A gun fight with the country bandit

what happened. It's winter of nineteen eighty eight. It's the twenty ninth of June, where a district up near Saint Arnold, up in central Victoria in the.

not all that exciting. They're basically mostly raising revenue, as we all know. This day, in fact, he had arranged for a very boring day. He was supposed to go and meet a Road Transport Authority officer and spend the day observing how trucks were weighed on the official waybridge at nearby Charlton. But that very exciting day fell apart when the road transport authority fellow rang up and said, I can't do it today, We'll have to do it another day. So you're off the hook. You can go

out catching speeding drivers. So Wine Sherwill went out to this spot fifteen cash from Snanad and he backed his yellow Commodore into a particular Heidi hole that he favored, and he sat there or stood there or whatever he did with his radar gun and he'd pin the passing vehicles if he thought they were speeding. By the time he pulled up his first one, it was about ten to nine in the morning, and he pulls up a

motorist called Jacobs who was going too fast. Ten minutes later, at nine ten am, he warns two motorists against speeding. He didn't actually book them, but warned them. The next speeding driver not so lucky. At nine point fifteen that feller copped a speeding ticket. Then at nine forty five, So our hero has been on a job for about an hour. At nine forty five, another car approaches. It's a silver Mazda six to six hatchback. It's going towards

an ARNT. It's going very fast. SHERBYL checks the radar reading it's doing one hundred and twenty eight case one hundred and twenty eight clicks, which is, you know, if not twenty eight k's over the limit, perhaps more it depends what the limit is there. When Mazda was about two hundred meters away, Wayne SHERBYL steps onto the bitchmen and waves at the driver because, as he said later, I like to give them plenty of warning. He indicated where to pull over, and the driver pulled over.

check the radar reading. That was fine. Everything about him, from the car, which was just a late model Master, to his neat casual clothes and his beard. Neat beard just reflected an average motorist. He didn't look out of the ordinary in any way. The man looks at the radar reading and said, oh, it must be right comfortable, lot. You know you got me, You got me, guv And Sherwel produces his notebook and asked the man's name and address, as you would. He's done it a thousand times before,

and it's just another one. He he called later that the man seemed to hesitate slightly and then he answered Philip Gould, and he spelt out the surname. He said his middle name was Roger, and he said that he lived at key Law Street in Bendigo noted its key Law which is the name of another suburber of town, which is interesting. Asked him about his driver's license, and the fellow says, look, I haven't got it, but I remember the number, and he recites a number, gives Sherwell

a number, and Shewell writes it down. So then Sherwell does the right thing. He goes over to his police car radios D twenty four that's sent for police communications channel, and he says, I want the usuals. Here's the reggio, here's the license number, and he gives him a car number CV that would be Charlie Romeo Victor or whatever it is, six five seven, and then the name of

Philip Gould. While this is going on, our driver, the alleged mister Gould, is making small talk about the weather, and he doesn't seem perturbed when the regio number comes up as belonging to a Master Dealership and had in fact been canceled the previous year nineteen eighty seven. Neither did he show any sign of concern when the license check also drew a blank. No one called Philip Gould had held a license except for a man born back in nineteen thirty who would have been too old to

be the man at the wheel of the Master. Somebody born nineteen thirty might have been twenty years older than this guy, something like that. Confronted with this, the driver said calmly that he had owned the car three months. None of this actually aroused Sherbel's suspicions until mister Gould. The so called mister Gould, admitted he had no identification whatsoever. The policeman follows him back to the Master to question

him further. Then he sees that there's a radio scanner on the front seat of the car, and this probably rang a faint alarm bell. A radio scanner is used, of course, to listen to, among other things, police channels, or it can be used to listen to police radio. And it's not the usual thing that most people are driving around with, particularly if they haven't got any identification, and particularly if the car comes up as unregistered. SHERBYL Says,

so what's your occupation? What do you do? The man says, I'm a vet, as in a vetinary surgeon. SHERBYL Said, well, you say you're a vet, but you don't have any idea on you. That's a bit strange, don't you think. The man says, oh, block, I'll look through a bag here, look through a belongings and see if I've got any letters or anything that show you to show them I'm a vet.

I was immediately scared for my life and I did as instructed, and I put both my hands on the roof of the car. SHERBYL tried to calm the attacker down. Now, Sherbyl his late thirties, but unlike a lot of police, he had done other stuff before he joined the force. As a youngster. He'd worked on cattle and sheep stations in the interior, and he'd worked manually in tough places with tough people, and so he'd knocked around a bit.

Then he joined the army and he become a military policeman, and after that his stint in the army, he'd become a prison officer. And so he was not a shrinking violet. He was a strong man physically and mentally, and he dealt with tough guys before, and he dealt with danger before, and he had plenty of physical and mental courage, and he kept his cool. When this man has pointed a gun. It was actually a sawn Off twenty two. I think the guy was pointing at him. Sherbel's trying to calm

this guy down, but the man keeps going. He reaches over and grabs Sherbel's revolver, his side Army's police revolver. So the stranger, the bad guy now has two handguns, one of which Sherwell knows for a fact is loaded and ready to go.

And so this struggle starts, and you've got the policeman, scared but very keen to save his own life, grabbing hold of a man who's got a gun in each hand, and he's got his wrists and he's forcing those hands apart so that neither gun is pointing at him long enough to get him shot. This is a very tense situation, ladies and gentlemen, and it would give you nightmares for a long time, because it's very scary and you're not

sure you can get out of it. And indeed, you would be thinking there's only one way out of it, that one guy gets shot or the other. It's a struggle to the death. There is no one else around, so they're wrestling on the side of the road. They both fall to the ground and googled. The bad guy falls on top of the policeman. At this time, says sherbyl All, my concentration was on keeping the firearms pointed away from me. I can recall seeing his finger through

the trigger guard of my revolver. Sherbell put the webbing of his own finger between his forefinger and his thumb behind the hammer of the revolver, so that he couldn't fire and couldn't hit him. Several times, the barrels of both weapons were pointed at him, and he was sure that one of them would go off and kill him. The two men stopped wrestling long enough for the attacker to ask the policeman to hand over his gun and let him go, but Sherwell, the policeman said, I can't

do that. If I lose my firearm, I lose my job. I've got four kids and a wife to support, so I can't afford to give up my gun and lose my job. Give it to me, mister girl, before things go too far. Very cool, underfire, our man, Sherbel. For a minute, it seemed as if that appeal might work.

The man hesitated, but then started fighting again. Not a smart move, because one sherbyl was a bit younger, and a bit stronger and a bit fitter, and he was very frightened of being shot, and that adrenaline burst gave him extra strength for sure. Moments later he wrestles the saun of twenty two from the other guy. Then he manages to twist the revolver his own Smith and Wesson thirty eight from the man as well, so suddenly Sherbel

the policeman has both guns. Sherbyll sticks the rifle in his own belt and he points his revolver at the ordering him to lie flat on the ground. Man refuses to do this. He also has got a bit of go about him and he won't hold his arm so that Sherwyll can handcuff him. Sherbyl starts towards the police guarter radio for help. The man blocks his way. Sherwyll says to himself, I don't want to get too close, and I don't want to get into another fighter, else

he might get one of these back from me. He asked him several times to get out of the way, and when Gould walked towards him, saying go on shoot me, Sherwyll instead of shooting him, which shows you what a thoroughly decent man he was. He could have just shot him stone dead right then and would have been completely within his rights. Sherbyll actually backed the way and said

stay where you are. He then fired a shot from his revolver into the air to try to scare the man off and hope that someone else around the place might hear it and call the police, you know, a farmer working in a paddock or whatever. The bad guy backs off a little bit, but he keeps saying, go on, shoot me, go on, shoot me. Sherwyll attempts to move to the back of the police car, at which time the bad guy tries to block him again. A car

passes traveling west. As that car approached Gould, the batman turns and walks towards his master. Sherwell seizes the chance, grabs the radio microphone through the open window of the police car and calls Sananad seven two to Snanad urgent. And that was a message back to Sonana, but not a terribly distinct or complicated message, not a very distinct message because he couldn't really add any more. Then Sherwyll looks back at the Masda where the bad guy is,

and you wouldn't believe it. What he sees makes him run around behind the police car for protection because mister Gould has now produced a sawn off shotgun. He didn't just have a sawn off rifle. He's got a sawn off shotgun and he grabs that and he's pointing it at Sherwell, who is scared for his life because a shotgun, particularly when it's sawn off, has a scatter gun effect, and he's going to cause terrible damage at close range and it is impossible almost to miss with such a weapon.

The raises the shotgun, points it at sherbyl Sherwoll fires two quick shots from his pistol. The man disappears behind the Master. Sherwyl does the same behind the police gar, squatting down behind the engine block, hoping it will protect him if there's more shooting. He can hear the radio D twenty four on the radio calling to him saying where are you and you know Sherwyll whatever seven two, But because he can't reach it safely. After a while,

Sherwyll screws up his nerve and he creeps along. He opens a driver's door and he reaches for the radio microphone. He put it on the bonnet and crouched again behind the engine block before calling D twenty four for help. He wasn't sure if the gunman was still there, but if he was, Sherwell was frightened that he was playing possum, that he was lying there with the shotgun waiting to get a chance to shoot him. So he's still very very nervous. Long story short, the Snana police realized that

something bad has happened. Two coppers there jump in a car and speed out to this site, which is fifteen k's out of town. So as long as if they can get there in two minutes, it takes a while, and it is a long time if they're squatting behind a car thinking that somebody might shoot you with a sawn off shotgun. They know that Sherwill has been checking a silver masder because that call had gone in, and they know that the man when the Master gave his

name as Philip Gould. That is all they know, not much.

that's what they do. Sherwell calls out, mister Gould, can you hear me? Mister Gould, can you hear me? But the man doesn't move or make a sound. A minute or so later the police creep up and they discover why he doesn't make a sound. It's because he's got a thirty eight bullet in his brain. One of Wayne Sherbyl's shots had hit the mark, which is probably a good thing. The police searched the masterne Not only had there been a sawn off rifle and a shotgun and

a scanner, there's false ID. There's a leather cartridge belt with eighteen shotgun cartridges and five hundred and eighteen twenty two bullets. There's an imitation forty four caliber cold handgun and a nine millimeter cartridge. The shaken policeman didn't know who the dead man really was, but one thing was certain. The mysterious mister Gould was no bird watcher. So at this point the dead man is still unidentified. You know,

police photographers come, forensic come, news, helicopters come. It's big news. Policeman shoots man, blah blah blah, great story, big story, but they don't know really who he is. As luck had it, the people who knew that car, that silver Master, we're watching the Channel ten news. Those people were a woman called Bev Turner and her two sons who were actually in Melbourne because they'd come down from Sheperdon with her husband, Ian Turner, her newish husband. When I say

her sons, they're her sons, not his. They're his step sons. And she's not long been married to this guy in Turner, and they're living around Sheperdon and three days before this shootout he's brought them down to Melbourne for you to stay at friends or whatever while he goes off on one of his mysterious business trips. Now he's persuaded this woman he's married that he's got a lot of business interests.

He owns buildings and properties and da da da da da, And she believes him because he often turns up with quite a bit of money and seems to be fairly well healed, and he's got a great line of patter, and in fact that is how he'd got her in thees, he big noted, and he carried large amounts of cash and so on and so forth. So she thought he was quite a successful businessman, but she wasn't absolutely certain

what his businesses were apart from the story. He told her that he owned certain buildings in Melbourne and he got rent and so on and so forth, And he told her he'd been a film producer and a television producer at Channel seven and all this sort of stuff which had an element of truth about it. He had worked at Channel seven, but in fairly lowly roles. So Bev Turner and her boys are watching television. They see

this car beside the road filmed. It's a Mazda six to six, and she thinks, that looks like the car we used to drive. And then she sees in the car with the filming, she sees the Scott Morone upholstery and a Morone overnight bag which looks very much like her husband. And so she's thinking, my god, that looks like that car we used to drive. That I thought I ain got rid of but that looks like he's gearing the car. My goodness me, So she thinks this

coincidence is a bit much. One of her sons, obviously a teenager or whatever, rings a friend in Sheperdon and he says to the friend, John, John, have you've seen Ian my stepfather? And this blog says no, but I'll go around and have a look. So John drives around to Turner's house in Sheperdon. It was just on the edge of Shep. It was a house on a little

fruit block with orchard trees. And he notices that, even though it's getting a bit late at night, that their Doberman dog is tied up to the random post and he thinks that's unusual. Usually that dogs around the back of his kennel at this time of night. And there's no sign of life, no lights, whatever, and he thinks this this is not quite normal. There's alarm bells ringing

in his mind. So he rings Melbourne and he tells Bev Turner's sons what he'd found, and then he went to Shep police station and he told the officer on duty. He thought he knew who was driving the silver Masda that had been on the news and therefore he thought he knew who the dead guy was. But by this stage events were already catching up Bev Turner, the worried wife, had asked her friend to ring Bendigo Police about the Master. It was then the police knew who the dead man was.

It was a stolen master. The dead man was Ian William Turner born the twenty fifth of July nineteen forty six. Respectable, married, no criminal record. He seemed hardly the sort of citizen you'd expect to be driving around with sawn off guns, an imitation pistol, five hundred rounds of AMMO, and a fatal habit bailing up policeman. And so the widow Turner was able to fill the police in on quite a remarkable story. She'd met Turner just a few years earlier,

about five years earlier. She had two sons from a previous relationship. And she met this guy Daddy and onng and he seemed a smooth operator and a big time operator, and he had money and started dada and they got married and so on. And he'd told her that he had a trucking business and he had an office block in Albert Road, South Melbourne, and all this sort of stuff, and she never really thought to question those things. They lived in the country, and now and again he would

have to take business trips. He would say, well, I've got to go and check this or that, and he used to tell her about the drivers of the trucks, and he had this whole line of patter. She was quite invested in this fantasy story that he told. And this guy Turner, it turns out, had always been somewhat of a fantasist. And so you know, when he worked at Channel seven, where he had a pretty basic job in the past, they called him Tickles because he had

a funny laugh. Most people at work with him thought he was a big notor who told a strange blend of fact and fiction, and that he would big note about owning a boat or owning this or that, or all sorts of things that some people realized that he was really a bullshit artist. But he's a fantasist who's not just a harmless fantasist. He's a fantasist who collects guns. He's a fantasist who's willing to do crimes to subsidize

his fantasies. So he pretends that he's got a trucking business, or he owns city buildings, but the reality is he's robbing banks to get money to pretend that he's doing good business. The bank jobs are way for him to support the fantasy in front of the woman that he's married and her sons, among others. It turns out when the police look through the records, they think, ah, there's a series of robberies here that this fellow fits perfectly.

They just had dubbed this guy the country bannit. The first robbery had been at the Rutherglen A and Z Bank back in November eighty four, so this is what tweent and a half years earlier. That was just one month after Turner had moved to Shepperton. The next was at the nab at Rushworth, another little country town just big enough to have a bank in that era, June

nine eighty five. Then that was followed by the state bank at Rutherglen back to rother Glen, just a different bank in October eighty five, and then the A and Z bank it's and Arnod in July eighty six. The last one was at Dimbula's State Bank on the eleventh of June eighty seven. So this fellow has been doing a bit more than one a year, but not many more. He's just been nailing one now and again when he

needed the money. So it's not really a spree. It's pretty cool and calculated, and the police are certain that on the day that he was shot dead he was on the way to do another robbery. It sort of fitted his mo He had the guns with him, he was driving fast, which was not smart, but maybe he was late for an appointment that he had made or

something before the shooting. Before he shot dead, police knew that the five robberies had totaled something like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and they knew it had been committed by the same man because of certain striking similarities. Each of the five banks, small country town, including the tour at Rushworth, all done by a man in his forties whose description was the same each time. His method

was simple, brazen, un effective. In each case, he made a bogus appointment by telephone to see the manager about investments the Bandit would turn up just before closing time, neatly dressed, without any attempt at disguise, and he'd go in and shake hands with the manager and sit down with his briefcase, and then he produced a gun and say have a look at this. Staff were often locked in a rear room while the offender rifled the strong

room and the tellis draws. Identical hand ties were used to tie up staff into of the robberies, and he used the same false name into the robbery, so that is a pretty good indicator that it was him. When he robbed the State bank at Rutherglen, one of his two rother Glenn robberies, the bandit pulled off an elaborate con. He posed as a telecom employee, working on the bank's phones for a week before finally bailing up the staff. Not a bad con, a little bit Ocean's eleven for Rutherglen.

Because of this approach, where he didn't wear disguises, the police had a very accurate description of the balding, fair haired, genial looking man with the chubby frame and the distinctive chuckle. Every one knew Ian's laugh.

killed by his own actions. The coroner said Constable Sherwell not only acted with exemplary restraint and self control, but he also remained mindful of the safety of those members of the public as motorists drove unwittingly into a theater of Mortal Kombat, Constable Sherwell has earned both respect and commendation. On the ninth of December nineteen ninety four, so this is six years later, Sherwell was presented with the Police Valor Medal in a quiet ceremony at the Police Academy,

attended by family and a few friends. Three days later he was given a civic receptionists and armored and then it was official. Wayne Sherwell was a local hero. It just took the criminal justice system six years and two days to acknowledge it. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to herold'sn dot com dot Au forward slash Andrew

rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcast's soul at news dot com dot Au. That is all one word News Podcast's soul and if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.