Speaker 1: Listeners should be born that this episode of Life and
Speaker 1: Crimes contains graphic imagery and language, and there is no
Speaker 1: doubt that the story we tell today is extremely disturbing,
Speaker 1: which it has to be. He was an unidentified intruder
Speaker 1: who preyed on women home alone, after studying their movements
Speaker 1: the way a crocodile watches and waits for prey. Born
Speaker 1: to a violent alcoholic father and a frightened mother, trapped
Speaker 1: by poverty to a life of family violence, His origin
Speaker 1: raises the question of whether he was born bad or
Speaker 1: made that way? Was it nature or nurture, a question
Speaker 1: we've asked many times in these podcasts. I'm Andrew Rule.
Speaker 1: This is Life in Crimes. It's thirty years since a
Speaker 1: prison officer took hold of a convicted rapist and led
Speaker 1: him out and put him in a van and took
Speaker 1: him off to prison, where he has remained until this day.
Speaker 1: That man's name was Christopher Clarence Hall, but he was
Speaker 1: known for many months as the Ascot Veil rapist, the
Speaker 1: sex attacker who terrorized Melbourne for nine long months in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two and nineteen ninety three, And as it
Speaker 1: turns out, he was a man who had raped other
Speaker 1: people even before that. I'm now going to read a short,
Speaker 1: sharp story that sums up the life and crimes of
Speaker 1: Christopher Clarence Hall, who might soon walk amongst us again.
Speaker 1: This is a version of the story I wrote for
Speaker 1: the Sunday Herald Sun. It was a big day for
Speaker 1: crime news. Serial self mutilator and would be mass killer
Speaker 1: Garret David finally died in a security ward from bizarre
Speaker 1: self inflicted wounds, such as slicing off his penis three times.
Speaker 1: Some pitied the tortured soul, but few mourned him, saydistic
Speaker 1: sex offendern certified scum ian Melrose Patterson died of cancer
Speaker 1: that same day, not before time. Even the palliative care
Speaker 1: nurses hated being near the dying Patterson because he was
Speaker 1: such a creep. Finally, the man dubbed the ascot val
Speaker 1: rapist was arrested after nine months of terrorizing women across
Speaker 1: the northwestern suburbs of Melbourne. It was June the eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. Melbourne's long night of fear and loathing
Speaker 1: was over. In daylight and in handcuffs. The figure who'd
Speaker 1: caused such anguish and terror didn't look like a monster.
Speaker 1: In daylight, he'd shrunk back into a pathetic human, just
Speaker 1: an ordinary looking forty year old man with an ordinary name.
Speaker 1: Anyone looking for outward signs of the cruelty he displayed
Speaker 1: to the women he attacked might have glimpsed it in
Speaker 1: eyes that seemed as dead as a shark's. He stopped
Speaker 1: short of murder, but extreme violence never seemed far away.
Speaker 1: He usually carried a knife during his string of sex assaults,
Speaker 1: and often bound and sometimes gagged his victims. His attacks
Speaker 1: were brutal and left women bruised or bleeding, and, in
Speaker 1: one case, with a seventy two year old with broken ribs.
Speaker 1: He taunted his victims and deliberately terrorized four of them
Speaker 1: by returning to attack them again, one of them four
Speaker 1: separate times. His youngest known victim was twenty two, the
Speaker 1: oldest was eighty two. One was eight months pregnant. Another
Speaker 1: had an eight year old daughter in the house, who
Speaker 1: he threatened to harm if the mother resisted. His willingness
Speaker 1: to attack old and young made him one of the
Speaker 1: most feared rapists in our history and one of the
Speaker 1: most despised prison inmates of the last thirty years. Like
Speaker 1: Raymond mister Stinky Edmonds, he was an unidentified intruder who
Speaker 1: preyed on women home alone after studying their movements the
Speaker 1: way a crocodile watches and waits for prey. Like the
Speaker 1: silver gun rapist Peter Vatos, he was a burglar who
Speaker 1: discovered rape, an opportunist who became addicted to terrorizing defenseless women,
Speaker 1: just as he had become addicted to theft to feed
Speaker 1: his gambling addiction. For months before his arrest, this increasingly
Speaker 1: bold predator caused fear and loathing among thousands of women
Speaker 1: in the Northwestern suburbs where he struck most often. Asket
Speaker 1: Vale was just one suburb of many where he preyed
Speaker 1: on women living alone, but it was roughly the center
Speaker 1: of a broad sweep extending from Carlton, where he lived
Speaker 1: in a lodging house, to Airport West, near where he
Speaker 1: had grown up in extreme poverty and abuse. The spate
Speaker 1: of ugly home invasions that drew police and public attention
Speaker 1: to the unknown rapist apparently began in late nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two and would continue until his arrest on June eleventh
Speaker 1: the following year, But forensic tests revealed that the same
Speaker 1: man was responsible for twice raping a middle aged woman
Speaker 1: in Mooney Ponds more than five years earlier. It was
Speaker 1: a double attack that shocked police who thought themselves unshockable.
Speaker 1: That woman, by then in her fifties, had been a
Speaker 1: nune most of her adult life. Before leaving her order.
Speaker 1: She was a virgin. On Remembrance Day, November the eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven, the rapist broke into her home in
Speaker 1: a quiet Mooney Pond's street. He didn't just ignore the
Speaker 1: former nun's terrified protests. It was as if he enjoyed
Speaker 1: inflicting extra pain, physical and mental to a Catholic authority figure.
Speaker 1: He specifically mocked her religion, asking her why God didn't
Speaker 1: save her. He tied her up, took her bank card,
Speaker 1: and forced her to tell him the security number so
Speaker 1: he could empty her account. He gagged her and went
Speaker 1: to get the cash, threatening to return and hurt her
Speaker 1: if the number was wrong. He stole three hundred dollars
Speaker 1: using the card, then returned and raped the poor woman again,
Speaker 1: a crime wrongly attributed for years to another unidentified sex offender,
Speaker 1: the child abductor, dubbed mister Crule. It wasn't until early
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three that a rash of rapes was alarming
Speaker 1: so many people that public meetings were held in northwestern suburbs.
Speaker 1: Detective Inspector Peter Harvey, acting head of the rape squad,
Speaker 1: called on local police to help saturate key areas with
Speaker 1: plain clothes police and cars. They formed a task force,
Speaker 1: Operation Century, named after the rapist's habit of ordering frightened
Speaker 1: victims to count to one hundred after he left them.
Speaker 1: Many of the victims did not want to stay alone
Speaker 1: in their homes and went to stay with relatives or friends. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: an armed policewoman in casual clothes would move into a
Speaker 1: victim's home and wait, acting as bait. Meanwhile, officers in
Speaker 1: plain clothes wandered the streets looking from a man who
Speaker 1: fitted the description that most victims gave, in his late
Speaker 1: twenties or three thirties, with dark hair an Australian accent.
Speaker 1: After four months, and with public fears still rising, the
Speaker 1: rapist was still at large. Late on the night of
Speaker 1: June tenth, nineteen ninety three, four task force members were
Speaker 1: near the Essendon tram terminus when they saw a man
Speaker 1: walk from a nearby street. As soon as he saw
Speaker 1: them he knew he knew they were police. He spun
Speaker 1: around and ran down the side street. The police chased
Speaker 1: on foot. One of them, Constable Lindsey Hansen, was almost
Speaker 1: run over as he pursued the fleeing man across Mount
Speaker 1: Alexander Road before catching him and tackling him to the ground.
Speaker 1: His name was Christopher Clarence Hall. He was interviewed, his
Speaker 1: address confirmed, and then he was released in the early
Speaker 1: hours of the morning after providing a blood sample. This
Speaker 1: was because his criminal record, which stretched back to his childhood,
Speaker 1: was all for burglary and theft, not sex crimes. So
Speaker 1: on the night that the police grabbed this wandering person
Speaker 1: who ran away from them when they thought, well, this
Speaker 1: looks promising, but they looked up his record and it
Speaker 1: was all for burglaries and thefts, long record, but no
Speaker 1: sex crimes, and so on that night four in the morning.
Speaker 1: By the time they'd finished with him, they turned him
Speaker 1: back on the street because they didn't really have enough
Speaker 1: to go on. But around noon next day police went
Speaker 1: to Hall's rooming house, a boarding house re stayed in
Speaker 1: Cardingen Street in Carlton, and they searched his room, and
Speaker 1: they found incriminating items, including a pair of runners identical
Speaker 1: to those that the unknown rapist had worn at a
Speaker 1: crime scene three weeks earlier. It was then that an
Speaker 1: alert policewoman, Jacqueline Curran, saw a man matching Hall's description
Speaker 1: in a nearby street. She grabbed him. In Hall's pocket
Speaker 1: was a one way bus ticket to Catherine in the
Speaker 1: Northern Territory. If the police had waited just a few
Speaker 1: more hours, he would have been on his way to
Speaker 1: the far North, where so many wanted men had gone
Speaker 1: and vanished. Once there, he might have done the same,
Speaker 1: but he had left his run too late. Hall faced
Speaker 1: the County Court in May nineteen ninety four. He was
Speaker 1: represented by respected criminal lawyer Brendan Wilkinson, who happened to
Speaker 1: live in the Yessendon area and knew the school. Wilkinson
Speaker 1: was personally very relieved to see that his new client
Speaker 1: had been caught. Wilkinson, being a criminal lawyer, had seen
Speaker 1: a lot of bad endings, especially for those with bad
Speaker 1: starts in life. Hall's criminal records started in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: when he was just twelve. Hall was a loner who
Speaker 1: was socially and sexually dysfunctional, one of a dozen children
Speaker 1: born to a violent alcoholic father and a frightened mother,
Speaker 1: trapped by poverty to a life of family violence. His
Speaker 1: origin raises the question of whether he was born bad
Speaker 1: or made that way? Was it nature or nurture, a
Speaker 1: question we've asked many times in these podcasts. Police noted
Speaker 1: that most of All's siblings had not been in trouble
Speaker 1: with the law, and that his mother was the only
Speaker 1: one in the family to support him during his trial.
Speaker 1: He wasn't at all popular with his siblings, particularly his sisters.
Speaker 1: A troubled child at school, he'd been sent away to
Speaker 1: institutions such as the notorious Saint a Gastine's orphanage run
Speaker 1: by the Christian Brothers of Geelong and the Morning Star
Speaker 1: Home run by Franciscan monks at Morning. Both institutions would
Speaker 1: later be shut down after the exposure of systematic sexual
Speaker 1: and physical abuse that produced a generation of ultraviolent offenders.
Speaker 1: Gary David, the one we mentioned at the start that
Speaker 1: did bizarre self mutilations until he died in hospital. He
Speaker 1: was one of dozens and dozens of the children who
Speaker 1: went through those sort of places. The notorious hit man.
Speaker 1: Chris Rentikil Flannery was another. There were many of them,
Speaker 1: including Stan Taylor, the man who took two young brothers
Speaker 1: and turned them into bombers. The boys homes and orphanages
Speaker 1: have a terrible record when it comes to producing ultraviolent men.
Speaker 1: Judge Glenn Waldron tried Hall for nineteen counts of rape,
Speaker 1: to have attempted rape, and six counts of causing serious
Speaker 1: injury and threats to kill and injure. He was also
Speaker 1: charged with a total of eighteen burglary and theft offenses.
Speaker 1: With his lawyer's agreement, Hall pleaded guilty. Rather than subjecting
Speaker 1: his traumatized victims to cross examination about the worst hour
Speaker 1: of their lives. He was meek in court, intimidated by
Speaker 1: the presence of some of those he had hurt so grossly,
Speaker 1: who came there to see justice done. A psychiatrist stated
Speaker 1: that Hall did not suffer a mental illness. He wasn't normal,
Speaker 1: but he certainly knew what he was doing. Judge Waldron
Speaker 1: sentenced him to thirty four years with a minimum of
Speaker 1: twenty seven, longer than most murder sentences, but in the
Speaker 1: eyes of many or most well deserved The judge said
Speaker 1: Hall had subjected the women quote to a humiliating, repulsive,
Speaker 1: as well as terrifying experience, an evil that constituted the
Speaker 1: high water mark of antisocial behavior unquote. An appeal court
Speaker 1: did not quite agree, reducing the sentence to twenty nine
Speaker 1: years with a minimum twenty five. But Jacqueline Curran, the
Speaker 1: detective who had arrested Haul in Carlton before he could flee,
Speaker 1: knew that he must have attacked other women. He didn't
Speaker 1: just appear as an adult burglar in his thirties. She
Speaker 1: interviewed Hall in prisons several times until he revealed other
Speaker 1: rapes to her. In nineteen ninety seven, he was charged
Speaker 1: with four more attacks. The extra convictions pushed his sentence
Speaker 1: to thirty two years with twenty seven minimum. If Hall
Speaker 1: had received full remissions for good behavior, he would have
Speaker 1: been released in the year twenty twenty. Even if he
Speaker 1: serves all of his sentence, he will be due for
Speaker 1: release from the John Hopkins Facility for Sexual Offenders at
Speaker 1: Ararat next year, maybe sooner. Whether he will be let
Speaker 1: back on the street or be required to live in
Speaker 1: the Village of the Damned, so called the community for
Speaker 1: Sexual deviates at Ararat. He is hard to say. Judge
Speaker 1: Waldron had no doubt about Hall's potential to re offend,
Speaker 1: and he said this, even in comparative old age, there
Speaker 1: is a real risk that you would offend again, he
Speaker 1: told Hall when he sentenced him. His lawyer, Brendan Wilkinson,
Speaker 1: recalls Christopher Hall as a pathetic figure, hated as much
Speaker 1: in prison as he was on the outside. He also
Speaker 1: recalls his grateful client, who had no money, no friends,
Speaker 1: no family who wanted to know him, apart from his
Speaker 1: mother making him. The lawyer a coffee mug in the
Speaker 1: prison workshop as a gift. Wilkinson told me he used
Speaker 1: that mug for years while he was at work, but
Speaker 1: when the time came to clean out his office, his
Speaker 1: wife told him not to bring it home. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for
Speaker 1: true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,
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