IT was always in the late afternoon, usually as the victims were returning home with their shopping. Their backs were turned and they were defenceless.

This is the way John Wayne Glover stalked his prey. He would surprise his victims - always elderly ladies - with a brutal blow to the head with a hammer. He was careful to inflict just enough force to kill them but not leave a bloody mess.

Glover was Australia’s Granny Killer, a psychopath who stalked Sydney’s wealthy North Shore suburbs throughout 1989 and 1990, killing six women and bashing and molesting several others.

His murder victims were: Gwendoline Mitchelhill, 82; Lady Winifreda Ashton, 84; Margaret Pahud, 85; Olive Cleveland, 81; Muriel Falconer, 92; and Joan Sinclair, 60. Police say there may be others.

Former Detective Inspector Mike Hagan led the hunt for the Granny Killer. He’s now retired but still occasionally lectures at police courses for senior detectives. Here, he tells news.com.au about the case he’s never forgotten.

THE MURDERS AND MANHUNT

“It started as the murder of elderly lady that was 82,” Mr Hagan said. “She’d been shopping and returned home and was assaulted at the front door. There were no witnesses to the murder [and] it was one of those mysteries to try and work out the motivation.”

A small amount of money was taken, but investigators weren’t convinced that this was a simple robbery gone wrong.

“The actual violence perpetrated on her body was absolutely alarming. It concerned all of us — why would you have so much violence perpetrated for such small amount of money stolen?” Mr Hagan said.

As well as being bludgeoned with a hammer, four of the victims were strangled, while others were “seriously assaulted”. They were strangled with pantyhose or had their heads bashed against the concrete.

Some victims were missing their underwear, a sign that Glover carried on a tradition of the worst serial killers by keeping trophies from his victims.

Mr Hagan says the case was one of the first serial killings in NSW, but it captured the attention of investigators from around the world.

“Serial murder has of course happened all around the world, but usually it involves young men and woman in their twenties and thirties. But what we were dealing with was much older ladies, most aged over 80,” he said.

The killings continued through “a second murder, then another and then an attempted murder”, and it soon became apparent they were all committed by the same person. His MO was the same and while police didn’t have a shred of evidence or anything close to a suspect, the nature of the killings provided a frightening insight into the killers mind.

“It was one of those cases of serial murder where there was a lot of planning and stalking by a predator who turned out to be a killer.”

It soon became clear he wasn’t going to stop.

“Each of the victims had been shopping and returned home. He’d obviously been following them as they walked along the footpath as they walked home. When they got to the vicinity of their home or near the front door they were attacked behind with a hammer.

“People were upset and rightly so. We wanted to get the word out into the community about their safety. All these murders happened in the afternoon, between 3pm and 6pm, on a weekday so we had to put the word out.”

Older Australians were encouraged to shop in groups and special buses were used to take concerned citizens home.

BREAKTHROUGH

The breakthrough finally came when Glover offended again - this time against a nursing home resident. He was a regular at nursing homes as part of his job as a pie salesman.

“One of the last things he did was interfere with an old lady in a nursing home on the North Shore. She reported it to police,” Mr Hagan said.

Glover was identified as a suspect and questioned. While there wasn’t enough evidence to pin the indecent assault on him, the nature of the offence - against an old woman in the killer’s hunting zone - was enough to put him firmly in investigators sights.

But Glover wasn’t the only suspect.

“We had 740 named suspects and obviously you try and eliminate them from the inquiry. We got it down to six prime suspects, and Glover was one of them,” Mr Hagan said.

The arrest came after Glover murdered Joan Sinclair, a woman he was having an affair with. At age 60, she was his youngest victim.

Because he was already identified as a prime suspect, officers had been following Glover and watched him enter Ms Sinclair’s home.

Glover had yet to exit the home before police stormed in, found Ms Sinclair’s body and discovered Glover had tried to commit suicide. He was lying in the bath unconscious after taking pills. On a suicide not he scrawled: “No more Grannies”.

After he recovered and regained consciousness, Glover was questioned by homicide detectives Glover and confessed to the crimes.

“He was quite open and quite engaging about what happened. But in terms of the impression experienced homicide investigators had of him, in their opinion he was quite removed and didn’t show any real signs of remorse at all,” Mr Hagan said.

WHY DID HE DO IT?

Mr Hagan said much of the investigation was spent trying to determine what motivated Glover to kill. Without forensic material or witnesses, they had little to go on.

Many of the books written about John Glover talk about how “evil” he was. Mr Hagan agrees.

“If you think about the way he worked, I think he was driven by evil,” he said.

“We can only assume, but a lot of it goes back to his own life — he did have a very serious dislike of his own mother and mother-in-law, what could have amounted to hatred. We believe when he was killing all these elderly woman, in his mind he was actually killing his mother and mother-in-law.”

Both women died of natural causes a few months before Glover’s killing spree began.

COURT

When he first appeared before a judge in court, evidence of his initial police interview was tendered.

He told officers he should be “strung up” for what he’d done, admitting that something in him was “triggered” when he saw the ladies.

“I’ve just got to be violent to them. One side of me was all right. The other dark, evil. I can’t control it,” he said.

When he was finally sentenced, Justice James Wood ordered him never to be released.

“This is a man, I’m afraid, of extreme cunning, of extreme dangerousness, who is prepared to attack whenever or wherever it pleases him,” said Justice Wood at the time.

OTHER VICTIMS AND THE GRANNY KILLER’S OWN DEATH

After he was convicted and jailed for life, police began to look closely at other unsolved murders.

They discovered there were cold cases in New South Wales and Victoria with eerie similarities to the Granny Killer’s victims.

Detectives visited Glover several times in jail to speak about those unsolved murders. But he wouldn’t talk.

“There was no factual evidence but there was quite a good feeling he did commit more,” Mr Hagan said.

But before police could elicit any more information from Glover, he committed suicide in jail in September 2005, aged 72.

At an inquest into his death, it was speculated he may have hung himself by accident in an attempt to gain sympathy.

In a statement tendered to court, Detective Senior Constable Ian Mitchell said: “Conjecture exists (as to whether) Glover staged his hanging to be discovered at the ‘usual’ 1pm head check ... in an effort to obtain a transfer.”

The inquest heard also from inmates who lived in cells nearby. They spoke of hearing the Granny Killer crying in response to a documentary about his crimes.

One inmate said Glover was remorseful after the program went to air, but a former colleague who still kept in touch with him offered another perspective.

Elizabeth Howarth said he fell into a depression because he didn’t like being portrayed as a monster. She described Glover as a “dramatic drama queen” who was “all over the place”.

But questions still remained after Glover’s death. Was he really to blame for more murders? And was it really a psychotic hatred of his own mother that sent him on a path of serial murder?

Mike Hagan says he still thinks of these questions - and the victims - 25 years later.

“They didn’t stand a chance. No chance at all.”