Raymond Edmunds

Raymond Edmunds
Born (1944-03-12) March 12, 1944
Melbourne, Victoria
Other names Mr. Stinky, Donvale Rapist
Conviction(s) Murder x 2
Rape

Raymond Edmunds, alias Donvale Rapist, Mr. Stinky, born 12 March 1944 at Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, is a convicted rapist and double murderer who was active in Victoria, Australia from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Edmunds was dubbed "Mr Stinky" by a sub-editor from Melbourne's Sunday Press newspaper due to his offensive body odour, which was believed to have been caused by a mixture of milk, manure and chemicals from his work as a sharecropping farmer on dairy properties.

Edmunds was convicted of the murder of 18-year-old panel beater Garry Heywood and rape and murder of 16-year-old Abina Madill on 10 February 1966 at Murchison East, near Shepparton, Victoria after they disappeared from a rock 'n' roll dance. Heywood was shot through the head with a .22-calibre Mossberg self-loading rifle and Madill was raped and then bludgeoned to death.

Edmunds had allegedly previously raped and beaten his first wife and sexually abused his three-year-old daughter. Edmunds was also convicted of a series of rapes in the 1970s and early '80s that led the police to dub the then-unknown offender "The Donvale Rapist".

Sergeant Andrew Wall, a Victoria Police fingerprint expert, matched two fingerprints found on the top of the FJ Holden car owned by Heywood. This occurred before computerised processing of fingerprints was developed and fingerprint matching had to be done manually. The fingerprint evidence was deliberately kept quiet so as not to panic the offender or help him become more adept at hiding his prints. These fingerprints connected the Shepparton murders with one fingerprint found at the Donvale crime scene.

On 16 March 1985, Edmunds was arrested on unrelated charges of indecent exposure while parked in his station wagon in Albury, New South Wales. After his arrest Edmunds was fingerprinted and the prints were matched with those found at the Shepparton crime scene. At the time, NSW had mandatory fingerprinting, whereas in Victoria this was yet to become law. He was convicted and is now serving two life sentences with no minimum term for the murders and a total of 30 years for five rape convictions in Greensborough and Donvale.

It has been alleged that Edmunds committed other murders and more than 32 rapes, although he has maintained his innocence. Police are seeking to utilise new legislation that allows them to compel convicted prisoners to provide a blood sample for DNA testing. He was at one point a suspect in the case of missing Beaumaris girl Eloise Worledge.

References

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