MURDERER Eric James Murray is a real-life monster who is the stuff of nightmares — but it is thought his known criminal history is just the tip of the iceberg. Police believe the convicted double murderer and rapist is responsible for other killings that would put him alongside infamous serial killers Ivan Milat and Lenny Fraser.
It is suspected that he may have murdered up to seven people — and that would put him on level pegging with Milat, the Backpacker Murderer who slaughtered seven young travellers in the 1990s. And it would put him ahead of Queensland serial killer Lenny Fraser who raped and killed nine-year-old schoolgirl Keyra Steinhardt and murdered three other Rockhampton women.
Police have told The Sunday Mail they have little doubt Murray has killed others. "We like him for another five," one detective said. "But I don't want to say who they are at the moment. One is pretty famous."
One reason police are careful in what they say is because Murray has gone quiet since his confession to the 1996 murder of 60-year-old Brisbane woman June Quinton."It looks as though he's spoken to a lawyer and has clammed up," the officer said. After Murray, 66, was last month jailed for life for Ms Quinton's murder, prosecutor Danny Boyle revealed Murray's life of savagery began with his first conviction for violence in 1964.
Then, in 1981, he escaped from a NSW prison camp, stole a 12-gauge shotgun and gunned down 32-year-old lecturer David Morrison-Howie in front of his wife and family. He then abducted Mr Morrison-Howie's wife — then four months pregnant — and tried to rape her. The trauma of the ordeal made her miscarry the baby.
Murray served 14 years of a 16-year term for those attacks and was on parole when he clubbed Ms Quinton to death for "being rude" to him. He then went on the run but was captured in 2003 after abducting a 17-year-old Northern Territory girl and holding her as a sex slave for at least four days.
It was expected Murray would have been left to die in an Northern Territory prison had he then not confessed to Ms Quinton's murder to get a transfer to a Queensland jail to be closer to his sister, who lives in NSW.
Last month Brisbane Supreme Court judge John Byrne, who sentenced Murray to life; branded him a diabolic and atrocious specimen of the human race.