When thirteen police waited to ambush a gang wanted for a crime wave covering a thousand kilometres they knew that at least one of the suspects would not do anything silly. With a criminal record spanning seven decades, Aubrey Maurice Broughill always knew when the game was up.
As six uniformed police and seven detectives ran towards the white Holden panel van in Keilor Downs, Aubrey sat quietly in the passenger seat with a look of resignation on his face. He knew police would not have to hunt far and wide for incriminating evidence – right behind him in the van was a stolen lawn mower all the way from South Australia.
With diabetes, high blood pressure and a bad heart, he knew there was no point making a run for it. To make matters worse it was his birthday.
He had just turned seventy-three.
Arresting officer, Senior Detective John McIllree, of the stolen motor vehicle squad, said Broughill was polite and calm. ‘He knew what it was all about. He’d been through it all so many times I don’t think he was worried.’ Broughill had, in fact, been a seasoned criminal before any of the policemen confronting him were born.
He was first confronted by an arresting officer in September 1938 when he was charged with housebreaking and larceny. He was twelve.
But even after being caught red handed sixty-one years later, Aubrey Broughill remains under investigation – this time as a victim rather than a perpetrator. Unfortunately, as much as he might have liked to, he hasn’t been able to help the police in the matter. That is because it is his death that is under investigation, ever since his body was found in mysterious circumstances in a flooded Wodonga quarry in February, 1999.
For a career criminal, Broughill kept a relatively low profile until 1961, when he stole a 4000 pound payroll from the Camberwell Town Hall and was later sentenced to eight years for his effort.
After his release in the mid-1960s he remained clear of the law, and later told a reporter that among other things, he’d worked as a boundary rider in the outback and a chef in an exclusive Sydney girls’ school.
He eventually returned to Melbourne and settled in Geelong with his much younger de facto wife. Unemployed and with debts, he returned to armed robbery in 1978.
Aged fifty two, he became known as the ‘Beanie Bandit’ when he robbed seven banks. He wore a beanie or cap and made no real attempts to disguise his identity. He had always been a little careless in matters of concealment, having previously been convicted in 1951 of wilful exposure.
Even though police had excellent security pictures of the ‘Beanie Bandit’ they had no idea of his name until he robbed a State Bank in North Blackburn on 8 March, 1979.
One off-duty constable saw him leave the bank and jotted down the registration number as the bandit jumped into his getaway car. Sadly, for Aubrey, he had decided to drive his own car, thus breaking one of the first rules of the robber’s handbook.
The car registration showed his home address in Corio and members of the armed robbery squad actually beat him home that day. The old boundary rider wasn’t one for speeding, especially when armed.
‘He was an obliging old soul,’ Senior Detective Graham Creece, was to recall later. ‘If there was such a thing as a gentleman bandit it was Aubrey. I felt quite sorry for him really, but you have to remember, he was still doing stick-ups that left victims traumatised.’
Senior Detective Creece said that once he was caught Broughill confessed readily, even showing police where he hid his takings in a relative’s woodpile. ‘He spent most of the money doing up his house.’
He was sentenced to fifteen years with a minimum of twelve when he pleaded guilty to all seven charges but, as a model prisoner, he received full remissions and was released after seven years on 21 November, 1986.
If he left jail with good intentions they didn’t last long. He could not find a job. There was no great demand for a sixty-year-old diesel fitter with a long criminal record. Within two weeks he bought a giant 44 handgun for $1000 and was back in the bank business, robbing the Wantirna National Bank of $11,000. ‘I couldn’t find work. I kept getting knocked back so I decided to get a gun and do a stick-up,’ he was to explain.
Unlike some senior citizens, he had no fear of flying and resisted the temptation to fill in the autumn of his life playing bowls. He flew to Brisbane for one job but found the pickings better in the south, robbing a further seven banks and two building societies in Melbourne over the next three months, escaping with a total of more than $50,000. His biggest haul was $15,597 from a bank in Heathmont on 17 December, his worst $410.50c in coins from a credit co-op on 14 January, 1987.
This time police had no doubt who they were after. The security picture at the first bank identified the gunman as Broughill and detectives believed he would hide out around Geelong.
His career-long carelessness about disguises continued. During one robbery on the National Australia Bank in Seville he walked up to the accountant and produced his giant handgun. The accountant said, ‘that’s not funny, put it away.’
Broughill responded ‘No, that’s not funny, this is the real thing.’
But the veteran armed robber had got the normal bandit’s routine out of order. He was menacing the victim before putting on his disguise. While trying to persuade the sceptical accountant that this was a real stick-up he put on his balaclava. ‘He was actually putting it on when I told him to put the firearm away.’
At least Aubrey had learned one trick. He decided to live near Traralgon, 200 kilometres east of where police were looking for him. Nick-named ‘Grandpa Harry’ due to his age and because he used the same sort of gun as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character, he set up a flat, but he knew not to take out a long lease.
In early 1987, Broughill’s mother died in a nursing home. Through brilliant crime intelligence gathering armed robbery squad detectives knew of this development in the wanted man’s personal life. They were convinced their man would turn up at the funeral, and so two car-loads of armed robbery squad detectives, all carrying shotguns, parked near the Box Hill cemetery. Undercover police mingled with the mourners at the 11am burial. An expert surveillance officer, known as ‘The Gnome’, muttered into his concealed microphone that he had identified the target. He told the armed robbery squad members he was certain Broughill had arrived – dressed as an old woman.
Before the detectives burst in on the funeral and wrestled the dress-wearing suspect to the ground, they asked for a confirmation of the identification. The Gnome’ responded that on second sighting it appeared the ‘suspect’ was indeed an elderly woman with a slight facial hair problem.
The surveillance police were so successful in infiltrating the funeral that suspicious mourners approached them, pointed out a group of nearby grave diggers and warned the undercover officers that the men with spades were obviously armed robbery squad detectives observing proceedings in the hunt for their friend Aubrey.
Detectives returned to the cemetery at 3 pm and hid in bushes believing their man may arrive to show his respects to his mother later in the day. He didn’t.
Police were warned through underworld contacts that Broughill had vowed to stay out of jail and was prepared to ‘shoot it out.’ But when armed robbery squad detectives raided his flat on 10 February, 1987, with guns drawn he did not resist. They found a man more likely to greet them with a warm cup of Milo than a blazing magnum.
‘Geeze, you gave me a scare before. I was expecting you sooner or later, I knew that I had to be caught … Yeah mate, I’ll come quiet, I’ll be no trouble.’
Legendary armed robbery investigator, the gregarious Detective Senior Sergeant Ray Watson, recalls taking part in the raid. ‘We had information that Aubrey would shoot but when we crashed in the door there was no venom in him at all.
‘He was polite and of the old school – prepared to talk about his involvement without ever talking about any criminal associates.’
When asked the name of his getaway driver during the robberies he replied: ‘You’re not going to ask me to give somebody up are you?’
When Senior Detective Mark ‘Nasty’ Harris asked Broughill why he carried a handgun the response was straight forward. ‘You can’t rob a bank without a gun.’
This time the prolific bandit was sentenced to sixteen years jail with a minimum of twelve. His police papers were marked, ‘will probably re-offend if he is ever released.’
In February, 1994, he was given a day release from Castlemaine prison to prepare for life on the outside, but when he got to Melbourne he had a few beers in a pub and missed the train back to jail.
As an escaper he proved to be as cunning as a lemming. He stayed on the run – or, more accurately, on the stroll – for two weeks before he was spotted by an off-duty prison officer and arrested. His barrister, Brendan Wilkinson, said Aubrey was one of his favorite clients. ‘Inside jail he was king of the kids.’ Wilkinson said Broughill kept large blow-up photographs on his cell wall of the security pictures from his armed robberies.
‘He was always friendly. I suspect even judges liked him.’
When he was released from prison on 27 November, 1995, he moved in with his younger sister in an outer Melbourne suburb. ‘When he was with me he was never in trouble,’ she said. ‘What he did was wrong and he paid for it, but he was never a violent gangster type.’
But that December he left – ‘He was always a roamer’ – and headed off with associates.
Police allege he was involved in a number of crimes, including car thefts and stealing computer equipment attached to six grain silos from Ouyen to the South Australian border. After his arrest on 12 January, 1999, police recovered two .45 pistols that may have been used in other unsolved crimes in Victoria and South Australia.
He was charged with two counts of car theft and six of burglary and bailed on the condition he report twice a week at the Boronia police station. But, never one for the subtleties of the criminal justice system, Aubrey turned up just once before he disappeared again.
His body was found face down in a water-filled quarry in Wodonga on 17 February, 1999. Police believe he had been in the water a week.
Why he was there and how he died remain mysteries that may never be solved.
The man who found his body, Reg Golding, said many locals didn’t know of the disused quarry’s location. He said it was not near a walking track and thirty metres from a rarely used dirt road that runs off the Hume Freeway.
No car, possessions or campsite were found in the area. His car had been seized by police when he was arrested. Why he was in Wodonga or how he got there remains a mystery.
Strange wounds on the body fed suspicions of foul play but an autopsy indicated the damage had been done by tortoises.
The head of the homicide squad, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins, said that despite an autopsy a cause of death had not been established.
The case was eventually handed back to local police because there were no obvious signs of foul play.
No-one ever really knew what made Aubrey tick, and now no-one knows why he stopped ticking. Murder, suicide or natural causes? None can be discounted.
‘His sleeping bag and knapsack weren’t found. I don’t think we’ll ever know what really happened,’ his sister said.
RICKY Renzella is no Bart Cummings but he is part of horse racing folklore, even if he hasn’t legally been on a track for more than twenty five years.
Long before the Fine Cotton scam there was the Royal School ring-in at Casterton races in western Victoria in 1972. Ricky Renzella was a racehorse owner and punter with an eye for the main chance. He switched the well-performed city sprinter Regal Vista for a mediocre country horse, Royal School, to win the Muntham Handicap. The winner’s stake money was only $325 but Renzella had coupled ‘Royal School’ with the Casterton Cup field in doubles bets and won $33,000 … and, later, two years jail.
The rort was exposed after a veteran trainer and expert horseman, the late Jim Cerchi senior, recognised Regal Vista in the mounting yard. Legend has it that the wily Cerchi backed ‘Royal School’ and waited until after the race before being sure enough about the matter to reveal his suspicions to stewards who weren’t as sharp-eyed as he was. Cerchi did, after all, have 13 children to provide for, an excuse that Renzella would have been pleased to adopt in the following weeks.
There followed a comedy of errors in which police sleuths attempted unsuccessfully to find Regal Vista, who mysteriously vanished after the race, while the ‘right’ horse, Royal School, was exactly where he belonged, eating up his oats as if he’d just won the Muntham Handicap, fair and square.
Rumors abounded that Regal Vista had been killed and used for crayfish bait, but an enterprising reporter eventually found him at the farm of a small-time trainer near Sale. He still had a piece of white calf skin glued to his head to make him look like Royal School. He also had the large scars on his rump – legacy of an early accident – that Jim Cerchi had recognised at Casterton. Afterwards, Renzella carried a few scars as well. He was banned from race tracks for life and got two years jail – despite an impassioned defence by his barrister, Phil Opas, QC, the man who had unsuccessfully defended Ronald Ryan before he went to the gallows a few years earlier. The kind-hearted lawyer later took both Royal School and Regal Vista to his country property, where they lived out their lives in peace as family hacks.
Renzella, however, did not fade into retirement so gracefully. In fact, he was just beginning. When he was released from jail he decided he needed a new profession. He became a used car salesman.
It came as no great surprise to those who knew him that ‘Honest Rick’ was named in State Parliament in 1985 as being a dishonest car trader who wound back speedos on cars and trucks. An attempt to find him unfit to hold a licence in 1986 failed.
To police, Ricky was just another small-time, Runyonesque spiv, always looking for the short-cut to a big earn. He never stopped trying.
Sick of tarting up rust buckets to sell, he decided it would be much more profitable to steal cars to re-sell rather than going to the trouble and expense of buying them first.
In November, 1992, Gabriel Chase found his two-year-old Toyota Landcruiser had been stolen. A week later he noticed a used car advertisement for a car, suspiciously similar to his own.
He went to a car yard in Mordialloc and saw his car, minus number plates, for sale. He alerted the police.
Detectives from the stolen motor vehicles squad started an investigation. They wanted to code name it ‘Ring-In’ but were told to call it ‘Cruiser.’ Police raided a workshop at the back of the car yard and found eleven Toyota Landcruisers in various states of alteration.
The cars had been stolen around Melbourne. Their engine and chassis numbers were changed, they were given new wheels, re-registered and given the usual detailing to make them look ‘as new.’
Ricky Renzella had graduated from race fixer to international car thief. Police found he had sold seven stolen vehicles, including a Mercedes and an eighteen-seater bus, to an agent in Nauru.
Detectives later discovered he had stolen fifty seven vehicles, mostly Landcruisers, with a value of around $1.5 million.
Renzella was grabbed when he returned from a business trip to the Philippines. After being refused bail at the Magistrates’ Court he was later freed by the Supreme Court. In July, 1993, police received information that Renzella was back in business but a week-long surveillance operation came up with nothing.
In November that year they tried again and within four hours they caught him red-handed.
He was followed in his Mercedes to the car park at the Southland shopping centre. Police watched as he dropped off his partner who stole a Landcruiser in less than ninety seconds.
Renzella could not help himself. He promised his car thief $1500 a car but ultimately refused to pay him. It was hardly a case for the Small Claims Tribunal. Detectives found their factory in Highett. Inside were twenty five Landcruisers being cut up and dismantled for spare parts to be sold through wreckers yards.
Ultimately the Motor Car Traders Guarantee Fund repaid more than $500,000 to people who bought Renzella’s hot cars, but many still found themselves out of pocket.
Renzella, a man of many parts, was also growing a large hydroponic cannabis crop valued around $1 million. The artificial lights above the crop were on rails and moved automatically, simulating the sun from dawn to dusk.
Police said Renzella and his team could turn a roadworthy Landcruiser into parts and scrap metal in less than twelve hours.
Detective Sergeant Martin O’Brien said Renzella ‘would never get angry, he was very smooth. He was obviously a very good conman.’
A regular at the casino, he would normally carry between $1000 to $2000 cash. ‘He liked to be seen as a high flier,’ Detective Sergeant O’Brien said.
His barrister, Nick Papas, told the County Court after his client pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud that Renzella had been dogged for decades by the Royal School controversy.
He said Renzella found it difficult to get business loans and was constantly recognised as the organiser of the Casterton ring-in.
Judge Barnett sentenced Renzella to an extra six months on top of the jail term he is presently serving. His release date has been set for 1 January, 2001.
When Renzella was arrested police found thirteen TAB tickets in his pocket. Only one was a winner. Some things never change.
IN THE underworld, Colin George McKane is a nonentity, just another time server in a prison system filled with men and women who lack the skills to prosper in mainstream society.
In the jail pecking order McKane is a bottom dweller, the type who needs to be protected from bigger, tougher men who take an instant dislike to his type of offender. But, outside jail, he changes from the hunted to the hunter – a predator, far more dangerous and unpredictable than the most prolific armed robbers.
For at least twenty-five years McKane, now aged over 40, has been every parent’s nightmare. In his miserable ‘career’ he attempted to bury a teenager alive, abducted girls from the street and made hundreds of obscene phone calls that left children terrified and traumatised for decades. He has refused prison sex-therapy programs, flouted parole conditions and reoffended every time he is released from prison.
Even though he was a known habitual sex offender he was allowed to remain free in 1997 for more than a month, following a parole breach. He was sent back to jail only after he attacked a ten-year-old girl. His criminal speciality has been to abduct young girls at random, then use a weapon – guns, knives, scissors and a tyre brace – to assault his victims.
Late in 1998 he pleaded guilty in the County Court to abduction and indecent assault and lawyers from the Office of Public Prosecutions asked Judge Leo Hart to declare McKane a dangerous offender, so he could be sentenced to prison indefinitely.
Police say McKane has one of the worst records for sexual offences over three decades, involving more than twelve attacks on girls aged between seven and sixteen. ‘He looks like an average Joe, but he is quite chilling,’ said one detective who interviewed him.
In a confidential police report in 1992, McKane was described as ‘a real threat to females and children. He is a definite sexual deviant and while serving his last prison sentence for rape, declined … medical assistance and counselling’.
In 1977, a psychiatrist wrote: ‘Colin McKane has a history of sexual deviation going back over some years. He has twice been charged for indecent exposure. On the first occasion he was only fifteen years old … I think he needs to be hospitalised for further psychiatric assessment in his own interest and also in the public interest.’
He told another psychiatrist he had impulses to expose himself since he was fifteen. Doctors placed him on a drug to try and lower his sex drive. It failed to work. They considered giving him female hormones and behavior therapy but McKane continued to offend.
He met and married a young women on 24 September, 1977, but after a short honeymoon he returned to his sexual obsessions.
On 18 October he exposed himself to two schoolgirls and later the same day he used a rifle to abduct a young girl.
‘This overt aggressive sexual inference with a young girl is a new and rather sinister departure from his previous behavior,’ his psychiatrist wrote.
‘His doctor accurately predicted it was likely his patient would get worse – and more dangerous. ‘Unless Mr McKane responds to a course of treatment for his sexual deviation, the chances are he will continue to offend. In the past he has only exposed himself, but this recent act shows evidence of overt sexual aggression. Previous psychiatric treatment with medication and supportive therapy has not been successful.’ The Parole Board found he was ‘a long-term recidivist sexual offender, progressing from indecent exposure to indecent assault. Offences had involved knives, scissors and once an unloaded rifle … also notable has been his lack of impulse control, no sense of responsibility of right and wrong and no remorse.’
The Board found him to be an ‘angry and violent man.’
A former Warrnambool senior detective, Peter Mackay, knows McKane well. ‘He is a sexual predator, the worst I’ve seen. Over the years he’s got worse. He continues to offend as soon as he’s released from jail. He will be highly dangerous all his life. He once refused parole because when he got out he didn’t want anyone to be able to keep tabs on him.’
In October, 1984, McKane hit a sixteen-year-old girl with a tyre brace in Warrnambool as she was walking home. He dragged her into his car, drove to a nearby beach, assaulted her and then dumped her in a hole, covering her with bracken and debris.
The girl pretended to be dead and escaped when McKane left. ‘He thought he’d killed her and he left her for dead,’ Mackay said. She ran naked for more than a kilometre to get help. Police were inspecting the crime scene later that night when McKane drove up the dead-end street. ‘He came back with a shovel. We believe he was going to bury her,’ Senior Detective John Norris said.
The father of one of his victims vowed to kill McKane but died before the rapist’s release. ‘There is no doubt in my mind the father would have killed him,’ a policeman said.
According to police, McKane identified young girls whose pictures appeared in Geelong papers and then made obscene and threatening phone calls to them. Mackay said McKane made at least one hundred calls to one girl, leaving her terrified. In 1995, he was jailed for making threatening calls. Two years later he was paroled under a Commonwealth order, even though he had refused treatment for sex offenders while in jail.
‘He concluded that he was unwilling to address any of these program areas and does not consider himself a sex offender,’ according to a Commonwealth parole report.
In July, 1997, he was released on parole under strict conditions. McKane was told he risked being sent back to jail if he went near schools or public toilets, associated with people under eighteen or continued ‘terrorising people over the phone.’
But, within three months of his release, he was already found to have breached his parole by associating with children, and moves were made to send him back to jail. He was allowed to remain free for more than a month, until he attacked children again.
On 11 December, 1997, he was on his way home to Hamilton from Melbourne, where he visited his psychologist as part of his parole conditions, when he saw a Christmas street party in a small country town.
It was just after 9pm. Santa Claus arrived on the local CFA truck with presents for local children but just after 9.30pm the fire alarm sounded and the truck headed off to a grass fire out of town.
Police said the children followed the truck until it turned off the highway, about 500 metres out of town. McKane followed the group, grabbed a ten-year-old girl and carried her off the road.
According to police, her screams alerted a friend, another ten-year-old girl, who followed. As the man attempted to sexually assault his victim, the friend attacked.
‘Her little mate punched into him, yelling, ‘Don’t you hurt her!’… She was very brave,’ said Senior Detective Tess Walsh of the rape squad.
The two girls acted instinctively and their actions stopped the attack becoming even more serious.’
Senior Detective Walsh said McKane showed no remorse over his actions. ‘He seemed to have no concept of the consequences of what he had done.’
Judge Hart refused to give McKane an indefinite sentence, but ordered him to serve a jail term of at least nine years. He will be about fifty when he is released and there are no indications he will have changed. He will have had a lot of time inside to plan his next attack.