Speaker 1: When he was on the outside of the walls, he
Speaker 1: would rob things.
Speaker 2: He's good at it.
Speaker 1: He was mad, he was bad, he was athletic, he
Speaker 1: was tough, he was fast, he's pretty funny, could do
Speaker 1: amazing stuff. But when a kid is walking to school
Speaker 1: at nine am and vanishes, that really hits.
Speaker 2: Home to all of us.
Speaker 1: We don't like it because we really think that could
Speaker 1: be our child. I'm Andrew Rule, this is life and Crimes,
Speaker 1: and once more I'm being subjected to questions from John Burton,
Speaker 1: our chief producer, editor and engineer.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Andrew, and thank you everyone who has supplied
Speaker 3: us with more questions. We are always in the market
Speaker 3: for questions, so if you do have them, we will
Speaker 3: give the address at the end of this episode, so
Speaker 3: as to preserve some sense of mystery as to how
Speaker 3: you can send them. In first question from Joanne, So Joanne,
Speaker 3: and I'll paraphrase your question if I may. Her father
Speaker 3: was a bank manager at Noble Park and had the
Speaker 3: misfortune of potentially coming face to face with Christopher Binns
Speaker 3: when he was in the process of robbing banks, and
Speaker 3: Joanne was interested in a point in time in Christopher
Speaker 3: Binns's life that she had heard that he had escaped
Speaker 3: custody mister Binns and actually had gone back to a
Speaker 3: life of robbing banks. Was that the case.
Speaker 1: Yes, Now, I'm not going to call Christopher Binns by
Speaker 1: the nickname that my friend and former colleague John Sylvester
Speaker 1: gave him. John was rude enough to go in rubbish Bins,
Speaker 1: which I thought was the height of bad manners and
Speaker 1: also courting disaster. Because before we answer the question, it
Speaker 1: turns out that Bins was once pulled up by the
Speaker 1: police when he was on one of his rare times
Speaker 1: out and about, and he had a notebook in the
Speaker 1: car with him, and he had various names shritten down,
Speaker 1: and one of them was John Sylvester's name, and he
Speaker 1: had a suburb written down next to it, which wasn't
Speaker 1: actually the precise suburb where John was living then, but
Speaker 1: it was the one next door. It was nearby, so
Speaker 1: just say, you know, he had Oakley and John was
Speaker 1: in Clayton something like that that was not far away.
Speaker 1: And that gave John pause for thought, and he thought,
Speaker 1: I don't think i'll call him Rubbishpins anymore. We'll call
Speaker 1: him badness, because that's what he calls himself. The question
Speaker 1: is that did he go back to robbing banks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he is a very keen or has been was until
Speaker 1: you know, lately, because he's been locked up for a
Speaker 1: long time. When he was on the outside of the walls,
Speaker 1: he would rob things. He's good at it. He was mad,
Speaker 1: he was bad, he was athletic, he was tough, he
Speaker 1: was fast, he's pretty funny, could do amazing stuff as
Speaker 1: escape artist, really good at it up there with sort
Speaker 1: of mad Dog Cox and those guys. When it comes
Speaker 1: to that stuff, I think he wants it a like
Speaker 1: a Fosberry flop, you know, jump over some raizor wire
Speaker 1: on top of a prison wall. He would jump across
Speaker 1: a wide gap between one wall and another, take a
Speaker 1: running jump and make it just like you know, some
Speaker 1: sort of like a stuntman on Hollywood standing in for
Speaker 1: some Hollywood actor. He got himself admitted to hospital, I
Speaker 1: think some Vincent secure ward in Melbourne with probably a
Speaker 1: fictitious ailment. Maybe he said he had a tummy ache
Speaker 1: and they probably thought it was a bindercitus or something. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he gets in there and lo and behold, his dear
Speaker 1: old dad comes to see him. His name Dad's name
Speaker 1: has not been's. Dad's name is a short, sharp Slavic name.
Speaker 1: When did I see? I think and Dad is also
Speaker 1: I've been, you know, knock about fellow. He wasn't sort
Speaker 1: of in the church choir, Dad and Dad's turned up
Speaker 1: wearing a large rodeo belt, you know, like.
Speaker 2: The cowboys wearing rodeos.
Speaker 1: And buckle on the big buckle, and I don't know
Speaker 1: that Dad had actually been. Although he was a knock about,
Speaker 1: I don't think he was a bull rider. I think
Speaker 1: he was more bullshit artus. Dad is wearing the big
Speaker 1: belt buckle, and when he goes through the scanner to get.
Speaker 2: Into the secure ward to see.
Speaker 1: Everloving son Chris, the scanner goes off and he says,
Speaker 1: it's a bloody belt buckle always happens, and screw the
Speaker 1: officer just waved him through. Well that was good because
Speaker 1: when he got inside, it turns out, allegedly allegedly that
Speaker 1: he had a small pistol either behind the buckle or
Speaker 1: somewhere about his person. But the buckler given him the cover,
Speaker 1: the cover of the alarm, and so he was able
Speaker 1: to hand this small derringer about. It's because of water
Speaker 1: pistol to his son, who it's amazing, what'll fix the pendicitis?
Speaker 1: Because there he was in great pain before this and
Speaker 1: suddenly wasn't. He was running around with a shooter, and
Speaker 1: he got out of the hospital and away he went,
Speaker 1: and he started robbing places all over again.
Speaker 3: So the interesting thing about Joanne and her question is
Speaker 3: her father had actually been held up three times as
Speaker 3: his bank employee, and she suggests or is wondering that
Speaker 3: perhaps two of those times was mister Bins.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think that'd be on the cards, depending which
Speaker 1: era this is, because Bins was one of the last
Speaker 1: of the Mullicans back when bank robberies were going out
Speaker 1: of style. He was doing quite a lot of them,
Speaker 1: which meant that, of course he came under suspicion a
Speaker 1: lot because there weren't a lot of other good practitioners
Speaker 1: and coppers with it's another Bin's job. He's out and about.
Speaker 1: It's him, and he had his own specific sort of
Speaker 1: way of doing things. One of his ways of doing
Speaker 1: things was to go around until he saw a police
Speaker 1: guard going past, and he thought that was good luck.
Speaker 1: If he saw a police guard go past him in
Speaker 1: the street and head off in another direction. He thought, well,
Speaker 1: I won't see that one again. It's gone, So then
Speaker 1: he'd go in and rob a bank. He'd wait to
Speaker 1: see one go past. You know, it's not so silly.
Speaker 3: I don't mean rabbit foot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all that different. You know, we have different things
Speaker 1: of luck, and that was his good. Luck didn't always.
Speaker 3: Work, so Joanne, Yes, that is possible.
Speaker 2: Oh, hugely likely.
Speaker 1: If it was late late eighties, early nineties. I think
Speaker 1: perhaps the mid nineties. There were very few other practitioners
Speaker 1: still around. In the seventies, there were lots of arm
Speaker 1: robbers and there they were with their old army revolves
Speaker 1: and sawn Off shotguns and sawn Off twenty two's running
Speaker 1: around holding.
Speaker 2: Up payrolls and all sorts of things. There were big
Speaker 2: payrolls in those days.
Speaker 1: I'm old enough remember when we got cash in the
Speaker 1: hand every Wednesday or every Thursday, whatever it was. Vast
Speaker 1: amounts of money went into every major organization and you're
Speaker 1: queued up and you've got a pay packet with cash
Speaker 1: in it. Everyone in the building got it. And that
Speaker 1: meant every big employer in Victoria in Australia had a
Speaker 1: huge amount of cash every payday, and there were a
Speaker 1: lot of targets for around Robertson.
Speaker 3: So you're saying, Andrew, just to go a little bit
Speaker 3: inside baseball. You're saying that in jobbing newsrooms, there once
Speaker 3: was a time where every week, every on in it
Speaker 3: they would be a wash with cash.
Speaker 1: They did, and not only they got a paypacket, their
Speaker 1: proper paypacket with the cash wages. You got a little
Speaker 1: buff envelope, a little tiny.
Speaker 2: Envelope but as big as just a.
Speaker 1: Few centimeter square, and that would have folded in your
Speaker 1: expense money. And that was you know, you put in
Speaker 1: an expense form saying I bought a pot and a
Speaker 1: parmejana and whatever and the two biros, whatever it was
Speaker 1: when I was entertaining police or entertaining something, and they
Speaker 1: would give.
Speaker 2: You cash money for that.
Speaker 1: And that was just like Christmas, because you'd get you
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty eight dollars wages, and you might
Speaker 1: get fifteen or twenty bucks expenses, and of course you
Speaker 1: goes straight to the pub with the expenses and spend
Speaker 1: it all over again.
Speaker 3: I was going to say, it seems like a very
Speaker 3: dangerous thing to first have that amount of money.
Speaker 2: It was, Yes, those were the days.
Speaker 3: Now, we have a question from Candace and she loves
Speaker 3: true crime, especially cold cases, and she asks, I've been
Speaker 3: listening to the Margaret and shawna Tap case on your podcast.
Speaker 3: I can't help but wonder why, if there is DNA
Speaker 3: available to test, we can't use genetic genealogy to solve
Speaker 3: this case. And wondering if that's just not something we
Speaker 3: do in Australia yet.
Speaker 1: Well, I think if all else was equal and we
Speaker 1: had all the good samples still available to the modern
Speaker 1: forensic scientists, that they could do that.
Speaker 2: But what it.
Speaker 1: Does depend on, and we've seen big cases solved like
Speaker 1: this in America. The Golden State Killer in California, for instance,
Speaker 1: was solved that way, and there's been some other interesting developments.
Speaker 1: It needs people to voluntarily given DNA samples so that
Speaker 1: there's a bank of them out in the world so
Speaker 1: that they can get hits. So unless relatives of the
Speaker 1: presumed killer, unless relatives of the presum killer have handed
Speaker 1: in DNA samples to some central database, there's nothing to
Speaker 1: work with. Meanwhile, the police, of course possibly we hope,
Speaker 1: have a viable DNA sample still.
Speaker 2: Now, this was basically.
Speaker 1: A semen sample taken from clothing in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: There is every chance that it might have degraded or
Speaker 1: been lost or broken up or something so that it's
Speaker 1: no longer as viable as it should be or could be.
Speaker 1: And we know in this case that there's already been
Speaker 1: one wrongful arrest made of a serving prisoner, a guy
Speaker 1: called Russell Geeser, on the basis of DNA, and subsequently
Speaker 1: it was proven that the DNA testing process was flawed.
Speaker 1: There'd been a bungle in the lab. Now that is
Speaker 1: going to present a lot of problems for forensics and
Speaker 1: for the police because A had they still got viable
Speaker 1: DNA viable samples? B Are they open to major questions
Speaker 1: from defense counsel about the efficiency of their processes in
Speaker 1: the forensic lab. These are the two big problems.
Speaker 3: Now, Ladies and gentlemen, you may have just heard an
Speaker 3: AD break. Then if you get the free version of
Speaker 3: this show, if you're a subscriber to Crime x Plus,
Speaker 3: you wouldn't have heard an ad break at all. Either way,
Speaker 3: we've put a little break in there because it's probably
Speaker 3: time that we go to the mister Krawl segment of
Speaker 3: the show. These, of course, are becoming a Hardy Perennial
Speaker 3: of the Q and A specials Amberley asks a long
Speaker 3: time listener of the podcast, thank you, Amberley. We'd love
Speaker 3: to know if there has been any connection or investigation
Speaker 3: into the possible link between mister Kraule and the disappearance
Speaker 3: of Cherry Westall and or bung Syraboon.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that the police have looked at every missing
Speaker 1: person that fits the category. You know, young females, no
Speaker 1: doubt about it. I don't know much about Cherry Bunk Sirraburn.
Speaker 1: I've done a bit on over the years. It is
Speaker 1: a genuine mystery and it's going to be one of
Speaker 1: two things. It's going to be either the suburban monster
Speaker 1: that none of us know is a monster, you know,
Speaker 1: the bloke driving around in a youth station making is
Speaker 1: something going from job to job, handyman, lawn mowing, tree,
Speaker 1: cut up, you know whatever. Something who's seen this kid
Speaker 1: walking along the street and snatched her and got away
Speaker 1: with it, acted on impulse, grabbed that and no one
Speaker 1: was watching, No one heard a noise, No cameras or
Speaker 1: security cameras or any dash camera any of that caught it.
Speaker 1: That can happen. It's a little bit like you know,
Speaker 1: flipping a coin and it lands on its edge. But
Speaker 1: it can happen the other option, and it's not one
Speaker 1: that many people endorse, and I merely.
Speaker 2: Throw it up.
Speaker 1: It's conceivable that Bunk Syra Boom is a victim of
Speaker 1: some sort of unseen Asian crime syndicate thing. I don't
Speaker 1: want to delve into all that, all the scenarios, because
Speaker 1: they'd be totally speculation. That is total speculation on my part.
Speaker 1: I have no knowledge of such a thing happening to her.
Speaker 1: But it is conceivable that she was snatched not by
Speaker 1: the tattooed yobo that has been watching too many bad videos,
Speaker 1: but by professional crooks who are acting on orders to
Speaker 1: do with some form of organized crime. They're the two options.
Speaker 1: Rank amateur, a very rank amateur or by that I
Speaker 1: mean smells rank as well, or professional, probably Asian organized crime.
Speaker 1: A lot of people will p poo that, and they
Speaker 1: might be right.
Speaker 3: It is interesting that we're talking about mister Crawl, but
Speaker 3: the Mister Crawl case and the Bunk Cerebone case. For
Speaker 3: both of those cases, the cases lived on in people's
Speaker 3: imagination far more than many others.
Speaker 1: They do some grasp the public imagination in ways, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it's just the name gets into the people's heads.
Speaker 1: It's like an earworm. Easy Street has always been in
Speaker 1: people's heads in a way that I think if it
Speaker 1: had been called arbuthnot Straight, it would not have. Easy
Speaker 1: Street is easy to remember. It's a catchy phrase. It
Speaker 1: sounds like a song title or whatever it is, and
Speaker 1: we've never forgotten it. And I think that bunk Sorriboon
Speaker 1: is a bit the same. There's something about the name
Speaker 1: that sticks in people's heads. The fact that a little girl,
Speaker 1: a teenager can just vanish off the street while she's
Speaker 1: walking to school in broad daylight absolutely horrifies people. You know,
Speaker 1: when a twenty three year old vanishes from a nightclub
Speaker 1: at two am, it's equally bad and equally awful and
Speaker 1: terrible for balaties and friends, of course, But the rest
Speaker 1: of us go, oh, well, she's an adult, she's at
Speaker 1: a nightclub at two am, she's you know, rubbing shoulders
Speaker 1: with bad dude. But when a kid is walking to
Speaker 1: school at nine am and vanishes, that really hits home
Speaker 1: to all of us. We don't like it because we
Speaker 1: really think that could be our child.
Speaker 3: Another question about mister Crawl comes from Carly Thanks Carly.
Speaker 3: Carly says that when she was growing up that her
Speaker 3: neighbor was apparently a suspect. Her dad was given this
Speaker 3: information by a police officer after reporting a series of
Speaker 3: bizarre breakings at their home in Smith's Gully to the
Speaker 3: Althham Police. Don't know if anything came out of it,
Speaker 3: but Elthham was an interesting place, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: On the outer edge of what we would call mister
Speaker 1: cruel territory. And I remember doing a story a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago to that effect that there were various
Speaker 1: reasons to look at Elham. But of course when police
Speaker 1: are looking for somebody like mister Krule, they don't know
Speaker 1: who they're looking for. Any weird crime to do with
Speaker 1: bizarre breakings or crimes that would appear to be aimed
Speaker 1: at families who have girls that age, they're going to
Speaker 1: naturally wonder if it's to do with mister Krule. Both
Speaker 1: the police and the locals and everybody else and the media,
Speaker 1: they're all going to think about it. They can't all
Speaker 1: be mister Crule, but you know, any one of them
Speaker 1: might be. It's just this is the problem with those things.
Speaker 1: It raises the fever pitch speculation about any offender in
Speaker 1: any post. You go, oh my god, that sounds like
Speaker 1: mister Krul and if you know, maybe it is. You
Speaker 1: think at this distance that whoever mister Krule was has
Speaker 1: either got too old or too dead to re offend,
Speaker 1: so we can hope, or ended up in jail on
Speaker 1: other matters.
Speaker 3: And lastly, a non mister Crule question. And this is
Speaker 3: a request from Jesse, please make an episode on and
Speaker 3: you will have heard of Beep there listeners, because we
Speaker 3: can't use that person's name. We still can't. We still can't,
Speaker 3: they say, or Jesse says that Ivan Mulatt is so
Speaker 3: well known but did very little compared to Beep.
Speaker 1: Beep is a fascinating case. Beep has been written about
Speaker 1: at length by a colleague of ours in Queensland, Matthew Condon,
Speaker 1: who is a very fine journalist, a very good writer,
Speaker 1: and he's written a lot of interesting books about goings
Speaker 1: on in Queensland, particularly criminal and political, and one of
Speaker 1: his better books is about Beep.
Speaker 3: And to be fair, Jesse, we actually have recorded an
Speaker 3: episode about Deep, about Deep, and we are just waiting
Speaker 3: for Beep to either get through beeps of various legal
Speaker 3: travails or preferably die and then as soon as that happens, Jesse.
Speaker 1: We'll go full Monty. In fact, we ought to try
Speaker 1: and get Matthew Condon on to talk about it, or
Speaker 1: someone else from up there who can talk with authority
Speaker 1: about him, because I do know I know an old
Speaker 1: scallywagg and old bird smuggler that could talk about Beep
Speaker 1: and the Brisbane crime scene, particularly in the past. He
Speaker 1: was very tough but relatively small, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the crooks know each other or know of each other,
Speaker 1: and if you've got a good contact up there, they
Speaker 1: can talk with some authority about such things. And Beep
Speaker 1: was used by other crooks. I mean he killed people
Speaker 1: on his own account because he's more or less a
Speaker 1: criminal serial killer, if that makes sense. He's both a
Speaker 1: criminal who hit man, but he's a serial killer as well.
Speaker 1: He's a very bad man and very twisted. And there
Speaker 1: are those who suspect was the last to see alive
Speaker 1: more than thirty people, the last person to see alive
Speaker 1: more than thirty people, most of them are just gone
Speaker 1: on the missing list.
Speaker 3: Well, Jesse, that's a watch this space because when we
Speaker 3: can we will thank you very much for everyone who
Speaker 3: has put in their questions. If you have questions, please
Speaker 3: send them in. They don't necessarily all have to be
Speaker 3: about mister Crawl. Either send them into Life and Crimes
Speaker 3: at news dot com dot Au or if you are
Speaker 3: like Jesse and have potentially a request for a show,
Speaker 3: you can send them in as well. But if you
Speaker 3: have a news tip on an active piece of crime
Speaker 3: based news that you would like to send to Andrew,
Speaker 3: you can send it to his email address, which.
Speaker 1: Is Andrew dot Rule at news dot com dot Au.
Speaker 1: That email address again, Andrew full stop Rule are U
Speaker 1: l E at news dot com dot Au.
Speaker 3: And either way, get in touch and thank you for listening,
Speaker 3: and thank.
Speaker 1: You Andrew, Thank you very much, thanks for listening. Life
Speaker 1: and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crimes.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more,
Speaker 1: go to Heroldsun dot com dot Au forward slash Andrew
Speaker 1: Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts
Speaker 1: Sold at News dot com dot Au. That is all
Speaker 1: one word news podcasts sold And if you want further
Speaker 1: information about this episode, links are in the description