William "The Mutilator" Macdonald

Trial

William MacDonald arrested, compared to police sketch

William MacDonald didn't oppose his extradition to Sydney to face murder charges and a crowd was at Sydney airport to greet the two detectives and get the first glimpses of Australia's most grotesque and notorious serial killer.

They were to be disappointed. The thin, short, shy MacDonald was nothing like the beast that they imagined was capable of such unimaginable crimes.

William MacDonald escorted to court, cuffed

William MacDonald confessed to everything. Charged with four counts of murder, he pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity. His trial, held in September 1963, was one of the most sensational the country had ever seen and the public hung onto every word of horror that fell from the Mutilator's mouth.

When he testified how he stabbed one of his victims in the neck 30 times and then removed the man's testicles and penis with the same knife, a woman in the jury fainted. Justice McLennan stopped the proceedings and excused the juror from the rest of the grisly evidence. He then ordered MacDonald to continue.

Autopsy photo of one of MacDonald's victims, showing stab wounds

The gallery listened in awe as the Mutilator told of the killings in great detail. He explained how the blood had sprayed all over his raincoat as he castrated his victims, put their private parts in a plastic bag and took them home. The jury was repulsed when he explained what he did with the genitals when he arrived back at his lodgings.

The jury didn't take long to find William MacDonald guilty of four counts of murder. As everyone thought that the Mutilator was crazy there was yet another sensation when the jury chose not to go with public opinion and found him to have been sane at the time of the murders.