by Malcolm Knox
Yet it also shows that he was aware of some boundaries. Aslett was a robber, a drug user and a master car thief. His jail sentences were short because his offences were not in the highest category of seriousness: he was not a murderer, he was not a deranged psychopath, he was not a rapist.
Or not yet.
He never had a job, though he started a course in welding and did some labouring while in custody. Quite a good-looking young man with dark eyes and a shaved head, he had a number of relationships with women that usually broke down when he went back into jail. His drug regime, by his own account, revolved mostly around heroin. He continued using heroin, while in and out of jail, until the last time he was released in early 2003.
Then Aslett took the step that tipped him over from minor to major criminality. He smoked ice, and he liked it.
Anna Robilliard would later say that as well as his preexisting antisocial characteristics, including paranoia and an inability to control his impulses, Aslett was feeling that his future was a ‘blank’. He was sad, pessimistic, apathetic and guilty, preoccupied with reflections on his own inadequacy. He could not unshackle himself from his past. His day-to-day life, then, reflected his wayward attempts to counter these feelings. He found a drug that, instead of plunging him into an introspective opiate dreamworld, lifted him out of himself. Heroin had helped him forget by taking him to another place. Ice left him in the same place, but made him feel good about himself. It was a direct antidote to his pessimism and apathy, a panacea for his self-pity and inwardness. It made him feel active, sexually potent and alive. It made him feel bulletproof.
After his release in 2003, Aslett was moving from house to house, among relatives and friends, including his girlfriend Linda Berry, in the Mount Druitt and Cabramatta areas in Sydney’s west. He was known as ‘Uncle’ to younger family members, among whom were his teenage nephew Steven, and Steven’s best friend Christopher Bonham. At some point, soon after he was released from jail, Uncle Dud was introduced to ice.
Among its other effects, ice can increase libido at the same time as it reduces impulse control. It submerges the user in a ‘flood of thought associations, so that the attention jumps rapidly and ineffectually from one thought to another’, according to Associate Professor Graham Starmer from Sydney University’s pharmacy department, in an assessment of Aslett that was later tendered to court. The crash is so severe, said Starmer, that anticipating the crash is itself a motive for the user to find more of the drug. In other words, the heavy user doesn’t wait to come down. He gets high again before the crash hits him. And he keeps on running, keeps getting high, because his dread of the crash is so intense.
Dudley Aslett didn’t want to come down, and he had no structured activities in his life that needed him to be straight and clear-headed. Nor did his young posse and Bonham, who saw Aslett as an experienced, confident, charismatic role model.
He did try to give up during the weeks after his release, he later said, but medical practitioners wouldn’t deal with him. He approached the Aboriginal Health Service and tried home detoxification, a regime that broke down under the stress of new assault charges that again threatened his freedom. And he preferred being high, anyway. It was the only time he was fully happy.
His problem was that, although crystal meth is a relatively cheap drug, he was using so much of it that he needed money he didn’t have. Meth addicts do not usually live in the criminal cycle of heroin addicts; a fortnightly dole cheque, and the proceeds of selling a little on the side, are usually enough to keep most meth users going. It is a cheap and long-lasting drug. But Aslett needed more, and he only knew one way to raise cash.
At around 9 pm on 3 May 2003, a young woman parked her red Mercedes coupe in the wash bay zone of the unit block where her sister lived in Newington, on Homebush Bay in Sydney’s mid-western suburbs. The housing development was only a few years old. Built to accommodate athletes and officials during the Sydney Olympic Games, Newington had been adapted into award-winning modern units and townhouses for mainly professional owners and tenants.
The young woman, known in the courts as ‘EC’, stayed in her sister’s unit for about two hours before taking her Maltese terrier outside for a walk. In the lane near where she had parked her car, she saw two male figures in the shadows. She waited until they had gone away before starting her walk. Then she noticed one of the men in an alley in front of her, and paused.
Dudley Aslett sprang out from behind a bush and stood in front of her. He said something indistinct; her dog barked; she picked it up and hurried towards her Mercedes, but decided not to get in yet, because the two other men had resurfaced near the car.
She walked around the carpark for a few minutes, her heart racing, hoping that they might simply go away. When she thought the men had gone, she went back to her car. As she opened it, she heard running footsteps. She jumped into the car and fumbled for the lock. Dudley Aslett sprinted around the front of her Mercedes, pulled open the passenger-side door, and got in. He pushed a gun against her temple. EC screamed, and Aslett told her to shut up. She noticed that he also had a 20-centimetre knife.
Aslett shifted her into the passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat. When he started to drive, EC screamed; Aslett shouted at her to shut up. The other men were left standing beside the car as Aslett drove off without them.
Newington is an enclosed community, off the main traffic circuit. Aslett drove EC’s Mercedes around the estate’s deserted streets.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, crying.
‘Nothing.’
Aslett found one of his accomplices walking around in the dark, stopped and let him in. EC was told to move into the back—Aslett nudged her with his knife. He started driving again, and the two men began chattering loudly, and laughing in a manic fashion. Suddenly Aslett said to EC: ‘You got a purse? Credit card?’
‘No,’ she said.
Aslett left the Newington estate and drove into Lidcombe, then south-west onto the Hume Highway before stopping near a service station by the intersection of the Hume with Woodville Road. When the other man took some coins out of the ashtray and went off towards the service station shop, Dudley Aslett got into the back seat with EC. The knife was still in his gloved hand.
She began to whimper.
‘Shut up and don’t look at me,’ Aslett barked.
EC screamed, and he pushed her face away. Then, pinning her against the upholstery, he began cutting at her underpants. She pushed him away repeatedly, but he shoved the fingers of his gloved right hand into her vagina. EC screamed in pain, but 123 Aslett, now excited and maddened into a state he said he could not later remember, punched and slapped her before pushing her down and forcing his penis into her vagina.
Soon the younger man returned. Aslett began going through EC’s possessions, and was furious to discover her wallet with her ATM card. He shouted at her to tell him her PIN—as if raping her was only a prelude, or an alternative, to the more pressing issue of robbing her—until she gave up her number.
While Aslett and his accomplice went to try the number with the card at an ATM (it didn’t work), EC ran away and knocked at the doors of several flats until she found someone who took her in and let her call her mother and the police.
Traumatised, EC was unable to provide a clear enough identification for police to find and arrest Dudley Aslett. This was to have tragic consequences in the coming weeks.
Between 4 May and 16 July, Aslett lay low. His chaotic lifestyle continued, however, as he bounced between houses near Mount Druitt and Cabramatta. He would try to clean himself up, then succumb again to the siren call of a crystal meth high. It wasn’t long before he needed more money to buy ice, which began a one-month crime spree of such mindless rapacity that it seemed to have no possible end except Aslett’s death or capture.
A criminal, like anyone else, can always rationalise his actions to himself, and it is conceivable that Aslett, accompanied by his awestruck teenage accomplices,
pictured himself as a modern-day Ned Kelly, on a payback mission for the victimisation he believed he had suffered. It is a testament to the delusionary power of crystal methamphetamine that he could tell himself such a story, imagine himself in such a movie.
On the night of 16 July, two months after he raped EC, Aslett took his little gang back to Newington, looking for a home to burgle. He, his eighteen-year-old nephew Steven, and the seventeen-year-old, first went to the house of eighteen-year-old friend, Christopher Bonham, at around 7.30 pm. Bonham’s sister, Tara, was there. She told the visitors that Christopher was at a neighbour’s house. After they rounded him up, the three teenage boys and Uncle Dud stayed for about an hour in a sleep-out at the back of the Bonham house and took drugs. It’s unclear what the younger boys took, but Dudley Aslett smoked ice.
The four of them drove off. Following Dudley’s instruction to ‘Look for Asians’ as prospective victims, they picked out a first-floor home unit where they saw a dark-haired man standing on a balcony. They waited for the lights around the target unit to go out. Then, wearing gloves and masks and carrying knives, the four climbed up onto the balcony and broke in through an unlocked sliding door.
The Philippines-born resident, known to the courts as Mr A, had returned from work at around midnight. While the predators were waiting outside, Mr A fell asleep in a lounge chair. Dudley Aslett pounced on him and tied him up, warning him to keep silent or he would kill him with the knife he held to Mr A’s throat. Aslett cut the telephone cords and used them to tie Mr A’s wrists to his ankles.
Leaving Mr A bound on the floor, Aslett and one of his accomplices crept into the main bedroom, where they found Mrs A lying on the bed watching television and the couple’s sixteen-year-old daughter, SA, working at the computer.
Both mother and daughter were diminutive, the daughter less than 150 centimetres in height and slightly built. Aslett ordered them both to lie on the lounge room floor with Mr A, and the gang started ransacking the unit, filling plastic bags with computer equipment, jewellery, money, CDs and DVDs.
In his hyperactive state, Dudley Aslett shouted orders to his boys, seeing himself as the commander of the scene.
‘Where’s your pay?’ he barked at Mr A.
Mr and Mrs A replied that the intruders could have anything they want. ‘But please, just don’t hurt us.’
‘Stop looking up!’ Aslett shouted, waving his knife.
The intruders found a safe in a wardrobe in the bedroom and commanded Mrs A to help them open it. They stole some items from inside, while SA and her mother were brought in to be guarded. Mr A was still tied up in the lounge room.
Aslett ordered Mrs A out of the main bedroom and took SA into her smaller bedroom, announcing to everyone in a sarcastic tone he was going to conduct a ‘further search’. Shutting the girl’s bedroom door, he told the sixteen-year-old to pull down her underpants. He pressed the knife against her cheek to warn her against disobedience. He proceeded to rape her; when she cried out in pain, he told her, ‘Shut up or I’ll start on your mother.’ SA cried that she was a virgin.
Once he was finished, Aslett left the bedroom and Bonham entered it, also raping the girl. Steven Aslett was next, commanding her to fellate him. When SA begged him to stop, he said, ‘I’ll stop when you start enjoying yourself.’ She said she was going to vomit; Steven Aslett said if she did, he would stab her. She spat his semen into the bathroom sink, and he told her to brush her teeth. Later, she was showered and dressed again, and told to lie next to her parents on the lounge room floor but not to say anything to them. She complied, tearfully telling her parents that she was all right.
As the four men left, almost three hours after they had broken in, one of them told the victims that ‘next time you should keep your doors and windows locked’.
For this crime, a trial judge, Michael Finnane, would later describe Dudley Aslett as a ‘cold, callous, vicious and extremely dangerous criminal’. But Aslett was only just getting started.
Whereas the first Newington rape had been followed by a period of relative quiet, almost remorse—with Aslett returning to Linda Berry’s house at Tregear, near Mount Druitt, and trying to combat his ice addiction—the second sexual assault triggered a wild chain reaction.
Nine days after the second Newington rape, on 25 July, Steven Aslett and the seventeen-year-old were arrested and charged with the break and enter of the As’ unit. Some DVDs belonging to the As were found in the boys’ possession.
When the younger pair were arrested, Christopher Bonham’s mother, Joan, asked her son if he had been with Steven Aslett on the night in question. He admitted that he had. She and her husband tried to take him to the police, but he refused. They rang 000, but while they were waiting, Christopher broke free and ran away.
A recording of the emergency call was tendered to court.
000 OPERATOR: What’s going on there, ma’am?
MRS BONHAM: About the rape, we just found out our son did it. The rape—
000 OPERATOR: What rape? What rape?
MRS BONHAM: Those two boys. The two, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old, our son’s involved too. Our son’s here, he’s going to run.
Meanwhile Dudley Aslett had fled to Cabramatta West, where he sometimes stayed in a house with his sister Catherine. Bonham joined him there. Uncle Dud wanted to buy crystal methamphetamine and heroin, but was running out of money. He knew a convenience store in Canley Heights which he judged a promising target. It collected cash in the course of a normal day and was operated by two Vietnamese women, whom he saw as easy pickings. On 25 July he and Bonham followed one of the women, Thi Thanh Ho, after she locked up. Growing frightened, she ducked into another shop until she thought Aslett had left. She went to her car and drove to the carpark of the BKK supermarket in Cabramatta. When she got out of the car, Aslett was upon her, seizing her handbag, which contained $3000 in cash and three mobile phones.
Three days later, on 28 July, Aslett was back at the same convenience store. At about 6.30 pm, Ms Ho’s colleague, Hoang Thi Nguyen, was leaving to drive home. As she got into her car, Aslett pounced from the shadows with a 30-centimetre knife and pushed Ms Nguyen into the driver’s seat.
His knife at her throat, he hissed: ‘Where’s your money?’
‘I don’t have any, I just work there.’
‘You’re a liar!’
Ms Nguyen insisted she was telling the truth, but said Ms Ho had the cash takings from the shop and was waiting for her. Aslett told her to call out to her friend. Ms Nguyen said she couldn’t, because Ms Ho had a boyfriend with her. Aslett again accused her of lying, and told her to call out in English, not Vietnamese. He grabbed her by the hair and took her to the shop’s back door.
Inside, Aslett leapt onto the twice-unfortunate Ms Ho, pressing his knife to her neck. Bonham burst in from the back and forced Ms Nguyen to the ground. Aslett got up and took about $6000 in cash from Ms Ho’s handbag. It wasn’t enough for him. He barked: ‘Where’s the rest of the money?’
Ms Ho got up and opened the cash register, from which Aslett’s young accomplice took about $500 more.
Aslett took Ho into a back office and demanded more money, in vain. So he went into the shop and stocked up on phone cards and cigarettes. He and Bonham also took the women’s mobile phones. For the next few days he would use the handsets with SIM cards belonging to his sister, Amanda Aslett, and Linda Berry.
Aslett and his friend had worn masks throughout the Canley Vale robbery, and had still not been sufficiently identified by any of their victims to enable the police to link the arrests of Steven Aslett and the seventeen-year-old with all of Dudley Aslett’s crimes.
Two days later, on 30 July, Aslett decided he needed a new firearm. He knew that in Auburn, a suburb not far from Newington in Sydney’s middle west, there was an indoor shooting range from which sporting gun owners would come and go. At 8.10 pm—Aslett typically worked his crimes under cover of night—he lay in wait outside the Shooting Academy until a
man named Eduardo Arbis came out. Arbis was carrying a green canvas bag, secured with a padlock. Inside the bag were a Smith & Wesson model 666 .357 calibre magnum six-shot revolver, a Colt model 1911 eight-shot semiautomatic pistol, ten rounds of .357 calibre ammunition, some earmuffs, a visor and a cleaning kit.
Arbis was placing the bag in the boot of his car when Aslett came out of nowhere, charging at him with a baseball bat. Aslett didn’t ask questions—he swung the bat at Arbis’s head. Arbis deflected it with his right hand. Aslett swung at him again. Arbis ducked away from the car.
Making an instant—and fortunate—decision that it wasn’t necessary to beat the daylights out of Arbis, Aslett told him to ‘back off’. He took the green bag and ran away. (For all of his offences during this spree, Aslett was ultimately another proof of the axiom that it is the dumb criminals who get caught: police would later find camera film with shots of Uncle Dud posing with the revolver.)
Twenty-four hours later, Aslett used the gun in his next robbery. Not far from the Shooting Academy, in Newton Street, South Auburn, a man named Jeky Li owned a shop called Mega Lighting. At around 9 pm on 31 July, Li locked up and walked from the store to his car, carrying the day’s cash takings of $800 and his laptop. He sat in the car, opened his window and started the ignition, only to look up and see a man at his window wearing a balaclava and holding a silver handgun in his gloved hands. A smaller man was with him, also in a black balaclava, wielding a 30-centimetre knife.
Aslett put the gun to Mr Li’s head, and his accomplice came close with the knife.
‘Get the money,’ Aslett said.
Mr Li replied that he had no cash on him, but when Aslett pushed the gun hard against his head he reconsidered, taking his wallet out of his laptop bag and handing it over.
‘There’s more,’ Aslett said. ‘There has to be more.’
He was right—Jeky Li had put the $800 not in his wallet but in the laptop bag. But Li wasn’t giving up easily. He tried to push the gun away. Aslett ordered him not to touch it again, and to prove his seriousness he opened the chamber and showed Li the six rounds loaded inside.
