William "The Mutilator" Macdonald

An Interview with the Mutilator, Part II

I was elated. At last I had the opportunity to put the face to the name of the man who I had come to know so well yet had never met, and for that matter, doubted that I ever would meet.

The approvals for the interview from the various government departments took another two months and eventually on Friday May 5, 2000, my photographer son Ben and myself met up with New South Wales Corrective Services Media Liaison Officer Bob Stapleton at the entrance to Long Bay Jail for our 10am interview with the Mutilator.

So many thoughts raced through my head as we were cleared by the maximum security guards and ushered into a small un-barred meeting room that contained a laminated table and four kitchen chairs and was situated just off the foyer at the entrance to the prison wing.

What would the Mutilator look like after almost 40 years behind bars? The picture of the rather good looking young man with the receding hairline that MacDonald was when he was arrested and the pictures in the identikit composition were stencilled in my memory as they were the only pictures that I had ever seen of him.

What of his disposition? Would he vent his rage upon me for writing the story about him in Never To Be Released? Was accepting my visit just a ploy to get near to me so he could unleash a verbal or physical assault upon me before they overpowered him and took him away?

Would he allow me to ask him the blunt questions from the list that I had painstakingly taken days to prepare for myself? I knew that I couldn't ask him any of the intricate details of the actual murders because that was a Corrective Services condition of the interview. But I didn't want to talk about that anyway. The gory details have been adequately described in the preceding story anyway.

No, I wanted to find out what sort of a man he was and what made him commit such atrocities. There were a few main questions I wanted the answers to so that I could put the final pieces of the Mutilator Murders jigsaw together. And only the Mutilator himself had the answers.

But would he tell me? I was about to find out.