Thick as, these thieves
LET’S just call it the Dumb Crook Defence.
And let’s just say it was unofficially rolled out in Geelong on many occasions throughout the course of 2017, but never more eloquently nor more accurately than by Bradley Saddington.
“I was just being a d---head, and I apologise,” the Norlane man told police by way of mitigation, seemingly mixing remorse with genuine insight into his offences.
While celebrating his 21st birthday Saddington had taken an ecstasy tablet during a heavy drinking session before he somehow stumbled into an elderly couple’s Highton garage.
Kicked out of there in the middle of the night by a rightfully aggrieved 71-yearold man, Saddington topped a memorable coming of age by leaving behind for police his phone and wallet — and a bag containing 10 ecstasy tablets.
When Geelong police this year offered Norlane residents DNA kits, encouraging them to mark their valuables with an invisible unique liquid, they were not thinking of the likes of Saddington and his DD cohort.
Who needs DNA when crooks leave clues to their identity lying freely around: like Billy Guest, surely Geelong’s most forgetful thief.
The busy though not very discreet burglar kept leaving things that crooks should take more care of at their crime scenes — stuff like his wallet, his credit card, his blood and his mobile phone.
On one occasion he left a phone in an abandoned getaway car outside a burgled business and, when it rang, a female caller asked to speak to “Billy” before hanging up when told it was police on the other end of the line.
And although he often covered his face, the Geelong court heard our criminal mastermind was often caught on security cameras wearing distinctive clothing.
Guest pleaded guilty to almost 50 charges and Silly Billy is now a guest of Her Majesty’s Prison Services.
Remarkably, if Saddington and Guest ever ran into Lara’s Matthew Blanchard, they could lend an empathetic ear to each other as Blanchard, too, knows how easy it is to leave a trail.
While drunk, Blanchard had taken an unregistered car for a test drive when he crashed on a gravel road.
In trying to flee the scene, the 38-year-old Blanchard compounded a rapidly growing list of errors when he then managed to drop his wallet. Oops!
He was quickly found nearby and subsequently pleaded guilty to driving offences, for which he was fined.
Another to run foul of Geelong police’s investigative prowess was hit and run driver Louis Hanlon, 23.
Hanlon had already clocked up four drink-driving offences in his five years behind the wheel when, at 4.55am on July 8, he ploughed into two parked vehicles and caused minor damage to a third on Autumn St.
Hanlon didn’t leave his wallet, nor his fingerprints or DNA, but police quickly tracked him down by following a 2km trail of leaking fluid and debris from the cars he hit to his home on the same street in Newtown.
While Hanlon did not have alcohol in his system at the time of the Geelong West crash, the magistrate said if not for his early guilty plea — and we would submit the associated DD — he would have been jailed.
Driving offenders were, sadly, a dime a dozen in the Geelong court this year and some people just can’t seem to learn their lesson.
Disqualified driver Adriana Erceg was caught driving without a licence for a third time when the Norlane woman ducked out to buy cigarettes even though she already had methylamphetamine, MDMA and another illicit drug in her system.
And Whittington man Norman Jacimovic was jailed in August for four months after the 50-yearold repeatedly ignored court orders not to drive, having six months earlier been put on a community corrections order for a string of driving offences.
Other offenders were quickly caught telling their porky pies.
When Mohammad Usman was pulled over after police saw him run a red light and drive at more than 40km/h over the limit, he said he had an Indian drivers’ licence and produced a card to prove his claim.
The only problem for Usman, a masters of mechanical engineering student at Deakin University, was that he drew a blank when asked his birth date.
“It’s in there,” he insisted hopefully . . . and without success.
Whittington woman Taylor Berkelaar also tried the ol’ bluffaroo, giving police a false identity after she was pulled over. She came unstuck when the woman living at the Highton home she’d named as her address had no idea who Berkelaar was.
Portarlington’s Robert Allen tried a bluff of a different kind: he pretended to be a high-ranking policeman.
Using his police persona, the otherwise mild mannered 63-year-old medical scientist approached a couple of tradies and inquired about their parking habits. But the tradies saw through the charade and reported the fake detective senior sergeant to a real-life senior constable.
Good citizens helped the police plenty of times throughout the year and we saw quite a few citizen’s arrests, but none more dramatic than that of Whittington’s Matthew Nicholson, who is likely to be known for the rest of his days as Geelong’s Great Stuffed Turtle Thief.
Armed with a loaded handmade pistol, Nicholson appropriately chose How Bazaar in North Geelong as his target, nicking brooches, necklaces and stickers before adding the final piece to his booty, a taxidermy turtle.
Staff at the store later saw him riding on his bicycle with the turtle stuffed under his arm and tried to restrain him but a struggle ensued as our turtle thief tried unsuccessfully to remove his homemade weapon from his backpack.
A court heard Nicholson, who was sentenced to a maximum of 12 months in jail for his bizarre crime, was off drugs and rehabilitating well. It is not known what became of the turtle.