The Family Court Bomber: Leonard Warwick

On the morning of Wednesday the 29th of July 2015, New South Wales Police homicide detectives arrested a 68-year-old retired firefighter at his home in the south-western Sydney suburb of Campbelltown. His name was Leonard John Warwick. The charges laid against him ran to 32 offences, including four counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and thirteen counts of causing bodily harm or property damage with an explosive substance. The offences dated back to a five-year period between February 1980 and July 1985. For 35 years, the state of New South Wales had known who it thought was responsible for one of the most sustained campaigns of politically motivated violence in modern Australian history. For 35 years, it had not been able to prove it. Over those five years in the early 1980s, a sitting judge of the newly established Family Court of Australia had been shot to death at his own front door. A judge's wife had been killed by a bomb on the doorstep of her home. A Jehovah's Witness minister had been killed, along with thirteen others injured, by a bomb detonated at a Kingdom Hall in south-western Sydney. And a young Family Court judge, along with his wife and two children, had narrowly survived a bomb that exploded outside their bedroom in the middle of the night. At the centre of every one of the incidents, in police files as thick as any built on a single individual outside the organised crime bureau, was the same name. A firefighter. An aggrieved former husband. A man who had been given visitation rights instead of custody of his infant daughter by a Family Court judge in 1979, and who had spent the following five years answering the court's decisions with bombs. The story of how one man's disappointment in a Sydney courtroom on a summer afternoon in 1979 led to the deaths of four people, the injury of dozens, and a 35-year manhunt that finally ended with three life sentences and the last decade of his life spent in prison.

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