And yet, between the ages of 20 and 38, he was only out of prison for thirteen months!
Born in Melbourne, Chopper had a disturbed childhood. Amongst other things, he was taken from his parents at the age of fourteen.
By the time he turned fifteen, Chopper had his own gang. He robbed drug dealers and other crooks. Years later he explained that he picked on criminals because, after all, they weren’t going to call the police.
In the late 1970s, Chopper actually managed to start a gang war in prison! He was in Pentridge Prison’s high-security H-Division at the time. When he applied to get out of H-Division and was turned down, Chopper decided that he was going to get out of there somehow, even if it was only to hospital.
On request, another prisoner cut Chopper’s ears off. Cutting off ears was no big deal to Chopper; he’d done it to someone else at one stage, though not by request.
Pentridge was not a healthy place to be imprisoned. His own gang attacked him when they felt he was going too far, injuring him badly.
Outside prison, Chopper continued his criminal career. Even some of the criminals involved in Melbourne’s gang wars were frightened of him. One of them, Alphonse Gangitano, even took his family and escaped to Italy when he heard that Chopper was about to finish his latest prison sentence in 1991. Chopper wasn’t free for long and Gangitano came home, although maybe he shouldn’t have. Someone else killed Alphonse in his own home in 1998.
Chopper was now in Tasmania’s Risdon Prison, with a stamp on his file saying, ‘Never to be released’ as he was tagged a ‘dangerous criminal’. He’d been imprisoned for shooting a bikie called Sidney Collins. Chopper had said he didn’t do it, but he went to jail anyway.
Somehow, all that crime and prison time hadn’t stopped him from writing books. His books even got him a wife. Mary-Anne Hodge, who worked for the Australian Tax Office, enjoyed his books so much that she went to visit him in jail in 1993. They married in 1995, when he was still never to be released, but in 1998 his ‘dangerous criminal’ tag was overturned and he was set free.
Chopper and Mary-Anne settled on a farm in Tasmania, where they had a son, Charlie.
By 2001, though, the marriage was over and Chopper returned to Melbourne, where he moved in with a new girlfriend, Margaret. Since he wasn’t going back to his life of crime, Chopper made his living from being a celebrity who had been a criminal. His books sold in the hundreds of thousands. People were always interested in hearing what he had to say about life, the universe and everything.
Still, he has upset a lot of people. He turned up drunk for a TV interview. He wrote a children’s book with a hero who committed murder. He said that his politics were somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan – in other words, very conservative. Many people don’t think he should be allowed to make money, even indirectly, out of his life of crime.
Australians are still arguing over whether he is a likeable character or just another crook, and a violent one at that. Some have compared him to Ned Kelly.
Since people are still arguing about Ned Kelly after more than 100 years, perhaps it’s not too bad a comparison.
DID YOU KNOW…?
In 1925, Perth girl Audrey Jacob shot her fiancé, Cyril, in front of witnesses. One night, when Cyril was supposed to be somewhere else, Audrey went to a ball. There was Cyril, dancing with another woman. Audrey went home, but returned, carrying a gun. When Cyril pretended not to recognise her, she shot him. The jury took two days to find her not guilty.
THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS
Snowtown is a tiny town north of the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Nobody would have expected the gruesome discovery that was made there in a disused bank vault in 1999.
The bodies of eight victims were found in plastic barrels of acid, along with the various tools that had been used to torture the victims. The final murder had been committed right in the building. The dead man was David Johnson, half-brother of James Vlassakis, one of the four to be tried for murder. Vlassakis had lured him there. The killers thought it would be a nice, quiet place where no one would ever notice. As it turned out, the fact that Snowtown was so quiet was why the bodies were found.
Three days later, two more bodies turned up in a backyard in the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North. Altogether, there were eleven murders. Only four of the six people involved were alive to stand trial. One, Elizabeth Harvey, died of cancer. Another, Thomas Trevilyan, who had helped with one murder, became a victim himself.
The leader of the group was John Justin Bunting. Bunting didn’t care why he killed. You could offend him by being fat, gay, a drug user – almost anything. When he was a child, his favourite hobby was burning insects in acid. Later, he used acid to try dissolving human bodies. Nearly all of the victims were people who knew their killers. The murderers made nearly $95,000 by claiming their victims’ pension money, but Bunting simply liked killing. Worse, he enjoyed torturing his victims before he killed them.
The others who were tried for murder were Robert Wagner, Mark Haydon and James Vlassakis, whose mother, Elizabeth Harvey, had helped with one of the murders. Haydon wasn’t convicted of any of the murders, as the evidence was uncertain, but he did plead guilty to helping to get rid of the bodies.
The bodies in the yard of Bunting’s house in Salisbury North were those of Suzanne Allen, a friend of Bunting’s, and Ray Davies, a mentally disabled man who lived in a caravan behind her yard. The killers later insisted that Allen had died of a heart attack.
In 1998, Bunting and Wagner killed Mark Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth, in her home while her husband was out. Killing her was a mistake. Her brother wouldn’t believe Mark Haydon’s excuses for her disappearance. She would never have left without her two children. The police found it strange that her own husband hadn’t reported her disappearance. They started to keep an eye on the suspects. They even bugged Mark Haydon’s house.
The barrels were moved around to different places before finally being taken to the Snowtown vault that Haydon had rented under the name of Mark Lawrence.
Snowtown was not a good place to hide something you didn’t want anyone to notice. Any stranger bringing barrels there to stash away in a vault was asking to have it checked out.
The police who found the bodies later described the place as something out of a nightmare. During the trials, three members of the jury were so sickened that they dropped out.
The trials went from 2001 to 2004, with some appeals happening in 2005. Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four murders and received a life sentence. In September 2003, Bunting was convicted of eleven murders and Wagner of seven. The judge sentenced them to imprisonment for life, never to be released.
After the discovery of the barrels, there was some sickening tourism. People wanted to go to Snowtown to see where the bodies had been kept. Some wanted to take a sniff at the bank vault, hoping to catch the stink of the bodies. Others took photos.
Someone suggested the town’s name be changed to Rosetown, to get away from the embarrassing and unpleasant press the town’s people had had to put up with. That suggestion was never taken up.
The house in Salisbury North was knocked down. Who, after all, could live there after what had happened?
DID YOU KNOW…?
In May 1931, 10,000 pounds sent by the Commonwealth Bank went missing between Queanbeyan and Canberra. When the mailbag was opened in Canberra, it contained only phone books. A thief called Harold Ryan was charged with the robbery, but no one was ever convicted. The jury simply couldn’t agree because of lack of evidence.
HEATHER PARKER – PETER GIBB
Heather Parker, a prison guard at the Melbourne Remand Centre, wasn’t very popular at work. Actually, she got on better with the prisoners than she did with the other guards – especially one prisoner, Peter Gibb, who was there for armed robbery.
In May 1992, she caused the other prison officers to go on strike after she was caught going into a broom cupboard with her new boyfriend! She was transferred to Pentridg
e prison and then to a hospital, but she wasn’t popular there either. Finally, she got a desk job.
That was when she started to make plans to help Peter escape. His friend Archie Butterly, another prisoner, would come with him.
Heather planned it carefully. She ordered weapons from the United States. She got all the equipment the prisoners would need for a life on the run and asked a criminal called Alex Thompson to steal her a car and a four-wheel drive. However, she made the mistake of not paying him much for the job. This would cost her a lot more than money later.
On 7 March 1993, Gibb and Butterly used explosives to blow out a prison window. They escaped in one of the stolen cars, with a prison officer called Donald Glasson chasing them in a taxi. Goodness knows what the taxi driver thought when he found himself going after escaped criminals.
Butterly and Gibb crashed the car, then a stolen motorbike. They shot Warren Treloar, a policeman who tried to stop them. Gibb grabbed Treloar’s gun and the prisoners stole the police van. They abandoned the van when they met Heather in her own car. This was another mistake she made – at first, police thought she might have been kidnapped when they checked the number plates, but they weren’t fooled for long.
In Frankston, the trio changed cars again, now using the stolen four-wheel drive. They drove out of Melbourne and stayed at a hotel in a small town called Gaffneys Creek, posing as a couple with a teenage son, who was staying in his room because he was sick. Heather and Peter went down to dinner and had an enjoyable evening with the other hotel guests. It was not a good idea because it meant people could describe them later. Still, they probably would have got away with it if the hotel hadn’t burned down a few hours after they left. That brought the police out.
The police caught Heather and Peter on 13 March 1993. Archie Butterly was dead. Someone had shot him in the head, using Warren Treloar’s gun. There was evidence that Heather might have done it, but she was never convicted of the crime.
During the trial, Alex Thompson said Heather had asked him to steal those cars, complaining about the ‘lousy’ $130 she had paid him.
Meanwhile, Heather sold her story both to the TV program Sixty Minutes and Woman’s Day magazine. Police had to take the story from the magazine’s offices. Heather was making money from her crime, which was against the law. Not only that, but the TV show and the magazine had made her look like a heroine who had done it all for love!
Her infatuation with Peter Gibb didn’t impress the judge. He sentenced the pair to ten years in prison, but Heather’s sentence was cut to five years and four months.
In 2007, she was in court again. She had attacked a woman whom she thought was competing with her for Peter Gibb’s love. She didn’t go back to jail, and Heather announced that she was considering breaking up with Peter anyway.
So ended the great love story.
DID YOU KNOW…?
In 2006, Queensland con artist Jody Harris was caught in Sydney, when someone recognised her. She pleaded guilty to 43 of 124 charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. Jody had 100 drivers’ licences, various disguise items, a false passport and fake bank and Medicare cards. She is known as the ‘Catch Me if You Can’ thief, after another con artist in America who did similar things.
MATTHEW WALES
THE SOCIETY MURDERS
It was a cool evening in early April 2002. In their home in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris, Matthew Wales and his wife Maritza were preparing to entertain Matthew’s mother, Margaret, and his stepfather, Paul King. While Maritza played with their two-year-old son, Domenik, Matthew was making dinner and setting the table. He had cooked a delicious vegetable soup.
Matthew, however, had added some ingredients not usually found in soup to Margaret and Paul’s bowls. He had crushed a mixture of painkillers and blood pressure tablets, which he had heard made you sleepy.
Making his mother and stepfather sleepy was important to his plans. One other thing he had prepared was a piece of wood, which he had hidden in the front garden.
Dinner went well, though later Maritza said she had noticed that her husband’s parents seemed a bit tired and her mother-in-law spoke in a strange way. However, she thought that perhaps Margaret had just drunk too much wine. Maritza did the dishes and took her little boy up to bed.
Matthew walked outside with his mother and her husband. There, he grabbed his piece of wood and bashed both of them, hard, on the head. When they were lying on the ground, he checked to see if they were breathing. They weren’t. He checked his mother’s pulse, then his stepfather’s. As far as he could tell, they were dead, as planned. When Maritza came downstairs, he told her what he had done, begging her not to tell on him.
Maritza was horrified. She pleaded with him to contact the police. When he wouldn’t, she agreed not to call them, though she was unhappy. Maritza believed she should be loyal to her husband, whatever he had done. She was also afraid that Domenik would lose his father.
Matthew drove the car to Middle Park, where he left it. He hid the bodies in the garden under a pile of rubbish including a child’s wading pool, and the next morning he hired a trailer and the equipment he needed to bury them. On Saturday, he drove to Marysville, a place 100 kilometres outside Melbourne, and buried the couple in a shallow grave.
By Sunday, the other members of Matthew’s family were wondering what had happened to Margaret and Paul. Margaret was supposed to have lunch with Matthew’s sister. She was never late and always told her family where she was. On Monday, the family told police that their parents were missing. Matthew said he had waved them goodbye on Thursday and had no idea where they were. Unhappily, Maritza supported him.
Unfortunately for Matthew, he made a lot of mistakes. He had tried to clean up, but police still found blood. He paid for everything with a credit card, which made it easier for police to work out what he had bought – and why. He thought he was burying the bodies in a lonely spot, but it was a popular camping place.
On 29 April, park rangers in Marysville found the bodies and soon afterwards Maritza told the police what she knew. Matthew was arrested and put on trial. Maritza was at first charged with being a part of the crime, but the charge was reduced to a two-year suspended sentence, since it was clear that she had known nothing about it. She had only lied to cover for him, slowing down the investigation of the crime.
Matthew admitted to his crime, but refused to accept that he had done anything wrong. He said that his mother had dominated his life and used money to control him. That wasn’t what his brothers and sisters thought. Matthew had been the youngest child, only seven when his parents divorced, and had been spoiled rotten, they said.
The murders became known as the Society Murders because the victims were wealthy.
Matthew was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
DID YOU KNOW…?
Mary Wade wasn’t Kevin Rudd’s only convict ancestor. In 2008, the Prime Minister was presented with a book that showed he had other convict ancestors. Thomas Rudd was transported to Australia in the nineteenth century for stealing a bag of sugar and married Mary Cable, who had stolen a bolt of cloth. One ancestor stole glue, while another female ancestor was transported in 1798 for forging coins. Perhaps Mr Rudd sometimes wishes he had her around when money is short…
SEF GONZALES
If your school marks were bad, you’d probably promise your parents to study harder and do better next time.
Sef Gonzales decided it was simpler just to kill his family before they found out.
Born in the Philippines, Sef came to Australia with his family in 1991, when he was eleven. His father Teddy, a lawyer, set up a business in Sydney. He and his wife Loiva worked hard and did well. They loved their two children, Sef and his sister Clodine, and wanted them to succeed in life. Sef was rather spoiled. He had money and designer clothes and, when he was old enough, his own car.
Sef was a strange boy, who could be violent. He also had an active imagination. He told his school f
riends that he had a recording contract, that he had cancer, that he had been shot at by a sniper. He also said that he was training for the Olympics, that he had a black belt in tae kwon do and even that he had a TV production company – anything his active imagination could come up with!
Sef’s parents hoped he could become a doctor, but when he finished school, his marks weren’t good enough. They persuaded him to do a special course which would let him study medicine later, but Sef failed again. After that, he did some subjects that would let him study law if he passed. But Sef was lazy. By 2001, it was looking as if he was going to fail that, too. He had to do something, before his family saw the letter with the bad news.
He would poison his mother, to start with. Sef didn’t just slip something into her tea. He did his research, finding websites that told him what would work well, and ordered some poisonous castor oil seeds. Then he wrote anonymous letters to a food and drink company, saying their products had been poisoned so that they would take them off supermarket shelves. He hoped that the story would get into the newspapers and then, when his mother died, people would draw the wrong conclusion.
When the newspapers didn’t report the story, he decided to go ahead with the murder anyway. His mother did become very ill, but she survived. Doctors didn’t know why she had been sick. Disgusted, Sef threw out the seeds.
He’d just have to do this the hard way. Sef chose 10 July as the date for his mass murder. He gave himself an alibi by arranging to meet a friend for dinner. By the time he met his friend, the Gonzales family was already dead. They were all stabbed and Clodine was also hit with a baseball bat. Just to make it look good, he wrote a race hate message on the family room wall, signed KKK.
When he came home, he screamed that his family was dead and called in neighbours and the police, claiming that he’d seen someone running away.
Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly Page 10