The Monster and the Highway: Andy Albury and the Enduring Mysteries of the Australian Outback

Cultural advisory: this dossier names Aboriginal people who have died.

Legal status: Andrew Christopher Albury was convicted in the Northern Territory of murdering Gloria Pindan in Darwin in November 1983 and is serving life imprisonment. On 12 November 2004 the NT Supreme Court ordered that he never be released. In July 2021 Queensland police announced they had obtained a warrant for his arrest over the 1983 death of Patricia Rose Carlton in Mount Isa. He has not been tried for that killing, and he is presumed innocent of it.

The board

Two Indigenous women were killed eight weeks apart in 1983, one in Mount Isa in northwest Queensland and one in Darwin, 1,600 kilometres away. Andrew Albury was convicted of the second. According to the 1990 Queensland Court of Appeal judgment, he told Darwin detectives he had killed a woman in Mount Isa, with some details the court called startlingly consistent with that attack. Queensland police charged someone else: Kelvin Condren, a 22-year-old Aboriginal man who had been in the Mount Isa watch-house on a drunkenness arrest when Patricia Carlton was attacked. Condren served six years. In 2021, 38 years later, Queensland police named Albury as their suspect. He has not been charged in court or tried over her death.

Around that core has grown a legend: the “Northern Territory’s own Hannibal Lecter,” the claimed killer of 14, the phantom of the Flinders Highway. The record supports the core. It does not support the legend.

Gloria Pindan

Albury was born on 20 November 1961. He was 22 when he murdered Gloria Pindan, 29, an Aboriginal woman, in Darwin late on 25 November 1983. The 2004 judgment records that he was heavily intoxicated, that he approached her in Mitchell Street, and that he made full admissions to police the next day. He also told the investigating officer that he hated Aboriginal people. A jury convicted him on 5 July 1984 and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. At the time, the law did not allow a non-parole period, so life meant life unless the Executive granted clemency.

In 1989 he was charged with the attempted murder of another prisoner. He was acquitted on the grounds of insanity and has since also been detained at the Administrator’s pleasure. In 2003 the Territory passed a law that gave every prisoner serving life for murder a 20-year non-parole period, and allowed the Director of Public Prosecutions to ask the court for more. On 12 November 2004 Chief Justice Brian Martin granted the Director’s application in The Queen v Albury [2004] NTSC 59. He revoked the 20-year non-parole period and refused to fix one, so Albury is to stay in prison for the rest of his natural life without the possibility of parole. That judgment is the main public record of his history in custody.

Patricia Carlton and Kelvin Condren

Patricia Rose Carlton, 24, was attacked in Mount Isa on the night of 30 September 1983. Police found her unconscious in a hotel car park the next morning, and she died on 1 October 1983. In October 1983 Queensland police charged Kelvin Condren with her murder. The Crown case rested on what he had said in police interviews. He was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to life.

Eight weeks after Carlton’s death, while being questioned by Darwin detectives about Gloria Pindan, Albury, by the account Justice Jim Thomas later set down, confessed that he had killed an Aboriginal woman in Mount Isa at the end of September. Justice Thomas wrote that while his account “contained a number of discrepancies, some of the details which [he] volunteered are startlingly consistent with the attack”: the type and length of the weapon, the injuries and her clothing. Queensland police set his account aside. Called as a witness at Condren’s trial, Albury repeatedly denied under oath that he had made any admissions to police.

The Court of Appeal, Justices Thomas, Jack Kelly and John Dowsett, ruled in Condren’s favour in 1990. Justice Thomas recorded two things. Condren had been arrested for drunkenness at 5:50 p.m. on the evening Carlton was attacked and held overnight in the watch-house. And “without that confessional evidence [he] could not have been convicted.” Condren was released in 1990 after six years, the case against him was withdrawn, and the Queensland Government made him an ex gratia payment.

In 1992 the Criminal Justice Commission, now the Crime and Corruption Commission, reported critically on the police conduct in his case. It noted cases in which confessions were unreliable because they were “induced by improper behaviour on the part of police.”

In July 2021, during a NAIDOC Week flag-raising, Mount Isa District Acting Superintendent Jason Smith said a cold-case review begun in March 2020 by Mount Isa detectives and state homicide investigators had identified Albury as the likely offender, and that a warrant had been issued for his arrest. That is a police allegation. It has not been tested in any court. Smith said Albury was unlikely to be brought to Queensland unless he was released in the Territory, and that if he were, “he would go straight to trial.” Albury has not been tried for the death of Patricia Carlton and is presumed innocent of it.

Claims and confessions

Albury’s reputation was partly his own work. A corrections report before the court in 2004 said that in 1985 he confessed to a murder in Mount Isa, and that an investigation concluded he might have committed it. In 1990 he confessed to 11 other murders. An investigation concluded that confession was fictional.

In December 2013 the Herald Sun ran a profile of the “Victorian-born killer dubbed the Northern Territory’s own Hannibal Lecter.” In February 2014 Les Chapman, the retired NT detective sergeant who arrested Albury in 1983, said publicly that Albury had boasted to him of killing 14 people while moving between Townsville and Mount Isa from 1970 to 1982. Albury would have been eight in 1970.

The Flinders Highway

The Flinders Highway runs west from Townsville through Charters Towers and Hughenden to Cloncurry and on toward Mount Isa. Between 1970 and 1982 it carried a run of unsolved cases that the press grouped together.

Judith and Susan Mackay, aged seven and five, were abducted from a Townsville bus stop in August 1970 and found murdered at Antil Plains. Decades later Arthur Stanley Brown was charged with their murders; his jury could not agree, and he was later found unfit to be retried.

Tony Jones, 20, of Perth, phoned home from Townsville on 3 November 1982 on his way to meet his brother in Mount Isa and was never seen again. A 2002 coronial inquest criticised the early police inquiry. His family’s campaign led to the first National Missing Persons Week in 1988 and, after his brother Brian mailed a pair of his shoes to the Attorney-General in 2010, to the inquest being reopened.

No evidence published to date links Albury to any of these cases. He was eight when the Mackay sisters were killed.

What the record shows

One conviction, for the murder of Gloria Pindan. One Queensland arrest warrant, issued in 2021 over the death of Patricia Carlton, an allegation no court has tested. Another man served six years for that death before his conviction was set aside. A confession to 11 murders that investigators found to be invented. A boast of 14, reported 31 years later. And a highway that would hold its unsolved cases with or without him.

The two women at the centre of this record were both Aboriginal, both killed in 1983. Gloria Pindan. Patricia Rose Carlton. Kelvin Condren lost six years to a conviction that rested, in the Court of Appeal’s words, on confessional evidence without which he could not have been convicted.

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