Leonard John Fraser

Two Months for Aggravated Assault

Map showing Queensland, Australia

Released in 1981 after serving the minimum seven years, Fraser made his way to Mackay in Queensland and took a job as a laborer on the railways. In 1982 Fraser gained entry to a woman's house by showing interest in a car she had for sale and once inside grabbed her from behind and held her arm up her back as he had done in his previous attacks. To the amazement of investigating officers, the woman said that she talked Fraser into allowing her to ring her husband while the physical assault was taking place and during the call Fraser took the phone and told the man: "I hope you're not going to kill me. I just wanted to prove a point that somebody could break in and rape your missus." In the Mackay District Court Fraser was sentenced to two months in jail for aggravated assault on the woman.

Out of jail, Fraser settled in Mackay and late in 1982, he was living with a woman and her son in an old house that had been converted into flats. He had a daughter with the woman and managed to hold down his job as a laborer with the railways for the next two and a half years.

In late 1985, after stalking a 21-year-old woman for several days as she went on her daily walks at an isolated beach at Shoal Point, north of Mackay, Fraser brutally raped her, again by attacking his victim from behind and holding her arm up her back and again in broad daylight.

Given his record and habitual modus operandi, the offender wasn't hard to find and was sentenced to 12 years in jail. In sentencing Fraser, Justice Derrington said he regarded the prisoner as a dangerous man who preyed on women who were strangers and alone. "They (the victims) would regard you as being the equivalent of a filthy animal," he said. "It (rape) is one of the worst forms of degradation on another human being you can think of and it deserves no sympathy whatever."