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The Faraday School Kidnappings

It was a crime so bizarre and potentially horrendous that as it unfolded a nation sat and watched in horror. But when it was all over and the perpetrators were sent to jail, it wasn’t long before one of them was on the loose and committing an almost identical crime.

What would become known as the Faraday School Kidnappings began on the Friday afternoon of 6 October 1972. Until that day Faraday was a tiny little unknown village situated on the Calder Highway about 120 kilometres northwest of Melbourne. If it wasn’t for the speed signs warning motorists to slow down to 60 kilometres per hour, they would have sped through never knowing it was there. But by the end of that Friday, everyone in Australia would have heard of Faraday.

At about 3.30 that afternoon two men wearing beanies and armed with sawn-off shotguns strode into the Faraday school and ordered six girl students – aged between 5 and 11– and their schoolteacher, 20-year-old Mary Gibbs, to come with them as they were being kidnapped.

So ridiculous was the situation that at first the children thought it was a joke and began laughing. But their laughter quickly turned to tears as the men roughly loaded them and their teacher into a small red van that was parked out the front of the school. They were then driven away at a reckless pace into the nearby bush.

When the first of the mothers arrived shortly after 3.30 to pick up their children they found the school empty and a note pinned to the schoolhouse door that read ‘RANSOM WILL BE ONE MILLION’ with instructions on where to leave the money and in what denominations. The second part of the note sent them into a panic. It read:

 

We are not going to waste anyone’s time by making idle threats so we will cut it short by saying that any attempt to trace us or apprehend us will result in the annihilation of every hostage.

 

At 5 pm one of the kidnappers rang a Melbourne newspaper and repeated the threats if the ransom was not paid on time. In spite of the kidnappers warning of what would happen to the children should the police mount a search, hundreds of armed officers took to the bush.

As instructed, police bundled a million dollars into three suitcases and took them to the nearby Woodend post office where they were left on the steps for the kidnappers to collect. No one turned up. In the meantime the kidnappers had left Mary Gibbs and the children in the locked van while they took off, supposedly to pick up the ransom money.

Given the opportunity, the teacher kicked the back door of the van open and hurried the children away into the forest. She blindly led them into the bush for three hours until they were found by searching police. But in the meantime, the kidnappers had returned to the van and escaped.

With the descriptions of the two men in the newspapers and broadcast over the radio, it was only a matter of time before they were rounded up. In pre-dawn raids the kidnappers, 20-year-old Edwin John Eastwood and 32-year-old Robert Clyde Boland, were captured as they slept at their homes in suburban Melbourne. After their hostages had escaped they had apparently lost interest in their scheme and gone home to bed hoping that it would all just go away. That was not to be the case.

It seemed as though the two men, both plasterers by trade, had been planning their get-rich-quick scheme for months. They had even dug a large trench in the bush and covered it with galvanised iron to hold their hostages at gunpoint until the ransom was paid. But the scheme never got that far. Both Boland and Eastwood were sentenced to 15 years of hard labour for their crimes.

But that was not to be the end of it, for Eastwood at least. Four years later Eastwood and another prisoner escaped from Geelong medium security prison. After lying low for a couple of months Eastwood kidnapped nine children at gunpoint from the rural Wooreen State School in southern Victoria. This time Eastwood bound and gagged their teacher and chained him and the children together before loading them into a utility and driving off.

Police found a ransom note demanding $7 million in US currency, 100 kilograms of pure cocaine and 100 kilograms of heroin as well as an arsenal of guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition or the children would be killed one at a time. Police were terrified that this time he meant business.

In the meantime Eastwood had kidnapped two elderly couples and commandeered their campervan. He now had 14 hostages. Police spotted the camper the following day as it sped along the highway and an ensuing gun battle that had Eastwood firing at the police as he drove, ended when police shot out the tyres of the camper. Eastwood was captured as he fled into the bush and his terrified hostages were released.

Convicted on 27 counts, this time Eastwood was sentenced to life imprisonment.