When he was on the outside of the walls, he would rob things.
He's good at it.
He was mad, he was bad, he was athletic, he was tough, he was fast, he's pretty funny, could do amazing stuff. But when a kid is walking to school at nine am and vanishes, that really hits.
Home to all of us.
We don't like it because we really think that could be our child. I'm Andrew Rule, this is life and Crimes, and once more I'm being subjected to questions from John Burton, our chief producer, editor and engineer.
Thank you, Andrew, and thank you everyone who has supplied us with more questions. We are always in the market for questions, so if you do have them, we will give the address at the end of this episode, so as to preserve some sense of mystery as to how you can send them. In first question from Joanne, So Joanne,
and I'll paraphrase your question if I may. Her father was a bank manager at Noble Park and had the misfortune of potentially coming face to face with Christopher Binns when he was in the process of robbing banks, and Joanne was interested in a point in time in Christopher Binns's life that she had heard that he had escaped custody mister Binns and actually had gone back to a life of robbing banks. Was that the case.
Yes, Now, I'm not going to call Christopher Binns by the nickname that my friend and former colleague John Sylvester gave him. John was rude enough to go in rubbish Bins, which I thought was the height of bad manners and
also courting disaster. Because before we answer the question, it turns out that Bins was once pulled up by the police when he was on one of his rare times out and about, and he had a notebook in the car with him, and he had various names shritten down, and one of them was John Sylvester's name, and he had a suburb written down next to it, which wasn't actually the precise suburb where John was living then, but
it was the one next door. It was nearby, so just say, you know, he had Oakley and John was in Clayton something like that that was not far away. And that gave John pause for thought, and he thought, I don't think i'll call him Rubbishpins anymore. We'll call him badness, because that's what he calls himself. The question is that did he go back to robbing banks. Yeah, he is a very keen or has been was until you know, lately, because he's been locked up for a
long time. When he was on the outside of the walls, he would rob things. He's good at it. He was mad, he was bad, he was athletic, he was tough, he was fast, he's pretty funny, could do amazing stuff as escape artist, really good at it up there with sort of mad Dog Cox and those guys. When it comes to that stuff, I think he wants it a like a Fosberry flop, you know, jump over some raizor wire
on top of a prison wall. He would jump across a wide gap between one wall and another, take a running jump and make it just like you know, some sort of like a stuntman on Hollywood standing in for some Hollywood actor. He got himself admitted to hospital, I think some Vincent secure ward in Melbourne with probably a fictitious ailment. Maybe he said he had a tummy ache and they probably thought it was a bindercitus or something. Anyway, he gets in there and lo and behold, his dear
old dad comes to see him. His name Dad's name has not been's. Dad's name is a short, sharp Slavic name. When did I see? I think and Dad is also I've been, you know, knock about fellow. He wasn't sort of in the church choir, Dad and Dad's turned up wearing a large rodeo belt, you know, like.
The cowboys wearing rodeos.
And buckle on the big buckle, and I don't know that Dad had actually been. Although he was a knock about, I don't think he was a bull rider. I think he was more bullshit artus. Dad is wearing the big belt buckle, and when he goes through the scanner to get.
Into the secure ward to see.
Everloving son Chris, the scanner goes off and he says, it's a bloody belt buckle always happens, and screw the officer just waved him through. Well that was good because when he got inside, it turns out, allegedly allegedly that he had a small pistol either behind the buckle or somewhere about his person. But the buckler given him the cover, the cover of the alarm, and so he was able
to hand this small derringer about. It's because of water pistol to his son, who it's amazing, what'll fix the pendicitis? Because there he was in great pain before this and suddenly wasn't. He was running around with a shooter, and he got out of the hospital and away he went, and he started robbing places all over again.
So the interesting thing about Joanne and her question is her father had actually been held up three times as his bank employee, and she suggests or is wondering that perhaps two of those times was mister Bins.
Oh, I think that'd be on the cards, depending which era this is, because Bins was one of the last of the Mullicans back when bank robberies were going out of style. He was doing quite a lot of them, which meant that, of course he came under suspicion a lot because there weren't a lot of other good practitioners and coppers with it's another Bin's job. He's out and about. It's him, and he had his own specific sort of
way of doing things. One of his ways of doing things was to go around until he saw a police guard going past, and he thought that was good luck. If he saw a police guard go past him in the street and head off in another direction. He thought, well, I won't see that one again. It's gone, So then he'd go in and rob a bank. He'd wait to see one go past. You know, it's not so silly.
I don't mean rabbit foot.
Yeah, all that different. You know, we have different things of luck, and that was his good. Luck didn't always.
Work, so Joanne, Yes, that is possible.
Oh, hugely likely.
If it was late late eighties, early nineties. I think perhaps the mid nineties. There were very few other practitioners still around. In the seventies, there were lots of arm robbers and there they were with their old army revolves and sawn Off shotguns and sawn Off twenty two's running around holding.
Up payrolls and all sorts of things. There were big payrolls in those days.
I'm old enough remember when we got cash in the hand every Wednesday or every Thursday, whatever it was. Vast amounts of money went into every major organization and you're queued up and you've got a pay packet with cash in it. Everyone in the building got it. And that meant every big employer in Victoria in Australia had a huge amount of cash every payday, and there were a lot of targets for around Robertson.
So you're saying, Andrew, just to go a little bit inside baseball. You're saying that in jobbing newsrooms, there once was a time where every week, every on in it they would be a wash with cash.
They did, and not only they got a paypacket, their proper paypacket with the cash wages. You got a little buff envelope, a little tiny.
Envelope but as big as just a.
Few centimeter square, and that would have folded in your expense money. And that was you know, you put in an expense form saying I bought a pot and a parmejana and whatever and the two biros, whatever it was when I was entertaining police or entertaining something, and they would give.
You cash money for that.
And that was just like Christmas, because you'd get you one hundred and twenty eight dollars wages, and you might get fifteen or twenty bucks expenses, and of course you goes straight to the pub with the expenses and spend it all over again.
I was going to say, it seems like a very dangerous thing to first have that amount of money.
It was, Yes, those were the days.
Now, we have a question from Candace and she loves true crime, especially cold cases, and she asks, I've been listening to the Margaret and shawna Tap case on your podcast. I can't help but wonder why, if there is DNA available to test, we can't use genetic genealogy to solve this case. And wondering if that's just not something we do in Australia yet.
Well, I think if all else was equal and we had all the good samples still available to the modern forensic scientists, that they could do that.
But what it.
Does depend on, and we've seen big cases solved like this in America. The Golden State Killer in California, for instance, was solved that way, and there's been some other interesting developments. It needs people to voluntarily given DNA samples so that there's a bank of them out in the world so that they can get hits. So unless relatives of the presumed killer, unless relatives of the presum killer have handed in DNA samples to some central database, there's nothing to
work with. Meanwhile, the police, of course possibly we hope, have a viable DNA sample still.
Now, this was basically.
A semen sample taken from clothing in nineteen eighty four. There is every chance that it might have degraded or been lost or broken up or something so that it's no longer as viable as it should be or could be. And we know in this case that there's already been one wrongful arrest made of a serving prisoner, a guy called Russell Geeser, on the basis of DNA, and subsequently it was proven that the DNA testing process was flawed.
There'd been a bungle in the lab. Now that is going to present a lot of problems for forensics and for the police because A had they still got viable DNA viable samples? B Are they open to major questions from defense counsel about the efficiency of their processes in the forensic lab. These are the two big problems.
Now, Ladies and gentlemen, you may have just heard an AD break. Then if you get the free version of this show, if you're a subscriber to Crime x Plus, you wouldn't have heard an ad break at all. Either way, we've put a little break in there because it's probably time that we go to the mister Krawl segment of the show. These, of course, are becoming a Hardy Perennial of the Q and A specials Amberley asks a long
time listener of the podcast, thank you, Amberley. We'd love to know if there has been any connection or investigation into the possible link between mister Kraule and the disappearance of Cherry Westall and or bung Syraboon.
I'm sure that the police have looked at every missing person that fits the category. You know, young females, no doubt about it. I don't know much about Cherry Bunk Sirraburn. I've done a bit on over the years. It is a genuine mystery and it's going to be one of two things. It's going to be either the suburban monster that none of us know is a monster, you know, the bloke driving around in a youth station making is something going from job to job, handyman, lawn mowing, tree,
cut up, you know whatever. Something who's seen this kid walking along the street and snatched her and got away with it, acted on impulse, grabbed that and no one was watching, No one heard a noise, No cameras or security cameras or any dash camera any of that caught it. That can happen. It's a little bit like you know, flipping a coin and it lands on its edge. But it can happen the other option, and it's not one that many people endorse, and I merely.
Throw it up.
It's conceivable that Bunk Syra Boom is a victim of some sort of unseen Asian crime syndicate thing. I don't want to delve into all that, all the scenarios, because they'd be totally speculation. That is total speculation on my part. I have no knowledge of such a thing happening to her. But it is conceivable that she was snatched not by the tattooed yobo that has been watching too many bad videos, but by professional crooks who are acting on orders to
do with some form of organized crime. They're the two options. Rank amateur, a very rank amateur or by that I mean smells rank as well, or professional, probably Asian organized crime. A lot of people will p poo that, and they might be right.
It is interesting that we're talking about mister Crawl, but the Mister Crawl case and the Bunk Cerebone case. For both of those cases, the cases lived on in people's imagination far more than many others.
They do some grasp the public imagination in ways, and sometimes it's just the name gets into the people's heads. It's like an earworm. Easy Street has always been in people's heads in a way that I think if it had been called arbuthnot Straight, it would not have. Easy Street is easy to remember. It's a catchy phrase. It sounds like a song title or whatever it is, and we've never forgotten it. And I think that bunk Sorriboon is a bit the same. There's something about the name
that sticks in people's heads. The fact that a little girl, a teenager can just vanish off the street while she's walking to school in broad daylight absolutely horrifies people. You know, when a twenty three year old vanishes from a nightclub at two am, it's equally bad and equally awful and terrible for balaties and friends, of course, But the rest of us go, oh, well, she's an adult, she's at a nightclub at two am, she's you know, rubbing shoulders
with bad dude. But when a kid is walking to school at nine am and vanishes, that really hits home to all of us. We don't like it because we really think that could be our child.
Another question about mister Crawl comes from Carly Thanks Carly. Carly says that when she was growing up that her neighbor was apparently a suspect. Her dad was given this information by a police officer after reporting a series of bizarre breakings at their home in Smith's Gully to the Althham Police. Don't know if anything came out of it, but Elthham was an interesting place, wasn't it.
It was.
On the outer edge of what we would call mister cruel territory. And I remember doing a story a couple of years ago to that effect that there were various reasons to look at Elham. But of course when police are looking for somebody like mister Krule, they don't know who they're looking for. Any weird crime to do with bizarre breakings or crimes that would appear to be aimed at families who have girls that age, they're going to
naturally wonder if it's to do with mister Krule. Both the police and the locals and everybody else and the media, they're all going to think about it. They can't all be mister Crule, but you know, any one of them might be. It's just this is the problem with those things. It raises the fever pitch speculation about any offender in any post. You go, oh my god, that sounds like
mister Krul and if you know, maybe it is. You think at this distance that whoever mister Krule was has either got too old or too dead to re offend, so we can hope, or ended up in jail on other matters.
And lastly, a non mister Crule question. And this is a request from Jesse, please make an episode on and you will have heard of Beep there listeners, because we can't use that person's name. We still can't. We still can't, they say, or Jesse says that Ivan Mulatt is so well known but did very little compared to Beep.
Beep is a fascinating case. Beep has been written about at length by a colleague of ours in Queensland, Matthew Condon, who is a very fine journalist, a very good writer, and he's written a lot of interesting books about goings on in Queensland, particularly criminal and political, and one of his better books is about Beep.
And to be fair, Jesse, we actually have recorded an episode about Deep, about Deep, and we are just waiting for Beep to either get through beeps of various legal travails or preferably die and then as soon as that happens, Jesse.
We'll go full Monty. In fact, we ought to try and get Matthew Condon on to talk about it, or someone else from up there who can talk with authority about him, because I do know I know an old scallywagg and old bird smuggler that could talk about Beep and the Brisbane crime scene, particularly in the past. He was very tough but relatively small, and a lot of the crooks know each other or know of each other, and if you've got a good contact up there, they
can talk with some authority about such things. And Beep was used by other crooks. I mean he killed people on his own account because he's more or less a criminal serial killer, if that makes sense. He's both a criminal who hit man, but he's a serial killer as well. He's a very bad man and very twisted. And there are those who suspect was the last to see alive more than thirty people, the last person to see alive more than thirty people, most of them are just gone on the missing list.
Well, Jesse, that's a watch this space because when we can we will thank you very much for everyone who has put in their questions. If you have questions, please send them in. They don't necessarily all have to be about mister Crawl. Either send them into Life and Crimes at news dot com dot Au or if you are like Jesse and have potentially a request for a show,
you can send them in as well. But if you have a news tip on an active piece of crime based news that you would like to send to Andrew, you can send it to his email address, which.
Is Andrew dot Rule at news dot com dot Au. That email address again, Andrew full stop Rule are U l E at news dot com dot Au.
And either way, get in touch and thank you for listening, and thank.
You Andrew, Thank you very much, thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crimes. 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