Gangland Robbers (28 page)

Renton was found not guilty of the first robbery, and both he and Festa were convicted of the others. He received fourteen years. Although the High Court upheld Festa's appeal on two grounds, they applied what was called ‘the proviso'. Under it, despite there having been inadmissible evidence or a misdirection by the trial judge, the court felt that a conviction was inevitable. Her failure to stay the course of the trial counted against her, said Justice Kirby:

 

Because of her flight, she offered no explanation of her own at the trial, compatible with innocence, such as infatuation.
Although she was not bound
to give evidence, the lack of any evidence necessarily
meant that the case went to the jury on the compelling basis established by the prosecution.

 

The papers were happy
to call Nicole Linda Young and Dwayne Eric Welsh Bonnie and Clyde when they were on the run from March to June 2007, committing a string of thefts, robberies and break-ins as they went. At Rutherford and Cessnock in New South Wales, they demanded money and motor vehicles, threatening victims with a sawn-off shotgun, a spear gun, an axe and a knife. In one home invasion, in Carr Street, Rutherford, Welsh pushed the victim onto the floor and stole $40; in another, while holding the spear gun, he kicked the door in, saying he was going to kill the householder. Young was behind him, holding what the victim thought was a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. Both received six years, with a three-year, three-month minimum.

While on remand, Young had come off both prescription and illicit drugs. On 26 November 2012, back on drugs, she hit an oncoming car, the driver of which, a father of three, died in the crash. Charged with a variety of offences, including grievous bodily harm, she was sentenced to a minimum of three-and-a-half years. Welsh was charged separately with a further string of similar offences including a stabbing.

A rather more benign Bonnie and Clyde, with Bonnie very much the senior partner, were Julie Anne Parr and her partner Harold Hodges. In March 1998 Parr, a 40-year-old security guard, and Hodges, eleven years her senior, planned a series of robberies, using what the prosecution called her ‘intimate knowledge' of company security systems to pull off a $570 000 heist at the American Express office where she worked. She had provided Higgs and other offsiders with security cards, codes, keys and the layout of the Qantas building in Melbourne where the office was located, and they also had plans to take down Australia Post.
In 2000 Parr pleaded guilty
to one charge of theft, and Hodges and Yuri Lazaridis pleaded guilty to burglary and theft.

Not in the same class as Cashman and Festa was Donna Hayes and Benjamin Jorgensen. On the night of 1 April 2007 the drug-dealing Hayes, 36-year-old former de facto of Jorgensen, teamed up with him again. They were to rob the Cuckoo Restaurant in Olinda, in the Dandenong Ranges, and estimated their haul would be in the region of
$30 000 cash. Unfortunately for them, before setting out they had tested some of Ms Hayes's stock.

Around 11 p.m. Jorgensen and Hayes were dropped off by an accomplice, and they hid out in the car park, waiting for all the customers to leave before they pounced on manager Peter Schmidt as he left. He was carrying a big black plastic bag to his car when the two approached him, Jorgensen hiding a sawn-off shotgun. When Hayes demanded the cash in the bag and his car keys, Schmidt told them that the only thing in the bag was stale bread rolls. Jorgensen tried to fire a warning shot into the air, but instead shot Hayes in the buttocks. Schmidt dropped the bag and his car keys, and ran back to the restaurant. He locked all the doors, warned the other staff members and called the police.

Jorgensen panicked, grabbed Schmidt's car keys and tried frantically in the dark to open each of the vehicles still in the car park, assuming that one of them must be Schmidt's. Unfortunately for him, Schmidt was parked down the road. Having set off several car alarms, Jorgensen grabbed Hayes, Hayes grabbed the bag, and they struggled to the side of the road, where Jorgensen had to shout into his mobile to their getaway driver over the wailing of his wounded former lover, four car alarms and the approaching police sirens. Just moments before the police arrived, the trio made their escape and hid in a driveway. Once in the car, Jorgensen opened the bag to discover that, just as Schmidt had told him, it was filled with stale bread rolls. Jorgensen drove Hayes to a friend, who took her to Angliss Hospital, where she promptly confessed in full before having surgery to repair her backside. She also provided the police with directions to Jorgensen's house, where he was arrested early the next morning.

Describing them as Keystone Bandits, Judge William sentenced Jorgensen to a non-parole period of four-and-a-half years, and Hayes, who was by then serving a sentence for culpable driving causing death, to five-and-a-half years. On appeal, in June 2010, Jorgensen's sentence was reduced to six years, with a minimum of four, and Hayes's to seven, with a minimum of four and a half. The Court of Appeal found that Jorgensen's health had deteriorated significantly during her time in prison and she would have trouble sitting for the rest of her life.

Another example to support Bernie Matthews' views on the professionalism, or lack of it, of the modern bank robber was the 2014 robberies of Daniel Roach (not to be confused with the then exiled Bandidos leader)
and his girlfriend, Amanda Ridden. For a few weeks, known as Sydney's Bonnie and Clyde, with another two young men and shotguns they carried out a string of robberies.

The first was the carjacking of an 87-year-old man as he parked in his driveway. He handed over his keys and the gang went to a cinema in Roseville, snatched the takings and held up the patrons, demanding their wallets. It was on to the Revesby Pacific Hotel, where they ransacked the tills. The next day, they were behaving badly in a McDonald's and the staff called the police. A fight involving at least four police officers took place before they could be subdued and arrested. By the time they got to court, Ridden was off drugs and, according to reports, beginning to have some insight into her behaviour.
She received a minimum sentence
of five years and eight months, and Roach one of seven years.

It was more a question of Mummy and Clyde when, on 8 July 1968, former showgirl Joyleen Williams, also known as Joy Ellen Thomas, took part in a bungled robbery at a Newtown postal depot. She was born Joy Sharman (of the boxing family), and was an old friend of Lennie McPherson and a one-time girlfriend of standover man Chikka Reeves. It was very much a family affair because along with her was her then husband, Maxwell; her son Ronald, theoretically acting as a cockatoo; and a third man, Daniel Clark. However, when nightwatchman Dudley Sperry Downton surprised them, Ronald battered him to death with the butt of a gun. His body was found at around 5 a.m.

The first trial aborted when the judge realised he had defended Joyleen Williams in a previous matter. Daniel Clark's plea of manslaughter was rejected, and all four were convicted of murder and received life imprisonment. Williams was released on parole in the late 1970s, and when Ronald escaped from Milson Island prison, she was charged with harbouring him. The cause ‘Free Joy' was taken up by radical feminists, who argued that a mother should not be imprisoned for helping her son, and she was freed on appeal. Ron Thomas was finally released on licence, in March 1982. Two years later he robbed the National Bank in Palm Beach, Queensland, and served the remainder of his sentence in New South Wales, followed by two years in Queensland for a Palm Beach armed robbery.

There were further problems for Joyleen Williams when Ron Thomas was convicted again, in 1994. This time it was for the December
1991 murder of a Gold Coast bookmaker, Peter Wade, and his girlfriend, Maureen Ambrose, shot by Thomas and John Bobak in Wade's flat in Surfers Paradise.

In 1997 poisoned packets of Arnott's Monte Carlo biscuits and some letters arrived at the offices of a Queensland newspaper, the Criminal Justice Commission and the Queensland Attorney-General. The letters claimed that Thomas was innocent and demanded his case be reviewed, the sender wanting the police officers involved in the case to take lie-detector tests. Joy Williams was arrested but, on 26 April 2002, walked free. After examining the results of new tests done on her behalf, a forensic biologist, who had allegedly previously matched a DNA sample, accepted there might be a second profile.
Arnott's calculated that $22 million
worth of biscuits had been recalled and for a time dealing in shares of its parent company had been halted.

And, in other family stories, in 1996 an anonymous 14-year-old boy received a $1000 good behaviour bond and a 12-month supervision order, having gone with his mother and father on robberies in the ACT, including one at the Ampol service station in Kambah when he wielded a machete. The proceeds had gone to buy drugs for the adults, and the boy told the court he believed his mother would die if she did not get heroin. She received four years, with a non-parole period of two.

Then, in 2011, Jane Van Der Weyden took her three-year-old along when she was the getaway driver for her de facto, James Peart, when he robbed the Ivanhoe Hotel and the Yarra Valley Country Club, Bulleen, twenty minutes from Melbourne's CBD. Peart and another man took $3471 from the hotel on 21 September, and three days later escaped with $53 800 from the country club, after Peart had walked up and down with a machete, telling gamers not to look at them but to concentrate on the machines. Sentencing Van Der Weyden to a minimum of twenty-two months, Judge Lisa Hannan told her, ‘How you could have had your infant child in the car is nothing short of astounding.' Peart received a minimum of forty-two months.

The Jane Van Der Weyden case was an instance of Australia doing today what England did yesterday. In 1964 in Manchester, a woman took her four-year-old along when she was the driver in a wages snatch, because she couldn't find a childminder.
When she later found a minder
for the evening, she gave her £2 out of her share of the proceeds. The mother received five years.

Over the years, robbers have come in all shapes and sizes. There have been career robbers, acting solo, in duos or teams; a solicitor or two, businessmen, and police officers, both serving and out of the force. The latter included David John Kurrle, a former Victorian police officer who took to crime after his trucking business collapsed.

It took a cold case review to link Kurrle to a thirty-month series of robberies and theft, including one on a newsagent's two days before Christmas 2001 and the $28 000 robbery of Aussies Tavern Hotel in Brisbane. He was eventually linked to the robberies through a trace of his DNA on a cigarette butt left at the newsagent's, and admissions made on taped calls to his ex-wife.
In August 2008 Kurrle pleaded
guilty to a series of crimes that had brought him $75 000, and received eight years.

In 2002 Steven Noel Gottliebsen, another former policeman, was sentenced to four years, with a minimum of two, for his part in a spree of armed robberies of convenience stores and service stations in Victoria in January the previous year. He had joined up with Dean Anthony McDonald and Craig Shore, and sometimes acted as the getaway driver. The three of them also conspired to rob an Armaguard van on its way to to the Hampton Park Tavern on the morning of 29 January 2001, Gottliebsen providing a sawn-off shotgun. The robbery was aborted because the van was late. McDonald and Gottliebsen also split $700 in a robbery of The Top Video Store in Dandenong North. McDonald had entered the store with a stocking over his head, carrying the Gottliebsen-provided sawn-off shotgun.

The trial judge found that Gottliebsen had been unable to work as a security guard after leaving the police force because of a bad back. He had, said the judge, ‘received minimal proceeds' from the crimes. McDonald received sixteen years, with a minimum of twelve, for fifty offences, including false imprisonment and twenty-four counts of armed robbery. This was reduced on appeal to fourteen years with a minimum of nine and a half.
Shore received a minimum of five
for twelve armed robberies.

When police officers go off the rails, it is often in a spectacular fashion, and this was never more so than the case of South Australian fraud squad detective Colin Creed, the dux of his intake class. Perhaps his superiors should have taken a closer look at him. A connoisseur of wine and ‘always flash with cash' when he was in the squad, Creed would spend $60 on a bottle of Riesling, a substantial sum in the 1970s.

In April 1974 a young woman was raped in her home at knifepoint. When she went to Hindmarsh police station the next day, she identified Creed, whom she saw there, as her attacker. He had been at her home some months previously, investigating a minor burglary. He was found not guilty, but after that, his marriage broke up. A year later he remarried; this time to a policewoman. Then, on 10 April 1980, when security cameras picked out a man in a Torrensville bank robbery, it appeared, to the shock of other police officers, to be Creed. He was questioned and brazened things out and, when he was not identified in a parade, was allowed to go home. That night he vanished, and he carried out a bank robbery at Glenelg the following month. After that, he went interstate and was said to have teamed up with robber and escaper Russell ‘Mad Dog' Cox. While on the run, Creed tidied things up by writing a formal letter of resignation to the South Australian force.

Creed's career on the run was marked by near misses. First, there were suggestions he had been standing over girls in Victorian massage parlours and that the underworld had put out a $15 000 contract on him. Number one on the government's most wanted list, and said to be a master of disguise and bluff, police saw him sitting in a car in Coburg for what appeared to be an inordinately long time, but when questioned he toughed it out, saying he was waiting for an assignation with a married woman. He certainly should have been caught in Queensland when, on 4 January 1982, police were alerted by a hotel manager who had seen green dye on Creed's hands and suspected he had touched banknotes
marked by authorities. However, after three hours of questioning, he was released.