Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  She told the police she thought he was joking but that when they went for a drive up to the Dandenongs to see the city lights, he informed her that the ES&A bank at Kalorama would be their target. She claimed she was reluctant, but on 11 September 1967 the two of them drove to Kalorama and slept in their car, close to the bank. She said she tried to get out of the car and run away but Bannon threatened that if she didn’t help him, he would take her baby boy away from her. The next morning the pair held up the Kalorama bank, getting away with $5774.

  Three months later, Kleehammer had a baby girl and the couple stayed living together. Again, Bannon said they needed to rob a bank and that this time it was to be the one in Stratford. On 2 August Kleehammer was found guilty of the Stratford hold-up, but the jury accepted she had been forced to assist in the Kalorama job and acquitted her of it. She was sentenced to three years’ jail, with a non-parole period of one year.

  Gair pleaded guilty to both the Stratford and Kalorama jobs, as well as an armed hold-up of the State Savings Bank at Warrandyte on 29 May 1967, and of escaping from a prison farm on 28 December 1966. Described by the judge as a ‘menace to society’, he was sentenced to fifteen years, with a minimum of eleven and a half. On 24 October 1969 Gair escaped from Pentridge with a David Gawned, hiding under a pile of boxes in a van. Until his recapture, Alan Raynor and his family received police protection.

  One Bonnie, whose Clyde later became involved in an early and ground-breaking Australian DNA case, offered an ingenious defence after the $23 000 raid on the Wanniassa branch of the Canberra Building Society on 16 April 1985. Alexandra Driuell claimed she had just gone for a drive from Sydney to Canberra with Desmond John Applebee, and knew nothing about how or why he came to be wearing a long black wig and false beard.

  For once in his life, Applebee did the decent thing, saying he could not remember who had been in the car with him and that he had changed in the back while a girl was driving. After the raid, he took the money out of the cash bags and put it in the boot, and when they were on the Snowy Mountains Highway he broke down the .22 rifle and put it in a car door panel. He received six years, with a minimum of four, and Driuell, who had been diagnosed with cancer shortly before the robbery, received a modest nine months.

  Applebee had a checkered criminal career. On 20 July 1978 he had received a five-year suspended sentence for maliciously setting fire to a house with his ex-de facto wife and son inside. In November that year he received ten years, with a non-parole expiring 10 November 1983, after pleading guilty to the rape of a 19-year-old Salvo who had asked him if she could read the Bible and pray during the attack. She was later awarded compensation of $1750 for her ordeal.

  In 1989 Applebee was charged with three counts of sexual assault and became the first man convicted in Australia on DNA evidence. Presented with the evidence that it was his semen and blood on the victim’s clothing, he changed his defence in Canberra from ‘I wasn’t there’ to ‘she consented’. It was this case that led to the introduction of victim impact statements in the ACT.

  For a short time, Brett Ronald Maston and Christine Evagora were ‘Australia’s Bonnie and Clyde’. However, she never helped him with his robberies, merely helped him to escape from prison in 1995.

  In November 1983 Maston, a dropout from Sunshine with dreams of the big time, had been charged with a number of burglary and theft offences. Given bail, and resolute that he would go straight, he was arrested in March the following year and charged with another series of burglaries. In March 1984, with Maston then aged seventeen, Mr Justice McGarvie—after hearing evidence from the experienced Senior Detective Walsh that Maston was easily led, and that those who had led him were now in custody, leaving no one to tempt him from the straight and narrow—granted him bail again. Detective Walsh had also noticed a dramatic change in Maston’s attitude.

  Sadly, by 1995 Maston had been led astray again, several times, one of which was a payroll robbery at a foundry in Melbourne’s western suburbs in December 1993. He decided to go on the run across the Nullarbor, with his then girlfriend. Once they were in Perth, the good-looking, baby-faced 29-year-old Maston met Evagora, and it was goodbye girlfriend, hello Christine. The 25-year-old Evagora was from Collingwood in Melbourne, and had been educated at a good Catholic school. Devastated when her parents’ marriage broke up, until she met Maston she had done nothing more daring than go and find a job in Perth.

  Maston was fun to be with and, apart from an increasing heroin habit to be fed, life with him was good. At the time, Western Australia had a relatively small professional underworld and Maston put together a team of interstate robbers—one who was an expert at planning and car theft, and two others who would carry out the snatches, wearing balaclavas and sometimes Prince Charles masks. During one robbery, an old man stood up to them and, for his troubles, had a gun put to his head and was told he would be shot. Instead, shots were fired into the ceiling.

  During what the police thought was their fifteenth robbery in six months, Maston and his gang were finally arrested and charged with four of the robberies, conspiracy and car thefts. And for Maston, it was off to Carindale Prison on remand, awaiting trial and with enough time on his hands to prepare an escape. He had hired a Melbourne gunman to hold up the guards at Fremantle Hospital, to where, after faking a suicide attempt, he had managed to get transferred. When the gunman did not arrive on 12 August 1995 to fulfil the contract, the besotted Christine literally took things into her own hands, wielding, in her first criminal enterprise, a sawn-off shotgun to hold off two prison officers. As they tried to chase him and Evagora, Maston snatched the gun from her and fired in their direction.

  They went on the run and it was back to Melbourne, where, on 6 November 1995, Maston was involved in an $80 000 robbery at the Lower Plenty Hotel in north-east Melbourne, in which a security guard, Alex McGaffin, died after being shot in the face at point-blank range. Maston stole his revolver.

  Sometime after that, Maston had ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ tattooed on his back. He was recaptured, once again, in Perth on 2 December and sentenced to fourteen- and-a- half years for the Western Australian robberies. For her sins and her part in the escape, Christine Evagora received four years and eight months. On 28 August 1996 they married in Casuarina Prison, 30 kilometres south of Perth. Also at the wedding was their daughter, 4-month-old Star Elsa Veronica.

  It was then back to Melbourne again to be near Star and Evagora, who had been parolled the previous year. There, Maston pleaded guilty to the two armed robberies committed before he had first left Victoria. Now he agreed to turn dog and to give evidence against his co-accused in the McGaffin murder. As a result, a nolle prosequi was entered on the charge of murder against him and, in view of his cooperation, he received a total of seven-and-a-half years. What this amounted to in real life was to extend his Western Australia sentence by less than two years; in all, something dispassionate observers might think to have been a very satisfactory result for him.

  Gold Coast robbers Marc Renton and Brunetta Festa do not seem to have been boy- and girlfriend. In 1996 she was living with a Con Christef and her young child, but when Renton got out of prison on 3 May and contacted her at her home at Kangaroo Avenue, Runaway Bay, she took up driving him about, which led to both of them being convicted of armed robbery.

  The first target, said the police, was the Morningside branch of the NAB on 8 May, followed on 27 May by a bank at Biggera Waters and, finally, one at Paradise Point on 13 June. The bank doors were rammed using stolen cars with, said the prosecution, Festa as the driver. Meanwhile, Renton, in the name of Donald White, had rented a nearby unit at Pine Ridge Road, paying $1160 in cash, and buying a $4000 Toyota, again in cash. When the police searched the Pine Ridge Road unit, they found guns, while at Kangaroo Avenue, there was a receipt for the Toyota. The pair’s spree was short lived. They were arrested on 19 June.

  The evidence against Renton and Festa was hotly contested. There was DNA evidence from the John T
onge Centre, which was seriously challenged, and a courthouse identification and voice identification for Festa. There was no proper record of the informal identification but the High Court allowed what it called ‘circumstantial identification evidence’.

  On the twelfth day of the trial, Festa disappeared, leaving a note saying that she was innocent but did not believe she was getting a fair trial. She went south and was not retrieved from Sydney for a year. The trial continued in her absence. Despite the lack of any evidence indicating Renton had also intended to abscond, the security around him now included handcuffs and leg shackles in the dock, and the elite Special Emergency Response Team sweeping all courtrooms and vis itors with metal detectors. Outside the Southport court complex, police snipers maintained a presence on the rooftops during the remainder of the trial.

  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.