INSIDE THE VAMPIRE CRIMES
SOME CRIMINALS BELIEVE THEY ARE SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, AND HAVE PERFORMED VILE ACTS
For Edward Baldock, October 20, 1989 began like any other Friday night – with a beer in hand. But it ended in a way the 47year-old council worker could never have imagined.
Edward spent the evening drinking and playing darts at the Caledonian Club in Brisbane. By the time the father of four decided to head home a little before midnight, he was happily tipsy.
As he left the pub to look for a taxi, a green Holden Commodore pulled up and one of the four young women inside the car spoke to Edward, and he got inside.
Around 5am, an early morning jogger found his bloodied, naked body on the banks of the Brisbane River. He’d been stabbed 27 times.
Hours later, police arrested his killer – Tracey Wigginton, a 24-year-old factory worker. As police questioned her and the other women with her that night, they heard a bizarre tale that involved Satanism and the occult. Wigginton’s friends told police they believed she possessed supernatural powers and could make herself disappear, and that she drank blood like a vampire. They said Wigginton had asked one lover to cut herself so she could drink her blood, and that she’d get pig and cow blood from a local butcher to drink, too.
Wigginton spent the Friday night of Edward’s death drinking at a lesbian bar with friends. On the drive home, Wigginton told police she felt like ‘an emotional volcano’ because the relationship she was in was under strain and she was angry. Someone would become her victim, and Edward just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“He was drunk, walking down the street. He was the one – I don’t know why – he just was,” Wigginton told police at the time.
The women drove with Edward to Orleigh Park near
the Brisbane River. Wigginton and Edward went down to the water’s edge and he undressed, perhaps expecting to have sex. Instead, Wigginton pulled out a knife and, in a frenzy, stabbed her victim in the back, neck and throat. She told police she smoked a cigarette, watched Edward die and said she felt “nothing”. Shockingly, one of the women remembered smelling blood on her breath when she returned to the car.
Wigginton went home to sleep, but she’d left behind key evidence. When police searched Edward’s neatly folded clothes placed near his body, they found Wigginton’s bank card tucked inside one of his shoes. As a result, she was arrested within hours.
On Monday, October
23, 1989, Wigginton was charged with the murder. At her Supreme Court trial in February 1990, she pleaded guilty to the crime.
The court heard Wigginton was adopted as a child, and claimed to have been physically and sexually abused. Her adoptive parents died when she was 15 and she moved in with a family friend, who remembered the teenager as “a loving girl, gifted artist and devout Catholic”.
Wigginton left school and ended up working as a nightclub bouncer and briefly as a sex worker. During this time, she became increasingly fascinated by the occult and death, but Wigginton’s biological mother, Rhonda Hopkins, struggled to see how her daughter became a killer.
“When she was a kid, she could never stand the sight
‘HE WAS THE ONE – I DON’T KNOW WHY – HE JUST WAS’
of blood,” she said during a press interview in 1991.
“She’s a beautiful, loving, good-natured girl. To her family, Tracey will always be this gorgeous, loving, wacky kid who always used to have us in stitches. Tracey is not evil.”
Wigginton was sentenced to life imprisonment. While the Baldock family pleaded for her to remain in prison forever, she was released in January 2012 and now lives a life out of the public eye.