Mass Shooting - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1976: Rejected From a Model Plane Club, He Opened Fire on the Streets of Spring Hill in Brisbane

On 22 September 1976, 36-year-old William Robert Wilson opened fire on Boundary Street in Spring Hill, a suburb of Brisbane. Armed with a .22-calibre rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition, he killed two teenage girls and wounded four other people. He had reportedly been upset after being rejected for membership by a model plane club.

Wilson then fled to a house in nearby Kelvin Grove and took five student teachers hostage. After around two hours of negotiations, one hostage escaped by pretending she needed the bathroom. Police stormed the house around 4pm, exchanging gunfire with Wilson before overpowering him and freeing the remaining captives.

Wilson spent three years in Hospital before being considered fit to plead. On 23 June 1980, he pleaded guilty to two murders and four attempted murders, receiving two life sentences and concurrent ten-year prison terms.

Old Windmill Brisbane, built by convicts at Moreton Bay penal settlement

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1986: Patrick Sherrill Kills 14 at Oklahoma Post Office, Coining a Dark New Phrase

On August 20, 1986, part-time mail carrier Patrick Sherrill walked into the post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, and opened fire on his colleagues, shooting 20 people and killing 14 before turning the gun on himself. It was the first mass shooting by an individual in a US office workplace environment, and it sent shockwaves through American working life.

The massacre gave rise to the phrase ‘going postal’, a term for sudden, explosive workplace rage. Between 1970 and 1997, more than 40 people were killed by current or former postal employees in at least 20 separate incidents, cementing the phrase in the English vocabulary.

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1987: The Hoddle Street Massacre: Seven Dead in Melbourne Shooting Rampage

On the evening of 9 August 1987, 19-year-old Julian Knight opened fire on motorists and pedestrians along Hoddle Street in Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne, killing seven people and seriously injuring 19 others. Knight had been discharged from the Royal Military College, Duntroon just 16 days earlier following a fight and stabbing at a bar. He returned home to find his girlfriend had left him and his mother had converted his bedroom. Armed with multiple weapons, he took to the street.

After a police chase lasting more than 30 minutes, Knight was caught in nearby Fitzroy North and arrested. He was later sentenced to seven concurrent life terms, with a non-parole period of 27 years, for what the presiding judge described as ‘one of the bloodiest massacres in Australian history’. As Knight neared parole eligibility in 2014, the Victorian Government amended the Corrections Act to prevent his release unless he was in imminent danger of dying or physically incapable of causing harm.

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1966: Charles Whitman Opens Fire from the Texas Tower, Killing 17 in Austin

On August 1, 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman, a former Marine and engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, killed his mother and wife the night before, then armed himself with rifles and climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of the campus clock tower. For 96 minutes he fired at random pedestrians below, killing eleven and wounding 31, before Austin police shot him dead. Three more had been killed inside the building on his way up.

Whitman had sought psychiatric help in the months before the attack, reporting violent ideations, severe headaches, and episodes of uncontrollable rage. A posthumous autopsy found a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor pressing on his amygdala, sparking lasting debate about neurological contributions to his behaviour. The attack, one of the first mass shootings to receive widespread national media coverage, is widely credited with driving the creation of SWAT teams across the United States.

UT tower clock tower on university campus under blue sky

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