The hitman who assassinated underworld leader Carl Williams has lost his attempt to have his conviction overturned and his life sentence commuted.
Matthew ‘the General’ Johnson, a supermax prisoner, savagely battered Williams inside a Barwon Prison ward in Victoria in April 2010, bashing him to death with the stem of an exercise bicycle seat. In 2010, CCTV cameras recorded Johnson in the act, filming him beating Williams eight times with the seat post within the prison’s maximum-security section. It took security personnel 30 minutes to realize what Johnson had done.
He was sentenced to at least 32 years in jail for the killing, despite his assertion that he was innocent and acting in self-defense, which the court dismissed as ‘fanciful’ at the time.
In 2021, Johnson filed an appeal against his conviction.
Williams, the baby-faced kingpin, had ordered the murders of three persons and plotted the murder of a fourth.
However, after being released from jail, he supported authorities in their investigations into at least 10 unsolved underworld kill operations.
Williams, a convicted murderer and drug trafficker, faced life in prison with a 35-year non-parole sentence.
A Supreme Court judge ruled that Johnson murdered Williams because he knew Williams was narking to cops about the 2004 shootings of police informant Terence Hodson and his wife Christine.
Johnson is the commander of the Prisoners of War group at Barwon Prison and has been isolated since the murder. The gang openly despises anyone who collaborate with the authorities.
In evidence submitted to Victoria Police, Williams connected himself to former detective Paul Dale and professional hitman Rodney Collins in the Hodsons’ killings.
The couple had been charged with the killings and were due to appear in court when Williams was slain.
According to a person close to Johnson, he’d had a ‘gutful’ attempting to get police records pertinent to the case, and Johnson had said that he was ‘not willing to lie and pretend others were involved’ in the murder of Williams in order to pursue his appeal further.
‘I did it for the reasons I did,’ he told the source.
Johnson continues to spend 23 hours of each day in Barwon Prison’s confinement.
His criminal record includes more than 100 past convictions for major offenses, as well as ten prior jail stints.
Prior to the murder case in 2010, he had had committed 76 distinct crimes inside jail, including repeated attacks on inmates and prison employees, causing a fire, and possessing contraband.
According to a 2012 investigation by the Victorian Ombudsman, POW members were “responsible for a series of violent attacks on inmates and prison,” including an assault on a prisoner who was reportedly functioning as a police informant.
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