The hitman who murdered underworld leader Carl Williams has given up trying to have his conviction overturned and have his life sentence commuted.
Williams was fatally beaten by Supermax prisoner Matthew “the General” Johnson in a Barwon Prison ward in Victoria in April 2010. Johnson struck Williams with the seat stem of an exercise bike.
According to a source close to Johnson, he decided not to pursue his appeal last month because he had a “gutful” attempting to collect the necessary paperwork from Victoria Police and was “not prepared to lie and pretend others were involved.”
In 2010, Johnson was captured on surveillance footage striking Williams eight times with a seat post within a maximum security section of the jail.
It took 30 minutes for security personnel to realise what Johnson had done.
He was sentenced to a minimum of 32 years in jail for the killing, despite his claims that he was acting in self-defense and was innocent. The court at the time thought this assertion was “fanciful.”
Against the conviction, Johnson had appealed in 2021.
The assassinated baby-faced kingpin Williams planned to murder a fourth person after ordering the deaths of three others.
But from behind bars, he later helped the police with their inquiries into at least 10 unsolved assassination operations in the criminal underworld.
Williams, a narcotics trafficker and killer, was facing a 35-year non-parole sentence and life in jail.
According to a Supreme Court judge, Johnson murdered Williams because he was aware that Williams was informing the police about the 2004 murders of Terence Hodson and his wife Christine, a police informant.
Johnson, the head of the Prisoners of War group at Barwon Prison, has been held in isolation ever since the murder.
The gang openly disdains people who assist law enforcement.
In evidence he gave to Victoria Police, Williams had implicated himself in the killings of the Hodsons together with former officer Paul Dale and senior hitman Rodney Collins.
Williams was slain when the duo were in court after being accused of the killings.
According to a source close to Johnson, obtaining police records crucial to the case had been a “gutful,” and Johnson had said that in order to forward his appeal, he was “not willing to lie and claim others were involved” in Williams’ murder.
I did it for the reasons I did, he said to the source.
Johnson is still kept in Barwon Prison’s confinement for 23 hours every day.
With almost 100 past convictions for major offences and ten prior jail sentences, he has a lengthy criminal background.
Prior to the murder case in 2010, he had had committed 76 other offences while inside, including many attacks on inmates and prison personnel, causing a fire, and possessing contraband.
POW members were “responsible for a series of violent attacks on inmates and jail,” according to a 2012 investigation by a Victorian Ombudsman, including an assault on a prisoner who was reportedly functioning as a police informant.
For his group, Johnson reportedly wrote a credo that outlined how to handle conflicts in the jail by using violence, including pounding, stabbing, and slicing.
On a social media account associated with the brutal jail gang, a picture of a sheet of paper with the barbaric creed was shared.
Only the strong can live in the jungle that is P.O.W. Prison. Conflicts are resolved by mayhem and bloodshed.
People live and die; our guiding principle is “eye for an eye,” the message states.
We beat, stab, and cut as it goes, “Behind the concrete we wage a battle, Action may explode one step over the cell door.”
“Matt Johnson, The General” ends the creed.
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