Collar bomb hoaxer deluded – ex-wife
THE MAN who placed a fake collar bomb on Madeleine Pulver last year in an apparent bid to extort millions from her family thought he had become an ‘‘avenging character’’ from the novel he was obsessively writing, a court has heard.
Paul Peters, 52, is being sentenced in the Downing Centre District Court in Sydney over the August 2011 attack in which he attached a fake bomb around the neck of the 18-year-old schoolgirl at her Mosman home. The court heard yesterday that Peters was suffering from depression and, in the opinion of two psychiatrists, a form of bipolar disorder at the time of the attack.
Central to this was his obsession with a novel he was writing and that had increasingly come to reflect his personal demons and delusions.
Peters’ ex-wife, Debra Peters, told the court the book had started as a historical novel about Hong Kong, but then changed dramatically as her husband’s drinking increased and he began to fray mentally. ‘‘The book I read wasn’t like that at all . . . the book I read was very dark,’’ she said.
Giving evidence for the defence, forensic psychiatrist Bruce Westmore said that in his disturbed state of mind Peters became ‘‘part of the novel’’.
‘‘ He rewrote the character of Chan from victim to avenger – he was angry at being rejected by his family, being rejected by the financial world,’’ Westmore said.
‘‘An easy way of dealing with by being Chan.’’
Peters told Westmore that he had no memory of the actual crime, with the last thing he remembered being at the Pulvers’ front steps and the next being back home on the central coast.
But Crown prosecutor Margaret neen, SC, suggested that rather
that was Cunthan being completely delusional, Peters may have been motivated by financial gain.
She also put it to Westmore that Peters had been suffering from depression that had been exacerbated by his drinking, not bipolar disorder.
In March this year, Peters pleaded guilty to aggravated breaking and entering, and detaining for advantage. According to the police statement of facts tendered in court, Peters told detectives he had been going to the Pulvers’ Mosman street for a week before the extortion attempt.
In the mid-afternoon, Peters walked through the front door of the home wearing a rainbow balaclava and carrying a baseball bat and a backpack.
He confronted Pulver and told her: ‘‘I’m not going to hurt you.’’ Peters then removed a black box from the backpack and tied it around his victim’s throat with a USB stick and a two-page letter.
In the document, Peters claimed he was a ‘‘Green Beret Munitions Specialist’’ and that the box contained ‘‘powerful new technology plastic explosives’’.
Police eventually tracked Peters down in a small country town in Kentucky.
The hearing will resume on October 31.