Crawford family murder

Last updated

Crawford family murders
Crawford Family Filicide July 1 1970A.jpg
Therese, Katherine, James, and Karen Crawford, circa 1969
Date1-2 July 1970
Location136 Cardinal Road, Glenroy, Victoria, Australia
37°41′56″S144°55′48″E / 37.698896°S 144.930003°E / -37.698896; 144.930003 (approximate)
Cause Bludgeoning
Electrocution
MotiveUnknown. Possible financial gain and/or rage [1]
ParticipantsElmer Kyle Crawford
Deaths
  • Therese Crawford (35)
  • Katherine Jane Crawford (12)
  • James William Crawford (8)
  • Karen Jean Crawford (6)
Burial Fawkner Memorial Park, Merri-bek, Victoria [2]
ConvictedUnapprehended

The Crawford family murder was the killing of pregnant mother Therese Crawford and her three children at their home in Glenroy, Victoria, Australia, in July 1970. The family car was located at the bottom of a cliff at Loch Ard Gorge in Port Campbell on 2 July with the bodies of the four victims still inside. [3] The husband and father of the decedents, Elmer Kyle Crawford (b. May 1930), is the prime suspect in the murders and has not been seen since. [4]

Contents

Investigation

Two weeks before the murders, Elmer Crawford, an employee of the Victoria Racing Club (VRC), and his pregnant wife Therese drafted new wills that left a considerable fortune to Elmer in the event of his family's death. [5] At the time of the murders, the couple had three children: Katherine Jane (aged 12), James William (aged 8), and Karen Jean (aged 6). It is believed by investigators that the impending arrival of their fourth child and Therese's mental state were the triggers for the murders. [6] Another factor could have been the theft of goods by Elmer from the VRC. [7]

A July 1971 coroner's inquest found that Elmer, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1951, [8] murdered his wife and three children at the family's home in Cardinal Road, Glenroy. Elmer had constructed an electrocution device, using a 15-metre (49 ft) length of electrical lead and alligator clips, which he attached to his wife's ears while she slept before electrocuting her. [9] He then battered Karen to death, presumably using the hammer found in the car, [5] and electrocuted both Katherine and James.

Crawford's 1956 Holden FE sedan is winched to the top of Loch Ard Gorge on the afternoon of 2 July 1970 E Crawford Loch Ard Gorge July 1 1970 Unsolved FamilicideA.jpg
Crawford's 1956 Holden FE sedan is winched to the top of Loch Ard Gorge on the afternoon of 2 July 1970

Elmer then loaded the blanket-wrapped bodies, along with a motorbike, fuel cans, rifle and hose, into the family's Holden FE sedan. He then drove them 200 kilometres (120 mi) to Port Campbell, where he connected the hose from the exhaust to the driver's side window before pushing the car over the cliff edge in an effort to frame his wife by making the crime look like a murder-suicide. [10] [11] To aid the vehicle's movement, he had also laid a stone pathway across a drainage ditch in front of the vehicle.

Elmer, who was last seen in his driveway on the day of the vehicle's discovery, has been missing since the murders, although he was reportedly spotted in 1994 in Western Australia by an acquaintance. [12] A reward of A$100,000 was offered in 2008 for information leading to his arrest. [3] In July 2010, Victorian Police announced that they were, in conjunction with the FBI, attempting to identify a man, via facial recognition technology, who died in 2005 in San Angelo, Texas, United States, that they believed to be Elmer. The man had no fingerprints and carried multiple identity documents. It was announced on 27 August 2010 that comparison of DNA from a Crawford blood relative ruled out any connection to the body in the US. [13]

Media

An episode of Sensing Murder titled "Almost Perfect" which aired on 30 May 2006 featured the crime. [14] Detailed investigation in Greg Fogarty's 2011 book, Almost Perfect: The True Story of the Crawford Family Murders, takes a close look at the case from the perspective of someone who lived in the same street at the time of the crime. The case was also detailed in a 2016 episode of Felon True Crime Podcast. [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Sutcliffe</span> English serial killer (1946–2020)

Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter Coonan, and dubbed in press reports as the Yorkshire Ripper as an allusion to Jack the Ripper, was an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Two of Sutcliffe's murders took place in Manchester; all the others were in West Yorkshire. Criminal psychologist Dr. David Holmes characterised Sutcliffe as being an "extremely callous, sexually sadistic serial killer."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dennis Rader</span> American serial killer (born 1945)

Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disappearance of Sarah MacDiarmid</span> Disappearance of Scottish-Australian woman

Sarah MacDiarmid was a 23-year-old Scottish-Australian woman who disappeared from Kananook railway station in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 11 July 1990. She is presumed murdered, although no trace of her body has ever been found.

The backpacker murders were a spate of serial killings that took place in New South Wales, Australia, between 1989 and 1993, committed by Ivan Milat. The bodies of seven missing young people aged 19 to 22 were discovered partially buried in the Belanglo State Forest, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south-west of the New South Wales town of Berrima. Five of the victims were foreign backpackers and two were Australians from Melbourne. Milat was convicted of the murders on 27 July 1996 and was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, as well as 18 years without parole. He died in prison on 27 October 2019, having never confessed to the murders for which he was convicted.

This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.

The Wanda Beach Murders, sometimes referred to simply as "Wanda", were the unsolved murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Wanda Beach near Cronulla in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on 11 January 1965. The victims, both aged 15, were best friends and neighbours from the suburb of West Ryde, and their partially buried bodies were discovered the next day. The brutal nature of the slayings and the fact that they occurred on a deserted, windswept beach brought massive publicity to the case. By April 1966, police had interviewed some 7,000 people, making it the largest investigation in Australian history. It remains one of the most infamous unsolved Australian murder cases of the 1960s, and New South Wales' oldest unsolved homicide case.

<i>Sensing Murder</i>  TV series or program

Sensing Murder is a television show in which three psychics are asked to act as psychic detectives to help provide evidence that might be useful in solving famous unsolved murder cases by communicating with the deceased victims. The program format was developed in 2002 by Nordisk Film TV in Denmark and has been sold to many countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the US. In 2004, Granada Entertainment bought the US rights. The New Zealand series first aired in 2006 and was hosted by Rebecca Gibney. On 17 January 2017, it was announced that Amanda Billing would be the new host for the Australia/New Zealand version.

A familicide is a type of murder or murder-suicide in which an individual, kills multiple close family members in quick succession, most often children, spouses, siblings, or parents. In half the cases, the killer lastly kills themselves in a murder-suicide. If only the parents are killed, the case may also be referred to as a parricide. Where all members of a family are killed, the crime may be referred to as family annihilation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Wright (serial killer)</span> British serial killer (born 1958)

Steven Gerald James Wright is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler. He is serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during the final months of 2006, and Wright was found guilty in February 2008.

<i>Crime Investigation Australia</i> Television series

Crime Investigation Australia is an Australian true-crime series that first premiered on pay TV Foxtel's Crime & Investigation Network in August 2005. The series was also rebroadcast on the free to air Nine Network, and made its debut there on 14 August 2007. The original host of the series was Steve Liebmann and is currently on Channel 7 with host Matt Doran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Tobin</span> Scottish serial killer (1946–2022)

Peter Britton Tobin was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006. Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Milat</span> Australian serial killer (1944–2019)

Ivan Robert Marko Milat, commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences and murders around Australia.

The Flat-Tire murders were a series of unsolved murders in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, Florida, occurring between February 1975 and January 1976. The name originated from the investigators' belief that, when the offender committed two of the murders, he had deflated the tires of the victims' cars. The list of suspected victims ultimately included twelve girls and women whose bodies were discovered in or near South Florida canals. The murders were the subject of a 2021 book entitled The Flat Tire Murders: Unsolved Crimes of a South Florida Serial Killer.

The murders of Margaret Tapp and Seana Tapp, sometimes simply referred to as the Tapp murders, are unsolved crimes that occurred on 7 August 1984. The murders have been described as one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in Australian history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Watts family murders</span> 2018 mass murder in Colorado

In the early hours of August 13, 2018, in Frederick, Colorado, American oil field operator Christopher Lee Watts murdered his pregnant wife Shanann (34) by strangulation, and their two children Bella (4) and Celeste (3) by smothering them. He buried Shanann in a shallow grave near an oil-storage facility, and dumped his children's bodies into crude oil tanks. Watts initially maintained his innocence in his family’s disappearance, but was arrested on August 15 after confessing to murdering Shanann in an interview with detectives. He later admitted to murdering his children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Kappen</span> Welsh serial killer (1941–1990)

Joseph William Kappen, also known as the Saturday Night Strangler, was a Welsh serial killer who committed the rape and murder of three teenage girls in Llandarcy and Tonmawr, near his home town of Port Talbot, in 1973. Kappen is also suspected of committing a fourth murder in February 1976.

References

  1. ↑ "Killer Crawford Still Haunts Ex-cop". The Standard (Warrnambool). 13 July 2010. Retrieved 10 August 2021.
  2. ↑ "US Corpse May Be Key to Vic Mass Murder". The Sydney Morning Herald. 13 July 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2021.
  3. 1 2 Police flooded with tips after posting murder suspect reward, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 25 February 2008
  4. ↑ Gore, Alyssa. "Familicide: Loving Your Family Too Much Or Not Enough. The Crawford Family Murders". forensicsandflorals.com. Retrieved 11 August 2021.
  5. 1 2 Elmer Crawford electrocuted family, bashed daughter, Herald Sun, 11 February 2008
  6. 1 2 "Felon - S1E1 - The Crawford Family". Audioboom. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  7. ↑ "Crawford electrocuted, bashed family". www.heraldsun.com.au. 10 February 2008. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  8. ↑ Malkin, Bonnie (15 July 2010). "Irish woman 'holds key to 40-year-old Australian murder mystery'". ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  9. ↑ "'The most wanted man in Australia': Irish emigrant still hunted by police almost 50 years after brutal murders". Independent.ie. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
  10. ↑ Koubaridis, Andrew (24 August 2015). "Elmer Crawford has avoided the police for more than 40 years". news.com.au. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  11. ↑ Where is Elmer Crawford?, The Age, 1 July 2005
  12. ↑ "The Aussie mass killer cops can't catch". NewsComAu. 24 August 2015. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  13. ↑ "Texas body not that of Victorian killer" Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 27 August 2010. Retrieved 27 August 2010
  14. ↑ "Sensing Murder" - Almost Perfect, Internet Movie Database, Retrieved 13 May 2008

Cited works and further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.