William "The Mutilator" Macdonald

In Hiding

He sat in the pools of blood beside the body, puffing and panting. There was blood everywhere. It was splattered all over the walls and the ceiling and it had collected in big puddles on the floor.

The Mutilator bandaged his hand with a dirty dishcloth and set about removing Hackett's genitals. But the knife was now blunt and bent from the ferocity of the attack. Too exhausted to go down to the shop to get another one the Mutilator sat covered from head to foot in blood, hacking away at Hackett's scrotum with the blunt and bent blade. He stabbed the penis a few times and made some cuts around the testicles before finally giving up and falling asleep where he sat.

In the morning the Mutilator woke to find himself covered in sticky, drying blood. He was lying next to the victim Hackett. The pools of blood had soaked through the floorboards and threatened to drip onto the counters of his shop.

The Mutilator had a bath, cleaned himself up and went to the hospital where he had some stitches put in his hand. He told the doctor that he had cut himself in his shop. It took MacDonald the best part of the day to clean up the mess. The huge pools of blood on the linoleum couldn't be scrubbed out and he had to tear it up, break it into bits and throw it out. He also removed all of Hackett's bloodied clothing leaving only the socks.

MacDonald dragged the dead and naked Hackett underneath his shop and left him there. Every few hours he went back to the body and dragged it a little further into the foundations of the building until it was jammed into a remote corner of the brickwork, out of view and almost impossible to see. MacDonald left all of Hackett's bloodied clothing with the corpse.

MacDonald panicked when he finally sat down and thought about what he had done. He thought that the police would come looking for Hackett. Only a few of the bloodstains had come off the walls and there was blood all over the floorboards.

If the police even came to ask him questions, he would be caught. And then there was the cab driver who had driven them to the shop on the night of the murder. He would remember them.

Paranoid and terrified, William MacDonald packed his bags and caught a train to Brisbane, where he moved into a boarding house, dyed his greying hair black, grew a moustache and assumed the name of Allan MacDonald. Every day he bought the Sydney newspapers expecting to read of the murder of Hackett and how police were looking for a man named Brennan in connection with the Mutilator murders.