Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [22]
Vitkovic kept a file of Melbourne newspaper clippings of Julian Knight’s massacre on Hoddle Street, underlining sections of the clippings in red. He also kept Rambo videos in his bedroom.
In mid-September he had obtained a gun permit from the Central Firearms Registry in Melbourne after failing just one of the 14 questions. It was: ‘Should firearms be unloaded before you enter a house or building?’ He had answered: ‘No.’
Around the same time, a salesman from Precision Guns and Ammo in Victoria Street, West Melbourne, sold Vitkovic an M-1 semi-automatic rifle for £275. Vitkovic sawed the stock and barrel off the 75-centimetre weapon to make it easy to conceal.
The night before he went into the Australia Post building, he wrote in his diary: ‘The anger in my head has got too much for me. I’ve got to get rid of my violent impulses. The time has come to die. There is no other way out.’
Judy Morris returned to her office from her 1 p.m. lunch-break on top of the world. Not only had she had the spectacular picture of the sunset developed, but she had bought a new outfit – white slacks with braces and a matching pink blouse. She showed them to her closest friend, a young supervisor who also worked behind the Credit Union counter.
Judy also passed the pictures of the sunset around her friends in the Credit Union. Twenty-two-year-old Con Margellis, one of the regular staff, may have seen them.
Margellis is the only apparent link between Vitkovic and the 1,000 people working that day in the Queen Street offices. He lived just a few streets from the Vitkovics in West Preston. He and Vitkovic had been at school together and had been friends for a number of years.
At 4.10 p.m. that Tuesday Vitkovic emerged from the lift and greeted Mr Margellis inside the fifth-floor Credit Union office with the word ‘G’day.’
He then brought out the carbine from under his green top and began firing shots in the direction of his friend. Police ruled out any homosexual relationship between them. Nor was there any dispute over a woman. Nevertheless Vitkovic was now shooting with murderous intent at his former classmate.
The Telecom Credit Union staff scattered in fear. Someone pressed the alarm button. Judy Morris and her best friend ran towards the glass exit doors. A shot rang out. Both women fell. They lay on the ground until Vitkovic finished shooting and disappeared out of the exit to the lift wells. Margellis was safe. He had hidden in the women’s toilets. But Judy Morris was dead.
The security doors shut tight behind Vitkovic, trapping him outside. He kicked the doors, trying to get back in. He went to the lifts and waited until one of the pink arrows flashed up. Then he rode to the twelfth floor.
The Philatelic Bureau was quiet when Vitkovic burst in. In the customer sales section he let rip with automatic rifle-fire. The bureau’s 29-year-old supervisor Warren Spencer was killed while trying to take cover behind the office photocopier. His 24-year-old wife, Susan, mother of their two children, who also worked at the bureau, watched in horror as her husband died. Twenty-year-old Julie McBean and 18-year-old Nancy Avigone were shot dead at their desks.
Below, Melbourne became aware of the shootings. As crowds began to gather in the street, Vitkovic took a sniper’s perch from a broken twelfth-floor window. He fired several bullets at the first motorcycle police officers who arrived at 4.15 p.m.
Vitkovic ran down the stairs to the eleventh floor, which housed the Australia Post accounts department. In the stairwell Vitkovic fired one volley that blew a fist-sized hole in the office window to his right. Turning left he confronted Michael McGuire in the data-processing room, where McGuire trained staff and fixed machines. Vitkovic fired at point-blank range into the young father of three. One bullet