William "The Mutilator" Macdonald

The Mutilator is Dead and Buried

But as the days turned into weeks and months, there was no mention of any body or any search for the missing Brennan. MacDonald was beside himself with worry. Had police found the body and set a trap for him? Would they knock on his door at any minute? The mystery of it all was driving him crazy. However, although he didn't know it, William McDonald didn't have a worry in the world. He had been declared dead, and no-one was looking for a dead man.

A few days after MacDonald left for Brisbane, customers wanting to pick up their dry cleaning had become concerned that no-one was at the shop. Neighbours assumed that the nice Mr. Brennan had left without telling anyone. After three weeks, a putrefying smell was coming from the vicinity of the empty shop.

After a month the smell was so overwhelming that neighbours called the Health Department, who in turn called the police to break the door in. The smell in the shop was hideous. It led police to the rotting body of Hackett. The corpse was so badly decomposed and mauled by rats that it was impossible to identify.

The police bundled it into an ambulance and sent it off to the morgue at nearby Rydalmere Hospital where the body was found to be so putrid that the mortician carried out the autopsy in a shed in the hospital grounds. The only thing they could determine was that it was a male aged about forty, the same age as the missing Brennan.

At this stage police assumed it was the body of the missing shop proprietor, Alan Brennan, who had crawled under his shop for reasons known only to himself and electrocuted himself. Police had no reason to suspect foul play. Everything was normal. It looked like an accidental death. The body was buried in a pauper's grave at the Field of Mars Cemetery, Ryde, under the name of Alan Edward Brennan.