Martin Leach

Legislation came into effect in 2004 providing for non-parole periods for life sentences for murder after that date; for an offender already serving life sentence(s), a section provided that the sentence be taken to include a 20-year non-parole period, or 25 years for those jailed for aggravated murder. On that basis, Leach would have been eligible for parole in 2009. The legislation also included that the Director of Public Prosecutions (Northern Territory) could apply to the Supreme Court to extend or exclude the non-parole period.

On 10 May 1984, Leach was charged with two counts of murder and one count of rape by Northern Territory Police. Six days later he was convicted by a jury on all three counts, and Justice Muirhead sentenced him to imprisonment for life on each count, to run consecutively with each other and with a three-month sentence for assaulting a prison officer while on remand.

On 20 June 1983, an eighteen-year-old local woman, Janice Carnegie, and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Charmaine Aviet, were swimming at a popular recreational waterhole at Berry Springs. Leach watched the girls for some time, before forcing them at knifepoint to accompany him to a nearby gully.

In June 1982, Leach was released from prison and resumed his relationship with his wife and held a job for some time with a cleaning company. He was made redundant in December 1982 and, apart from employment for a period of one week in March 1983, he remained unemployed. His wife was in full-time employment.

Leach met his wife when aged sixteen and they married in 1979. In 1978, Leach had been involved in a serious motor vehicle accident near Mataranka which left him seriously injured.

In 1979, Leach raped a woman at knifepoint after breaking into her house. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

Martin Leach (born 11 January 1959 in New Zealand), is a convicted rapist and double murderer in Australia, and has been described as one of, if not the Northern Territory's worst, killer.