My teacher, the killer.
May 20, 2025 3:38 pm Leave your thoughts
Yes.
You read correctly.
I was added to a group on social media by one of the girls who wanted a class reunion. The school was one for kids aged between 4-12. We went through each grade together (until my mother pulled me out of the school in the final year.) I didn’t think people did reunions for primary school, so I wanted to see what the plan was. No one said anything personal; where they now worked or if they had a family, but we each contributed some pics and some of our experiences at the school.
We came to realise that out of all the classes and grades we were in…Mr R’s class was the one we had scary memories of. There were hair-raising moments in a lot of the grades, but Mr R was traumatic…and we traded the trauma over a couple of nights’ conversation.
It was like hearing different witness accounts of the same car crash
Mr R was my teacher in 4th grade, I was 8-9 years old. I didn’t have fond memories of him. For years, and I couldn’t remember why exactly, I always credited his class with destroying my trajectory. I always won DUX of the year – the smart kid award. You’d win a certificate, a book or something and the accolades of the teachers and other students in the school. Between myself and one boy, we’d clean up all the awards every year, for years. It would come down to the wire, head2head. We were the smart nerds. His parents would walk out of the assembly when I won and he didn’t. It was serious shit, apparently. (LOL)
But around 4th grade, I faded. I wasn’t confident in my ability in school anymore. I didn’t want my parents giving me advice on my homework and I felt embarrassed not to know the answers. I got impatient and weird when I was offered any help. Talking to these people, a whole pile of memories came back and I know it was due to Mr R’s intimidation.
He was strange, with at tick like he was wincing in pain all the time. He would yank our plaits/ponytails hard if he caught us talking. He wouldn’t let us out to play if we didn’t get math problems correct, he threw objects at us, he made us write pages of lines for days on end, and he shoved a student into the trashcan outside.
These are just some of the memories, myself, and the kids in this class photo remember.
When the group chat talked about how he was now in jail for murder…I wasn’t surprised. I remembered hearing his last name on the news years ago as I breezed through my mother’s house barely paying attention. His surname is uncommon, so I did notice them mention it but I only chuckled to myself wondering if it was him. Then I just forgot about it until the conversation with these kids in the photo.
After the conversations, I searched for any information but there was barely anything other than his wife’s name and that he had been the one to take her life. She was mentioned in a few lists and articles pertaining to convicted criminals wanting parole, but who have never given up the location of the bodies of their victims.
Mr R had never told anyone where the body was.
I found a few summaries of the case online, and one that had the details.
Mr R had dug a hole in his backyard to bury his wife in after years of animosity between them. They had gotten divorced or separated and lived in different houses. When asked why he didn’t kill her back then and put her in the hole he dug, he stated he’d “thought better of it.” This matters to me because he dug that hole only a few years before he was our teacher. He was mentally unstable (duh) before he ever met us.
The other creepy thing was that when the police searched his house, they’d found a picture of his wife with the eyes scratched out and dollar signs drawn in. Reading the document, he apparently owed her over $85,000 in what (I think) was to do with child support. She would get official letters and debt-collector threats sent to him for years. He’d also found out she was having a relationship with a man he’d been told was just a friend while they were married.
They never found the body, but Mr R’s friends at the gun club had recounted a conversation years earlier where he was venting about his (ex)wife. They jokingly said they’d get rid of her for 10grand, then they’d each laughingly tried to one-up the offer. Mr R had told them he could do it himself and no one would find her.
I guess he was right.
He apparently killed her at her home. There was only a smaller patch of blood found by his adult daughter who had gone to the house to see her mother. However, the luminol showed that there was a volume of blood at the scene so big that it meant the victim would not have survived. The luminol also showed that the bloodtrail went from the house, down the path and then disappeared at the driveway, where Mr R’s car had been parked.
Mr R’s daughter was told what the police thought happened and she came to the station and saw her father. She asked him what happened and how he could do this. And he told her some line about how material/greedy people were in the world. So, he kind of admitted it to her, even before any court proceedings. He has since appealed his case based on some DNA evidence that was found in his car – apparently it wasn’t blood but could have been dandruff, skin cells or organic material and not even his wife’s. The prosecution used it as if it was water tight blood evidence.
The appeal was not successful.
I made an Ever Something to Say episode called MR HARD R that briefly discussed this stuff…but chatting with these people has brought a lot of memories back. We went through some baaad experiences. I think about recourse…there is probably none; statute of limitations, the school no longer exists (a housing estate now on top) and the teacher is in jail. He will probably die there since he committed the major crime in 2002 and he was already older.
I’m still digesting the experience…but what the hell…
No wonder we were all traumatised by this person. I’m thinking about it all the time now. :\
Tags: abuse, australia, court, crime, education, elementary school, jail, law, murder, opinion, past, personal, primary school, school, schoolkids, shooting club, story, targets, teacher, trauma