A relatively new trend in robberies has been the ‘home invasion’, the worst form of robbery for a victim. It is one thing to be robbed in the workplace or on the street; it is quite another not to be safe in one’s home. Home invasions run the gamut of violence. At the relatively low end is an invasion such as the one by Schapelle Corby’s half-brother, James Kisina, in 2006, which resulted in a beating for the victim. Then there is the horrifying attack on Spiro Grafu, who, with a worker’s compensation payout, had bought himself a small farm near Ballarat. In August 1985 he was tied up, doused with petrol and set on fire. He died two days later.
There is no legal definition of home invasion. The term seems to have been coined by New South Wales police in Task Force Oak, which investigated a series of home raids in which Asian families were threatened by weapon-carrying gangs of three or more people. Actually, it is merely a new name for an old crime.
Home invasions began taking place shortly after the First Fleet arrived, and in 1790 William Harris and Edward Wildblood were hanged for a home invasion at Rose Hill. A century and a half later, the Sydney Razor Gangs of the 1920s adopted the practice with enthusiasm. It had then become so prevalent in New South Wales that it was dealt with there by the Crimes Act 1924.
The Act did not, of course, stop such invasions. On 27 March 1930 a number of men made an attempt on the Riley Street, Darlinghurst, house of the redoubtable Kate Leigh. They were looking for her chauffeur, Walter Tomlinson, who was considered to be a dobber. There had been a similar attack a week earlier, after which Leigh had bought herself a pea rifle and fifty cartridges. During the second attack, she shot and killed John Prendergast, known as Snowy because of his cocaine habit, and was charged with murder. The coroner acquitted Leigh and she would later say charitably, ‘I’ve never stopped saying a prayer of repose for the blackguard’s soul.’
Home invasions resurfaced as a major problem in the 1990s, and John Newman, the Cabramatta MP who was shot and killed in his driveway in September 1994, had suggested that Vietnamese youth gangs were responsible for their increase. But home invasions were not wholly an Asian crime. That year, bookmaker Lloyd Tidmarsh had been shot and killed in his home by masked and armed robbers, one of whom was said to be the notorious Jockey Smith. Chief Inspector Alan Leek thought home invasions were common among the Anglo-Saxon drug-taking community, which often did not report it. There had, he said, also been outbursts in the Greek and Lebanese communities.
About 10.30 p.m. on Thursday 24 October 1985, a five-strong gang invaded Jeff Lang’s 32-hectare property outside Yarra Glen. Sixty-one-year-old Lang ran a string of late-night chemists, and over the years he and his wife had collected antiques, gold, silver and a considerable amount of jewellery. Their four young children were asleep in bed, and Lang and his wife were in the living room, when the armed bandits, dressed alike in overalls, gloves and balaclavas, burst in. They carried shotguns and sawn-off rifles, and ransacked the house. The telephone was smashed and the telephone lines cut, and a gun held to Lang’s head as they demanded the keys to his safe.
Lang hesitated, and the robbers then woke the children. They brought Lang’s 12-year-old daughter into the living room, telling her that her parents would be shot in front of her if her father did not hand over the keys. Lang gave in, and the thieves stuffed their loot into thirty sausage-shaped bags and several of Lang’s briefcases. Before they left the property, they slashed the tyres on Lang’s Rolls-Royce, so no one could leave the premises and raise the alarm.
Amazingly, it turned out that the Langs had neither security nor insurance. The estimated resale value of the items stolen was a staggering $14 million—said to make it the single biggest robbery in Australian history—of which only $12 500 worth was recovered. The police believed the robbery was the work of a team they had dubbed the Collector Gang, or the Locusts, which had netted millions of dollars’ worth of goods in sixteen big east-coast robberies over the previous thirty months.
The gang had started by getting information from antique and philately circles, and stealing stamp and coin collections. They quickly moved on to stealing jewellery, paintings, antique clocks, ceramics, gold, silver and ivory. At first they seemed happy with hauls of $20 000 to $30 000, but after their information networks were established, they aimed higher, with the later hold-ups worth more than $1 million each time. Police believed the Collector Gang was headed by masterminds who organised local and overseas buyers ahead of a raid, and then farmed the jobs out to various minor gangs to conduct the robberies. At the time of the Lang robbery, a team of detectives was said to have been working with antique and philately associations for six months in an attempt to corner the gang. Seven months after the robbery, Mrs Lang heard noises outside the house and thought, wrongly, that her family was being burgled again—they were perfectly legitimate callers. She had a heart attack and died. She was aged thirty-six.
In 1988 Neville Mackley, his daughter Jennifer, her de facto, John Bannon, and Leon O’Garey were convicted of the robbery. Mackley, who turned informer and pleaded guilty, received ten years, with a minimum of seven, reduced on appeal to eight and six years respectively; and his daughter and Bannon received three years, with a pre-parole of two years. O’Garey pleaded not guilty, and after his conviction, his application for leave to appeal against a twelve-year sentence, with a minimum of nine years, was dismissed. He had claimed the sentence was excessive and that the judge had wrongly treated him as the ringleader.
In the meantime, on 7 October 1987, Douglas Frederick Robinson and Victor Campbell Loughnan received eleven and eight years respectively, for carrying out a home invasion on an elderly couple at their isolated farmhouse in Narbethong, north-east of Melbourne. The robbery netted $3.5 million of artworks, including a Raphael. It was a thoroughly professional job, with Robinson, who had seventeen priors, casing the farmhouse and cutting telephone links, and the pair equipping themselves with walkie-talkies and shotguns. But Robinson and Loughnan found that selling stolen art, unless it has been stolen to order, is often more difficult than the theft itself, and Robinson telephoned the couple several times, offering to sell their paintings back to them.
One of Australia’s worst home invasions took place in Brisbane on 31 July 2003, when 21-year-old university student and saxophonist Phil Evans arrived home. There, he found two men, who tied him up, taped his mouth, and then started hacking off his fingers with an axe. After he screamed when the first finger was cut off, the attackers told him that his flatmates were doused in petrol in the room next door and would be set on fire if he screamed again. Evans lost three fingers during the ordeal.
In March 2006 30-year-old David Ritchie pleaded guilty to involvement in the assault, claiming he had only been the getaway driver. He had earlier been caught in Sydney, after an unrelated high-speed chase, and had confessed to the police regarding the attack on Evans. He told the police that after the assault, one of the other robbers had said that they had attacked the wrong man. He was in trouble with a Brisbane drug lord, and to get himself off the hook had named a number of perfectly innocent university students, including Evans, putting the blame on them for the money he had lost. Ritchie received seven years. After surgery to reattach his fingers, Evans joined his parents in France, and while he was abroad, an instrument maker, Tom Sparkes, created a saxophone with slightly different fingering that he was able to play.
Bizarrely, almost to the day eight years later in July 2011 stockbroker Paul Shepherd was attacked after opening the front door of his Bulimba, Queensland, home to two men armed with weapons, who tried to cut off his fingers. Apart from telling the police they were stockily built Caucasians, Shepherd was unable to identify them.
In 2009 there was a spike in Sydney home invasions, with twenty-four attacks in the first three months of the year, but the figure has since remained fairly constant. Sydney Institute of Criminology lecturer Garner Clancey has expressed the view that home invasions may just be a ‘fad’ crime. Improving home security systems had made it harder for thieves to stage robberies when the premises were unoccupied, so now the trend was to attack when residents were at home. ‘[As] car jackings increased when manufacturers made cars harder to steal, the criminals evolve and adapt,’ he said. ‘The same with homes. As other types of targets become harder there can be a displacement of crime.’
In Tasmania in 2013 there was a spike in home invasions, with the invaders often operating in pairs and bashing the victims. In July that year, the Tasmanian Opposition called for more police funding to tackle violent crime after a gunman broke into a house at Mount Rumney on Hobart’s eastern shore and attacked the 65-year-old owner, before fleeing when alarms were activated.
On 29 May 2014 a 69-year-old truck driver and pig farmer, Keith Cini, was bashed to death in a home invasion at Badgerys Creek, Sydney. The target was a large amount of cash believed to have been kept on the premises. Two men have been charged with his killing and with another home invasion the previous month.
Statistics published in 2014 showed that, overall, violent crime in Australia, including home invasions, was down. However, in February 2016, Western Australia was named the home invasion capital, with a rate double the national average. Given that there are conflicting definitions of what constitutes a home invasion, this may, however, include simple and attempted breaks-ins.
In the past two years, there has been a disturbing increase in home invasions in and around Melbourne, with the Apex gang, mainly Sudanese and Somalian youths, breaking into houses to obtain the keys of smart cars, which can then be rebirthed. While at first this was a sneak-thief operation, the gangs, armed with machetes and baseball bats, are now kicking in doors.
Throughout Australia, sentences for serious home invasions have tended to run into double figures. Aaron Paul Pryce was quickly dis-abused when he thought an eight-year sentence was too much for his offence. He forced his way into a Rockhampton house with his offsider, Lindsay Winslade, on 4 December 2013. They held the residents hostage, cutting them with machetes—including cutting one man’s leg to the bone—and threatening to rape the women. At one stage, Winslade used a machete to lift up the towel one of the women was wearing, saying, ‘I haven’t had a root in a while and you are a fresh piece of meat, I might take you here and now.’
Pryce claimed he should have received a shorter sentence than Winslade, as he had a lesser criminal history. Justice Philip McMurdo said although other offenders had received lesser sentences for similar offences, this did not mean Pryce’s sentence was too harsh: ‘The present sentences, in my view, are heavy but ultimately I am unpersuaded that they are manifestly excessive.’