This man is one of Australia’s worst mass killers – and yet he only spent EIGHT years in jail.
EIGHT years for murdering his wife, his sister-in-law, his seven children and his nephew.
On September 6, 1971, Clifford Cecil Bartholomew murdered Heather Bartholomew and her children, Roger, Neville, Christine, Sharon, Helen, Gregory and Sandra; and Winnis and Daniel Keane.
Bartholomew shot them all – and beat some with a hammer – because he believed Heather was having an affair and he was jealous and controlling.
She wasn’t having an affair. And even if she was, she had every right to live her life any way she wanted.
He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison.
A sympathetic magistrate set him free less than eight years after he murdered the family.

The government gave him a new name and a new life.
He became a ‘Christian’ and married a woman who had seven children – all the same age as the children he murdered. He helped raise them.
They called him ‘Poppy Cliff’.
His new family only found out about his horrendous actions when the media contacted them in 2018.
“He never disrespected our mother and they hardly had a raised voice in more than 20 years together,” one of his stepsons told a media outlet.
Bartholomew died in 2002 and is buried next to his new wife.
His grave reads “Dearly loved husband. Devoted to and sadly missed by children and grandchildren. Rest in peace.” You’d never know he was a mass murderer.

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