Has Australia’s most prolific serial killer been exposed? If what police suspect is true, then the grotesque record of the infamous Snowtown killers may be exceeded by a healthcare worker already convicted of two murders and an attempted murder.
Garry Davis murdered two vulnerable aged patients at Summitcare Wallsend aged care facility in Newcastle in 2013 and attempted to murder a third. He killed his victims by injecting them with lethal doses of insulin. But when police searched his bedroom in the home where he lived with his grandparents, they made an alarming discovery.
Under Davis’s bed, police found a black bag including syringes, needles, literature about insulin and a pharmaceutical guide including adverse effects of medications.
Police also located medication belonging to aged care residents, and a stolen vial of Midazolam, a sedative used in palliative care and as a twilight anaesthesia that, when injected, wipes the memory of a user.
Also stashed in Davis’s room were 13 death notices that had been cut out of a local newspaper. All the notices were from 2008 – five years before Davis murdered the Summitcare residents – and most came from a nursing home where he worked at the time.
Why would he keep such stuff stashed away? As retired detective Graeme Parker, who led the investigation, points out, it’s common for serial killers to keep ‘trophies’.
“Most people don’t keep death notices from people they don’t know or have had very little to do with,” he told Background Briefing.
Parker says it raised fears among police that Davis could have harmed those patients also.
“I am still to this day concerned about some of the evidence that tends to [suggest the Summitcare victims] may not have been the first,” he says.
“There was a general feeling that he may have committed more [murders].”
Another person close to the investigation agrees.
Dr Michael Diamond, a forensic psychiatrist who analysed Davis for the police, diagnosed him with a severe personality disorder.
He believes the death notices are “trophies”, and says that if Davis had harmed those residents or was even involved in their deaths, the notices could be “enjoyed” as a “trigger to experience whatever was involved in those acts”.
“There has to be some gratifying component to keeping these notices and keeping them hidden in a box under your bed,” he told Background Briefing.
Dr Diamond also described as trophies the medication belonging to other elderly residents from Koombahla.
He theorises that Davis took their medication so he could be in a position of power, and believes he would have enjoyed watching residents suffer or become “more frightened”.
Why wasn’t this brought up at the time of Davis’s trial in 2016? They were considered prejudicial. But closer investigation raises deeply disturbing questions. Most of the notices were from Uniting Koombahla, a Newcastle aged-care facility, during the time Davis worked there. His work roster shows him working the afternoon shift in the facility’s East Wing.
[Davis] identified several people in the death notices to police as people from “the East Wing”.
Davis was sacked from Koombahla after management found he breached its ethics code, including posting “I hate old people” on Facebook.
Two further notices were from Calvary St Joseph’s Aged Care at Sandgate and one was from Newcastle’s Mater Hospital.
While Davis started his career at St Joseph’s, the ABC couldn’t find records that indicated he worked there or at the Mater Hospital in 2008, when the notices were published.
Davis told police that he kept the death notices as mementoes of ‘people I used to care for … [that] were close to me’. Yet, when pressed further, police videos shows that he seemed to have trouble remembering many names. His story has also changed notably.
At first, he told the ABC it was his grandmother who’d cut the death notices from the newspaper because they named aged care facilities where Davis had worked.
However, Background Briefing found some of the notices do not name an aged-care facility, meaning it would’ve been impossible for his grandmother to identify them.
Questioned at length about this, Davis eventually conceded to the ABC it was “possible” he had cut out some of the notices himself.
Davis steadfastly denies killing anyone, instead maintaining he was wrongfully convicted.
