‘Psycho’ kangaroo leaps to freedom after being rescued

A DISTRESSED kangaroo leapt over a 2.2 metre wall at a shelter on Tuesday and escaped into a forest after having been rescued from a home he had crashed into in Melbourne two days earlier.

The rescuers had named the kangaroo Norman Bates, after the killer in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho, when they pulled him from a home on Sunday where he had smashed through a window and spattered blood all over the walls.

“There was just blood everywhere. It looked like a scene right out of Psycho,” said Manfred Zabinskas, who runs the Five Freedoms Animal Rescue shelter and was called in by police to retrieve the runaway roo.

Norman was put in a large, state-of-theart enclosure with other kangaroos but was clearly highly strung and by day two was looking for a way out.

“We’ve not seen a kangaroo so desperate to get out as Norman. He didn’t even touch the top rail at two metres. He jumped pretty bloody high,” Mr Zabinskas said.