Crime Investigation Australia

A chilling investigation of John Ernest Cribb, who on August 11th 1978, broke into the home of the Connell's. On a winter’s afternoon, Valda Connell and her four-year-old son Damien arrived home after having collected ten-year-old Sally from school. What was as an average day for the family turned to horror when Valda and the children were confronted by a man brandishing a knife and ordering them back into the car. The man, John Ernest Cribb, had just a couple of months earlier been released on parole after serving about six years for armed robbery. As Cribb drove north towards Taree, on the NSW Mid North Coast, Valda pleaded to let her and her children go. Later, under the dark of night, Cribb raped the 39-year-old mother, while her two children remained in the car terrified, cold, and hungry. In the early hours of the next morning near the small town of Wingham, Cribb left the family gagged and bound in bushland next to a deserted road and then drove back south towards Newcastle. But his thoughts got the better of him as he began telling himself that Valda knew too much, and decided he must instead go back and silence her. He returns and with his knife, viciously slays the family, one by one…