'He didn't show any emotion.' How the 'Mornington Monster' was caught.

Content warning: This story contains depictions of murder and graphic violence and may be triggering for some readers.

It's May 2004, and Rockleigh Stone Waste Management Facility in Tuerong - 60 km South of Melbourne - is, in the most literal sense, a dump.

Like any other tip site, the facility holds mounds upon mounds of household rubbish across a large expanse of land. But unlike any other tip site, there are hundreds of police officers digging through the rubbish. It's like a scene from an Apocalypse film as the investigators and police wear biohazard suits and heavy duty masks, trying to protect themselves from the asbestos-riddled muck. 

The officers are on the lookout for two ordinary blue rubbish bags that they suspect contain the bodies of pregnant 41-year-old Anna Kemp and her 20-month-old daughter Gracie.

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But there are of course thousands of blue rubbish bags all over the place.

Every time the search party comes across one, they must halt everything. This unavoidable process has delayed their investigation considerably, costing the force almost half a million dollars a day.

Morale is low as officers are told they’re reaching the limits of their resources and are down to their last day of searching. They’ve only got one more chance to find the mother and daughter. 

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Narelle Fraser is a young woman working for the Missing Persons Unit and although she’s been heavily invested in the case since day one, she never wants to see another blue bag again... nor feel the dread that rises up every time they do.

It’s 10am on the 11th and final day of searching, and an excavator pulls up a huge claw of rubbish. Fraser spots a blue bag lodged at the top.

Just as they’ve done hundreds of times over the last 10 days, she halts the search to investigate. Scrambling up metres of rubbish, Fraser finds and opens the rubbish bag only to see a kitchen glove, so she signals for the search to continue.

But something feels wrong... Fraser’s gut takes her back to the bag and as she opens it again, she sees something else. 

What she'd thought was a kitchen glove was actually a bloated, decomposing human hand and arm.

She screams at the top of her voice. She's found them.

*************************************

Anna Kemp met John Sharpe when they both worked together at The Commonwealth Bank in the 1990s and their relationship moved fast. 

By 1994, the pair were married, and they moved to Mornington, a suburb in the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. Little Gracie was born in 2002. She had a condition known as hip dysplasia which meant for the first three months of her life she was required to wear a corrective orthopaedic brace. This led to many sleepless nights for both her and her family and caused strain between Kemp and Sharpe.

Kemp fell pregnant with their second child in 2003 and while she was thrilled, subsequent interviews with friends and family revealed that Sharpe was very unhappy with the news, even questioning his wife whether it was his child. 

Fortunately, Kemp had a great support system and relationship with her family in New Zealand, especially her mother. The two would call each other every couple of days, so when Kemp missed several calls, her mother grew concerned. 

She rang Sharpe, who explained Kemp's absence with flimsy excuses such as being busy dropping Gracie off at daycare. This only made Kemp's mum more concerned. 

Eventually Sharpe called Kemp's mum to tell her that Kemp had left him for another man and taken Gracie with her. But Kemp’s mum was adamant that her daughter would not leave, especially at 20 weeks pregnant. 

It was Kemp’s mother’s birthday that was the straw that broke the camel's back. She received a text and a bunch of flowers with a card from Kemp, but neither messages sounded like her daughter had written them.

So in March 2004, she called the New Zealand Police and reported Kemp as missing. 

The New Zealand police followed protocol and called Sharpe but they were fed the same story about her leaving him for another man. Suspicions were raised enough for them to report the case to the Mornington Police in Australia who then immediately made a house call. 

Sharpe failed to convince the officers there was nothing wrong, and they immediately escalated the case to Victoria’s Missing Persons Unit. An investigation team was sent out just hours later. 

Sharpe was quickly the main suspect. There was no evidence of Kemp ever getting into a blue car as Sharpe had stated on the supposed day she left. There was no evidence of bus tickets, plane tickets or hotel rooms booked. Kemp's friends had absolutely no information that could back the story that she had run away with another man. 

In fact, the only evidence that she was alive was the activity on her phone and bank account. 

Sharpe was a loner who hardly rang anyone or had house guests, so the investigators had plain clothes officers follow him to keep track of his whereabouts. They increased pressure on him as they ramped up the investigation, trying to make him nervous and stress him out so he would make a mistake. 

Sharpe then went on a now infamous television interview where he begged Kemp to contact him, holding a photo of Gracie and crying crocodile tears.

John Sharpe in his television interview. Image: AAP

Then the surveillance team caught him doing something very incriminating. Sharpe immediately drove down to Chelsea Beach, constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. He went to a specific bush by the shore and pulled a white plastic bag from under it.

Taking it back to his car, he pulled out a phone from the plastic bag and made a call with it, then drove to the nearest ATM and withdrew some cash. Sharpe then put everything back into the bag and reburied it under the bush by the beach. 

These suspicious acts were all caught on camera by the surveillance team.

Sharpe then proceeded to drive home and call the Missing Persons Unit claiming that his wife had just rung him and withdrawn cash from their joint account. The team knew better.

While this breakthrough in the case confirmed that Sharpe was guilty of killing his pregnant wife, the investigative dream realised with dread that it meant he must have also killed young Gracie. 

The timing of bringing Sharpe in for questioning became a toss up of priority. They had enough for an arrest, but did they have enough to charge and convict him? There were still hopes that with further surveillance, the man might lead them to the bodies. 

After several days of no action from Sharpe, the team decided to arrest him and take him back to the Missing Persons Unit.  

Missing Persons Officer Narelle Fraser spoke to Mamamia's Emma Gillespie, host of True Crime Conversations, about Sharpe's mindset during his arrest.

"I don’t think anybody would know how John felt about anything," she said. "He was a closed book, he was very insular, he was a loner, I don't think anybody apart from his parents understood how John felt about anything. He didn’t show any emotion, he showed no personality. I think you could call him inept."

Sharpe refused to budge from his story during his post-arrest interview and the detectives knew that they needed to find another avenue to get through to him. So they brought in his parents, who were shown the incriminating footage of their son on Chelsea Beach, and then they sent them in to talk to him.

After one hour, they came out, and Sharpe was ready to talk.

Anna Kemp and Gracie. Image: AAP

"It’s almost difficult to describe," Fraser explained, tearing up, "but to hear a man talk about murdering his wife, who was three months pregnant, that was hard enough, but he said it with no emotion whatsoever."

Sharpe admitted to the premeditated murder of Kemp, explaining how he practised using the spear gun in the shed days before the murder because she was "getting on his nerves". On the night of the murder, after Kemp went to bed, Sharpe grabbed the speargun and shot her in the head while she slept. 

He buried her in the backyard, only to exhume her a few days later, cut her up with a chainsaw, put her into a rubbish bag and threw her out with the household rubbish. 

"This is his wife, that’s pregnant... I kept thinking what was coming next and then he told us about little Gracie, it’s the most difficult interview I have ever listened to," Fraser said. "I remember at one stage, there was a break in the interview, I went to the ladies' toilets, there were other ladies [in there] and I just put my head in my hands, I couldn’t listen."

A number of days after killing Kemp, Sharpe admitted he started thinking Gracie "needed to be with her mum." 

After downing a couple of shots of scotch, he once again grabbed the spear gun and shot Gracie. Once again, he placed the body in a garbage bag.

When asked what Sharpes demeanour was like as he detailed these events, Fraser said his confession was "like he was saying what he’d had for breakfast that morning."

The rubbish bags were tracked to the site in Tuerong and thanks to some impeccable bookkeeping, the management at the site was able to specify the rough 100 square metres that they believed the bodies would be found in. This saved the team an immeasurable amount of time and labour.

Fraser has never forgotten what it was like to find Kemp's body. "I’ve thought about it since, and I know it sounds bizarre but I almost feel like Anna was reaching out to me," she said. "I was determined to make sure that Anna wouldn’t end her life in this smelly, disgusting, ratty tip... I just knew I would find her and you know what? I did."

She confessed that the elation they felt at the discovery was quickly dampened by the realisation that Gracie must be close by. "I put my head in my hands and I just cried... I cried for what Anna had endured, for Anna’s family, for humanity as a whole I suppose... but the thought of Gracie nearby..." Fraser trailed off. 

With the discovery of Kemp's body, the search efforts were renewed and a couple of days later whilst walking back to an onsite caravan, the wind blew a photo of Anna to the feet of one of the detectives. A day later they found the body of Gracie. 

John Sharpe, labelled The Mornington Monster, was convicted to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment in 2005 and is considered Victoria’s worst case of familicide. 

Feature Image: News Corp.

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