by Malcolm Knox
Aslett took about $200 from Li’s wallet and another $30 or so in change from the car, then dragged his victim back to the store, forced him to open the doors and disable the alarm, and then to open the cash register. It was empty.
‘Where’s the big money?’ Aslett demanded.
Li maintained that he had no more cash. Aslett, pressing the gun barrel to Li’s back, forced him into a rear storeroom and told him to lie on the ground.
‘We’re going to kill you,’ he told Li. ‘Tell us where the money is.’
Finally he seemed to run out of nerve, or believe Li’s protestations. Stealing Jeky Li’s mobile phone, Aslett ordered him into the toilet and said if he left he would be killed. Some time later, Li came out and called the police.
But the police still couldn’t find Aslett, or connect him with the other crimes. At 5 pm the next day, Aslett was working the same patch. He sneaked into the Bob Jane T-Mart in Auburn just before it closed. The last employee to leave, Mathew Ryder, was confronted by Aslett in a balaclava holding the Smith & Wesson handgun. Bonham put his knife to Ryder’s throat. They took a small amount of cash from the till and from Ryder’s pocket, then ordered him to open the safe. He couldn’t—he was only a low-level employee without access to the safe. Aslett, in a fury, stalked around the store smashing all the landline telephones. He and his accomplice tied Ryder up and left him on the floor, stealing some mobile phones and car keys as they went. Out back, they found Ryder’s Ford Falcon utility parked on the tarmac, and drove it away. Aslett was about to make his biggest mistake yet.
The first of August fell on a Friday in 2003. That week Uncle Dud and Christopher Bonham had already stolen more than $10 000 in cash, two guns and ammunition, several mobile phones and a car in five separate forays. Aslett wasn’t satisfied. He was having more fun than ever, and he believed he was somehow invisible, undetectable by the authorities. The extreme ice user knows no limits.
Emad Youssef owned a pharmacy in Canley Heights, close to the convenience store which Aslett had robbed twice that week. When he closed up his pharmacy at 6.30 pm on the Friday and left with a staff member, Eva Keovongsack, Youssef might have had reason to look over his shoulder.
Youssef and Keovongsack took their cars out of a locked yard. Youssef got out to relock the gate. As he was getting back into his car, he was set upon by Aslett, who had been lurking behind the shopping strip in Mathew Ryder’s Ford Falcon utility.
Aslett pulled at Emad Youssef’s car door, and the pharmacist fought back. In the struggle, Aslett took the magnum pistol from his pocket and fired at point-blank range.
Eva Keovongsack heard the shot as she was driving away down a service lane. In her rear-vision mirror she saw Emad Youssef staggering towards her, calling her name. She left her car and ran back to him; he collapsed on the roadway, bleeding steadily. Keovongsack ran into another shop to get someone to call the police and an ambulance. By the time the ambulance officers arrived, Emad Youssef had died from his wounds.
Aslett, meanwhile, had flipped open Youssef’s boot and stolen his suitcase, then sped off to his sister Catherine’s house in Cabramatta West and told her and a friend, Irene, that he’d tried to rob the pharmacist but it had gone wrong and he’d accidentally shot him. He believed he’d only wounded Youssef in the shoulder. But he was panicking now. Later that night, he told Bonham to throw Youssef’s briefcase into a creek behind the Mount Pritchard Community Club.
If Aslett was shaken by the shooting, he was not deterred. He did what he had always done when the situation got hot: he ran away.
Still with Bonham in tow, Aslett drove to the Central Coast north of Sydney.
At around 6 pm on Wednesday 6 August, less than a week after killing Emad Youssef, Aslett was driving past a Ford dealership, Grawill Ford, in Tuggerah. He liked the look of a 1987 turbo Holden Commodore sedan sitting in the service area. The theft was simple in the darkness. Dudley Aslett and Christopher Bonham simply walked up to the Commodore, found the keys inside, and drove it away.
Two hours later they bailed up Warren Richardson as he was closing up the Toowoon Bay Cellars bottle shop. Again wearing the balaclava and waving the gun, accompanied by his mate, Aslett said to Richardson: ‘We don’t want to hurt you. We want the money.’ But just to make sure Richardson got the message, Aslett aimed the magnum at his stomach and said: ‘It has hollow-nose bullets.’
Aslett and Bonham pointed Richardson back into the bottle shop and ordered him to empty the cash register into a plastic bag. There was almost $600 in the take.
‘Where’s the rest of the money?’ Aslett demanded.
‘There is none,’ Richardson said.
Bonham said: ‘I’ll have some cigarettes then.’
They ordered Richardson to fill two plastic bags with packs of Long Beach and Winfield cigarettes, and also took some alcohol and a sports bag containing his jacket and some personal effects.
The cigarettes and alcohol were for Bonham, not Aslett. Dudley Aslett never drank or smoked tobacco. He just took ice, day after day, and heroin to soften the landing. When he needed more money, he went out to steal it. To steel himself for stealing, he took a drug which had consequences that even he, a hardened drug user, did not understand or anticipate.
He knew, though, that ice gave him Dutch courage. Five days after arriving on the Central Coast, at around 4.40 pm on Monday 11 August, Aslett and Bonham parked near the Ourimbah Medical Centre and walked to the local post office. They slipped on balaclavas and went inside. Aslett waved the .357 magnum revolver at the post office’s owner, Shirley Ellis, then jumped over the counter and raided the wooden cash drawers. He and Bonham put $1840 into a backpack and ran outside again, where they bumped into Haley Kuhn. Bonham shouted at her to give them her car keys. She resisted, and the teenaged boy started wrenching at her hand.
‘Don’t take it out on her, come on!’ Dudley Aslett called, and the pair ran off.
At some point they took the stolen Holden Commodore to The Entrance, where Dudley Aslett had a friend to whom he could sell auto parts. He and Bonham removed the steering wheel, stereo and speakers, turbo pop-off valve, mats, wheels and tyres, and on-sold them. The dismantled car was found near the intersection of Bay Road and Ocean Parade on 21 August.
Two days after the Ourimbah post office robbery, Paul and Jennifer Marlow were locking up their newsagency in the Central Coast hamlet of Maidens Brush. The couple, in their fifties, went through the same routine every evening at around 6.30 pm. Paul took the rubbish out the rear door, before coming back inside and leaving with Jennifer.
On 13 August, Paul Marlow was being watched. When he went outside, Aslett and Bonham burst in with balaclavas and bailed up Jennifer Marlow.
‘Open the safe, you cunt,’ Aslett said.
Jennifer said: ‘I don’t know how.’
‘Yes you do, cunt. Lie on the floor. Look at the wall, don’t look at me.’
Jennifer lay down but couldn’t restrain a scream. Paul Marlow came to the back door to find Aslett pointing the gun at him. Paul was able to run away, though, and he got the owner of the next shop in the little mall to call the police.
Aslett snarled some more at Jennifer Marlow but, realising that her husband was getting help, he soon left, taking only a black briefcase with some personal papers inside. He threw it out the car window while driving away.
Things were fully out of control by now. The next afternoon, Aslett and Bonham drove the stolen Commodore to the Bateau Bay post office, donned balaclavas and bailed up the owners, Gary and Beryl Ives, and a customer, Gregory Culpan. They stole $4019 from behind the counter and Culpan’s wallet, which contained only $10.
It was six days before Aslett struck again. Bonham split for the north coast, hiding out in a caravan park in Lismore. Meanwhile the $4000 haul from Bateau Bay kept Aslett on a high, but running out of drugs gave him an unquenchable need to go out and steal again. This time, on 20 August, he netted his biggest cash haul yet—as well as two cars in on
e day.
On Wednesday 20 August, Aslett kicked off the day by stealing a 1985 maroon Holden Commodore from the Supa Centre at Tuggerah. He drove the maroon Commodore to the rooftop parking area at the Westfield shopping centre at Tuggerah and then stole another Commodore, a red 1989 model, which he drove down to the parking area at the back of the National Australia Bank. At about five minutes to four, just before the bank’s closing time, Aslett, wearing not his usual balaclava but a cap and sunglasses, strolled into the Westfield mall and made for the National Australia Bank branch, where he fronted up to Peter Sutherland, a young worker at an open inquiry desk.
Aslett threw a plastic bag at him. It fell to the floor. Sutherland bent down to pick it up. When he raised his eyes, he saw Aslett pointing the .357 magnum revolver at him, partially concealed by a leather holster.
‘Fill it up,’ Aslett hissed, motioning to the bag. ‘Do as I say and no one will get hurt.’
Sutherland pressed the entry code into the tellers’ area. Aslett followed him in, as if he was a client with a bank official going inside for a private meeting. Sutherland removed all of the cash from the top three drawers between the two female tellers who were working, and placed it in the plastic bag.
‘Where’s the rest?’ Aslett insisted.
Sutherland opened another drawer and put three bundles of $50 notes into Aslett’s bag.
‘Don’t look at me,’ Aslett warned him. ‘Give me that mobile phone.’
He pointed to a phone sitting on a counter. It belonged to one of the female tellers, Gillian Hickman. Sutherland put it in the bag. Aslett let himself out the back door and calmly, quietly, walked away with $28 075 in Australian currency, 20 pounds sterling, and 300 euros, as well as a mobile phone, in his bag. It was a handsome booty, and Aslett’s last cash theft.
He drove the stolen red Commodore back up to the roof, switched into the stolen maroon Commodore, and drove off to Long Jetty, where he dumped the car on Anzac Road.
Flush with the money from the NAB robbery, Aslett probably decided that he’d pushed his luck as far as it would go on the Central Coast. He bought a second-hand car and drove back down to Sydney. He was worried about Emad Youssef, who he’d heard had died. Aslett must have known the police would be on his trail, so he didn’t stay at his sister’s house in Cabramatta. Instead, he went to a friend’s home at Busby, near Liverpool, and hid out for another night.
Meanwhile, Bonham was arrested at the caravan park in Lismore. He admitted having broken into the As’ home in Newington, but denied having raped SA with the man they called Uncle.
‘What’s their uncle’s name?’ the police asked Bonham.
‘Dudley.’
‘What’s his surname?’
‘I don’t know, might be the same as my mates.’
‘Okay. What does Dudley look like?’
‘He’s Aboriginal, bald hair, sort of like . . . I think he had a goatee or somethin’, I dunno, sort of.’
‘How old is Dudley?’
‘He’s about 30, 30-something, maybe 28, 20, I dunno.’
‘Have you ever seen Dudley before?’
‘I seen him once.’
‘Where was that?’
‘At a mate’s house, at Steven’s house.’
‘What did Steven call him?’
‘Uncle.’
Bonham said that Dudley and Steven Aslett had had sex with SA, but he and the seventeen-year-old hadn’t. He named Dudley as the ringleader, but a year later, in court, he recanted on his Lismore confession and refused to give evidence against anyone else, including Uncle Dud.
It’s unclear if Bonham told the police during the Lismore interview where Dudley Aslett had gone, but within two days they had tracked him down to the house in Busby. At 10.50 pm on 22 August, members of the Tactical Operations Unit surrounded the house. Aslett saw them, and tried to escape through the backyard. He was spotted by two senior constables, who called out to him to stop. Ignoring them, he leapt the back fence and threw away a bag that contained the Smith & Wesson revolver. The two policemen quickly caught him and placed him under arrest, bringing to an end a singularly shocking spree, the ice-fuelled culmination of a lifetime of crime.
Four days later, while police interviewed him at Silverwater jail, Aslett broke down, crying and saying, ‘I can’t sleep, I’m thinking about the man I killed.’ In a later interview he revealed that a friend had shown him how Emad Youssef left his pharmacy every day. Aslett had watched and planned, cold-bloodedly. On the fatal day, he smoked ice and heroin before committing what he thought would be a simple robbery. He said he’d only used the gun to scare Youssef, and hadn’t meant to fire it at him. When he’d run away, he said, he thought he’d only wounded Youssef in the shoulder.
What is there to say about Dudley Aslett? He expressed some remorse over the death of Emad Youssef and the rape of the two young women, though this went no deeper than saying he ‘felt bad’ and had ‘bad dreams’ about what he’d done. In court his counsel detailed his drug use, his prior criminal history, and his truly appalling young life spent mostly in one form of detention or another. But while these factors were taken into account by successive trial and appeal judges, none gained Aslett any mercy or were seen to mitigate his crimes. In the NSW Supreme Court, Justice James Wood gave a succinct summary of Aslett’s life and crimes:
It is rare that one can say, with any confidence, that a Prisoner presents a very serious ongoing danger to the community, or that his rehabilitation prospects are negligible. The present however is a case where I am satisfied beyond any reasonable doubt . . .
The Prisoner has shown himself to have no regard for person or property, he has ignored the lessons which his prior sentences should have conveyed, and he has effectively placed himself outside all normal standards of behaviour or constraints of civilised living. The manner in which he posed with a fistful of bank notes and with a pistol on his hip in [a] photograph which was tendered, says much as to the way in which he regards himself.
The psychological profile similarly holds out very little hope of him ever being rehabilitated, or of controlling his aggressive and dangerous impulses. He came from a supportive family. While it was a big family which had its own problems, with the exception of the alleged sexual abuse by a stepbrother, of which no evidence came from the Prisoner or his mother, there is nothing to suggest that his early years were particularly dysfunctional.
His subsequent periods of custody either in boys’ homes, in detention centres or in adult prisons have, no doubt, hardened him to the point where, if he is not already institutionalised, he is very close to it. Again, his history of almost continuous detention away from his family, and the inevitable exposure to delinquent peer behaviour, almost certainly go a long way to explaining where he is today, and why he has chosen to continue offending.
On Aslett’s drug use at the time of the crimes, Justice Wood said: ‘[T]hey included “ice”; and . . . may also have included cannabis, heroin and cocaine.
‘The abuse of drugs by the Prisoner helps to explain his behaviour but it does not excuse it.’
Justice Wood applied the legal principles established in the case of R v Henry in 1999, which included:
(a) the need to acquire funds to support a drug habit, even a severe habit, is not an excuse to commit an armed robbery or any similar offence, and of itself is not a matter of mitigation;
(b) however the fact that an offence is motivated by such a need may be taken into account as a factor relevant to the objective criminality of the offence in so far as it may throw light on matters such as:
(i) the impulsivity of the offence and the extent of any planning for it;
(ii) the existence or non existence of any alternative reason that may have operated in aggravation of the offence, e.g. that it was motivated to fund some other serious criminal venture or to support a campaign of terrorism;
(iii) the state of mind or capacity of the offender to exercise judgment, e.g. if he or she was in
the grips of an extreme state of withdrawal of the kind that may have led to a frank disorder of thought processes or to the act being other than a willed act;
(c) It may also be relevant as a subjective circumstance, in so far as the origin or extent of the addiction, and any attempts to overcome it, might:
(i) impact upon the prospects of recidivism/rehabilitation, in which respect it may on occasions prove to be a two-edged sword;
(ii) suggest that the addiction was not a matter of personal choice but was attributable to some other event for which the offender was not primarily responsible, for example where it arose as the result of the medical prescription of potentially addictive drugs following injury, illness, or surgery; or where it occurred at a very young age, or in a person whose mental or intellectual capacity was impaired, so that their ability to exercise appropriate judgment or choice was incomplete;
(iii) justify special consideration in the case of offenders judged to be at the ‘cross roads’.
Justice Wood said that giving Aslett any benefit of these mitigating circumstances would be an act of ‘irresponsibility’. He sentenced Aslett to life imprisonment for the murder and the sexual assaults, and a variety of long sentences for the other sixteen counts. In effect, he would have been eligible for parole on 21 August 2036, when he would be a 65-year-old man. On appeal, the Court of Criminal Appeal increased this term so that Aslett has no hope of parole until 2044, when he will be 73.
Without mitigating or excusing Aslett in any way, it is still possible to ask the question: Would Aslett have committed his crimes without the influence of ice? Legally and morally, it’s irresponsible to ‘blame’ the drug. Aslett deserved his long sentences. But in a study of crystal methamphetamine, it is instructive to remember that Aslett had previously been a smalltime crook with a staple cycle of break and enter, car theft and heroin use. He had been no more violent than threatening police or victims in the course of his usual robberies. He had no record of sexual violence. His accomplices had no prior criminal records. But Dudley Aslett had found ice, or ice had found him. Within weeks, he led robberies that turned into rape and murder.