Graham Sales guilty of Ron Penn murder, Wyong Local Court shooting
It was the murder that rocked the Central Coast a quarter of a century ago. Police may never have found the body of Ronald Penn but the case has finally been solved after a killer’s shocking admissions in court.
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A sadistic monster has finally pleaded guilty to two infamous crimes that rocked the Central Coast 25 years ago.
Graham Thomas Sales has admitted to killing 61-year-old Ronald Penn at The Entrance and soliciting his brother, Ross Sales, to murder a woman, known as JF, inside a courtroom at Wyong Local Court.
Both incidents took place a month apart in October and November 1995, with Mr Penn’s death remaining a mystery until now.
His body has never been found.
JF, who was attending court to take out an AVO against Graham Sales, survived after being blasted with a shotgun.
On Friday Sales, 56, was due to be arraigned before the NSW Supreme Court but was instead committed for sentence on charges of murder and solicit to murder.
“Guilty, thankyou,” he replied cheerfully as Justice Elizabeth Fullerton asked him for his plea to the charges before the court.
He will be sentenced on July 24.
He appeared via video link from Lithgow jail where he is serving a 31-year prison sentence for torturing and raping women in the 1980s and 90s.
He was found guilty of 21 offences, many depraved and sadistic in nature, including raping women with household objects, forcing them to eat their dinner off the floor and hogtying them and putting them face down in the bath.
He was then given a further four year sentence in 2018 after pleading guilty to six counts of sexual and aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, common assault and two counts of threatening the officer in charge during a fiery outburst in the witness box
THE MYSTERY BEHIND RON PENN’S DISAPPEARANCE
Mr Penn was a 61-year-old former rail worker who became loosely employed by Sales as his driver because Sales never held a licence.
According to police records, in October 1995 Sales, his brother Ross Sales and Mr Penn were pulled over in Charlestown, near Newcastle, in Mr Penn’s white Mazda van.
Police alleged at the time they were following one of Sales’ ex-partners who had finally summonsed the courage to flee his violent, manipulative clutches.
She had used a family outing to a soccer match as a diversion and fled to a refuge.
Police believe Sales tracked her down some days or weeks later at the refuge and unsuccessfully tried to abduct her.
There was an interim apprehended violence order (AVO) put on Sales and arrangements were made to drive her to another women’s refuge in the Hunter Valley when Mr Penn, Sales and Ross Sales were pulled over at Charlestown following behind.
Police charged Sales with breaching the AVO and the matter was set down at Wyong Local Court on November 21, 1995.
Mr Penn had an unrelated traffic matter listed at the Downing Centre Local Court on October 24 and the magistrate ruled against him.
It was to be the last confirmed sighting ever of Mr Penn.
Three days later, on October 27, 1995, three men including two described as Aboriginal and one caucasian were seen near the vicinity of Mr Penn’s van shortly after it was set alight about 10pm in bushland off Berkeley Rd, Berkeley Vale.
All three were seen leaving the area in a car believed to be a red Ford Laser hatchback or similar vehicle.
Police believed Mr Penn had, by this stage, been murdered and his body dumped at an unknown location.
Police also believed the alleged motive was to prevent him being subpoenaed and have to give evidence during the AVO proceedings.
A month later when the AVO went to court the victim, known as JF, was walking in with a support person about 11.30am when Ross Sales walked in behind with a shotgun, called out her name, and fired as she turned around.
She was hit in the upper left shoulder, forearm and face but remarkably survived.
Ross Sales was charged with the shooting but was found not guilty on the grounds of mental illness in 1996.
Mr Penn was known to travel between family at Inverell and where he lived at Wyong.
The problem for police was he was not reported missing until January 1996 when a concerned niece went to Inverell Police Station after she had not heard from him in a while.
Christmas cards and letters sent by Mr Penn’s family to his last known address at Wyong were marked return-to-sender.
By September 2013 officers from Strike Force Rankmore had learned Mr Penn, who would have been 77 years old by then, had only a few of his clothes and personal belongings with him when he vanished.
While the burned out Mazda van — and any evidence it may have contained — had been lost almost a decade earlier police returned and conducted a two-day search of bushland where it had been found.
In December 2013, police also returned to search an address at Mitchell Drive, Bateau Bay.
It was where Sales was living in the mid-1990s and one of the other last known places Mr Penn had been seen alive.
Acting on new information police used a cadaver dog to search sand hills north of Magenta in May 2014.
Large tracts of the sand hills, which stretched from The Entrance North to Wyrrabalong National Park, were historically used as illegal tip sites before the area was extensively redeveloped as part of the Magenta Shores Golf Course.
Whatever evidence could have been salvaged there, would have been dug up or exposed by shifting dunes and reburied multiple times over between 1995 and 2014.
The breakthrough, however, came when Strike Force Rankmore detectives finally managed to get Ross Sales to confess to his involvement in Penn’s disappearance.
Ross Sales, then aged 43, was charged and later convicted of being an accessory after the fact to Mr Penn’s death.
The courthouse shooting was the reason metal detectors were installed in courts across NSW.