If John Glover had been insane then the grief-stricken relatives of his victims may have found some consolation, however minuscule, in knowing that their loved ones met their cruel demise at the hands of a maniac, someone who was driven to heinous crime by an unbalanced mind. But that was not to be the case. At his trial John Glover pleaded not guilty to his ghastly crimes on the grounds of diminished responsibility but the jury could not accept this. In fact the jury didn't even think he was temporarily insane at the time of the killings.
Instead, they agreed with a prominent Sydney psychiatrist who studied the case and said: "He built up a pile of hostility and aggression from childhood against his mother and then his mother-in-law. She was the lightning conductor and when she died he had to take it out on other people. This is a very unusual case because there are very few mass murderers and most of them are mad and have an organic disease of the brain. He is not mad."
As the Crown prosecutor maintained, Glover was very aware of what he was doing. As he killed, he was at the same time planning what to do with the contents of his victim's purses. His killings weren't sexually motivated. John Glover was impotent and not the least interested in sex. The pantyhose wrapped tightly around his victims' necks was to ensure that they were dead. But at the same time, it would make police think that the crime was the work of a sex killer.
Glover knew exactly what he was doing. Only a cool, clear, sane mind would risk the possibility of being caught by lingering for that extra minute or so to remove the pantyhose and strangle his victim with them. But it was worth the chance to throw the police off the scent.
No, insanity or lust was not the cause behind these cowardly murders and muggings. Glover's actual motives were as old as crime itself... revenge and greed. Combined with cowardice, they made the fatal combination that would keep Glover killing until the law finally caught up with him.
John Glover was chronically addicted to poker machines. He would stand for hours virtually pouring money through the slot machines at the Mosman RSL Club. The easiest way for Glover to get more money was to steal it. As police would reveal later, Glover was a convicted thief and had a record of cowardly attacks on defenceless women.
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