Crime Queensland: Child rapist Melvin Mott’s twisted jail break
MELVIN Mott had an errand. He broke out of jail, stole a car and drove north of Brisbane. There he found the shallow grave he had dug - and the one piece of evidence that could have brought him to justice.
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CHILD rapist Melvin Mott escaped from a Queensland prison to find another victim. By the time police caught him, he’d committed a horrific crime. But it would be years until they discovered how much of a monster he really was, as Kate Kyriacou reveals.
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THE carpenters’ gang worked in thick fog, so thick that Melvin Mott was able to put down his tools and slip away.
Mott was a sex offender. He liked young girls. It’s what had put him in prison in the first place.
He’d picked up a 14-year-old girl from the side of the road, convincing her he’d give her a lift home. But instead, he’d driven her into bushland near Kallangur and raped her.
On that foggy day in Brisbane, Mott made his way through the thick white curtain until he felt the riverbank under his feet.
The Brisbane River was wide, flowing strongly. He followed its banks until he found a creek.
He swam across, still wearing his prison clothes. Dungarees, a blue shirt and a tweed coat.
Mott ditched his sodden trousers on the far bank and kept running.
At Jindalee, he came across a couple of young girls playing by the water.
He asked them how old they were, for directions to a nearby shopping centre. One of the girls was under 12. He liked the look of her. He asked her to come and meet his sister. She told him to go away.
Mott grabbed the girl by her arm and dragged her along the river bank.
While her terrified friend ran for help, Mott, a sadistic sex predator with no self-control, assaulted his victim.
Melvin Mott’s twisted jail break
The murder weapon
Mott helped himself to a car and went in search of food.
He stole clothing to replace his waterlogged prison clothes. Khaki trousers, a sweater, a sports coat and a pair of sand shoes.
He had an important errand to run. Something that had been on his mind the long months he’d spent behind bars.
He drove back to Kallangur, not far from the place he’d taken the 14-year-old girl the day he’d convinced her to get in his car.
He left the car near a narrow bush track and fought his way through the scrub.
He found her exactly where he’d left her.
Still in the blue and white dress.
Still wearing the gold locket around her neck.
He scrabbled around in the shallow grave until he found what he’d been looking for.
His .22 rifle, buried beneath its victim.
In hindsight, it hadn’t been the best idea to bury the murder weapon with the victim.
The victim
On October 17, 1964, 13-year-old Doreen Lambert, a freckle-faced and studious girl, left her Margate home to visit a school friend.
It was 8am when she made her way to the bus that would take her to Bald Hills. Early, but not as early as her friend Cherryl Riley was expecting.
By the time Doreen arrived, the Riley family had already left, assuming she wasn’t coming. They’d planned to go swimming.
When locals saw the young girl get off the bus that day, she’d been swinging a yellow nylon shopping bag in one hand, her bathers folded inside.
Finding her friend’s house empty, Doreen went into a nearby shop and asked about a bus back to Margate.
She never made it home.
The missing girl
Beryl Lambert sat up the entire night waiting for her daughter to come home.
Minute by minute, hour by hour, worry turned to fear and fear turned to terror.
Something was very wrong.
She reported Doreen missing the next morning.
Police figured she had run away. Perhaps the pressures of school or a fight with her parents had driven her to take some time out.
But Beryl knew her daughter had done no such thing. Doreen wasn’t the type.
She was young for her age. You wouldn’t call her worldly. She was an intelligent, diligent and shy student who was always polite and well-behaved.
She was not a runaway.
As the days passed and Doreen didn’t come home, dozens of police were put onto the case.
Her disappearance received national publicity.
Police tracked down sex offenders known to frequent the area and grilled them on their whereabouts.
Melvin Mott was among them.
But the days and months passed and detectives hit dead end after dead end.
Doreen’s trail went cold after witnesses described her looking for a bus in Bald Hills.
But the case was far from closed.
The body
Then, two years later, a timber cutter named John Murray made a terrible discovery.
Mr Murray, his son and another worker had been working in bushland in Kallangur for some weeks when he found her.
She was lying in a deep depression, left by a fallen tree.
Just a skeleton by then, a piece of cloth tied around her throat.
A bullet hole was found in the back of her skull.
There was more damage to the front of her face, where the bullet had exited near her eye.
“I was walking through an area we had been clearing for firewood when I just came across the skeleton in the hole left by the tree,” he told reporters.
“There was no covering over it and we must have walked close to it dozens of times since we’ve been working in that area.”
It hadn’t come as a surprise, he’d said. It was quiet in the bush. Isolated. Nobody ever came through there.
“I’ve been working in the area where the body was found for four years. It’s so deserted and quiet I always thought someone might have killed her and hidden her body in there.”
The hunt for a killer
With the discovery of Doreen’s body, the hunt for her killer began again.
Valley CIB Chief Inspector Merv Chalmers came back from long service leave to take over the file.
He read every word.
Doreen had been shot with a .22. But they had no idea who’d pulled the trigger.
Insp Chalmers began putting together a list. Sex offenders mostly — particularly ones who’d shown they were prepared to use violence.
Melvin Mott made his list. He made the top of his list.
Mott was 24 and lived in the area. He knew it well.
He had a history of sex offences involving young girls.
He’d taken a girl into the bush and raped her, very close to where Doreen’s body was found in scrubland at Kallangur.
Police had spoken to Mott twice about Doreen’s disappearance and he’d denied having seen her.
Chalmers decided to track him down and it didn’t take long.
Mott was in prison.
The detective knew he couldn’t waltz in and expect a confession. So he tried something else.
In the same prison was an inmate named Edward Bennett.
Bennett was serving a four-year term for shop-breaking. It was Chalmers who’d arrested him. But despite this, Bennett held a lot of respect for the detective.
Chalmers approached him and asked for a favour.
Could he get another inmate talking?
Mott could be responsible for the rape and murder of a little girl. Surely he shouldn’t go unpunished?
Bennett agreed.
He had another prisoner introduce them. And Mott talked.
He spoke about the murder in great detail. He admitted to burying his rifle with Doreen’s body and going back for it after breaking out of Wacol prison. He said he’d buried it under a bush.
Bennett and the prisoner who’d introduced them gave statements to the police.
Chalmers tracked down friends and associates of Mott. Two remembered seeing a .22 rifle in his car.
In September, 1967, Chalmers went to the prison to speak to Mott.
He questioned him at length, confronting him with the statements of his fellow prisoners.
They took him to the place where Doreen’s body had been found and questioned him some more.
But Mott wouldn’t break. He denied everything.
The murder charge
Police still didn’t have enough to charge Mott. But Chalmers wouldn’t give up.
Two months after visiting Mott in prison, a phone call came through to the detective’s office.
The man on the other end told Chalmers he’d shared a cell with Mott in the Brisbane watchhouse in 1965.
Mott had bragged about shooting Doreen in the head. He’d buried her body in bushland in Kallangur. The man claimed he’d been told the location long before the wood cutter had stumbled across her remains.
There’d been another man in the cell that day too. Chalmers tracked down the third man and he confirmed the story.
It was enough. Mott was charged with murder.
On April 17, 1968, a jury found Mott had killed Doreen. He was sentenced to life in prison.
He would become Queensland’s longest serving inmate and, over the years, he made numerous attempts to convince the parole board to release him.
Eventually, Mott was allowed to stay with a friend on weekend release from the prison.
The last public record of Mott’s whereabouts show he was still being refused parole as recently as 2006.
But today, Mott, who would now be in his 70s, is no longer listed as an inmate.
For Doreen’s mother Beryl, no sentence would have been long enough.
“Do you believe in capital punishment for murderers?” a journalist asked her in 1968.
“My word I do,” she answered.
“I’d pull the rope myself.”
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