I DIDN’T KILL RICKY
HAGUE PLEADS NOT GUILTY AS POLICE CASE REVEALED
BELL Park man Karl Michael Hague pleaded not guilty to murdering Ricky Balcombe yesterday, 23 years after the teenager was stabbed in the heart in Geelong’s Market Square shopping centre.
A Supreme Court jury was told the prosecution believed it had a strong case against Mr Hague, now 44, over the public execution of the teenager.
RICKY Balcombe will always be 16.
Cheeky, mischievous, loving and fun-loving.
A troublemaker with too much time on his hands.
Seduced by the streets and a misguided sense of adventure, he is a mall rat.
He has quit school and he is involved in a gang. He is no angel. But that is precisely what he is.
Ricky Balcombe has been dead almost 23 years. He would be 38 were he alive. He made mistakes. Who didn’t when they were 16?
The sad tragedy of the Ricky Balcombe story are the unknowns.
No one will ever be able to say when that wayward 16year-old boy will grow up.
He was on the wrong side of the tracks when he died, but his family will never know if it was a short detour or his destined path.
He never had the chance to reflect and cringe at the poor decisions of his youth, because he will be forever young.
These are the unknowns that must weigh heavily on his family and friends.
The other great unknown is the mystery that has troubled this city since Ricky’s death on May 5, 1995.
Who killed the boy and why?
This was a murder. In the middle of the afternoon (3.20pm), in the middle of the city in a bustling shopping centre. But still the case has never been cracked . . . despite all the theories.
The police’s No.1 theory has long centred on Karl Michael Hague.
Then 21, now 44, he has maintained his innocence for more than two decades.
Grey at the temples, strongly built and neatly
dressed, he appeared in court yesterday looking more like a middle-aged businessman than a Corio thug.
But the tattoos on his hands hint to his own colourful past.
Without many details, the jury was told yesterday he had links to fights, drugs and other misdemeanours at the time of Ricky’s killing.
But, of course, being a troublemaker neither makes one a killer nor sentences them to a short life.
The jury heard yesterday that Karl Hague was first charged with murdering Ricky Balcombe in 1997.
A Supreme Court trial was scheduled for February 1998 but never went ahead.
The murder of Ricky Balcombe became a cold case.
A bugbear for the Homicide Squad and a mystery to Geelong.
Yesterday we had the outline of why the prosecution thinks Karl Hague did it, and the defendant’s simple denial. He says he was not in Market Square at the time and did not kill Ricky Balcombe.
His fate rests in the hands of a 12-person jury.
For close to a month they will hear varying accounts of what happened before, on and after May 5, 1995.
What they know at the end of all that evidence will determine Karl Hague’s future, and what the rest of us know about this dark chapter in Geelong’s history.
But Ricky Balcombe will still be 16.