Killer Naden’s creepy letter to terrified target
As police stalked fugitive killer Malcolm Naden he was stalking his own prey — a young woman alone at an isolated property in the bush. One night she found him standing over her in bed. Then he left her a chilling letter.
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Australia’s most wanted murderer Malcolm Naden was believed to have died in a rock fall during his years on the run until he made one mistake that prompted the biggest police stalking and sniper operation ever undertaken in this country.
Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, a former NSW Police sniper — who we are identifying only by his nickname, Fingers — has revealed the lengths police went to to end Naden’s almost eight years on the run.
He also reveals chilling, never-before-known details about the case, and how close one young woman came to being his next victim.
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Fingers said Naden, wanted for the strangling murder of 24-year-old neighbour Kristy Scholes and suspected in the disappearance and murder of his cousin Lateesha Nolen, had gone quiet for some time, prompting police to believe he had fallen down a mountain crevice in the Gloucester Valley around which he was last seen.
But then he became obsessed with a young woman at a rural retreat in Misty Mountain and began to stalk her.
The caretaker at the isolated retreat, about 6kms from the nearest home, had seen a man lurking about the premises and initially thought little of it. But Naden continued to stalk her for days as she skinny-dipped in the river and went about her work.
He approached her twice, including once late at night, shining a torch in the terrified woman’s face as she lay in bed, but never said a word. She fled at one point and police were called, taking blood samples off a doorframe where the intruder had cut himself, but in those days the DNA analysis to identify him would have taken days.
“But she came back a few days later and went to her bedroom and there next to a photograph of herself was a note Malcolm wrote,” Fingers told True Crime Australia.
“‘Really love the moles and birthmarks on your back and I enjoyed watching them’ (it read), she s--- herself. He’d been watching her for days, skinny-dipping and this sort of thing, how she survived I don’t know, why he didn’t kill her … the only person who knows that is Malcolm.”
The woman’s ordeal was the first trigger to amp up the operation to find Naden, which was already zeroing in on him because of his propensity to burgle properties more than once. The second was an incident in which police officer Brad McFadden was shot. Fingers said that changed everything, another line had been crossed.
Fingers was involved in four pre-planned sniper operations that went for weeks at a time to stalk Naden in the area where they believed he was hiding out. It was the most snipers used in the country for a single operation. Backed by movement cameras placed about the bush, they waited and watched for the right time to corner the dangerous fugitive.
It was a tough assignment, hours and hours of waiting, and then, in the moments of his capture, getting through the jungle of the Gloucester Tops in the middle of the night, in darkness, trying to navigate and using night-vision goggles to get to the arrest point.
“As a sniper it’s an isolated job at times; I don’t mind isolation, I’m a pretty laid back sort of isolated person at the best of times, so that gravitated me to the job even more because it gave me a thinking process, it gave me thought process to deal with it,” Fingers said.
“You take your life in your hands if a hostage situation starts, take your life in your hands if negotiations are going well and you try and engage that target when a proper justification line (for a shot) hasn’t been reached. Think about the consequences if you miss, think about the consequences for the hostages, what’s going to happen to them …. the events you are witnessing doesn’t make it a justifiable line.
“From one end of that line in the sand to the other, where you have to wait and wait and wait and decide, ‘I’m happy to engage him now, I’m satisfied’, it’s back to your ability, your own perceived view on how confident are you. Confidence of … telling the system, that you’re justified. There is no senior officer in the NSW cops, none, that can tell me or yell ‘a green light’ to do this, doesn’t exist. I make that call cos at the end of the day I am the one that has to stand up and justify squeezing that trigger.”
“I’m not going to get white stuffed shirts (lawyers), as I like to call them, standing before a coroner and the coroner (asking a commanding officer), ‘What did you tell him to commit an unlawful homicide when there wasn’t a need, negotiations were going well’.”
Naden was cornered by Fingers and the Tactical Operations Unit and eventually arrested at gunpoint in March 2012.
He was jailed for life for two murders, the attempted murder of McFadden and the indecent assault of a 12-year-old girl, as well as multiple burglaries and thefts.