It was a pleasant morning on Saturday the 21st of October, 1989, when rowers training with the Brisbane Grammar School in Brisbane, Australia, were by the Brisbane River in the southern suburb of Hill End.
It was around 6:15AM, when they observed something on the banks of the river. As they got closer, they recoiled in horror to see that it was the body of a man, nude except for his socks.1
The body was transported to the medical examiner’s office where it was found that he had sustained 14 stab wounds to his back, as well as others to his chest and side. His throat had also been slashed with such ferocity that his head had almost been severed.
The body was identified as 47-year-old Edward Baldock. Edward was a Brisbane council worker.
Investigators first of all wanted to establish the timeline leading up to Edward being found on the Brisbane River. They determined that he had left his home in the suburb of West End at around 7PM on Friday evening. He had caught a taxi to the Caledonian Club where he spent the night drinking with his friends. He left at around 11PM, but what happened between that time and the following morning remained a mystery.
As investigators were trying to establish a timeline, they examined evidence found at the crime scene. Alongside Edward’s body were his shoes. Inside one of these shoes, they found a bank card belonging to 24-year-old Tracey Wigginton. She was arrested that afternoon, and instead of deny any involvement, she readily confessed to murdering Edward along with her 25-year-old girlfriend, Lisa Ptaschinski, and two of her friends: 24-year-old Tracey Waugh and her girlfriend, 24-year-old Kim Jervis.
As Wigginton was confessing, both Waugh and Jervis went to police with details of the murder, and both placed the blame directly on Wigginton.2
According to Wigginton, she was a vampire that fed on human blood. On the night of the murder, the women drank champagne in a nightclub before driving around looking for a victim for Wigginton to feed on. After Edward left the Caledonian Club, he was spotted by the four women as he waited for a taxi. He was intoxicated, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.31. The four women pulled up alongside him. It’s disputed whether Edward was lured to the car with promise of sex, or whether he was simply offered a lift by the women.
They drove Edward to a deserted yacht club. Wigginton and Edward got out of the car and walked to the yacht club. Moments later, Wigginton returned and said: “This guy is too strong, I’ll need help.” Both Wigginton and Ptaschinski were armed with knives, so Ptaschinski and Jervis followed Wigginton back to Edward. At this point, Edward was sitting naked on the riverbank. Wigginton took the knife from Ptaschinski and came up behind Edward and began to stab him as Ptaschinski and Jervis held him down.3
Wigginton recalled of the murder: “I walked around him. I took my knife out of my back pocket. I said nothing and stabbed him. I stabbed him on the other side of the neck and I continuously stabbed him. I grabbed him by the hair, pulled him back, stabbing him in the front of the throat. At that stage he was alive. I stabbed him in the back of the neck again and cut the nerves. I then sat and watched him die.”
As Edward slowly bled to death, Wigginton smoked a cigarette and watched. Once Edward was deceased, Wigginton drank the blood that was spilling out from his almost severed head. As Jervis said, Wigginton looked “like a person would if they had just sat down to a three-course dinner.”
Following the women’s arrests, they were separated and interviewed. They all contended that Wigginton was the ringleader, and they described her as a “vampire” who lived on human blood. Over the course of the friendship, Wigginton had told her three accomplices that she had the ability to disappear, except for her “cat’s eyes.” They also said that she avoided mirrors and was capable of casting spells upon them.4 According to the women, Wigginton had told them that she could not eat solid food and survived solely on blood.
Ptaschinski revealed that before the murder, Wigginton had drank her blood from cuts on her hand. This then progressed to Ptaschinski using a tourniquet to pump up the veins in her arm so that Wigginton could drink the blood more easily. Ptaschinski said: “She dominated me more than anyone has in my life. She had some sort of inner power.”
Waugh confirmed the blood drinking, but she said that Ptaschinski had a “weak heart” and “couldn’t give her anymore” blood. Wigginton and Ptaschinski had only met around a week prior, and almost as soon as they met, Wigginton began planning the murder. She said that the murder would satisfy her “craving for blood.”
Following Wigginton’s arrest, she was asked by Detective Senior Constable Danny Murdoch: “Have you been involved in this sort of thing before?” She replied: “Only when I was young, I would sacrifice goats.” According to her three defendants, they had never seen Wigginton eat, despite the fact she was 6 foot and 17 stone. She had told them that she drank pig and goat blood she had collected from butcher’s shops. In addition to the three women believing that Wigginton was a vampire, they also believed that she was “the Devil’s wife.”
Tracey Wigginton ultimately pleaded guilty to the murder and was handed a sentence of life in prison. An investigation into her background revealed that she had been born into a wealthy family. She claimed that from the age of 8 to 11, she was sexually abused by her grandfather. She was expelled from high school after molesting other pupils. As an adult, she inherited $35,000 from her grandparents and worked as a bouncer at a local gay nightclub.5
The murder trial for the other three women began in February of 1991 and was dubbed “The Lesbian Vampire Trial” by the media. During opening statements, Prosecutor Adrian Gundelach said that Wigginton had stalked a victim and then drank his blood. He likened her to a shark in a feeding frenzy. While Wigginton was the one to conduct the murder, he said that the three other defendants deserved to be convicted as well because they had helped her plan the murder and helped her search for a victim.
Wigginton did not testify during the trial but two psychiatrists who had examined her did. They testified that she had multiple-personality disorder, and had demonstrated four distinct personalities.
Jervis was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 years in prison while Waugh was acquitted of the charges. As for Ptaschinski, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 2008, Ptaschinski was released from prison.
Wigginton routinely applied for parole and on the 11th of January, 2012, that parole was granted. Wigginton had served 25 years in prison.
Footnotes:
- The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October, 1989 – “Four Women on Murder Charge”
- The Sydney Morning Herald, 31 January, 1990 – “Student Drank Blood of Victim, Court Hears”
- The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February, 1991 – “Trial Told of Blood Drinking Frenzy”
- The Toronto Star, 16 February, 1991 – “Court Convicts Two Women in Australian Vampire Trial”
- The People, 1 May, 1994 – “Blood Lust of the Evil Lesbian Vampire”
Comments:
Great read! How terribly awful what that poor man went through! Some people are just SICK and all of these woman are!
They should never have let her out.
Author needs to do some geography fact checking since there’s a few errors in this article.
It’s Brisbane, Queensland not Brisbane, Sydney.
It’s West End not Hill End.