"The Terror of Kyneton: Bucky the Butcher"
“Bucky: The Midnight Cradle”
The wreckage in the Dandenong ranges still smouldered in the public’s memory. Dozens dead, their families left broken, headlines screaming:
“BUCKY TAKES ANOTHER BUSLOAD – WHERE WILL HE STRIKE NEXT?”
But just as the city reeled, something even darker began.
Chapter 4: The Midnight Cradle
While the police searched highways and bus depots, Bucky had already slipped back to where it all began — the cold, quiet streets of Kyneton. The town that birthed his legend. The town he vowed to poison forever.
He didn’t come back for blood this time. He came back for something worse.
Babies.
It began with whispers. Mothers waking in the night to find nursery windows ajar. Cots empty. A toy left in place of their child — a crudely stitched doll, its mouth painted in red. No forced entry. No broken glass. Just… absence.
Locals swore they heard him at night. A soft giggle in the fog. The creak of floorboards. The lullaby again, drifting down Piper Street like a nursery rhyme twisted wrong.
"Rock-a-bye baby, up in the tree top…"
Only it wasn’t sung. It was hissed.
By the third abduction, panic swallowed Kyneton whole. Doors were double-bolted. Families took shifts watching over their cribs. But Bucky always found a way. He moved like smoke, slipping through chimneys, side doors, even storm drains. Some said he wore a child’s mask, pale and grinning, to lull his prey before he snatched them up.
The truth emerged when a hiker in Black Hill Reserve stumbled on a clearing littered with bones. Small bones. Tiny skulls. Half-burnt baby clothes scattered in the ash. And in the dirt — a crude shrine of dolls with knives in their hands, surrounding a painted word in crimson:
“FEEDING TIME.”
The town begged police to bring in the army. Some fled Kyneton altogether. But Maureen Griggs, the widow who’d spoken out before, shook her head grimly when reporters shoved microphones at her.
“This ain’t just killing anymore,” she muttered, voice shaking. “He’s feeding. Feeding on innocence. That’s not a man. That’s the Devil wearing overalls.”
And so the legend grew:
Parents rocking their babies to sleep swore they saw a face at the window.
Farmers riding home late heard laughter by the old bluestone ruins.
And deep in the hills, where the gum trees creak and the mist never lifts, some said you could hear children crying… only for it to turn into Bucky’s giggle.
Bucky wasn’t just murdering anymore.
He was harvesting.
And Kyneton, once again, belonged to him.
