A harrowing crime and a quest for justice

Then she saw the glint of the knife in his hand, held low between the bucket seats. That's when she knew there was no way out. I'm Andrew ruled this as Life and Crimes. Today we're going to talk about the

ones that got away. I'm going to do this because recently I've put together a book, which, funnily enough, is called Life and Crimes, and it features twenty two of the stories that I've written over the years, twenty two out of hundreds, really, and I chose them as some are old, some are new, some are borrowed, and some are blue. There's all sorts of stories there, But the ones that stand out for me over forty odd years of writing stories are the stories that are about people

who got away with it. Stories where I tell the victim side of the story but we don't know who'd done it, who did it, and who done it is a common enough feature of crime stories, but in the real world there's nothing amusing about it. It is often a terrible thing because in many cases, someone has got away with a very serious crime and has never been hauled to account, and they're victims are haunted by that

fact and it never leaves them. They are damaged. And not long before we came into the studio to do this, I had a long conversation with a woman who's now middle aged. We will call her Donna. It's not her real name. Her real name does start with d that's not Donna, But I've always called her Donna in any reference to her, in print or anywhere else. And Donna is someone I've spoken to and I've met, but I've

spoken to her regularly for more than twenty years. She was the victim of a pack rape when she was fourteen years old, along with a school friend of hers, a girl from her own class out in a high school in the eastern suburbs, and that crime was horrendous in all ways and in many ways, and all the more so because of the effect it had on those girls. I don't really know. I can't talk for the other one. Because she didn't want to have anything to do with

stories or anything else. She decided to lock that experience away in a box and get on with her life, which is one way to cope with such a terrible incident. But Donna is a different sort of person. She's I have to say, highly intelligent, highly articulate, I would suggest, creative, I'd suggest sensitive, and by her own admission, very damaged by what happened to her all those years ago. Now we're talking about Melbourne Cup Day nineteen seventy six, when

this happened. That is a long time ago. It's coming up forty years in two more years, and I recall it well. It was a dark, wet day. It was the wettest Melbourne Cup on record. I think I think many inches of rain fell in the afternoon of the Cup. It almost drowned out the running of the Cup. It was run and won in about the slowest time of the twentieth century, because the horses were running basically through

three inches of water as they galloped. It was so dark and so wet and so much rain that the caller couldn't see the field. There was so much mud spattered over the field that the caller couldn't tell which one was what until they got halfway up the straight. It was a remarkable day with this feeling of doom and thunderstorms and rain. It was biblical. It was sort of like the end of the world. And on that

day there was what they called Cup Day Rock. They used to hold this concert at Festival Hall, the old boxing venue in West Melbourne. Now Festival Hall was a very big venue. It had started life as a boxing and wrestling stadium run by Stadiums Limited, which was a front for the notorious John Wren, the man who virtually

ran Melbourne in the old, bad old days. And as time were on and boxing became less popular, Festival Hall was a very big rock and roll venue back in that era in the year seventies and Cup Day Rock was a big thing they did every year. And that afternoon, while seventy eight thousand people were at the races getting wet, watching a Kiwi Mudla called vanderhum Win the Melbourne Cup. There was a big crowd at the Cup day rock concert, mostly teenagers or young you know, people that were not

far out of their teens. And among them were these two fourteen year old girls who'd come in on the train from i'l say, Ringwood out that area. They went to school high school out there. There was a little bit of background to it, at least one of the girls, Donna, had been into the Rock Toober concert a couple of weeks earlier, and there she had met a young guy who could have been an apprentice builder or something like that.

His name, she thinks was Wayne Thompson. That's the name she's got, and that's the name that has been published before in connection with this story, so I believe it's okay to use that name. And Wayne Thompson or the guy that called himself Wayne Thompson, may not be his real name. He drove a tan colored or fawn colored station wagon, probably a Holden or a Falcon. He had tools in the rear of the station wagon, as if

he worked on building sites that sort of stuff. He might have been an apprentice build, a carpenter, whatever, or maybe a laborer. Back in those days, a lot of people left school fairly young and went to work and the minute they turned eighteen, they had a car. And they were young blucks with adult tastes. So I have to say they drank and they smoked, and he chased around after girls, and some of them, the bad ones,

did a lot more than chase after girls. They were bad dudes who set out to trap young girls, sometimes against their will, and they did some very bad things.

And that is what happened on this occasion. Wayne Thompson was quite a pleasant looking bloke and had a good line of talk, and he'd actually driven out to the eastern suburbs from his home suburb, which I think was footscrap, and that had impressed our girl Donner that he'd driven out during the week before the Cup day to see her, and she thought, you know, he was a bit of good stuff because he had a car, he was eight

in et cetera, et cetera. He had the blonde haircut, the sharpie haircut, which was then very fashionable among some young people. And he also had a few bad habits which she didn't know about. And on this day, after meeting up again, with him at cup Day Rock. She went outside and there he was with his station wagon, and he had in the car a couple of other young guys who both of them call themselves John, which

probably may not have been their real name. Wayne persuaded Donna that they'd go to a party, and at first she played it cool and said, I don't know, I don't want to do that. But she realized later, too late, much later, that Wayne, being persuasive and plausible and you know, sort of a blonde pretty boy, that it was his job in this group of young men to chat up vulnerable girls picked out of the crowd at concerts. This was the modus operandi of a gang, a gang of

gang rapists. Terrible thing. Donna took the bait. She and her friend Angela we will call her, agreed to go, and as soon as he closed the deal, Wayne switched things. He said his car was already full, but the girls could get a lift with his friends, and he assured them that he's in the other car were trustworthy. Now, as he says this, right on que a gleaming red Tarana pulled up next to them. Now, back in that era, at nine to seventy six, Tarana xw ones were big deal.

They were racing them at Bathist. They were hot. A V eight model I think was one of them, and they were very fast production cars, and every young buck in the Burbs I thought they were wonderful and wanted one, and in this case, one of these guys had one. This would suggest, of course, that whoever was driving it wasn't actually eighteen. It was probably twenty twenty one. It

was a two door manual. It had black bucket seats that had a bittered ball on the gearstick, which was what they used to do then, and it had a huge transfer on the top of the windscreen the front wind screen with the word Tarana, funnily enough, and so that made it quite a distinctive vehicle. There were four young men in the car. The driver wore a hat. A big man leaned forward in the passenger seat and unlatched it so that Angela could climb in between the

pair of young guys in the back seat. Donna realized that she was expected to sit on the big man's knee in the front. She wasn't that delighted by this, but she thought, well, it won't take long to get to the party. It gave her the impression, being squeezed in like this, that the party could not be far away and maybe there in three minutes. Well, she was wrong.

Wayne had assured her that he would drive ahead and lead the way, and she believed him, and Angela trusted her because Donna was sort of the sparky, outgoing, verbal one, the one that could talk fast and all the rest of it. And so in a sense, she was the one that led Angela, the quieter girl along, which I think is another thing that has haunted her, that she felt responsible for her friend or for her classmate. It

was all organized in seconds. The situation had changed from the girls going with three people that Donna had already met before to being in a car full of strangers. Bang. That's how fast these guys had switched. They'd done the Thinberland Patrick switch and bait, as they say. The first thing she realized was that the four men belonged to one ethnic group. They were dark haired and spoke with the same accent. She thought they were Greek or perhaps

Italian in itself. That didn't matter to her. Donna and some of her five siblings were born overseas to a Canadian father, and a Northern Irish mother and her family had been all over the world before immigrating only a few years before, so she knew what it was like to be an outsider. She had a bit of an accent. She still does have a trace of her an accent that's a touch of Irish and a touch of Canadian. So when she was fourteen living at home with her parents,

I'm sure that that accent was quite pronounced. What made her uneasy was that these strangers knew things about her. They knew which concerts she'd been to. They knew she liked dancing. She used to do ballroom dancing lessons. They knew where she came from, and they knew which school she went to. Now that was, looking back on it, a bit spooky because they knew all about her and she knew nothing about them. They'd done their homework. This when you look back on it, when you know what

happened later, he's quite sinister. She said. They were kind of laughing, but in a sly way, and that's how she told me about it. Later, she says, we were being interviewed, but I didn't realize they were looking for someone who fitted their someone who came from a different area and had no idea who they were with or where they were taking us. The men avoided using each other's names. This is how cold blooded they were. They called each other mate, although she heard the name Joe

and one of them mentioned working in a garage. What the men knew about her was harmless enough in itself, but they fact they knew it did unsettler and settled her greatly. Later on, Donna looked in the revision mirror and caught the eye of one of the men in the back seat. She didn't like the look he was sizing her up. The longer they drove, the stranger the situation seemed. For the second time in three days. She

was driven into the Western suburbs. She'd been out there a few days earlier with Wayne on a bit of a reconnoiter, a trip that in itself hadn't been altogether satisfactory, but which hadn't scared. I'd point that out. Both cars pulled up at a service station. She was uneasy. The one that she calls the big Guy got out and spoke to Wayne secretively. It was as if they were discussing a drug deal. It wasn't a drug deal, but it was a deal. The big guy was the boss.

He was broad shouldered, thick set, strong accent. Donna noticed a distinctive crease across the bridge of his nose. By the time they left the service station, Donna was spooked, but she didn't know what to do. Even if she got away from the front seat, Angela was trapped in the back of a two door car. She'd never get out. Soon the cars leave the houses of the Williamstown area.

Back in those days, Williamstown and Altona were sort of the outer edge of the western suburbs, very different from now, and they passed open country. It was, in fact, the rifle range at Williamstown. They then turned off onto a rough dirt track that led into wasteland between the Altona beachfront and a row of huge fuel or chemical storage tanks,

which used to be a bit of a landmark. Out there in the distance, she could see the tiled roofs of a new housing development, but the wasteland was deserted. She could hear thunder as the cars stopped near a patch of stunted scrub. Everything seemed wrong. Donna jumped out of the tarana and ran to the other car to Wayne's car, checking over a shoulder that Angela was behind her. What's going on? She yelled to Wayne, what's the problem? He said, and one of the two people with Wayne

said something strange. He said, we're doing a deal. It was an emission. She heard a thud. She heard a sudden exhalation of air and a scream. She jerked around the sea that the big guy had knocked Angela to the ground and was dragging her, much like a hunter dragging an animal that they'd shot. Angela was clearly terrified. Years later, when Donna saw Edvard Munch's painting the scream, it reminded her of the way her friend Angela looked

at that moment. Donna turned back to Wayne and the two Johns, the alleged Johns, and begged them to do something, but they mumbled something about going for help. They got in their car and drove away. She never saw them again. It was clearly a setup. The big man threw Angela into the Tarana. Donna ran at him and jumped on his back. She clawed at his neck. He grabbed her and tossed her into the back seat with Angela, who was sobbing. She's crying. The other two men were still outside,

leaving the driver and the leader in front. The other two walked off as if they had reversed their movements. The driver sped off, bouncing over the rough ground, then stopped the car. Donna was terrified, but she was still thinking clearly. She said, you don't want to do this, you don't want to do this. But the big guy interrupted. He said, why don't you just fucking shut up? And he said it, staring at her in a very threatening way. Then she saw the glint of the knife in his hand,

held low between the bucket seats. That's when she knew there was no way out. But she couldn't imagine what was going to happen. How could she. She just turned fifteen, She just had her birthday. She'd been fourteen a few days earlier, and now she was fifteen. It wasn't until Donna was twice that age, an apparently successful and sophisticated woman living a long way from Melbourne, that she found

the words to finally tell what happened that day. By then, another fifteen years later, she had worked hard and lived fast, a party girl, running on adrenaline and deadlines, pushing herself to exhaustion so that she could sleep it off and do it all again night after night. She left school in Melbourne soon after the rapes, after the rape of herself and her friend Angela, and a waste land out

near Altona Beach, she started as a window dresser. She moved to working in nightclubs and then theater steadily, more frenetic jobs that kept her body and her mind busy. It was the mask she turned to the world away to keep her nightmares at bay. It didn't always work. Once, when she was drunk in a club at five a m. She told a friend she'd been raped, and then she went silent. The friend did not hear the full story until years later. After one failed relationship and a few

false starts, Donna stayed single for years. Her family knew what had happened in Melbourne, but it was to boo. Nobody wanted to.

In any case, this fifteen year old girl who became that thirty year old woman who is now in her early sixties. For years, she couldn't force herself to talk about it until one day in early nineteen ninety two, when the past finally caught up and her mask cracked. It happened with a chance sighting at a place where she was working. A supervisor asked where she went to school, explaining that one of the men working there thought he

remembered her face from a high school in Melbourne. It was a harmless enough query, but Donna was rattled by it. Being recognized triggered a rush of submerged memories and fear. From that day, friends noticed that her behavior changed. Now, this is classic PTA. It's pushed down, it's pushed down, it's pushed down, and eventually it gets the top and spills over. This is what happens to so many police soldiers, you know, victims of violence, victims of rape. One of

those friends was a guy called Tom McDonald. He was a business lawyer who then practiced mostly in the United States, but he often visited the city where Donna lived. The Australian city with Donna lived. He first met her in nineteen ninety one at a club that she managed. They became friends, and then he helped her with a legal problem and they became good mates. He told me that the Donna he met when she was okay. She was sparkling company on a great cook, but their friendship was platonic,

fair enough. After one meal together in early ninety two, they were listening to music and having a drink when Donna's charm offensive fell apart. She said she trusted him because he had never made a pass at her. Then she said she'd been having strange feelings, and then she broke down completely. The savvy club manager that she was in working hours turned back into that terrified, frightened schoolgirl. Crying. She poured out a stream of raw recollection. It was

so traumatic it made her physically ill. Tom MacDonald told me a long time later afterwards, he said, he felt ashamed to be a man. Then he decided to help her. He suggested psychological treatment and legal remedies and crimes compensation, all these things that she could do to try and regain some control over what had happened to her. Really, not so much you needed the crimes for the money, but to feel that you'd taken back some control. The

other was justice. Of course, she wanted to search for the attackers and see them punished. So McDonald helped Donna to launch a crime's case that she eventually won. But mere compensation about six months wages for a dozen rapes and a ruined life was never going to be enough to put her back together again. Meanwhile, Donna's friends saw what they call that sparky, mischievous, bossy girl unravel completely. The workaholic could no longer work. Her inner suburban house

was a mess. She stayed indoors for days, curled in a ball crying. On a first visit to a psychologist, she handed over a tape recording of an interview she'd had with a sexual assault counselor. It was, the psychologist said later, a harrowing account of a harrowing crime. We haven't yet shared the full extent of this with our listeners here. Another friend heard the story firsthand with detail, shook him all the terrible, filthy parts that she needed

to have said, he says. Johnna finally went to the police in March nineteen ninety two, while in Melbourne for a conference. She went to nine to one in community policing squad and started talking. It took ten hours to finish the statement. A policewoman took it all down and shared a piece of boiled fruitcake with her, the only thing either of them ate from midday until ten o'clock at night. She recalled every detail as if it were frozen in time. I had these snapshots in my brain,

she told me later. It unfolds like a film, looks like a Noah film. And I have to say, for those listeners who have seen Dead Man Walking, which I personally find one of the most haunting films I've ever seen, the scenes in that film that are shot in black and white, that are reconstructing the crime that was committed. I think that the sense you get when you watch that film is the sense that Donna gets every time she thinks about what happened to her that total sense

of nightmarish, sinister horror that you cannot escape. She says, it wasn't just the knife that the man held, the main leader of the pack rape, but the look in the eyes. He dragged her out of the car, and then he got in the back seat and he proceeded to assault Angela. Donna was in shock. Back then the driver stayed in the car watching the other two men walked up. These are the two men who had walked away. They returned. They pushed and abused her, working themselves up.

They called her a looking slut, stupid bitch, and other worse words. They grabbed it a breasts. They called her bhutana or putana Greek and Italian variations of war. She refused to undress. One of them called her a smart bitch, and they shoved her face down on the bonnet of the car and pulled her clothes down, one holding her by the hair. What followed was obscene, violent, and degrading. She was numb with pain, fear, and concern for Angela, who she knew was a virgin, and who Donna thought

guiltily wouldn't be there except for her. Donna felt guilty that she'd brought Angela with her. She could hear her friend whimpering in the car. It rained again. This is the wettest day for years, the wettest Melbourne Cup day ever. She tried to block out what was happening by concentrating on the sky and on the rain drops on the windscreen. She'd see them running down. She never forgot that forever. After a wet windscreen jolted her into remembering those unspeakable acts.

The rapists laughed and taunted Donna as they zipped up their jeanes. She dressed herself and got in the car with Angela, thinking it was over. But it wasn't. The Tarana when a few hundred meters and stopped waiting was another station wagon, a metallic mock, a brown Ford with curtains in the back. There were two men in it, a tag team. The big guy dragged Angela out and ordered both girls into the ford. He got in too, as if he owned them. They drove off. Donna didn't

see the Toronto again except in bad dreams. She had no idea where they were until she saw a footscray Institute of Technology sign as the car turned down a sloping entrance. To park land beside the river. That's the Marrabanong River, opposite Flemington Racecourse, which she noticed was still crowded after the races. It was quiet over on the Footscray Bank, but a family was nearby trying to have a picnic despite the weather. The girls were raped again.

Donna could see the picnickers through the fogged up windows. She willed them to realize what was happening and to rescue them, but of course that didn't happen. They drove off again. This is the third lot of driving in this sequence of this nightmare series of horrors. The gang leader put his arm around Angela in a grotesque parody of affection. When the cars stopped the traffic lights, he whispered in Donna's ear, I know you'd like to run.

They drove under a bluestone bridge where water was lying across the road, almost knee deep. They turned into cobbled lanes among warehouses and factories, somewhere in North Melbourne or Kensington. Now this is an area I know reasonably well because I once lived over there. I'd suggest that it's on the city side of the main Bold Meadows railway line at Kensington down the hill between the railway line and

the old Arden Street football ground. I reckon it's in there, because there was a heap of lane ways and factories and empty places and all the rest of it. Particularly on weekends, there was nothing much happening there. The car went up a steep lane and stopped in a car park underneath the building. It was dark and deserted. That's cup day, see it's public holiday. But suddenly the space was filled with the rumble of a V eight engine and male voices. More men. Donna whispered to Angela to

cling to the pack leader. She said, just stay with him. He won't let anyone else touch you. She was not sure this was true, or even if they would both survive. She feared their ordeal was heading for some more sinister climax. I was frightened. We were going to be annihilated. Are the words, she told me. Years later, one by one the newcomers raped on her, except the last one, the twelfth man to grab her that day. She saw his face. She thought one of the others called him Steve. He

was smaller and fairer than the rest. Unless sure of himself, she whispered to him, help get me out of here. He quietly helped her to get dressed, and then he called to the leader. They made us getting late. Why don't we get rid of them? They drove it was getting dark. Minutes later, the car pulled into a lane beside the North Melbourne Railway station and the two girls were shoved out like pieces of rubby. They'd avoided death,

but their life sentences were just beginning. And that is the major part of a story that I wrote a long time ago, and that I've rewritten with some changes in recent times. It is one of the stories, one of the twenty two stories in my new book Life and Crimes. It's one of the stories there that stand out for me because it is one of those where the bad guys got away, the ones that got away. In the forty plus years since those rapes, those two girls have grown into women who have been haunted by

what happened to them. I doubt this is a day in their lives that they don't think about it, that it doesn't affect them in some way. Nothing can change that. But one of the bad things is that the people that did it were never ever caught. At the time their parents persuaded them not to go to anybody. And it was only in the nineties, some sixteen odd years later that as we discussed that, Donna went to the police and made a ten hour statement and set certain

things in train. Now in the end that did not lead to anybody being arrested or convicted either. And ultimately, some time after that, she came to me and poured her heart out. Somehow we found each other and she told me her story, trusted me with it, and I wrote that story, and I stay in touch with Donna. As I said before, she's intelligent, she's articulate, She's a very clever woman. And I think that probably makes it even harder for her. Really, the humiliation is probably even

sharper for her. She can talk about it, and she talks about it with passion and with anger and with great verve. But every time she talks to me about it, even you know, if it's on the phone or in person, she'll break down. At some point it overwhelms her. The emotion overwhelms her like a wave, and it hits her and her voice breaks and she starts to sob, and then she forces it back inside her and keeps talking. Because even now, at the age of sixty three or thereabouts.

She is determined if she can to a do something, to find the people that did it and make them pay and be She wants to see the system altered so that victims of sexual assault and these sort of violent assaults are handled better by the system. I think

by and large that has happened. Things have changed a lot since the seventies, and a lot of the things that she knew were missing back in the day are now present, and there are now specialist sexual assault units, etc. Donna's problem is that when she goes to see police about it anytime in the last thirty years, inevitably she's frustrated because the original file from the nineteen nineties has been lost I think twice, not only physically lost, but

the police that handled it and have dealt with it, they've moved on, they've retired, they've been transferred, so there's never been any continuity. She doesn't feel that this crime is.

in the nineties. He originally got more than thirty years, which was later pulled back to twenty seven or twenty eight years on appeal. But you can see that if these men had been caught, they probably would have got

more than twenty years jail and thoroughly deserved it. Now, we can't spend all day going through this, but I've done some research on it in the past, and I was able to track down a phone number and an address for the then boy, the nineteen seventy six boy called Wayne Thompson, and to track down people that knew people and so on. Police were able to identify certain individuals, but the problem was that in the absence of any other evidence, they were not in a position to lay charges.

All these people would have to do is to deny everything and to say it didn't happen. But against that, let's put a few things out there. This car in nineteen seventy six, November nineteen seventy six, a young man from it'll be from the western suburbs, so it'll be Foot's Gray or el Tarner or Spotswood or out that way, Williamstown. Young guy, probably Greek, maybe not maybe Italian, but the Mediterranean. He had a red tarana, the hot tarana, with the

big tarana writing across the windscreen in capital letters. Someone somewhere is going to have a polaroid snapshot or one of those old snapshots that people used to take of each other on weekends or whatever. It's stuck in an album somewhere of that car with its driver. Someone somewhere will remember this. Someone somewhere will be the young guy who didn't rape the girl, who said let's get out of here, let them go. That young guy took pity

on them, he didn't commit rape. That guy is out there somewhere he might recall who was who and the zoo. They're all old now. I believe some of them will be dead. Others will be getting on. They were older than they're victims.

guys who fit this profile that era. Someone who remembers Wayne Thompson or a guy called Wayne who in nineteen seventy six was a young apprentice, or a builder builder's laborer who had a tan colored station wagon undoubtedly Holden nor Falcon, that sort of stuff. Someone somewhere must recall that Melbourne in nineteen seventy six was a much smaller place. The western suburb in those days ran from the Maravanong out to the Williamstown Rifle Range. They were much smaller suburbs.

There were far fewer people around, and out there somewhere there are people listening to this who will know someone who knows someone who can help. I'm asking you in listener land to get in touch to help us solve the one that got away. There are other stories in this collection Life and Crimes that also need to be solved, but I would like to see none of them solved

more than this one. This really means a lot. Anyone who wants to get in touch with us, please email us on Life and Crimes at news dot com dot Au or email me direct Andrew dot Rule at news dot com. All our emails are at news dot com dot Au, so they're easy. Please do that. I'd love to talk to anyone who can throw any light on any of this. It doesn't matter if it's just a

little thing. Someone lived in the same street, someone used to work on a building site nearby that had a car like that used to whistle at girls as they walk past. Whatever it might be, you might know something that we can use to backtrack to solve this case. I have to say that I've done today's podcast without

talking with Donna. On the podcast, Donna is currently in a distant part of a distant state, and one day, if we get anywhere, I would like to talk to her, and I think she would like to talk to us. But I have to say it is a grueling process and it's not easy. 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 Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew

Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.