Unsolved homicide: new details emerge into the link between Ron Penn and Graham Sales
AFTER Graham Thomas Sales was sentenced to 31 years jail yesterday, it can finally be revealed he is the same man at the centre of the disappearance of Ronald Penn and a shooting at Wyong Local Court in 1995, which led to the introduction of metal detectors in courts across NSW.
Central Coast
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AFTER Graham Thomas Sales was sentenced to 31 years jail yesterday, it can finally be revealed he is the same man at the centre of the disappearance of Ronald Penn and a shooting at Wyong Local Court in 1995, which led to the introduction of metal detectors in courts across NSW.
Mr Penn was last confirmed alive on October 24, 1995.
Sales was initially charged with murdering Mr Penn and soliciting the murder of a woman known only as JF.
But as detectives worked through mountains of statements from victims of Sales’ domestic and sexual abuse, prosecutors advised them to withdraw the charges.
While Sales remains a person of interest, he has never been recharged nor convicted of either crime.
The end of Sales’ legal proceedings in the Downing Centre District Court for torturing and raping women in the 1980s and 90s means this newspapers can finally reveal how Mr Penn’s murder and the shooting of JF fit together.
An officer close to Strike Force Rankmore — established in 2012 to investigate Mr Penn’s disappearance — said the former 61-year-old rail worker was employed by Sales as his driver because Sales never held a licence.
According to police records, back 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 believe Mr Penn had, by this stage, been murdered and his body dumped at an unknown location.
Police also believe 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 got off 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.
None of his bank accounts had been accessed and his driver’s licence had not been renewed.
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 both crimes.
They subsequently charged Sales with soliciting JF’s murder in May, 2014, and he was remanded in custody.
In March 2015, with Sales still in custody, officers from Strike Force Rankmore charged him with the murder of Mr Penn.
Ross Sales, then aged 43, was charged and later convicted of being an accessory after the fact to Mr Penn’s death.
What, if anything, Sales knows about the crimes remains unsolved