Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly (11 page)

RAYMOND BENNETT

THE GREAT BOOKIE ROBBERY

R
aymond Bennett was a career criminal. When he planned a robbery, it ran smoothly. It worked. He could probably have had a career in the army, as a commando leader. But crime paid a lot better.

While he was serving a prison term in England, Raymond began to plan the most daring robbery ever. Late in 1975, while he was still in jail, Raymond was allowed out on leave.

Other people would have taken a local holiday. Raymond climbed on a plane, came home to Melbourne and checked out the Victorian Club in Queen Street. Convinced that his idea would work, Raymond got back on the plane and returned to England to finish his sentence and plan his crime.

The Victorian Club had been around for nearly a century. During that time, after every major racing event, bookmakers, who made their living taking bets, would gather to ‘settle up’, or pay and receive money owed. Millions of dollars changed hands on those days. No one was expecting a robbery. The money was brought there in an armoured car. Police would visit to make sure everything was all right. Criminals assumed that it would be too hard to get in.

Little did they know how easy it actually was.

When Raymond got back to Melbourne, he chose his team and took them out to the bush to train. He made them promise to avoid drink and women for three months before the heist. Raymond couldn’t afford to take a chance on anyone talking. It had to run quickly and smoothly. When he decided to do the job just after Easter – on 21 April 1976 – he took the team into the deserted building to rehearse over the weekend.

After Easter was the best time, because there would be money from three races, belonging to 116 bookmakers. The robbers would make a fortune!

The operation was embarrassingly easy. Just after noon, one of the team entered the building disguised as a repairman, supposedly to fix a fridge. Only seven minutes later, the team burst in, wearing balaclava masks, made the bookies lie on the floor and escaped with the money. They jammed the service lift with the empty cash boxes. It took just eleven minutes, including the time it took to get the money up the stairs to the office in the same building which they had rented before the robbery! While police hunted for the money and followed up leads about a white van, the money was right under their noses.

Afterwards, the police had an impossible time, trying to track the cash. They couldn’t even find out how much money had been stolen, because many of those bookmakers didn’t keep accurate records. This avoided paying some taxes. The official amount was $1.4 million, but it was probably a lot more than that, perhaps as much as $7 million.

Raymond made sure that his team didn’t just go off and spend their loot. That would have made it easy for police to track them. The money was spread out. Some of it was invested in property, some went out of the country. There was so much that they had to find all sorts of ways to hide it. When Raymond’s mother fainted one day, the ambulance officers found $90,000 hidden in her clothes!

Police had guessed Raymond was involved, but couldn’t prove it. They tried to get information from his friend, Norman Lee, but Norman was no help to them at all, even after he was arrested for being involved in the robbery. Police had to release him, though, because they couldn’t prove the money he had was from that particular robbery.

The police gave up. It seemed that Raymond and his friends had got away with the crime.

However, while nobody went to prison for this particular crime, all the robbers ended up suffering in other ways, because none of them could settle down and enjoy the money.

In November 1979, Raymond was waiting outside the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court to go on trial for another robbery when a gunman who has never been definitely identified simply shot him dead.

That was the end of the leader of the Great Bookie Robbery.

DID YOU KNOW…?

In 1788, an eleven-year-old girl called Mary Wade was transported to Australia for luring a younger girl into the toilets, where she and another girl stole the poor child’s underwear. She wasn’t sorry at all, saying afterwards that she wished she had thrown her victim down the toilet! In Australia, Mary later married another convict and had 21 children. She would have been pleased to know that one of her descendants, Kevin Rudd, would become Prime Minister of Australia.

GEOFFREY CHAMBERS AND KEVIN BARLOW

W
hen Geoffrey Chambers was growing up in Perth, he dreamed of being famous one day. He would certainly become well-known, but not in the way he had hoped.

Geoffrey started his criminal career early, stealing and selling lawnmowers when he was only eleven years old. By 1977, as a young man, he was selling drugs on a small scale.

But Geoffrey Chambers wanted a nice house, fast cars and all the other enjoyable things that money could buy – and he was a heroin user himself. Heroin was an expensive drug.

He began to buy heroin from Thailand and to sell it all over Australia. For a while, he had a Thai girlfriend who helped him, but she was sent back to Thailand as an illegal migrant. She stayed in touch, though, and continued to help him commit his crimes.

Chambers’ next girlfriend was a trainee nurse called Sue. He introduced her to heroin and the two of them travelled to Asia quite often, bringing back illegal drugs. They were doing well and had a nice house by the sea, but they were worried about the police and decided to move to Sydney, travelling by car. On the way, the car crashed and Sue was killed.

Chambers was depressed. He didn’t care much what happened to him after that. He drank far too much and took drugs.

In August 1983, he took a drug-smuggling trip to Penang in Malaysia for a drug boss called Paul Musarri. He was supposed to hand over the drugs to two other Australians whom he was to meet there, but he kept some of the heroin, burying it near his hotel.

The Australian police knew about the drug smugglers, though not about Chambers. Back in Australia, the pair were arrested. Paul Musarri was also in trouble.

Musarri desperately needed the money from the buried heroin. He asked Chambers to fetch it, but Chambers would need someone to help him. Kevin Barlow was boarding with a woman called Debbie whose boyfriend, John Asciak, was working with Musarri. Barlow seemed like a good person to ask, as he needed some money to pay off his car, which he was about to lose. He agreed to go, even though Debbie begged him not to.

From the very beginning, the two men made mistakes. They weren’t supposed to travel together, as doing so would put them in more danger, but they did. They certainly weren’t supposed to spend any of the money, but they did. Chambers and Barlow spent their first week in Malaysia drinking and using drugs. Making more mistakes was inevitable.

When the time came to smuggle the heroin, Barlow became nervous. The plan was that Chambers and Barlow would hide the drugs in their bodies. This was unpleasant, but a common way of smuggling drugs. If Barlow had followed the plan, perhaps they wouldn’t have been caught. But he refused. In the end, they hid the drugs in their luggage.

At Penang airport, their drugs were found and they were arrested.

Now they were in real trouble. In Malaysia, drug smugglers were hanged.

Australians were shocked. No one in Australia had been executed since Ronald Ryan’s hanging in the 1960s. And these two men were small criminals compared to those who had sent them. While they were in Penang prison, using heroin supplied by guards, the Australian government tried hard to get their sentences reduced. A National Crime Authority officer even visited John Asciak, who was in prison for another crime, to ask him to give evidence that would help keep the men from hanging, but he refused.

On 7 July 1986, after two years in prison, and in spite of a huge public outcry in Australia, the two drug smugglers were hanged. Geoffrey Chambers and Kevin Barlow were the first Westerners to be executed in Malaysia for drug offences.

DID YOU KNOW…?

An old pensioner called Billy Mears died in 2002, too poor to afford a tombstone. In 1949, Billy had escaped from jail with a more famous crook, Darcy Dugan. Among Billy’s belongings, the minister from Sydney’s Wayside Chapel found a lottery ticket which had won enough money to buy the tombstone.

DAVID AND CATHERINE BIRNIE

T
he story of the Birnies of Perth is a strong warning against ever accepting a lift from strangers, even if they look like a nice young couple.

Both David and Catherine Birnie had miserable childhoods. Neither of them had many friends, but they fell in love early, when they were both fifteen. They were jailed when they were eighteen, for housebreaking, but David kept committing crimes – 21 over five years. Catherine’s parole officer told her that she and David were no good for each other and advised her to break up with him.

For a while, Catherine took this advice. She got a job and married her boss’s son. They had several children together.

However, in 1985, Catherine left her husband and children to live with David. She changed her surname to Birnie. They moved into a house at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee. David got a job at a car wrecker’s in April 1986.

Later that year, women started disappearing. The first was Mary Neilson, a university student who vanished one day in October when she went to buy some tyres for her car.

Susannah Candy, a high school student, disappeared a couple of weeks later. She was forced to write her parents two letters saying she was safe.

Denise Brown, a computer operator, went missing on her way home from a friend’s house. She phoned home to say she was okay, but her friends worried anyway – with good reason.

The fourth victim was Noelene Patterson, a former flight attendant, who was working at the Nedlands Golf Club. She went missing on 30 October, but her disappearance wasn’t reported until several days later, after the Birnies had been caught.

On 10 November, a half-naked teenage girl ran into a shopping complex, begging for help. She told police that she had been kidnapped at knifepoint by a couple, while giving them directions. They had driven her to their house and chained her to the bed. The man had raped her twice. They had forced her to ring home, saying she was safe. The girl had escaped when the man was at work and the woman went to answer the door. She gave a good description of the house.

The police found the Birnies’ house easily enough. They searched it and found some evidence, but needed more. They decided to question them separately, in hope that one of them would break down and confess.

It didn’t take long for them to get confessions, first from David, then from Catherine. At 7.00 p.m., the Detective Sergeant said, ‘It’s getting dark. Best we take the shovel and dig them up’.

To his amazement, David agreed. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘There’s four of them.’

The first grave was Denise Brown’s; she had accepted a lift. After David had abused her, they took her to a pine plantation, where he did it again, while Catherine held a torch. Then he stabbed his victim. Killing her was harder than they thought. A larger knife also didn’t kill her so finally they hit her on the head with an axe.

Mary Neilson, their first victim, had made the mistake of trying to buy tyres from David, whom she had met at the car wrecker’s. She had been buried in the Gleneagles National Park, after David strangled her with a nylon strap.

Susannah Candy had been hitchhiking. This time, David asked Catherine to do the killing, as proof of her love for him. Catherine strangled the girl.

The last grave was that of Noelene Patterson, who’d been unlucky enough to run out of petrol when the Birnies were passing. Catherine spat on this one. David hadn’t wanted to kill this victim, making Catherine jealous. Catherine had insisted, so he’d given their victim sleeping tablets and strangled her while she slept.

Both David and Catherine were sentenced to ‘strict security life imprisonment’. This meant that they couldn’t get parole for twenty years. From their separate jails, they exchanged thousands of letters.

David Birnie killed himself in 2005. Catherine is unlikely ever to be released.

DID YOU KNOW…?

During World War II, night time street lighting was reduced, to make it harder for the enemy to bomb cities. This was known as ‘brownout’. Unfortunately, it wasn’t only the enemy who were a problem. And if brownout made bombing harder, it made murder easier. American soldier Eddie Leonski was stationed in Melbourne, where he continued his drinking binges. Leonski had been in trouble before, trying to strangle a woman in America. He drank a lot and became violent. In May 1942, he used the brownout to commit three murders, all of women older than himself. He was caught when a soldier he’d confided in reported him. During his trial, Leonski didn’t explain why he committed murder. He only said of one of his victims, ‘I wanted that voice. I choked her’. Despite this, he was found sane and was executed in November 1942.