Scattered (18 page)

Three days later, on 28 July, Aslett was back at the same convenience store. At about 6.30 pm, Ms Ho's colleague, Hoang Thi Nguyen, was leaving to drive home. As she got into her car, Aslett pounced from the shadows with a 30-centimetre knife and pushed Ms Nguyen into the driver's seat.

His knife at her throat, he hissed: ‘Where's your money?'

‘I don't have any, I just work there.'

‘You're a liar!'

Ms Nguyen insisted she was telling the truth, but said Ms Ho had the cash takings from the shop and was waiting for her. Aslett told her to call out to her friend. Ms Nguyen said she couldn't, because Ms Ho had a boyfriend with her. Aslett again accused her of lying, and told her to call out in English, not Vietnamese. He grabbed her by the hair and took her to the shop's back door.

Inside, Aslett leapt onto the twice-unfortunate Ms Ho, pressing his knife to her neck. Bonham burst in from the back and forced Ms Nguyen to the ground. Aslett got up and took about $6000 in cash from Ms Ho's handbag. It wasn't enough for him. He barked: ‘Where's the rest of the money?'

Ms Ho got up and opened the cash register, from which Aslett's young accomplice took about $500 more.

Aslett took Ho into a back office and demanded more money, in vain. So he went into the shop and stocked up on phone cards and cigarettes. He and Bonham also took the women's mobile phones. For the next few days he would use the handsets with SIM cards belonging to his sister, Amanda Aslett, and Linda Berry.

Aslett and his friend had worn masks throughout the Canley Vale robbery, and had still not been sufficiently identified by any of their victims to enable the police to link the arrests of Steven Aslett and the seventeen-year-old with all of Dudley Aslett's crimes.

Two days later, on 30 July, Aslett decided he needed a new firearm. He knew that in Auburn, a suburb not far from Newington in Sydney's middle west, there was an indoor shooting range from which sporting gun owners would come and go. At 8.10 pm—Aslett typically worked his crimes under cover of night—he lay in wait outside the Shooting Academy until a man named Eduardo Arbis came out. Arbis was carrying a green canvas bag, secured with a padlock. Inside the bag were a Smith & Wesson model 666 .357 calibre magnum six-shot revolver, a Colt model 1911 eight-shot semiautomatic pistol, ten rounds of .357 calibre ammunition, some earmuffs, a visor and a cleaning kit.

Arbis was placing the bag in the boot of his car when Aslett came out of nowhere, charging at him with a baseball bat. Aslett didn't ask questions—he swung the bat at Arbis's head. Arbis deflected it with his right hand. Aslett swung at him again. Arbis ducked away from the car.

Making an instant—and fortunate—decision that it wasn't necessary to beat the daylights out of Arbis, Aslett told him to ‘back off'. He took the green bag and ran away. (For all of his offences during this spree, Aslett was ultimately another proof of the axiom that it is the dumb criminals who get caught: police would later find camera film with shots of Uncle Dud posing with the revolver.)

Twenty-four hours later, Aslett used the gun in his next robbery. Not far from the Shooting Academy, in Newton Street, South Auburn, a man named Jeky Li owned a shop called Mega Lighting. At around 9 pm on 31 July, Li locked up and walked from the store to his car, carrying the day's cash takings of $800 and his laptop. He sat in the car, opened his window and started the ignition, only to look up and see a man at his window wearing a balaclava and holding a silver handgun in his gloved hands. A smaller man was with him, also in a black balaclava, wielding a 30-centimetre knife.

Aslett put the gun to Mr Li's head, and his accomplice came close with the knife.

‘Get the money,' Aslett said.

Mr Li replied that he had no cash on him, but when Aslett pushed the gun hard against his head he reconsidered, taking his wallet out of his laptop bag and handing it over.

‘There's more,' Aslett said. ‘There has to be more.'

He was right—Jeky Li had put the $800 not in his wallet but in the laptop bag. But Li wasn't giving up easily. He tried to push the gun away. Aslett ordered him not to touch it again, and to prove his seriousness he opened the chamber and showed Li the six rounds loaded inside.

Aslett took about $200 from Li's wallet and another $30 or so in change from the car, then dragged his victim back to the store, forced him to open the doors and disable the alarm, and then to open the cash register. It was empty.

‘Where's the big money?' Aslett demanded.

Li maintained that he had no more cash. Aslett, pressing the gun barrel to Li's back, forced him into a rear storeroom and told him to lie on the ground.

‘We're going to kill you,' he told Li. ‘Tell us where the money is.'

Finally he seemed to run out of nerve, or believe Li's protestations. Stealing Jeky Li's mobile phone, Aslett ordered him into the toilet and said if he left he would be killed. Some time later, Li came out and called the police.

But the police still couldn't find Aslett, or connect him with the other crimes. At 5 pm the next day, Aslett was working the same patch. He sneaked into the Bob Jane T-Mart in Auburn just before it closed. The last employee to leave, Mathew Ryder, was confronted by Aslett in a balaclava holding the Smith & Wesson handgun. Bonham put his knife to Ryder's throat. They took a small amount of cash from the till and from Ryder's pocket, then ordered him to open the safe. He couldn't—he was only a low-level employee without access to the safe. Aslett, in a fury, stalked around the store smashing all the landline telephones. He and his accomplice tied Ryder up and left him on the floor, stealing some mobile phones and car keys as they went. Out back, they found Ryder's Ford Falcon utility parked on the tarmac, and drove it away. Aslett was about to make his biggest mistake yet.

The first of August fell on a Friday in 2003. That week Uncle Dud and Christopher Bonham had already stolen more than $10 000 in cash, two guns and ammunition, several mobile phones and a car in five separate forays. Aslett wasn't satisfied. He was having more fun than ever, and he believed he was somehow invisible, undetectable by the authorities. The extreme ice user knows no limits.

Emad Youssef owned a pharmacy in Canley Heights, close to the convenience store which Aslett had robbed twice that week. When he closed up his pharmacy at 6.30 pm on the Friday and left with a staff member, Eva Keovongsack, Youssef might have had reason to look over his shoulder.

Youssef and Keovongsack took their cars out of a locked yard. Youssef got out to relock the gate. As he was getting back into his car, he was set upon by Aslett, who had been lurking behind the shopping strip in Mathew Ryder's Ford Falcon utility.

Aslett pulled at Emad Youssef's car door, and the pharmacist fought back. In the struggle, Aslett took the magnum pistol from his pocket and fired at point-blank range.

Eva Keovongsack heard the shot as she was driving away down a service lane. In her rear-vision mirror she saw Emad Youssef staggering towards her, calling her name. She left her car and ran back to him; he collapsed on the roadway, bleeding steadily. Keovongsack ran into another shop to get someone to call the police and an ambulance. By the time the ambulance officers arrived, Emad Youssef had died from his wounds.

Aslett, meanwhile, had flipped open Youssef's boot and stolen his suitcase, then sped off to his sister Catherine's house in Cabramatta West and told her and a friend, Irene, that he'd tried to rob the pharmacist but it had gone wrong and he'd accidentally shot him. He believed he'd only wounded Youssef in the shoulder. But he was panicking now. Later that night, he told Bonham to throw Youssef's briefcase into a creek behind the Mount Pritchard Community Club.

If Aslett was shaken by the shooting, he was not deterred. He did what he had always done when the situation got hot: he ran away.

Still with Bonham in tow, Aslett drove to the Central Coast north of Sydney.

At around 6 pm on Wednesday 6 August, less than a week after killing Emad Youssef, Aslett was driving past a Ford dealership, Grawill Ford, in Tuggerah. He liked the look of a 1987 turbo Holden Commodore sedan sitting in the service area. The theft was simple in the darkness. Dudley Aslett and Christopher Bonham simply walked up to the Commodore, found the keys inside, and drove it away.

Two hours later they bailed up Warren Richardson as he was closing up the Toowoon Bay Cellars bottle shop. Again wearing the balaclava and waving the gun, accompanied by his mate, Aslett said to Richardson: ‘We don't want to hurt you. We want the money.' But just to make sure Richardson got the message, Aslett aimed the magnum at his stomach and said: ‘It has hollow-nose bullets.'

Aslett and Bonham pointed Richardson back into the bottle shop and ordered him to empty the cash register into a plastic bag. There was almost $600 in the take.

‘Where's the rest of the money?' Aslett demanded.

‘There is none,' Richardson said.

Bonham said: ‘I'll have some cigarettes then.'

They ordered Richardson to fill two plastic bags with packs of Long Beach and Winfield cigarettes, and also took some alcohol and a sports bag containing his jacket and some personal effects.

The cigarettes and alcohol were for Bonham, not Aslett. Dudley Aslett never drank or smoked tobacco. He just took ice, day after day, and heroin to soften the landing. When he needed more money, he went out to steal it. To steel himself for stealing, he took a drug which had consequences that even he, a hardened drug user, did not understand or anticipate.

He knew, though, that ice gave him Dutch courage. Five days after arriving on the Central Coast, at around 4.40 pm on Monday 11 August, Aslett and Bonham parked near the Ourimbah Medical Centre and walked to the local post office. They slipped on balaclavas and went inside. Aslett waved the .357 magnum revolver at the post office's owner, Shirley Ellis, then jumped over the counter and raided the wooden cash drawers. He and Bonham put $1840 into a backpack and ran outside again, where they bumped into Haley Kuhn. Bonham shouted at her to give them her car keys. She resisted, and the teenaged boy started wrenching at her hand.

‘Don't take it out on her, come on!' Dudley Aslett called, and the pair ran off.

At some point they took the stolen Holden Commodore to The Entrance, where Dudley Aslett had a friend to whom he could sell auto parts. He and Bonham removed the steering wheel, stereo and speakers, turbo pop-off valve, mats, wheels and tyres, and on-sold them. The dismantled car was found near the intersection of Bay Road and Ocean Parade on 21 August.

Two days after the Ourimbah post office robbery, Paul and Jennifer Marlow were locking up their newsagency in the Central Coast hamlet of Maidens Brush. The couple, in their fifties, went through the same routine every evening at around 6.30 pm. Paul took the rubbish out the rear door, before coming back inside and leaving with Jennifer.

On 13 August, Paul Marlow was being watched. When he went outside, Aslett and Bonham burst in with balaclavas and bailed up Jennifer Marlow.

‘Open the safe, you cunt,' Aslett said.

Jennifer said: ‘I don't know how.'

‘Yes you do, cunt. Lie on the floor. Look at the wall, don't look at me.'

Jennifer lay down but couldn't restrain a scream. Paul Marlow came to the back door to find Aslett pointing the gun at him. Paul was able to run away, though, and he got the owner of the next shop in the little mall to call the police.

Aslett snarled some more at Jennifer Marlow but, realising that her husband was getting help, he soon left, taking only a black briefcase with some personal papers inside. He threw it out the car window while driving away.

Things were fully out of control by now. The next afternoon, Aslett and Bonham drove the stolen Commodore to the Bateau Bay post office, donned balaclavas and bailed up the owners, Gary and Beryl Ives, and a customer, Gregory Culpan. They stole $4019 from behind the counter and Culpan's wallet, which contained only $10.

It was six days before Aslett struck again. Bonham split for the north coast, hiding out in a caravan park in Lismore. Meanwhile the $4000 haul from Bateau Bay kept Aslett on a high, but running out of drugs gave him an unquenchable need to go out and steal again. This time, on 20 August, he netted his biggest cash haul yet—as well as two cars in one day.

On Wednesday 20 August, Aslett kicked off the day by stealing a 1985 maroon Holden Commodore from the Supa Centre at Tuggerah. He drove the maroon Commodore to the rooftop parking area at the Westfield shopping centre at Tuggerah and then stole another Commodore, a red 1989 model, which he drove down to the parking area at the back of the National Australia Bank. At about five minutes to four, just before the bank's closing time, Aslett, wearing not his usual balaclava but a cap and sunglasses, strolled into the Westfield mall and made for the National Australia Bank branch, where he fronted up to Peter Sutherland, a young worker at an open inquiry desk.

Aslett threw a plastic bag at him. It fell to the floor. Sutherland bent down to pick it up. When he raised his eyes, he saw Aslett pointing the .357 magnum revolver at him, partially concealed by a leather holster.

‘Fill it up,' Aslett hissed, motioning to the bag. ‘Do as I say and no one will get hurt.'

Sutherland pressed the entry code into the tellers' area. Aslett followed him in, as if he was a client with a bank official going inside for a private meeting. Sutherland removed all of the cash from the top three drawers between the two female tellers who were working, and placed it in the plastic bag.

‘Where's the rest?' Aslett insisted.

Sutherland opened another drawer and put three bundles of $50 notes into Aslett's bag.

‘Don't look at me,' Aslett warned him. ‘Give me that mobile phone.'

He pointed to a phone sitting on a counter. It belonged to one of the female tellers, Gillian Hickman. Sutherland put it in the bag. Aslett let himself out the back door and calmly, quietly, walked away with $28 075 in Australian currency, 20 pounds sterling, and 300 euros, as well as a mobile phone, in his bag. It was a handsome booty, and Aslett's last cash theft.