Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [21]
Name: Frank Vitkovic
Nationality: Australian
Number of victims: 9
Favoured method of killing: shooting
Melbourne had scarcely recovered from the shock of the Hoddle Street rampage when four months later another mad gunman claimed a further eight victims.
On 8 December 1987, 22-year-old Frank Vitkovic went to the Australia Post office, initially intending to kill an old schoolfriend against whom he harboured a grudge. He was suffering from depression and severe headaches. But the gun misfired and his friend escaped. Vitkovic then began to shoot at random.
Twenty-year-old Judy Morris photographed the last sunset of her life on Monday from the roof of her father’s funeral parlour.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Judy, a Telecom Credit Union teller, as she pointed her camera at the horizon. ‘I want it on film so I can always remember.’
She was speaking to her fiancé, 19-year-old Jason Miles, an apprentice chef she had met just a year before. According to Judy’s father, Ken Morris, it was Jason who had coaxed his shy daughter out of her shell.
Shortly before sunset that night Judy told her fiancé that something was worrying her. Her workmates at the Credit Union on the fifth floor of the Australia Post building, at 191 Queen Street, had met about security that morning. The tellers had complained that the bullet-proof screens they had asked for a year before had still not been installed.
‘She was horrified at not having any security at work,’ Jason said. ‘Not for herself, but for everyone else.’
As Jason moved to go that night, Judy said: ‘Don’t go.’ They lay in each other’s arms for a long time. It was as if she knew her time was up, he said.
Next morning Judy Morris waved to her mother, Nola, as she walked to the train station and called out that she would see her that night. Six-and-a-half hours later Frank Vitkovic caught another train to Queen Street and entered the blue-tiled foyer of the Australia Post building.
As Judy and Jason had contemplated the happy course of their own lives the previous evening it is likely that Vitkovic had already decided the course of his. Vitkovic came from the West Preston area of North Melbourne, home to many European immigrants of the late 1950s and 1960s. Yugoslav house painter Drago Vitkovic and his wife lived in a small white-painted weatherboard house on May Street, the very picture of respectability. The front lawn had been covered with concrete to give more off-street space for Mr Vitkovic’s brown Valiant station wagon and the family’s two other small vehicles.
In these affluent surroundings, their son Frank grew into a good-looking, big framed youth who was over six feet tall. At high school he was placed in the top five per cent of students. Vitkovic also had a passion for playing tennis, becoming something of a legend on the twin clay courts of St Raphael’s tennis club. A strong backhand drive floored many opponents and scared others. Margaret O’Leary, a former club secretary, recalled that Vitkovic sometimes aimed his returns at an opponent’s body. It was enough to help him win the club championship in 1983.
The young sons of immigrant families in the club quickly identified with Vitkovic. They became known in the clubhouse as ‘the ethnics’. Mrs O’Leary recalled that some of the young men idolised Vitkovic and his confidence blossomed.
‘The topic of conversation was always Frank Vitkovic,’ she said. ‘He found it very hard to lose.’
Everyone agreed that Vitkovic was destined for bigger things. Nobody was surprised when, in 1984, he won a place at Melbourne University’s Law School. To start with everything went fine. Vitkovic told tennis-club friends he was ‘breezing through’. But in early 1986 things began to go wrong. Midway through his last year, Vitkovic abandoned his studies and helped his father paint houses.
Those who knew him still detected no hint that Vitkovic was having problems. His family were good people. Nobody ever expected anything bad to happen to Frank.
Vitkovic returned to Law School at the beginning of 1987, but