William MacDonald Walking Corpse Case
On the night of 6 June 1962, Australian serial killer William MacDonald, using the alias Alan Edward Brennan, lured 37-year-old Patrick Joseph Hackett back to the mixed business shop he had just bought in Sydney, stabbed him repeatedly, and hid the body under the building before fleeing to Brisbane. Three weeks later neighbors complained of a terrible smell, and police found a badly decomposed corpse that an autopsy said belonged to a man in his forties, so they assumed the body was the missing shop owner Brennan and made no connection to the three earlier “Mutilator” murders in inner Sydney.
Months after MacDonald’s supposed death, a former coworker spotted him alive, and press coverage of the “case of the walking corpse” pushed police to exhume the body, fingerprint it, and finally identify it as Hackett, whose stab wounds and mutilation matched MacDonald’s other crimes.