Saturday, 4 January 2025

Murder Most Vile Volume 50

 

18 Chilling true murder cases, including

A Terrible Truth: John Sharpe has decided that he no longer wants to be married. He’s bought himself a speargun. It’s cheaper than a divorce.

Poor Twisted Me: He was good-looking rich kid obsessed with losing his virginity. If it doesn’t happen soon, he might just do something rash.

Permission to Kill: The killer offered a bizarre defense for murder, he claimed that the victim had asked him to kill her.

Showtime: A petulant man-child and his doting mother get into a war over her refusal to pay for concert tickets. One of them won’t survive the fall-out.

Pinky Swear: An infant dies in the care of a babysitter. The ruling is SIDS, but the child’s family never believed that. Years later, the dreadful truth emerges.

Killer Ratings: As a crime reporter, Wallace was always looking for a good story. And if the headlines weren’t compelling enough, he’d make them himself.

Evil Fantasies: Tanya has a bucket list of things she wants to do, like watching her boyfriend rape and murder a young girl.

Victim of Love: A woman dies in a tragic fall from a horse. At first glance, it looks like an accident. A closer look reveals murder.

 


Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of

Murder Most Vile Volume 50


A Terrible Truth

 

Sometime in September 2003, John Sharp visited a sporting goods store in Melbourne, Australia, and came home with a speargun. This was a surprise to his wife, Anna, since John wasn’t a particularly sporting type and had never shown any interest in the ocean. Neither did he give any indication that he planned on taking up scuba diving. His sole use for the gun seemed to be firing its two projectiles into a board in the backyard, retrieving them, firing again. Anna, watching bemused from the kitchen window, wondered what her husband might be up to. Had she known the answer to that question, she’d have taken her baby daughter and run.

 

John Myles Sharpe was born on February 28, 1967, in the Melbourne suburb of Mornington. He would never stray far from the area, spending his childhood there and remaining in the general vicinity as a young man. By then, John had landed a job with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and it was here that he met his wife-to-be. Anna Kemp was an attractive, vivacious transplant from New Zealand. She was four years older than John, but that proved no obstacle to romance. The couple started dating, and things moved pretty quickly from there. They were married in October 1994.

 

To everyone who knew them, to colleagues, friends, and family, John and Anna seemed like a normal, happy couple. But that would change with the birth of their daughter in August 2002. Gracie Louise Sharpe was born with a congenital condition called hip dysplasia, which required her to wear a corrective harness for the first three months of her life. She was also subjected to painful orthopedic treatments. She had difficulty sleeping and cried a lot. This put a strain on the marriage, with Anna trying to do the best for her child and John becoming increasingly tetchy. Tempers flared and John complained to friends that his wife was “moody and controlling.”

 

Was the marriage in trouble? Apparently not, if the couple’s next move was anything to go by. In September of 2003, the Sharpes made a substantial investment in their future by signing the deeds on a new house at 116 Prince Street, Mornington. It was in the backyard of this property that John would practice his speargun skills.

 

2003 would turn out to be quite a momentous year for the Sharpes. In November, Anna discovered that she was pregnant again. The pregnancy was unplanned, and Anna had mixed feelings about it. For John, there was no such ambiguity. He didn’t want the child. He and Anna already had their hands full with Gracie. How were they going to cope with another kid? It would take him weeks to come to terms with the idea that he was to be a father again. Once he accepted the inevitable, though, things seemed to improve between him and Anna. When they attended a nephew’s birthday party on March 21, 2004, they seemed to be a happy family again. That, as it turned out, was a pretense. 

 

On March 29, Anna’s mom received an e-mail from her daughter saying that she had left John for another man, that she was pregnant by her new lover, and that she was happy for the first time in ages. The concerned mother then called her son-in-law to find out what was happening, and John confirmed that Anna had walked out on him, taking Gracie with her. However, this did not ring true to Anna’s family. In fact, they were so concerned that they went to the police in Dunedin and filed a missing person report. The New Zealand authorities then contacted their counterparts in Australia and asked them to do a welfare check. Officers who knocked on John Sharpe’s door that day found him home alone. To them, Sharpe repeated his story. He said that Anna had left him for another man and had moved with their daughter to the nearby suburb of Chelsea.   

 

However, the Melbourne police found no trace of Anna or Gracie Sharpe in their subsequent search, and now concerns were growing for their safety. They would remain among the missing over the weeks that followed. During that time, a distraught John Sharpe appeared on national television, issuing a heartfelt appeal that said in part, “Anna, our marriage may be over, but I still love you and you are the mother of our beautiful daughter Gracie, whom we both adore more than anyone else. Please let me know that you are okay.” A week later, Sharpe informed the police that the message had generated a response. Anna had called and told him that she and Gracie were fine. She’d also told him not to look for them and had refused to reveal her location.

 

Not everyone was convinced by this story. In New Zealand, Anna’s family was pushing the authorities for an official inquiry, and that pressure was being relayed to the police in Melbourne. On May 20, the New Zealand authorities issued an official request. That same day, Sharpe was interviewed at his home and repeated what he’d said earlier, that Anna had left him. He would stick to that narrative during another interview on June 10. When the police returned for a third time, two weeks later, it was with a warrant in hand. John Sharpe was arrested on suspicion of murder.

 

The questions now were more pressing, and they were being asked by homicide investigators who’d done this many times before. Sharpe hung tough through the first session, but by the second, he was showing clear signs of strain. Eventually, he asked for a break so that he could speak with his family. When he returned, he said that he was ready to tell what had happened. It was now that the terrible truth would be revealed.

 

Sharpe started his confession by admitting outright that he had killed his wife and baby daughter. He had done it, he said, because Anna was “moody” and because she was trying to “run his life.” Things had come to a head on March 23 when, after another argument, Anna stormed off to bed while he stayed up, angry and brooding. Eventually, he decided that he wasn’t going to take her abuse anymore. He walked to the garage and fetched his speargun, loading it with one of the bolts. He then returned to the bedroom where Anna was asleep. Holding the gun just inches from her face, he’d pulled the trigger and fired the spear into her brain.

 

Anna was fatally wounded but not killed. It would take the second spear to end her life. Sharpe then covered her body with a towel and went downstairs, where he folded out the sofa bed and went to sleep.

 

The following morning, Sharpe tried to remove the spears from Anna’s head but couldn’t. They were too deeply embedded. All he was able to do was unscrew the shafts and separate them from the heads. That done, he went about his day, even dropping Gracie at daycare and later collecting her there. He also stopped at Sport Phillip Marine and bought another bolt for his speargun. Later that night, he dug a hole in the backyard and committed his pregnant wife to a shallow grave. Before putting her in the ground, he dug the two spear points out of her skull.    

 

What John Sharpe had done would already qualify him as one of the most depraved, cold-hearted killers in Australian history. But Sharpe wasn’t done yet. He had still deeper depths to dredge. On March 27, four days after he’d killed his wife, he decided to alleviate himself of responsibility for his daughter.

 

According to Sharpe, he put Gracie to bed in her cot and then drank several glasses of whiskey and Coke to “numb his senses.” He retrieved the spear gun from the garage, loaded it with the newly acquired spear, and re-entered his daughter’s bedroom. Standing over the baby, he fired a bolt into her brain at close range. He expected Gracie to die instantly, but she did not. Instead, she started screaming in pain. Sharpe had to run to fetch his other two bolts to finish the job. And still, Gracie wasn’t dead. He had to pull out one of the spears and fire it again to kill her. This murder, he claimed, was not premeditated. “I was thinking of taking care of Gracie by myself,” he told the officers. “Amongst all this madness, I just lost the plot.”

 

This was difficult testimony to hear, even for hardened homicide cops. But there was more to tell. With Gracie dead, Sharpe wrapped her tiny corpse in garbage bags and a tarpaulin and bound it with duct tape. He then drove the body to the Mornington Refuse Transfer Station and dumped it there, along with a boxful of the baby’s clothes and toys. The speargun and its projectiles were also tossed in.

 

The following day, Sharpe purchased two tarpaulins and an electric chainsaw. He exhumed his wife’s body and hacked it into three pieces. These sections were wrapped and taped and thrown into the same waste collection bins where he’d disposed of his daughter. Thankfully, these remains would be retrieved by police after a massive three-day search. Mother and daughter and unborn son would at least have the dignity of a Christian burial. 

 

John Myles Sharpe appeared for trial at the Supreme Court of Victoria in August 2005. He entered a guilty plea to the murders of Anna and Grace Sharpe and was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum non-parole period of 33 years. Sharpe was sent to serve his time at HM Prison Barwon, where fellow inmates made it clear that they’d kill him if they could get their hands on him. As a result, the family killer spends his time in protective custody, cut off from the prison population.

 

One further detail would emerge in the aftermath of the Sharpe trial, a detail that paints John Myles as even more of a monster than you might previously have assumed. A member of the extended Sharpe family suggested an alternative motive for the murders. Sharpe, it appears, had a history of molesting children and might have been sexually abusing his daughter. Once Anna found out, the deadly plot was set in motion. Two innocents would be brutally slain to cover up the dirty secrets of a debauched pedophile.

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