cluster of disparate reports of prowler activity, break and enters and assaults on sleeping women were registered in the Kingsgrove and Beverly Hills area," Peter Doyle wrote.
"The attacks increased in number, then dropped off, then spiked again in late 1958, and continued until an arrest was made in April, 1959."
Peter Doyle said, in his uncle's files, "statements by victims and witnesses are matched up with Scanlon's unnervingly deadpan commentary about each matter. '...I got in through a back window. It was closed but not locked. I went into a bedroom. There was a woman in bed with her husband. I remember cutting the buttons on her pyjamas and cutting her pyjama cord. I cut the sleeves of her pyjamas and also cut her'."
The writer said, "Reading the Slasher papers, the modern observer is struck by how much it's a blokes' business. The suited men doing the investigating, the chasing, the arresting, accusing, reporting, judging, analysing, speculating on the perpetrator's actions and motives. The violence is all against women and girls, but except for victims and a few eyewitnesses, women are mostly excluded from the procedure."
Detective-Sergeant Doyle's reports to his superior spoke of the mass panic aspects of the case.
"One night I witnessed the spectacle of about 2000 men, women and children scantily clad in night attire, lining the streets in the vicinity of Tabrett St Banksia, where an alarm had been raised," he said.
"...people were prepared to stand out of doors all night. Many of the men seen that night, including boys of 12 and 14 years of age started a stampede around the district with rifles, going through parks, canals etc, in numbers, searching or pretending to search for some ghost-like figure of whom they knew nothing"
Detective-Sergeant Doyle was assigned to the case late in the piece, in early November 1958, and put in place a strategy to catch the Slasher in the act.
After a three-months' stakeout, police got lucky when a woman raised the alarm after the blind on her bedroom window was lifted and a man was seen nearby climbing a fence.
The streets backed on to to Wolli Creek bushland, where the police had a plan to seal off tracks and other possible exits.
Scanlon was herded towards a footbridge and when arrested merely said, "I'm the man you're after. I'm the Kingsgrove Slasher".
Peter Doyle said Scanlon, who was young, strong and dark haired "turned out to be something of an anti-climax".
He was living in a flat in Arncliffe, with his wife of two and a half years and had "more or less desisted from the attacks when he got married".
"He was fit, a local champion sprinter and long distance runner. He was agile, and, as Doyle remarks, 'silent as the night itself'.
"Scanlon held down a good job as a clerk and warehouseman with an electrical merchant in the city, on a modest but for the time reasonable wage of £16 ($32) a week.
"He'd worked there since leaving school, was regarded as intelligent and capable by the firm. He didn't drink or smoke, was not 'an associate of prostitutes, criminals or undesirables'.
"His wife ('a very decent type of young person') worked in the ladies shoe department of David Jones. Police believed she knew nothing of his doings, and bits of evidence later affirmed that.
"Scanlon was keen to help police distinguish his actual attacks from the spurious claims and cases of self-harm. (Doyle notes with some satisfaction that Scanlon confirmed all the police hunches about real and phony attack stories.)
"But Scanlon himself, the man, and his particular psychopathology, remains shadowy in the reports, and in his own statements.
"A peeping tom, who graduated to sadism, cruelty and perversion is Doyle's summation, which he puts in about as many words as I just did.
"Experts testified in court, not very helpfully, that psychiatric records worldwide held no similar cases.
"Scanlon was evasive when questioned by Doyle about his motives, possibly embarrassed about whatever kicks he got from his activities: he claimed repeatedly that it was simply the thrill of being chased, of outrunning the cops or irate householders.
"When Doyle pointed out that actually, he had only been chased once or twice, and even then not so much, he just shrugged."
Scanlon had said it was "hard to say" how many houses he had entered, but agreed it could be "thousands".
"Some nights, he said, he 'prowled around for as long as eight or nine hours'. There were streets - he named five in Earlwood and Bexley - where he had been into every single house or backyard, more than once, in some cases many times.
"He had spent hours on end inside some individual houses, entering and exiting through every doorway and window in turn, or silently staring at the sleeping residents.
"Three different psychiatrists gave evidence, all of it vague and inconclusive. Scanlon was 'mildly psychotic' but 'not insane', and so notionally, he should have been able to control his impulses, which were kind of sexual but kind of not, in that he never attempted to sexually assault his victims.
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