Gangland Robbers (27 page)

In 1987 Cashman complained about a report in the
Sunday Mail
that she had fallen in love with the lifer, writing to reporter Peter Hansen:

 

My marriage to Ray was and is sacred to me; I do not take my vows lightly. The love I shared with my husband, validated by our marriage, will continue to remain with me for the rest of my life.

 

In April 1988 she was transferred from Boggo Road back to Mulawa, where prison officers staged a walk-out protest. As a result, she was transferred to the segregation unit at Parklea men's prison in northwestern Sydney. And there was still the RSL robbery and the Auburn escape to be dealt with. The Australian criminal justice system sometimes grinds extremely slowly and it was not until April 1989 that all matters—Cashman was never charged with the RSL robbery—were finally dealt with. This left her with an additional five years on her sentence, and an extended non-parole period of three years and nine months. This time, however, the Court of Appeal ruled that Mr Justice Sinclair had not given her sufficient credit for her efforts at rehabilitation, and reduced the non-parole period so that she would be released within the year. She left prison on 22 September 1990, and went to live with her parents in Saratoga, New South Wales, before she rented her own place.

In 1991 her well-received autobiography
The Angel of Death
was published. In it, Cashman did not resile from her life with Kennedy and Wright:

 

I loved them both very much. I chose to go with them and I went. What I don't understand is how I got to be in a position where a criminal life was the right choice. I think it's about allegiances. You go with people who are your friends, whom you understand and who understand you.
When there is nobody else, where do you go?

 

But she still had not learned to choose her men wisely, and began a de facto relationship with Garrick Joseph Norman, who knew Jockey Smith. After the bank robber visited them in their New South Wales home in late November 1992, the police bugged the premises and taped the pair discussing how they would deal with around 5 kilos of marijuana. It took her and Norman a fortnight to discover the bugs, and within half an hour of dismantling them, they were arrested. Initially, Cashman's solicitor said she would contest the charge. She was remanded in custody and finally received seventeen months. Her criminal career had come full circle.

Upon her release, Cashman returned to the coast and resumed her work to stop young people following her into a life of crime. She died on 12 February 2003 in Gosford, where she had been living on the dole since her last release from prison. Aged forty-seven she had contracted pneumonia, followed by a virus, which, in turn, caused kidney problems.

Police officers who knew her grudgingly admired her. ‘At least she was staunch,' said one. ‘She never gave up an accomplice.
She never even gave up the
second man in the Wolston Park payroll heist.'

A friend delivered her epitaph:

 

How Julie lived her life depended on the men in her life.
Meeting the quieter ones in these
last few years meant she lived a quieter life.

 

One of the earliest Bonnies was rather less willing to sacrifice herself than were some of her later sisters. At 4.45 a.m. on 1 February 1968, Alan Raynor, the manager of the National Bank in the small town of Stratford in Gippsland, was woken by the screams of his wife, to find a masked man standing over him with a gun. Another shorter bandit, also wearing a suit and a long black mask was lurking in the passageway. The taller bandit said he wanted money from Raynor's bank next door. Raynor explained that the strongroom could not be opened without a key held by the teller. For four hours, the bandits held the family at gunpoint while they waited for the teller to turn up.

When he did, they forced Raynor to tie up the teller, open the strongroom and unlock the safe. As the taller bandit was stuffing more money into Raynor's daughter's schoolbag, the shorter bandit left the building. The teller managed to untie the ropes that held him, and he and Raynor slammed the strongroom door on the taller bandit. The police were called and 30-year-old Geoffrey Anderson Gair was arrested. In a search of a nearby unit, they found the shorter bandit, who turned out to be Lorraine Ann Kleehammer, a 21-year-old mother of two young children Gair and Kleehammer were charged with the armed robbery of $7500.

Kleehammer told the police how she had met a man she knew as Jeb Bannon in Sale in July 1967. He told her he was a journalist and abalone diver, but neglected to say that he was an escaped prisoner with a number of priors. Although she had a 10-month-old baby boy and was expecting another child, Bannon took her to Melbourne to live with him in Brunswick, before they went travelling around the countryside, staying in his caravan. He occasionally appeared to be doing some writing, but in September told her they needed money and would have to rob a bank.

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 Tonge 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.