ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

A Betoota Grove man who terrorised his entire year group – as well as many younger pupils and teachers – is coming off as a massive creep these days as he tries to rebrand as a good person.

Only his parent’s private wealth and connections prevented Matthew Legstrong from being asked to leave The Whooton School, one of our town’s most exclusive boys’ schools.

His bullying of selected students was unprecedented and needlessly cruel. Some of the now 31-year-old’s actions severely impacted upon the lives of dozens of young men in town still to this day. There’s a lot of men in this town who’d meet at a local pub and celebrate the day Matthew ignores a red man and ends up rag-dolling under the D45 to Betoota Heights.

For a long time, that fact was lost on Matthew. But after a chance encounter with a former classmate outside the Leonard’s Chicken in the French Quarter Stockland, he decided to change his ways.

Matthew now works with his father and uncle in the Bjelke Chambers in the Old City – and somehow he found the time this morning in his busy schedule to speak to our reporter about how he’s turned his life around.

“I smiled at this bloke from high school I saw at the shops and he basically told me to get fucked,” he said.

“He gave me a real spray, actually. I pulled him up and he said I was an absolute cunt to him in high school and pretty much destroyed his high school experience – and I did. The penny finally dropped. This dumping wave of guilt rushed over me. I knew then I had to change.”

While his intentions might be good, Matthew’s attempts to be kind to people are just coming off as creepy.

Another classmate who had a recent run-in with Matthew said his efforts to be kind and nice to him made ‘his fucking skin crawl’.

“Stay in your lane, cunt,” said that classmate, who asked to remain anonymous.

“It’s just creepy. That guy being nice is fucked. It’s like he’s learning how to be. He came up to me and was all like, ‘Hey mate, how’s everything going? It’s been ages, blah blah blah,’ and I was waiting for him to wind me or something but yeah – he just wanted to know about what I’d been up to for the past 10 years,”

“Fuck that.”

More to come.

