00:00Yeah, like most police activity, it just comes out of the blue.
00:04And this one was one of those things.
00:06Back in January of 1984, police at Holbrooke were told there was an armed robbery at Holbrooke.
00:13People got held up at a farm at Holbrooke.
00:17The chap went there, broke into their house.
00:20The two people from Holbrooke come back home, and they're held up by this bloke holding a shotgun at them.
00:26He was dressed in camouflage gear, military gear, and he tied them up, and they were bound by hands and feet for about five hours.
00:41Whilst he was there, he changed from being a reasonable sort of talking guy to being something wrong up in his head, basically.
00:52He was a bit of a mental type patient. His attitudes and whatnot changed pretty dramatically.
00:59But at no stage in the five hours that they were tied up, did he not have a firearm pointed at them.
01:07After about the five hours, he decided to leave the place and said, I'm going to come back.
01:12And when I come back, you'll never see me again.
01:14And they took that to mean that he was going to murder them.
01:17Whilst he was away, they took the opportunity to unfree themselves, and they took off across country.
01:28The nearest property was about four or five miles from where they were, and they ran across these paddocks, up and downhill.
01:35Got to this property.
01:36It took them about two hours to get there, and this is the early hours of the morning.
01:39They then got the police from Hobbrook to go to the property, and they went back to where they'd been held up.
01:48By then, the offender, he'd decamped. He'd left. He'd gone.
01:54But before he left, he loaded in front of these people about six or seven firearms, a variety of rivals and shotguns.
02:03They saw him load all these weapons and cock the weapons.
02:08He also took about a thousand rounds of ammunition, and then off he's gone.
02:13He's disappeared.
02:15The police looked for him a couple of days out in that neck of the woods, but he never surfaced.
02:22And then about five days later, a dog trapper employed by the lands department at Corriong,
02:29Mr. Wayne Twindle was his name. Tindle, I should say.
02:34He was up there checking his, doing the rounds of his dog traps.
02:38And on one of the steep sections of the road, and it's mountainous country up there.
02:42The trail itself in various places, if you stepped off, it was a cliff.
02:48Ferns, massive gum trees, and just mountainous country.
02:52Big time stuff up there.
02:53So he's coming out of a bend on the road, and all of a sudden he gets propped by this chap holding a gun at him.
03:02And after over a period of about an hour or so, he thought he was going to get murdered as well.
03:08But after various conversations, he was allowed to leave.
03:11He didn't relate this person to the bloke that had done the job at Holbrook.
03:16He didn't know that was the bloke the police were looking for.
03:20He drove away. He was allowed to leave.
03:24He went for about an hour until he got to the nearest property.
03:27Called him there, and the property owners there put two and two together that this was the chap the police were looking for.
03:35They contacted the police at Corriong, who then got onto Wodonga.
03:39And out of the blue, Dennis Monk, one of my colleagues, Bert Bennett, who was here as well, senior sergeant, and myself, got reacted to this job at Corriong.
03:52And I think to this day, I'm still scratching my head as to why we end up in Corriong.
03:57But the simple thing was that the police in Victoria for special operations such as that would have been, they were based in Melbourne.
04:06Dennis, Bert Bennett, and myself had a little bit of training in special weapons for the New South Wales Country Police.
04:14And so we went up there to do that job.
04:19It was a bit of an urgency type thing just in case this bloke escaped.
04:24If he had, we didn't know if he was going to create havoc up there and hold other people up.
04:31So we had to go and react to that job.
04:33Normally, we would have been just a group in the background and the specialist police would have gone past.
04:40We were a primitive group and they would have taken over.
04:44But the urgency was that we had to go up there and do the job.
04:48We drove up there.
04:49Pat got dressed as the dog trapper, similar to it.
04:52He took his shirt and his hat and that sort of stuff in the front of the dog trapper's vehicle.
04:57I'm pretty sure the senior sergeant, Bert, was in the front seat.
05:00Dennis and me were laying down in the back of the vehicle concealed.
05:03We had a couple of shotguns and a rifle.
05:07Pat was totally unarmed.
05:09No bulletproof vest or nothing.
05:11Dennis and myself and Bert had bulletproof vests on.
05:16And our plan was to stop short of where this bloke had been last seen, sneak through the bush and ambush him,
05:23which he was mostly trying to do to us.
05:27But we got to a point in the road and all of a sudden,
05:30he had moved the vehicle, used his jumper starter to get the vehicle to a higher part of the hill.
05:37So we'd virtually come to the top of the hill and he's almost virtually in front of us.
05:42He had a rifle.
05:43He was holding a rifle across his chest.
05:45You could see the barrels of all these other guns across the dashboard of the vehicle.
05:52And we've all been in the vehicle we were in and basically just charged this bloke, went for him.
05:58That's all we possibly could have done.
06:00There's nothing.
06:01Because this bloke was holding the rifle and we couldn't negotiate.
06:06That would have been silly.
06:08It would have set us up mostly to get shot.
06:11So we just charged him.
06:13Bert Bennett, the senior sergeant, got the driver's door first and grabbed this bloke and threw him on the ground.
06:20And the rest of us then hopped in and subdued him.
06:21And the job was over.
06:26We'd got the bloke who we were looking for.
06:29He was going to cause no more problems then because he's in custody.
06:33What was that feeling of relief at the end of it?
06:36Well, I think there's a lot of emotions going through at that stage.
06:40I think at the command post, we were still scratching our head as to why we were going up there.
06:45So there's a bit of trepidation bearing in mind we knew this bloke had all these firearms.
06:48We weren't a particularly well-trained group.
06:52We didn't have a sort of real plan.
06:53We never worked together as a team.
06:56And we didn't know what the reaction of that guy was going to be when we got there.
07:01So, yeah, there's anxiety, stress.
07:04But then the closer we got to where this bloke was last seen, the adrenaline started to kick in.
07:10And if you haven't had that, it's an amazing bit of a substance in your veins.
07:16You just sort of put everything else in the background.
07:17And that's why you do what you do.
07:20I think, really, if we hadn't had did what we did, there could have been people shot.
