A sadistic sex offender serving a sentence for the horrific rape and murder of a young woman has begun claiming a transgender identity. Mark Richard Lawrence, now 64, was 22 when he abducted, raped, and murdered Julie Ann Muirhead. Lawrence, who now calls himself Maryanne, previously confessed that he “always wanted to kill a girl” and said he “tried to kill his 12 year-old sister” as practice.
Lawrence has a long and disturbing criminal record. The convicted rapist and killer began offending when he was just a teenager, and has said he began to have violent fantasies beginning from the age of 15.
Lawrence appeared in court for the first time in 1978 at the age of 17, having been charged with the aggravated assault of a young boy. The judge released Lawrence with a warning and, six months later, he was again charged with committing the same offense on another young boy. According to The Herald Sun, Lawrence was handed two years’ probation.
Months later, in early 1979, he was back in court on charges of assaulting a 17 year-old girl. He again avoided jail time and received a slap on the wrist: three years’ probation and an order to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. That same year he was again charged with the aggravated assault of a child, for which he was fined $75.
By 1981, at the age of 20, he had been committed to psychiatric clinic Wolston Park Hospital in Queensland. Lawrence escaped the facility and attempted to rob a man at knifepoint, for which he served only four months in prison. After completing his sentence, he was returned to the psychiatric hospital, where he reported having repeated fantasies about rape and murder.
It was here that Lawrence met his next victim, 29 year-old Julie Ann Muirhead, a fellow patient at the metal health facility who was being treated for self-harm. Lawrence lured Muirhead away from the hospital grounds before brutally assaulting and killing her.
Wolston Park Hospital personnel first noticed Muirhed was missing on December 26, 1983. Because the hospital was short-staffed, a search was not conducted out of concern that other patients would have been neglected. On January 4, Muirhead’s decomposing and burned corpse was found under a tree 50 meters away from the hospital.
Muirhead’s body had been stripped down to her underwear, and her trousers were pulled down around her ankles. Her clothing was nowhere to be found. A towel had been wrapped around her neck.
While Muirhead’s death was initially suspected to be a suicide, it was later uncovered by an investigator that Lawrence, along with fellow psychiatric patient 21-year-old Robin Joseph Sirett, had lured Muirhead away from the facility with the promise of beer in a bid to act out one of the rape fantasies he’d been having.
After sexually abusing her, Lawrence slit her throat with a broken bottle as Sirett helped him hold her down. The two then reportedly tried to burn her body.
In 1985, both men were found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The investigator who solved the murder said that he believed that Lawrence should never be released. Former detective Bob Munt told the press Lawrence was a “sex maniac” who was dangerous to the public.
“I still think he is crazy,” Munt said. “I believe he will reoffend without doubt as he has offended before the (killing) and after while in jail… I saw the way he acted, the things he did at the time, the way he spoke, the way he laughed in court at sentencing,” he added.
In October 1999, while incarcerated at the Moreton Correctional Centre, Lawrence violently raped his cellmate, and an additional seven years was added to his sentence. An additional year was added for an escape attempt in 1991, bringing his expected release date to 2008.
When his sentence expired in 2008, prison officials utilized the Dangerous Prisoner (Sexual Offender) Act in a bid to keep him behind bars indefinitely, due to concerns that he remained a danger to the community and harbored sadistic sexual fantasies. Lawrence appealed, and the Supreme Court determined that he should be released under a series of strict limitations.
Among the restrictions of his release was a requirement for Lawrence to receive regular injections of Goserelin Acetate, a drug used to chemically castrate dangerous sexual predators. However, then-attorney general Jarrod Bleijie intervened, filing a petition to keep Lawrence behind bars, where he remained for another decade.
In April 2020, Lawrence was released under a supervision order in accordance with the Dangerous Prisoners (Sexual Offenders) Act of 2003. Justice Bowskill ordered Lawrence to obey “reasonable direction” provided by a corrective services officer, including who he may or may not have contact with, and required him to do so for the following twenty years. Lawrence has been appealing the terms of his supervision order since 2022, and in December 2024, the High Court of Australia ruled in his favor.
Sometime between 2024 and 2026, Lawrence was returned to the prison estate and is currently being held at Queensland’s Wolston Correctional Centre.
Now, The Courier Mail reports that Lawrence is “undergoing transition” and is asking to be referred to by the feminine name Maryanne. In response to questions from the outlet, a spokesperson for Australia’s correctional services said that he would not be held in a women’s prison at any time in the future.
“No prisoner is transferred to a Queensland correctional facility that does not align with their birth sex,” the spokeswoman said. “All prisoners in QCS custody are strictly managed in a way that protects the safety and security of the facility, officers and the community.”
Each state in Australia has different policies with respect to the housing of transgender inmates, and Queensland Corrective Services (QCS) has said the initial placement decision for a transgender prisoner must be made by an Assistant Commissioner on a case-by-case basis.
In 2023, Fair Go for Queensland Women reported that there were 65 trans-identified male inmates in the Queensland male prison estate. Of that number, 55% were serving sentences for the most serious offenses including murder and aggrevated sexual assault.
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