In November 1962, after complaints about a putrid smell, police found a badly decomposed body under the floor of a mixed-business shop in Concord, in Sydney. It was taken to be the shop's new owner, a man who called himself Alan Edward Brennan, and a death notice ran in the newspapers. Some time later John McCarthy, who had worked with Brennan at the post office, ran into him in central Sydney. The man told him to leave him alone and hurried off. When McCarthy went to the police, he was not taken seriously, so he went to a newspaper, which ran the story as the case of the walking corpse. The publicity led to an order to exhume the body. Fingerprints showed it was not Brennan but Patrick Joseph Hackett, and the body bore the wounds of the killer the papers had named the Mutilator. Brennan was William MacDonald.
He was born in Liverpool, England, on June 17, 1924. His birth name is given as Allan or Allen Ginsberg; published spellings differ. According to the findings of the 2016 New South Wales inquest into his death, he had discipline problems at school, was treated in his mid to late teens by a psychiatrist who certified him as an erratic schizophrenic, and was conscripted into the British Army at eighteen, serving during the Second World War and leaving with an honorable discharge. He later said a corporal had raped him in an air-raid shelter while he was in the army, and that the voices he heard told him his victims were that man. In 1948 he went to Canada, ran out of money, and returned to England when his family sent the fare. Back home his behavior turned erratic, and he was briefly a voluntary patient at the Crichton mental home in Scotland before his mother brought him home.
He arrived in Brisbane in 1954 and drifted through a series of jobs. In Adelaide on April 18, 1955, he was charged with indecent assault on a male and two counts of gross indecency, and was given a two-year good behavior bond on condition that he undergo treatment. He ignored the condition and left Adelaide at once. He spent time in Ballarat and Perth, took the name Alan Edward Brennan, moved on to Hobart and in 1959 to New Zealand, and in 1961 was back in Sydney working for the Postmaster-General's Department. His behavior there struck people as odd, and a doctor who examined him wrote that Brennan, as he was then known, was an unusual personality best described as schizoid. A 2022 account in the gay newspaper QNews says he prowled Sydney's beats in search of men to kill.
Five men died. Amos Hugh Hurst was killed in Brisbane in 1961, one of the five killings attributed to him in contemporary and later reporting. In Sydney the bodies of Alfred Reginald Greenfield, found at the Domain Baths in June 1961, and Ernest William Cobbin, found in a public toilet at Moore Park, had been stabbed many times and their genitals cut off. Frank Gladstone McLean was stabbed to death in Darlinghurst on the night of March 31, 1962. Later accounts say the precision of the mutilation led police for a time to suspect a surgeon. Hackett was killed at the Concord shop in 1962; published accounts say MacDonald cut his own hand badly in the attack and hid the body beneath the shop before leaving Sydney.
After the exhumation an identikit picture ran in newspapers across the country. MacDonald had dyed his hair, grown a mustache and found work as a porter on the Melbourne railways under another name, and he was recognized there and arrested in May 1963. He confessed. On September 24, 1963, he was sentenced in the New South Wales Supreme Court on four charges of murder. The inquest record gives the sentence as penal servitude for life; other published accounts say Justice McLennan imposed five consecutive life terms with a strong recommendation that he never be released. The jury convicted him despite evidence of insanity, and some jurors reportedly fainted at the details of the killings. Accounts of the trial say he told the court he would kill again if he were able.
He was held first at Long Bay Gaol, then committed by the Minister for Health to Callan Park Mental Hospital, certified medically and legally insane. In 1964 he was moved to Morisset Hospital and treated for depression and schizophrenia, and in 1976, with both illnesses considered in remission, he entered the prison system proper. In 2003 the Sunday Herald Sun quoted him as saying, "I have no desire to go and live on the outside. I wouldn't last five minutes." From the end of 2004 he lived in prison hospital and aged-care units at Long Bay. On the evening of May 11, 2015, he complained of severe abdominal pain and was taken to Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, where doctors found a bowel obstruction caused by an incarcerated hernia and judged it not survivable. He died the next morning, May 12, at ninety, the oldest inmate in New South Wales. The coroner found he died of natural causes and that his care had been appropriate.