By Makayla Muscat For Daily Mail Australia
11:28 23 Jun 2024, updated 11:41 23 Jun 2024
A mass murderer who shot dead six people and two unborn children in a killing spree on the NSW Central Coast more than three decades ago has died behind bars.
Malcolm George Baker, 76, died in palliative care on Saturday while serving six life sentences for a shooting spree known as The Central Coast massacre, the Daily Telegraph reported.
He used a double-barrel shotgun to smash the window to his ex-girlfriend Kerry Gannan and her sister Lisa’s Terrigal apartment on October 27, 1992.
A friend of the two women, Chris Gall, 22, who was visiting the house was the first victim to be shot.
Baker then shot his ex Kerry dead. She had called off the long term relationship six weeks earlier.
Baker then found Lisa – eight months pregnant – sleeping on the sofa and shot her in the face. She and her unborn child couldn’t be saved.
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The women’s father Thomas Gannan, 43, was found dead in the street with a bullet to his head.
Baker then drove to his son David Baker’s home in Bateau Bay, hot him in the back of head and left his son for dead in the backyard.
From there, Baker drove to Wyong, intending to take revenge on Ross Smith, 35, who he blamed for a failed business deal that cost Baker a housing deposit.
After breaking down the door, he killed Smith in the bath before shooting pregnant Leslie Read, 25, who died soon after in hospital.
Not done with his killing spree, Baker planned to go to Sydney and murder the rest of the people on his list.
Instead he visited a friend, John Thompson, who convinced him to hand himself in at a police station.
At 11pm that night, Baker went to Toukley police station and handed over his shotgun, telling police where they would find the trail of bodies.
He was charged with six counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
On the 25th anniversary of the massacre, the mother of the killer’s ex-girlfriend, Ann Gannan, spoke out about her last encounter with him.
Baker, who was 43-years-old at the time, tried to run Ms Gannan over before making a chilling threat to her and her family.
‘Then he called out something like: “I’m going to take the lot of youse out,” and I really panicked then,’ she told news.com.au in 2017.
‘I went back to Lisa and told her and we were all scared.’
She was right to be afraid of the unemployed mechanic, who went on his murder spree only weeks later.
‘He was the type of person he had to be in control. You’d just get a sense that something was amiss and if you see that you know trouble’s coming,’ she said.
‘I already knew it, I’d seen it in the girls. I’d seen the girls getting scared.’
In August 1993, Baker was sentenced to life imprisonment for each of the six murders without parole, which he was serving when he died.
He was one of the first six inmates sent to Goulburn Supermax jail’s High Risk Management Unit in 2001.