CRIME REPORTER COULD ‘SMELL SERIAL KILLER’S BREATH’

IT WAS a day investigative crime journalist Debi Marshall will never forget – when a serial killer got so close to her she could smell his breath.

She had turned up alone to his home and knocked on the door of the man who had lived scot-free for 30 years, “living the life of Riley” despite committing four murders.

“If you look at his psyche, Lenny Warwick is a manifestation of a pure psychopath,” the Hobartbased author and Walkley Award winner said.

Warwick’s litany of evil in the 1980s included the murder of two judges, the wife of a judge and a Jehovah’s Witness minister, plus the injuring of more than a dozen others through two shootings and five bombings, including of the Family Court of Australia.

Next week, Marshall’s work, which helped finally bring Warwick to justice in 2020, will be screened in a four-part investigative crime series on the ABC.

But there was a time when Marshall wasn’t sure she would live to see the day Warwick was finally held accountable for his crimes.

In 2012, she flew from Hobart to Sydney and went on her own to Warwick’s home.

She knocked on the door, but nobody answered. Then, she saw movement in his garage.

“I thought, ‘that’s Lenny Warwick’. He broke his cover and came down to meet me,” Marshall said.

“I’d been warned by Kevin Woods, one of the lead investigators, he’s got ice cube eyes.

”He said ‘if you look into those eyes, Debi, you’ll join a club you don’t want to be a part of’. And I did, and I got that fear. He got so close to me that I could smell his breath.”

Marshall said Warwick told her to “get off my property now”.

“I’ve had some pretty hairy experiences in my career as a true crime writer but that would have to be up there,” she said.

“I thought, ‘just walk slowly, Debi, don’t let him smell your fear’.

“I just walked away from him and thought ‘please don’t shoot me in the back’.”

Before Warwick was jailed, Marshall was fearful – like the loved ones of his victims – that he “wasn’t going to go down”.

“If he hadn’t been convicted, I have no doubt that he may have wanted to take some revenge,” she said.

The Family Court Murders will premier on ABC TV on May 10 at 8.30pm.