Listeners should be born that this episode of Life and Crimes contains graphic imagery and language, and there is no doubt that the story we tell today is extremely disturbing, which it has to be. He was an unidentified intruder who preyed on women home alone, after studying their movements
the way a crocodile watches and waits for prey. Born to a violent alcoholic father and a frightened mother, trapped by poverty to a life of family violence, His origin raises the question of whether he was born bad or made that way? Was it nature or nurture, a question we've asked many times in these podcasts. I'm Andrew Rule.
This is Life in Crimes. It's thirty years since a prison officer took hold of a convicted rapist and led him out and put him in a van and took him off to prison, where he has remained until this day. That man's name was Christopher Clarence Hall, but he was known for many months as the Ascot Veil rapist, the sex attacker who terrorized Melbourne for nine long months in nineteen ninety two and nineteen ninety three, And as it turns out, he was a man who had raped other
people even before that. I'm now going to read a short, sharp story that sums up the life and crimes of Christopher Clarence Hall, who might soon walk amongst us again. This is a version of the story I wrote for the Sunday Herald Sun. It was a big day for crime news. Serial self mutilator and would be mass killer Garret David finally died in a security ward from bizarre self inflicted wounds, such as slicing off his penis three times.
Some pitied the tortured soul, but few mourned him, saydistic sex offendern certified scum ian Melrose Patterson died of cancer that same day, not before time. Even the palliative care nurses hated being near the dying Patterson because he was such a creep. Finally, the man dubbed the ascot val rapist was arrested after nine months of terrorizing women across the northwestern suburbs of Melbourne. It was June the eleventh, nineteen ninety three. Melbourne's long night of fear and loathing
was over. In daylight and in handcuffs. The figure who'd caused such anguish and terror didn't look like a monster. In daylight, he'd shrunk back into a pathetic human, just an ordinary looking forty year old man with an ordinary name. Anyone looking for outward signs of the cruelty he displayed to the women he attacked might have glimpsed it in eyes that seemed as dead as a shark's. He stopped short of murder, but extreme violence never seemed far away.
He usually carried a knife during his string of sex assaults, and often bound and sometimes gagged his victims. His attacks were brutal and left women bruised or bleeding, and, in one case, with a seventy two year old with broken ribs. He taunted his victims and deliberately terrorized four of them by returning to attack them again, one of them four separate times. His youngest known victim was twenty two, the
oldest was eighty two. One was eight months pregnant. Another had an eight year old daughter in the house, who he threatened to harm if the mother resisted. His willingness to attack old and young made him one of the most feared rapists in our history and one of the most despised prison inmates of the last thirty years. Like Raymond mister Stinky Edmonds, he was an unidentified intruder who preyed on women home alone after studying their movements the
way a crocodile watches and waits for prey. Like the silver gun rapist Peter Vatos, he was a burglar who discovered rape, an opportunist who became addicted to terrorizing defenseless women, just as he had become addicted to theft to feed his gambling addiction. For months before his arrest, this increasingly bold predator caused fear and loathing among thousands of women
in the Northwestern suburbs where he struck most often. Asket Vale was just one suburb of many where he preyed on women living alone, but it was roughly the center of a broad sweep extending from Carlton, where he lived in a lodging house, to Airport West, near where he
had grown up in extreme poverty and abuse. The spate of ugly home invasions that drew police and public attention to the unknown rapist apparently began in late nineteen ninety two and would continue until his arrest on June eleventh the following year, But forensic tests revealed that the same man was responsible for twice raping a middle aged woman in Mooney Ponds more than five years earlier. It was a double attack that shocked police who thought themselves unshockable.
That woman, by then in her fifties, had been a nune most of her adult life. Before leaving her order. She was a virgin. On Remembrance Day, November the eleventh, nineteen eighty seven, the rapist broke into her home in a quiet Mooney Pond's street. He didn't just ignore the former nun's terrified protests. It was as if he enjoyed inflicting extra pain, physical and mental to a Catholic authority figure. He specifically mocked her religion, asking her why God didn't
save her. He tied her up, took her bank card, and forced her to tell him the security number so he could empty her account. He gagged her and went to get the cash, threatening to return and hurt her if the number was wrong. He stole three hundred dollars using the card, then returned and raped the poor woman again, a crime wrongly attributed for years to another unidentified sex offender,
the child abductor, dubbed mister Crule. It wasn't until early nineteen ninety three that a rash of rapes was alarming so many people that public meetings were held in northwestern suburbs. Detective Inspector Peter Harvey, acting head of the rape squad, called on local police to help saturate key areas with plain clothes police and cars. They formed a task force, Operation Century, named after the rapist's habit of ordering frightened victims to count to one hundred after he left them.
Many of the victims did not want to stay alone in their homes and went to stay with relatives or friends. Sometimes, an armed policewoman in casual clothes would move into a victim's home and wait, acting as bait. Meanwhile, officers in plain clothes wandered the streets looking from a man who fitted the description that most victims gave, in his late twenties or three thirties, with dark hair an Australian accent. After four months, and with public fears still rising, the
rapist was still at large. Late on the night of June tenth, nineteen ninety three, four task force members were near the Essendon tram terminus when they saw a man walk from a nearby street. As soon as he saw them he knew he knew they were police. He spun around and ran down the side street. The police chased on foot. One of them, Constable Lindsey Hansen, was almost run over as he pursued the fleeing man across Mount Alexander Road before catching him and tackling him to the ground.
His name was Christopher Clarence Hall. He was interviewed, his address confirmed, and then he was released in the early hours of the morning after providing a blood sample. This was because his criminal record, which stretched back to his childhood,
was all for burglary and theft, not sex crimes. So on the night that the police grabbed this wandering person who ran away from them when they thought, well, this looks promising, but they looked up his record and it was all for burglaries and thefts, long record, but no sex crimes, and so on that night four in the morning. By the time they'd finished with him, they turned him back on the street because they didn't really have enough
to go on. But around noon next day police went to Hall's rooming house, a boarding house re stayed in Cardingen Street in Carlton, and they searched his room, and they found incriminating items, including a pair of runners identical to those that the unknown rapist had worn at a crime scene three weeks earlier. It was then that an alert policewoman, Jacqueline Curran, saw a man matching Hall's description
in a nearby street. She grabbed him. In Hall's pocket was a one way bus ticket to Catherine in the Northern Territory. If the police had waited just a few more hours, he would have been on his way to the far North, where so many wanted men had gone and vanished. Once there, he might have done the same, but he had left his run too late. Hall faced the County Court in May nineteen ninety four. He was represented by respected criminal lawyer Brendan Wilkinson, who happened to
live in the Yessendon area and knew the school. Wilkinson was personally very relieved to see that his new client had been caught. Wilkinson, being a criminal lawyer, had seen a lot of bad endings, especially for those with bad starts in life. Hall's criminal records started in nineteen sixty five, when he was just twelve. Hall was a loner who was socially and sexually dysfunctional, one of a dozen children born to a violent alcoholic father and a frightened mother,
trapped by poverty to a life of family violence. His origin raises the question of whether he was born bad or made that way? Was it nature or nurture, a question we've asked many times in these podcasts. Police noted that most of All's siblings had not been in trouble with the law, and that his mother was the only one in the family to support him during his trial. He wasn't at all popular with his siblings, particularly his sisters.
A troubled child at school, he'd been sent away to institutions such as the notorious Saint a Gastine's orphanage run by the Christian Brothers of Geelong and the Morning Star Home run by Franciscan monks at Morning. Both institutions would later be shut down after the exposure of systematic sexual and physical abuse that produced a generation of ultraviolent offenders. Gary David, the one we mentioned at the start that
did bizarre self mutilations until he died in hospital. He was one of dozens and dozens of the children who went through those sort of places. The notorious hit man. Chris Rentikil Flannery was another. There were many of them, including Stan Taylor, the man who took two young brothers and turned them into bombers. The boys homes and orphanages have a terrible record when it comes to producing ultraviolent men.
Judge Glenn Waldron tried Hall for nineteen counts of rape, to have attempted rape, and six counts of causing serious injury and threats to kill and injure. He was also charged with a total of eighteen burglary and theft offenses. With his lawyer's agreement, Hall pleaded guilty. Rather than subjecting his traumatized victims to cross examination about the worst hour of their lives. He was meek in court, intimidated by the presence of some of those he had hurt so grossly,
who came there to see justice done. A psychiatrist stated that Hall did not suffer a mental illness. He wasn't normal, but he certainly knew what he was doing. Judge Waldron sentenced him to thirty four years with a minimum of twenty seven, longer than most murder sentences, but in the eyes of many or most well deserved The judge said Hall had subjected the women quote to a humiliating, repulsive, as well as terrifying experience, an evil that constituted the
high water mark of antisocial behavior unquote. An appeal court did not quite agree, reducing the sentence to twenty nine years with a minimum twenty five. But Jacqueline Curran, the detective who had arrested Haul in Carlton before he could flee, knew that he must have attacked other women. He didn't just appear as an adult burglar in his thirties. She interviewed Hall in prisons several times until he revealed other rapes to her. In nineteen ninety seven, he was charged
with four more attacks. The extra convictions pushed his sentence to thirty two years with twenty seven minimum. If Hall had received full remissions for good behavior, he would have been released in the year twenty twenty. Even if he serves all of his sentence, he will be due for release from the John Hopkins Facility for Sexual Offenders at Ararat next year, maybe sooner. Whether he will be let back on the street or be required to live in the Village of the Damned, so called the community for
Sexual deviates at Ararat. He is hard to say. Judge Waldron had no doubt about Hall's potential to re offend, and he said this, even in comparative old age, there is a real risk that you would offend again, he told Hall when he sentenced him. His lawyer, Brendan Wilkinson, recalls Christopher Hall as a pathetic figure, hated as much in prison as he was on the outside. He also recalls his grateful client, who had no money, no friends, no family who wanted to know him, apart from his
mother making him. The lawyer a coffee mug in the prison workshop as a gift. Wilkinson told me he used that mug for years while he was at work, but when the time came to clean out his office, his wife told him not to bring it home. 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
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