Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [83]
The Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher was on the streets of Hungerford two days after Michael Ryan. She visited the area where 14 people had been gunned down and the four houses that had been gutted when Ryan set his mother’s house on fire. At the local vicarage she met some of the relatives of Ryan’s victims and was soon close to tears. After visiting the wounded in the Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon, Mrs Thatcher described the incident as ‘not an accident in which we get a terrible tragedy, it is a crime, an evil crime’.
Chapter 15
Lesbian Vampires and Satanic Cults
Name: Tracey Wigginton, Kim Jervis, Lisa Ptaschinski, TraceyWaugh
Nationality: Australian
Number of victims: 1
Favoured method of killing: stabbing
On the night of Friday 20 October 1989, four women met at the Club Lewmors, a lesbian dive, where they sipped champagne. Wigginton and Jervis were carrying knives – but Wigginton bragged that she would kill with her bare hands if she had to. Around 11.30 p.m., they left the club and began cruising the streets in Wigginton’s green Holden sedan looking for a likely victim. On River Terrace, they spotted 47-year-old Edward Baldock, clinging drunkenly to a lamp-post. He had been out for a few beers and a game of darts with his mates in the Caledonia Club and was now slowly making his way home to his wife of 25 years. The women stopped and asked him if he wanted a lift home. He thought it was his lucky night, accepted and climbed in the back with Wigginton. They held hands. Wigginton instructed Ptaschinski to drive down to Orleigh Park, which was near Baldock’s home. Ptaschinski parked under a fig tree near the deserted South Brisbane Sailing Club. Wigginton asked Baldock whether he wanted a good time. He was all for it. They got out of the car and walked down to the river bank, where they both undressed. A few minutes later Wigginton returned to the car, complaining that Baldock was too strong. Ptaschinski said she would help and Jervis handed her her knife. The two lesbian lovers walked back down to the river where Baldock sat, naked except for his socks. Wigginton urged Ptaschinski to creep up on him and stab him, but she did not have the nerve. She could not kill a poor old drunk. Instead, she collapsed in the sand in front of him and began to gabble. Wigginton had no such qualms. She stabbed Baldock repeatedly in the neck and throat until his head was nearly severed, then she drank his blood. She returned to the car satisfied and the elated women drove back to Jervis’s flat, convinced that they had committed the perfect murder. It was only when they arrived at the macabre apartment that Wigginton realised that she had lost her bank card. She had dropped it while she was undressing.
Panicked, the women drove back to Orleigh Park and scoured the area, but they could not find the card. They decided that Wigginton must have lost it elsewhere. On the way back to Jervis’s flat, they were stopped for a routine check by a patrol car and Ptaschinski was breathalysed. The breath test was negative, but she had come out without her driving licence and the police took down the details of the car.
The next morning, Baldock’s naked body was discovered by two women out on an early morning walk. They called the police. Within minutes of their arrival, detectives found Wigginton’s bank card in Baldock’s shoe. They quickly discovered that the green Holden that had been stopped by a patrol car in the area was also registered to a Tracey Wigginton and put two and two together. At this point, they assumed that Wigginton was Baldock’s mistress and she had murdered him in an argument over money.
In the morning,