Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly

by Sue Bursztynski

But they couldn’t just arrest the burglars. They had to catch them in the act. There was an undercover agent, ‘Dave’, who would be able to take over as the safebreaker, but Fred had to introduce him.

  Chubb Security gave Dave a crash course in safebreaking. He would have to convince the burglars that he knew what he was doing.

  Fred rang Lipp and pretended to be interested in the robbery. Lipp met him in a pub and discussed the matter. It soon became clear that he wanted the expert to come with them on the night and actually open the safe. Even when he introduced Dave, Lipp wasn’t interested unless Fred also came along.

  It was going to be horribly dangerous for the civilian, but it was the only way.

  The two undercover men recorded a number of planning sessions, to incriminate the burglars later.

  On 15 September, police set up a surveillance team near the factory. They had put secret cameras in the vault room, where the safe was kept.

  Now the thriller started to look more like a comedy. The robbers had planned to put their own cameras in the room, because they’d seen a movie about this sort of heist, Heat with Robert de Niro, and were copying what the fictional thieves had done. It had to work! When they found the police cameras, instead of running, they were merely annoyed that someone had got in before them.

  On the big night, Paul Elliott gave everyone in the team the equipment they needed. He also gave them stopwatches. They didn’t really have any use for the stopwatches, but the characters in Heat had them, so they would too.

  Lipp and Elliott broke in and disabled the security system. They came out and called the two safecrackers to do their part of the job. It was a wet and miserable night and there were a lot of accidents happening on the slippery roads. The heist took four hours, as they waited for various emergency vehicles to go past. Finally, they came out and the police pounced.

  The four men went on trial in October 1998 and pleaded guilty. They all received a number of years in prison, although Elliott’s defence told the court that he’d been trying hard to rehabilitate himself while he was out on bail. He’d got himself a job.

  He was working for a security alarm company.

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  In 1929, Lewis Lasseter, a man who had tried a number of careers and not done too well in any of them, wrote to the member for Kalgoorlie, A.E. Green, telling him that he’d discovered a vast, gold-bearing reef in Central Australia, eighteen years before. He was ignored. Next, Lasseter spoke to John Bailey of the Australian Workers Union. He told Bailey he’d found the reef 33 years before! The Depression was on. The idea of all that gold was tempting. Bailey listened. An expedition set out from Alice Springs in July 1930. They found nothing and most of them turned back. Lasseter kept going and died. It’s thought now that he got the idea from some novels popular at the time. Certainly, he’d never been to Central Australia before. Oddly enough, there are still people who believe in ‘Lasseter’s Reef’.

  PETER DUPAS

  SERIAL KILLER

  Peter Dupas committed his first violent crime in 1968, when he was only fifteen. He asked a neighbour to lend him a knife for peeling vegetables and then stabbed her with it. She survived the attack and Peter told police he didn’t know why he’d done it.

  That time, he only got probation and psychiatric treatment.

  Over the next few years, Dupas spent time in jail for several more attacks on women.

  Every time Dupas came out of jail for one offence, he would commit another. Despite this, he often didn’t serve full terms for his crimes.

  The first murder for which Dupas was jailed was the last he actually committed. Evidence for two others turned up after he was already behind bars.

  Nicole Patterson was a youth counsellor. She had a job working for the Ardoch Youth Foundation, but she wanted to do some private work from her home in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote. In 1999, she advertised in the local newspapers and had a call from someone who told her his name was Malcolm. She made an appointment and wrote it into her diary, along with a mobile phone number.

  On the morning of 19 April, neighbours heard screams coming from her house. Later that day, a friend coming to take her to dinner found her mutilated body. She had been stabbed 27 times. Her breasts had been cut off. They were missing. So was the murder weapon.

  Police checked the mobile phone number in Nicole’s diary. The phone belonged to someone else, who let them know Peter Dupas’ name.

  Dupas had been planning the murder carefully. He’d phoned Nicole three times, supposedly to arrange counselling, but really to find out how easy it would be to kill her. Police found plenty of evidence at his home. There was bloodstained clothing, tape similar to tape found on the victim’s body, a balaclava, her ad from the local paper and clippings about the murder.

  The jury took less than three hours to find him guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  While he was in jail, evidence turned up for other murders which had been unsolved until then.

  A woman called Margaret Maher had been murdered in October 1997, in the suburb of Broadmeadows. A man found her body under a cardboard box. Her breasts, like Nicole’s, had been cut off. There was a black glove found near the body which turned out to have Dupas’ DNA on it.

  The trial for this murder, in 2004, went for three weeks. Again, Dupas was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The jury didn’t know he was already in prison for another murder.

  Only a month after the murder of Margaret Maher, Mersina Halvagis went to visit her grandmother’s grave at Melbourne’s Fawkner Cemetery. Her fiancé found her body. She had been stabbed 87 times, mostly around the breasts.

  Dupas, who was already in prison for the other crimes, was not convicted right away, even though many witnesses said they had seen him at the cemetery that day. His defence lawyer argued that he was suspected just because he lived nearby and he’d been in trouble for violent crimes before. That didn’t mean he’d done it this time.

  But there was a breakthrough late in 2006. A man called Andrew Fraser had known him in the Port Phillip Prison in 2002. He said that while they were gardening one day, they had found a homemade knife. Dupas had held it, murmuring, ‘Mersina, Mersina…’ When another prisoner had accused him of murdering her, he’d asked Andrew Fraser, ‘How did he know I did it?’ And he had spoken of it over several months.

  At the trial in 2007, it took the jury just over a day to find him guilty again. A third life sentence was added to the other two.

  Peter Dupas is suspected of three more murders. Whether or not he is convicted of those, he will not be leaving prison alive.

  MARTIN BRYANT

  PORT ARTHUR MASSACRE

  It was 28 April, a beautiful autumn afternoon in 1996. In the former penal colony of Port Arthur, Tasmania, tourists were enjoying the sunshine. The Broad Arrow Cafe was full of people having lunch and browsing in the gift shop. Nobody could have guessed that in a short time, 35 people would be dead and 37 others injured.

  A young blond man entered the cafe, carrying a sports bag. After eating lunch, he put the bag onto a table. He took out a video camera, then pulled out a semi-automatic rifle and began to shoot people, beginning with a Malaysian couple, Ng Moh Yee William and Chung Soo Leng. Within fifteen seconds, he had shot twelve people. He didn’t know these people or care. He just wanted to shoot someone. Plenty of someones.

  In eight minutes, he had murdered twenty people in the cafe and gift shop before moving on to the car park.

  Outside, the man, whose name was Martin Bryant, shot some more people, including some tourists in – and under – a bus. A woman called Nanette Mikac had come to Port Arthur for a picnic with her two daughters while her husband was playing golf. Now Bryant shot her and her younger daughter, Madeline. Alannah, the elder daughter, ran away, but Martin Bryant chased her down and shot her, too. He continued his shooting spree from his car, then shot the owners of another car before stealing it. Finally, he held up a white Toyota, shot the f
emale driver and forced the man into the boot of the car, driving the car on to a guesthouse called the Seascape. There, he dragged his hostage inside, where the bodies of the owners, David and Sally Martin, lay. He had killed them on his way to Port Arthur.

  By this time, someone had contacted the police, but because Bryant had a hostage, they didn’t dare rush the house. They called in expert negotiators, who spoke to him for several hours until his phone batteries ran out. The next morning, he started a fire and ran out, his clothes burning. He surrendered to the police, who took him to hospital to have his burns treated. The police found the dead bodies of his hostage and the Martins.

  Who was Martin Bryant and why did he do this terrible thing?

  Martin was born in 1967. He was a strange boy who didn’t get on with anyone at school. He preferred to be alone, and was often bullied when he wasn’t terrifying people. He had a very low IQ, about 66, and didn’t seem unhappy when his father’s body was found drowned in a dam. The death was treated as suicide.

  Martin’s low intelligence meant that he was able to claim a pension when he left school instead of looking for work. However, he did odd jobs for a rich woman called Helen Harvey, who lived in a huge house in Hobart. They became great friends. Helen spent thousands of dollars on Martin. When she was killed in a car crash, she left Martin all her money and the big house. He enjoyed himself, travelling and spending money, but it seems this wasn’t enough for him.

  After the massacre, some people suggested that he couldn’t possibly have known what he was doing, but it turned out that he had visited Port Arthur several times before the day of the murders. He had also measured the sports bag carefully when buying it. These clear plans suggest that he did know what he was doing.

  We will never be really sure of his reasons behind what he did. He was considered fit to stand trial and in November 1996 he was sentenced to 35 life sentences, one for each person he had killed, to make sure he would never be released. For ten years, Martin lived at Hobart’s Risdon Prison. In 2006, after a number of suicide attempts, he was moved to a special mental health unit, to be treated by doctors and nurses.

  This tragedy led to a change in Australia’s gun laws and a ban on all semi-automatic weapons.

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  Con artist Murray Beresford Roberts once managed to steal some diamonds from a jewel dealer in India. Travelling to India, he posed as a rich British lord who was there at the time. Pretending he was shopping for a diamond coronet as an anniversary gift, he was introduced to a dealer, who trusted him with the coronet. Ripping the jewels out of the headpiece, he swallowed them and flew to London, where they – ugh! – came out at the other end and he cleaned and sold them. What happened when the real lord was presented with Murray’s hotel and jewellery bill, we’ll never know.

  LUCY DUDKO

  Lucy Dudko was in love. The Russian-born librarian had a new boyfriend, John Killick. John was a perfect gentleman who treated her well and brought her coffee in bed every morning. Even better, she thought, he was protecting her from her violent former husband. The pair had been living together for about a year in a place called Queanbeyan in New South Wales.

  There was only one problem: John was a thief. He was a thief who had been caught committing armed robbery in 1998. When he was arrested and sentenced to several years in Sydney’s Silverwater Prison, Lucy was horrified.

  She decided that she wasn’t going to take this disaster lying down. She didn’t care what John had done. She loved him! She decided that she would free him, somehow.

  Being a librarian, Lucy knew how to do research. She made her plans carefully and borrowed some videos to help her carry them out. There were three videos about daring prison escapes – The Getaway, Captive and a Charles Bronson movie, Breakout, in which there was an exciting escape by helicopter.

  This seemed like a wonderful idea. In March 1999, Lucy spent $360 on hiring a helicopter for a joyride over Sydney. She told pilot Tim Joyce that she wanted to take a look at the site of the Olympic Games, which were going to happen the following year.

  Poor Tim! How could he have imagined, when he left for work that morning, that he would suddenly find a gun being pointed at him by an excitable Russian woman, demanding that he take her to the yard of the maximum security Silverwater Prison? Being hijacked was bad enough, but when the helicopter arrived at the jail, Tim found himself being shot at!

  The couple made him take them to a park near Macquarie University, where they argued as to whether or not they should keep him as a hostage. In the end, they tied him to a tree and escaped together.

  For the next 45 days, the newspapers were full of their adventures. The hunt for them was on. To the annoyance of the police, many people actually hoped that Lucy and John would escape. However, their luck finally ran out in early May when they were found in a caravan park, registered as Mr and Mrs Brown. John was taken back to prison and had an extra fifteen years added to his sentence.

  Lucy was sentenced to ten years in jail, though she protested she was innocent and that someone else had hijacked the helicopter. Unfortunately for her, those videos were found in her home.

  During her time in prison, she continued to protest her innocence, even appealing to the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. Nothing helped. And jail wasn’t that bad. Even her father in Moscow said that if she had to go to jail, she was much better off in an Australian prison than a Russian one! Lucy became a model prisoner and was released in 2006, after serving seven of her ten years.

  Perhaps she wishes she had returned those videos to the library on time.

  IVAN MILAT

  BACKPACKER MURDERS

  Between 1989 and 1992, seven young hitchhikers were bashed, strangled, stabbed and shot. Their bodies were dumped in Belanglo State Forest, outside Sydney.

  Ivan Milat, their killer, was one of fourteen children. His parents couldn’t handle him. He left school at fourteen, and was soon in trouble with the law, spending a total of about five years in jail by the time he was 25. He married, but his wife left him, suspecting there was something not quite right about him. He frightened her.

  Late in 1989, two young university students from Melbourne, Deborah Everist and James Gibson, went to Sydney for a holiday. Deborah rang her mother from Sydney to say they were fine, but that was the last time they ever spoke. She and James went south along the Hume Highway, towards Albury. Then they vanished.

  A month later, Paul Onions, a British backpacker, was on his way to Mildura. He accepted a lift. Outside the city, the driver pulled out a gun. Paul escaped from the car, leaving his belongings behind. He stopped a car and urged the driver, Joanne Berry, to drive on. Joanne later identified the 4WD and its driver.

  She dropped Paul off at the local police station, where he told his story. He and Joanne were both witnesses in Milat’s trial.

  A year later, German tourist Simone Schmidl was on her way to Melbourne to meet her mother. She told friends she was planning to hitchhike. They said it was unsafe and offered to pay her fares. But Simone insisted on hitching.

  She disappeared.

  On Boxing Day 1991, two German students, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, left Sydney and also vanished.

  Tourists Joanne Walters and Caroline Clarke left Sydney on 18 April 1992, never to be seen alive again, except by their killer.

  In September 1992, two bushwalkers found Joanne Walters’ body. They contacted police, who soon found Caroline Clarke’s remains. Both girls had died horribly. Caroline’s head had been used for target practice. Police also found cartridges from a gun called a 10/22 Ruger.

  What was left of university students James and Deborah was discovered in October 1993 in the same region.

  Police began to search the Belanglo Forest for other bodies.

  Simone Schmidl’s body turned up on 1 November. She had been stabbed several times. Finally, they unearthed the bones of Gabor and Anja. Anja’s skull was missing.

  One hundred cartrid
ge cases from bullets used by the killer were found around these bodies. There was also the wrapping from Winchester .22 calibre bullets. It had the batch number on it.

  Now, police investigators had to find the murder weapon itself. It wasn’t easy, since there were 55,000 Ruger guns of that model listed in Australia. There were even more bullets from that batch. But somehow the police found the gun shop where Ivan Milat did his shopping.

  Information poured in. Especially useful was one woman’s mention of a certain Ivan Milat who liked guns and had a property near the forest. Paul Onions returned to Australia to be a witness. He identified Milat from a photo.

  Police investigators watched Milat’s home and questioned his family and workmates. His employers said he’d been off work on the days when the murders happened. Now nervous, Milat asked his brother Wally to hide most of his guns for him.

  But when police started raiding properties they suspected might contain evidence, they got enough evidence to arrest Ivan Milat on 22 May 1994. In his house were guns, including a murder weapon, and ammunition matching what they’d found in the forest. They even found some of the victims’ camping equipment. The DNA retrieved from a blood-covered cord matched Caroline’s. At Wally Milat’s home, they found most of Ivan’s guns and literally a tonne of ammunition.

  No matter how much evidence was piled up against him, Ivan insisted he had been framed. But 170 witnesses and hundreds of statements and photos said otherwise.

  On 20 July 1996, a jury found him guilty of the seven murders and the attempted murder of Paul Onions. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is unlikely he will ever be released.

  MARK BRANDON ‘CHOPPER’ READ

  Unlike most criminals, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read has become a celebrity. Since leaving prison for the last time in 1998, he has been writing books, doing live stage performances, recording rap songs, acting and being interviewed about other criminals. In 2001, a film of his life was released, starring Eric Bana.