Gangland Robbers (29 page)

He also survived the police raid following the January 1983 shoot-out at Cox's safe house on the Mornington Peninsula, when former Painter and Docker turned bank robber Ian Revell Carroll was killed. By the time the police searched the house and found an arsenal of weapons and Creed's fingerprints, he was long gone. By the spring of 1983 the hunt for him stepped up, with women's magazines asked to refer specifically to the rape allegations, and medical magazines to the fact that Creed was suffering from a bowel disorder, which, his family thought, might kill him unless he had treatment. Restaurants were canvassed in case any waiters could remember a man buying expensive wine.

Creed was finally caught in the ABC Shop in Hay Street, Perth, on 6 September 1983, when Ian Goldsmith, another South Australian police officer on holiday in WA, recognised him. Goldsmith said, ‘It's been a long time, Colin, hasn't it.' Creed then pleaded guilty to charges relating to two armed hold-ups in Underdale, Adelaide, on 10 April 1980. He sometimes claimed that a possible murder charge had kept him on the run.

In November 1984 Creed's South Australian sentence of twenty-one years, with a pre-parole term of twelve years, for the rapes and bank robberies was increased to a minimum of seventeen on appeal by the Crown. A psychological report suggested that at the time he went off the rails, Creed was ‘in a state of depression and anxiety and that contributed to his offences'. In early June 1986 the Victorian Supreme Court sentenced Creed to a total of forty-five years on charges relating to six robberies, three of them armed, the sentences to be served concurrently.

Throughout his sentence, Creed's behaviour was exemplary but, as with all former police officers in gaol, he was at risk of attack from other prisoners and, in February 1988, his cell was firebombed. Two months later, with his security rating downgraded, he was transferred to Mobilong Prison. In 1995, now deemed a model prisoner and with no objections from the police, he was granted parole. When he spoke of his time on the run, he said, ‘You may as well be in prison … it's a pretty terrible lifestyle.'
Some escapees might disagree
.

Jim McNeil, the Laughing Bandit—although his victims cannot have found his behaviour equally amusing—acquired his nickname from the apparent delight he derived from holding up people, often TAB
employees, at gunpoint. On one occasion he hit the manager of the Olympic Hotel, Preston, on the side of the head, saying, ‘Thanks, it's been a pleasure to do business.' In 1967, after failing to appear in court in Victoria, McNeil robbed a hotel at Wentworth Falls, west of Sydney. He forced the hotel manager at gunpoint to empty the safe. Attempting to escape, he shot a police officer in the leg and, after telling him to run away, shot him again, this time in the buttocks. At his trial, after claiming the shooting was in self-defence, McNeil was sentenced to seventeen years—his sixth sentence in all.

A friend of Ronald Ryan, in prison he became a playwright of moderate, and almost certainly overpraised, talent. In Parramatta Correctional Centre he joined The Resurgents Debating Society, a small group of inmates who would meet in the prison chapel to debate with visitors, write and paint. In 1970 McNeil wrote his first play,
The Chocolate Frog
. Prisoners performed it for Saturday morning visitors, and theatre critic Katharine Brisbane reviewed it favourably. McNeil also wrote
The Old Familiar Juice
,
How Does Your Garden Grow
and
Jack
, which was his last play.

Australian arts identities agitated for McNeil's early release and, on Monday 14 October 1974, he was released on parole, ten years early. The next year, the Australia Council for the Arts awarded McNeil a $7000 literary grant. In 1975 he also won the Australian Writers' Guild award for the most outstanding script in any category for
How Does Your Garden Grow
. Within months of his release from prison, he married Australian actress and director Robyn Nevin. McNeil had not had a good marital track record. He had branded his first wife, Valerie, with whom he had six children, and then stripped a friend of hers and tied her up, putting a noose around her neck. He and Nevin separated less than two years after marrying, with Nevin taking out an apprehended violence order to prevent McNeil coming near her.

Katharine Brisbane, whose Currency Press published McNeil's plays, later said that:

 

Re-entering the outside world did his talent no good. He was no longer the brightest, cleverest person in the room: the skills that prison life had taught him were of little use outside. He was frightened most of the time, took to drink and to making promises he could not keep … In his time he received more recognition than he deserved and he exploited everyone he got to know. His plays are still remarkable
and still have an important message that those inside are people just like us on the outside, with the same feelings and the same domestic needs. But reading them today I find that they are a little thinner than I thought at first sight.

 

In 1981 McNeil went to live at Ozanam House, a crisis accommodation facility for homeless men. Rumoured to have been the actual killer of Painter and Docker Freddie ‘The Frog' Harrison, shot on Melbourne's docks in 1957, McNeil died, aged forty-seven, of alcohol-related illnesses on 16 May 1982.
In 2012 two of his plays
,
The Chocolate Frog
and
The Old Familiar Juice
, were revived as a double bill at Melbourne's fortyfivedownstairs theatre.

There is a maxim in the underworld that your best partner in crime is yourself—no one to dob you in, no one with whom to have to share the proceeds—and Australian identities often follow it. One, the Vietnam war veteran Alexander MacDonald, known as The Collie Bomber, acquired his nickname in March 1978, when he left a plastic lunchbox and a note saying it contained unprimed gelignite, behind the Crown Hotel in Collie, some 200 kilometres south of Perth. He wanted, he said, $5000 from each of the hoteliers in the district; otherwise, he would bomb them. Three months later, he did bomb the Crown. After that, he upped his demands to $60 000 and was caught with a four-stick gelignite bomb.

MacDonald was released from his seven-year sentence in September 1981 and headed for Queensland, where he carried out a string of armed robberies of banks and service stations, often taking hostages. He was finally arrested in the Northern Territory. This time he received seventeen years, to which was added in short order six months for an escape attempt in 1984; and, later, a further five years for bashing a prison officer and trying to take a nurse hostage.

In 1995, after completing twelve years, MacDonald was working as a trusty at the Borallon Correctional Centre, near Ipswich, when he downed his gardening tools one day and walked away. He then robbed a Westpac bank near Noosa Heads, and from then on, robbed a series of banks, often either walking or pedalling to the premises. On 15 December that year he took $83 000 from another Westpac, at Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays. He also took a female teller hostage, releasing her after he had gone only some metres out of town. He then simply disappeared into the bush.

MacDonald began to work his way west, robbing as he went—often wearing a white Panama that became his trademark—and ending in Busselton, before he changed his modus operandi and went to Victoria. There, he placed a job advertisement in a Melbourne newspaper for a ‘general hand geosurvey'. The dubious prize was the opportunity to earn a fortune prospecting gold. The successful applicant was a 45-year-old divorced loner, Ronald Joseph Williams, of about MacDonald's size and build, who until then had lived with his mother in Noble Park. MacDonald signed him up at $60 000 a year, more than double the salary he earned at a car spare parts company.

First, MacDonald borrowed the unsuspecting Williams' birth certificate, Medicare and bank cards, and opened an account with the Plenty Community Credit Union. Next, he told Williams to prepare for a two-year visit to Western Australia. As the pair travelled west, Williams wrote postcards that MacDonald collected to post at intervals. In February 1996, when the pair went fishing at Cheynes Beach near Albany, MacDonald shot Williams in the back of the head and buried his body in the dunes. Using Williams' documents, he acquired a passport, driver's licence, five credit cards, a Myer Card, ambulance cover and private health insurance. With the proceeds of his various crimes, he bought a boat for $23 000 and spent another $40 000 doing it up. With the passport in Williams' name, he prepared to leave for Vanuatu.

MacDonald was caught while hitchhiking with his brother near Melbourne. He produced papers in Williams' name, but when his fingerprints were taken, the game was over. Asked if he knew killing people was wrong, he replied ambiguously, ‘I know that many people consider it to be, yes.' He had thought that killing Williams was ‘appropriate'. He cannot, however, have been wholly bad, as he did use some of the money from the bank raids to sponsor a child in South America.

That good deed did not, however, overly influence the judge, who sentenced MacDonald to life imprisonment, with a non-parole period of twenty-five years.
MacDonald indicated that he did
not think he would—one way or another—survive the sentence.

While MacDonald successfully robbed Westpac twice, Ronald Joseph Rowles was less fortunate. In June 2010 he was caught after robbing a Westpac in Northbridge, Perth, convicted and sentenced, and was due for release in 2014. However, in October 2011, while at Wooroloo Prison
Farm, he claimed to be suffering from stomach pains and, taken to the Royal Perth Hospital, he walked out. Two hours later he was back in Northbridge, where he placed a rolled-up jumper on the same bank's counter and took $16 000. He then went to a barber and had his head shaved. He stayed out for a week before he was caught and, in February 2012, was sentenced to an additional four years, to be served after he finished the first sentence. By then, Rowles had racked up nearly ninety convictions for robbery and other offences, and the authorities were criticised for classifying him a minimum-security prisoner.

A wholly different type of loner was London-born businessman Ronald ‘Greybeard' Morley, who took to crime to support his failing companies and pay his back taxes. At one time, he had had around 600 employees but his companies had collapsed in 1978. He set himself up in business again the next year, but by 1983 his media monitoring company was having cash-flow problems, with $30 000 needed immediately to pay the Australian Taxation Office and other creditors.

Between 1983 and 1984 Morley robbed seven banks in Western Australia, generally disguised by the long grey beard that gave him his nickname. He claimed that he robbed his first bank after bailiffs acting on behalf of the taxation office visited him and demanded $5000 in seven days. He hit upon the idea of putting on his disguise in public lavatories near the targeted banks. He bought himself a starting pistol, but had a fit of conscience and returned it to the shop. Then, he bought a replica gun and was up and running. In June 1983 he paid off the tax debt with $5000 from a Westpac and then set about paying off the remainder of his creditors.

Arrested in January 1984, on his seventh go-round, Morley wittily told the police his surname was Banks and his first name Robin. He was sentenced to nine years, with a minimum of five, but three weeks later, the Crown appealed. He did not attend the hearing at which his sentence was increased to thirteen years, with a seven-year pre-parole period. In 1990 he wrote
Greybeard
, a memoir of his robberies and subsequent life in prison.

In answer to a question on a website, his daughter Lisa wrote:

 

Hello, I am his youngest daughter and he passed away in 2010. After he finished his prison sentence he obtained a good job and eventually got back on his feet. He reunited with my mother (love of his life) and
bought a cheap home that they both worked hard at restoring and which my mother still resides in. It was a happy ending for him as his family meant everything to him and we embraced him fully back into our lives. He was a wonderful granddad to my three children.
We will never forget him
, he was such a kind and loving man.

 

Alexander MacDonald may have pedalled his way to the banks he robbed but one-time baker and security guard Ross David O'Connell, the so-called Jetset Bandit, earned his name by flying in and out of Perth. Unlike MacDonald, with his trademark white hat, O'Connell ran the gamut of disguises.

He served a sentence for seven bank robberies in the 1990s and was then implicated in at least another sixteen. His next spree began on 27 September 2004, at the Bankwest in Wembley, and continued at the Commonwealth Bank in Kalamunda, on 5 October. To mislead the police, on 12 October he travelled to South Australia, where he hired a vehicle and disguised himself before robbing the National Australia Bank at gunpoint. This time, though, a red dye bomb hidden among the cash exploded as he escaped, ruining the notes. Amazingly, he managed to exchange some of them in a Perth casino. He then robbed the Bankwest in Westminster on 22 October, and the National Australia Bank in Mount Lawley three days later.

On 29 October O'Connell was arrested at the domestic terminal at Perth airport. After he had flown in from Sydney, a replica gun was found in his checked luggage. Granted bail so that he could care for his dying father, he took the opportunity, so police believe, to fake his own death on Perth's Trigg Beach in May 2005, his car left in the car park, along with his wallet and mobile phone. Although his family believe O'Connell is actually dead, he has since been a suspect in bank robberies from Bendigo to Cairns, and back to Adelaide.

Harry Richard Nylander's career as a bank robber and escaper finally ended in February 2008. He had served a six-year spell in Victoria in the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s while serving a twelve-year sentence, he escaped from Pentridge's high-security B division and stayed out for over a year. Between 1996 and 2000, masked up, he robbed a series of banks in the Adelaide suburbs of Kent Town, Wayville and Walkerville, netting more than $30 000.