Mark Valera
"The Butcher of Wollongong".
Previously known as Mark van Krevel, in June 1998 he fatally bashed shopkeeper, David O'Hearn, 59, in his Albion Park home in a random attack. He mutilated and dismembered the body and wrote the word Satan on a mirror with the victim's blood.
 Mark Valera |
 David O'Hearn |
 Frank Arkell |
Two weeks later he bashed and strangled alleged paedophile and former Wollongong mayor, Frank Arkell, 68.
Sentenced to two life sentences without parole in December 2000, aged 21.
Three months after the two murders, Valera turned up at Wollongong Police Station to confess to the crimes. Valera was a 19-year-old local who had never come under police notice before. He lived in different places around the area, including a house with a friend which was just a few doors down the street from O'Hearn.
Valera told police that the killing of O'Hearn was "just random" and that he didn't know if O'Hearn was homosexual or not. He had killed Arkell, an alleged paedophile, because he was a "very, very horrible man". At his trial in 2000, Valera attempted to run a homosexual advance defense, claiming that his father, Jack van Krevel, had sexually and physically assaulted him during his childhood and that this had caused him to lose control when each of O'Hearn and Arkell had sexually propositioned him and this caused flashbacks of his troubled childhood. Valera's evidence was that he was propositioned by O'Hearn immediately before the killing occurred while Arkell had seduced him and that they had been in a sexual relationship for more than a year but Arkell wanted him to be the active partner for the first time immediately before Valera killed him. In convicting Valera of murder the jury had rejected the homosexual advance defense. In sentencing Valera to two terms of life imprisonment, Justice Tim Studdert found that Valera's father had been violent towards him, but rejected Valera's evidence that he had been sexually abused by his father or that either O'Hearn or Arkell had propositioned him and that this prompted a loss of self control.
In August 2000, Valera was found guilty of the murders, and in December 2000 he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.[6][7][8] He later appealed against the sentence, but the appeal was dismissed. He is serving his sentence at Goulburn Correctional Centre.