Murder of Andrew Pea

Andrew Pea, born in 1956 and also known as Andrew Ronald Smith, was a 22-year-old originally from Victoria who had moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1975. He worked as a labourer for the State Energy Commission and lived alone in a Salvation Army hostel in East Perth. He was known as a casual drinker at several inner-city Perth hotels, including the Paddington, the Criterion, the Imperial, the Railway, the Globe and the Victoria. Two weeks before his death he had been involved in an altercation in which he dislocated his shoulder.

On the evening of Saturday 1 July 1978, Pea was drinking in the Tube Bar, a basement bar at the Paddington Hotel. He left around 9pm and walked to a nearby TAB betting shop on Barrack Street to collect a bet. About 9:30pm, near the corner of Barrack and Wellington streets, a man approached Pea and told him to stop bothering a newsboy. An exchange of words led to a short fist fight, which the much larger Pea won. The smaller man ran off but returned within seconds armed with a pocketknife and attacked Pea, stabbing him 21 times in the head, back and chest. The wounds included fatal injuries to the heart and through the ear into the brain.

Witnesses estimated a crowd of around 50 people saw the attack but did not intervene out of fear. One bystander, 20-year-old backpacker Mark Forrest, pulled the attacker off Pea and struck his head against the pavement several times in an effort to make him drop the knife. The assailant broke free, threatened Forrest with the knife, and fled across the Barrack Street Bridge into the Northbridge nightclub district, evading pursuers and police. Pea was taken to Royal Perth Hospital, where he died at approximately 9:57pm. A post-mortem recorded a blood alcohol level of 0.362%. Forrest was later awarded the Bravery Medal (Australia) in November 1978 for his actions.

The crime scene was described as chaotic due to crowds of Saturday-night revellers, and witnesses gave conflicting accounts, leading some investigators at the time to consider whether more than one attacker was involved. No arrests were made for months, despite police initially believing an arrest would come quickly. In December 1978, Channel 9 and WA Police broadcast a televised re-enactment of the murder in an effort to generate leads, but the case remained unsolved for almost ten years.

A breakthrough came in early 1987 with new information received by WA Police. Following a six-month nationwide search, Peter Munckton, then 33, was arrested in Darwin, Northern Territory, on 8 October 1987, while on parole for an earlier armed-robbery conviction. Munckton had been in Perth in 1977–1978 and suffered a serious motorcycle accident causing head injuries, epilepsy and memory loss; the murder occurred after one of his outpatient hospital visits. After extradition to Western Australia, Munckton pleaded not guilty to wilful murder but guilty to the lesser charge of murder, and on 29 August 1988 was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Supreme Court of Western Australia. His account differed from the prosecution's mainly regarding whether Pea had been the aggressor.