page_title: Hoddle Street massacre
section_title: Prelude
hierarchical_section_title: Hoddle Street massacre / Events of 9 August 1987 / Prelude
caption_attribution_description: 6 Ramsden Street, Clifton Hill, Victoria, Australia, where Julian Knight, the perpetrator of the 1987 Hoddle Street Massacre, lived at the time.
context_page_description: The Hoddle Street massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the evening of Sunday, 9 August 1987, in Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, in Australia. The shootings resulted in the deaths of seven people, and serious injury to 19 others. After a police chase lasting more than 30 minutes, 19-year-old former Australian Army officer cadet Julian Knight was caught in nearby Fitzroy North and arrested for the shootings.
  Knight was later sentenced to seven concurrent sentences of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 27 years for what was described by the presiding judge as "one of the bloodiest massacres in Australian history". The Crown prosecutor, Joe Dickson QC, "did not contend that a minimum term should not be fixed". Knight currently resides in the maximum security Port Phillip Prison in Truganina, Victoria near Melbourne and was eligible for parole in 2014.
context_section_description: At 11:30 on Sunday 9 August 1987, Knight, woke up in his temporary bedroom in the front room of his mother's house at number 6 Ramsden Street, Clifton Hill. Between 13:10 and 16:10 on Sunday 9 August 1987, Knight attended a belated birthday party for his mother at his grandmother's house in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. While at the party Knight consumed two cans of regular beer. He left the party in his own car and drove his younger sister home before driving aimlessly around the Clifton Hill area.
  At about 16:50, Knight went to see an old girlfriend in Clifton Hill in order to give her a magazine. He only stayed at her flat for about five minutes then he continued to drive aimlessly around the area. Minutes later the gearbox of his car – his only asset – jammed and stuck in second gear. He limped the car home, where he changed clothes and drank another can of beer before walking angrily around to the nearby Royal Hotel, his local pub, at around 17:30. None of Knight's friends were there, so he drank alone from around 17:30. At around 20:50, Knight reportedly began to feel the effects of the beer he'd been drinking and he had a "vision" of soldiers being ambushed. He felt as if it was a "call to arms" and at about 20:55, he rushed from the hotel and ran back to his mother's house.
caption: The house in Ramsden Street, Clifton Hill
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