Melbourne underworld crime family matriarch Kath Pettingill dies aged 91

Melbourne underworld matriarch Kath Pettingill has died aged 91 following a battle with dementia.

The mother-of-10 known as ‘Granny Evil’ died in a nursing home on Saturday.

A former sex worker, Pettingill ran several brothels in inner-city Richmond, where some of her children became Melbourne underworld figures from the 1970s through to the early 2000s.

For some of her children, their crimes resulted in violent deaths, prison time, or witness protection.

The Pettingills inspired the 2010 Academy-Award-nominated Australian film Animal Kingdom starring Jacki Weaver, which was loosely based on the family’s underworld links.

Her eldest son Denis Allen, nicknamed ‘Mr Death’, was given a ten-year prison sentence for rape in the 1970s.

Allen was reportedly a major player in the drug scene across Melbourne during the 1980s.

He died in 1987 of a heart attack while in custody awaiting trial for murder. Police suspect he killed more than a dozen people.

Pettingill’s second son, Peter Allen, was once considered Victoria’s most dangerous man who spent 28 years in jail for convictions including armed robbery and assault. 

Her sixth son Victor Peirce and youngest, Trevor Pettingill, were among four men charged over the shooting deaths of Victoria Police constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, in the infamous 1988 Walsh Street killings. 

A member of their gang, Graeme Jensen was shot dead by police the day before.

Both brothers were later acquitted.

‘I hate coppers but those boys [Tynan and Eyre] didn’t do anything. Our family wouldn’t do that. We were not involved,’ their mother told the Age hours after the killings.

‘You don’t kill two innocent coppers. If you want to get back, you kill the copper who killed Graeme. Why take out two young boys?’

Peirce was himself murdered in 2002, gunned down outside a Melbourne supermarket. 

Peirce’s wife, Wendy, said in a 2005 interview that her husband had planned and carried out the killings.

Pettingill did not hold back when she was asked about Animal Kingdom, the blockbuster loosely based on her family.

‘Jacki Weaver and I have only one thing in common, neither of us can act,’ she told the Herald Sun in 2011 following its release.

‘I’ve seen the movie and I’m not impressed. She’s supposed to have read books about me and studied me for the part, but it doesn’t come off,’ she said.

Pettingill eventually left Melbourne to spend her final years away from the public eye in the beachside town of Venus Bay, in South Gippsland. 

Locals frequently saw Pettingill around town but noted she did not leave her nursing home in recent years.

The matriarch was easily identifiable with her left glass eye.

Pettingill lost here eye when she was shot at a housing commission home in Collingwood in 1978 while attempting to pay a debt owed by her daughter. 

The police investigation into the shooting was infamously named Operation Cyclops.

Pettingill is survived by her sons Lex, Trevor and Peter.