Pavel ‘Mad Max’ Marinof’s wild shooting spree in Melbourne
MAD Max Marinof waged a terrifying one-man war against Melbourne’s police force, shooting half a dozen officers before being taken down after eight months on the run.
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THE odds of the first and last of several police officers shot by Pavel “Mad Max” Marinof having the same name are astronomical.
But just to prove that truth is often stranger than fiction, that’s exactly what happened.
Constable Rod McDonald had his thumb shot off by the notorious Noble Park gunman known as Mad Max on October 12, 1982.
And Mad Max shot the then major crime squad detective Rod MacDonald through the chest on February 25, 1986, after MacDonald and his partner, Detective Sergeant John Kapetanovski, intercepted Mad Max’s panel van on the Hume Highway at Kalkallo.
In between those two dates — on the night of June 18, 1985 — Mad Max shot and wounded five other Victoria Police officers.
The shooting spree of Bulgarian-born army deserter Marinof — who changed his name to Max Clark after arriving in Australia in 1969 — in the Noble Park area in 1985 catapulted him to the top of Victoria’s most wanted list.
It also sparked one of the biggest manhunts in the state’s history.
That manhunt ended when the then Sen-Det MacDonald shot Mad Max dead as Mad Max drove his panel van away after shooting and wounding him and Det-Sgt Kapetanovski, known to all as Kapa.
The now Sergeant MacDonald is still a Victoria Police member and has become a strong advocate for better mental health support for both serving members and police veterans.
In October he intends joining Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton and Police Association boss Wayne Gatt’s 1000km walk to show his support for their aim to raise $500,000 to help the thousands of former officers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other work related issues.
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Sadly, the other Rod McDonald is somebody who needed such support and didn’t get it.
“The other Rod McDonald has struggled,” Sgt MacDonald said yesterday.
“Kapa and I got a lot of recognition for our incident whereas the other Rod didn’t.”
There was very little professional help available for people like the then Constable McDonald, with the most likely scenario for most back then being going to the pub with colleagues to debrief over pots of beer.
Long retired, Mr McDonald, 71, recently told Sgt MacDonald he is still doing it tough.
“Mad Max will always be a problem for me and for half a lifetime has haunted me,” he told Sgt MacDonald.
Mr McDonald’s encounter with Mad Max happened in October 1982 about 9.15pm while he and another officer were assigned to patrol in Clayton after a spate of burglaries in the area.
While they were in Winterton Rd a passer-by told them a man was hiding in bushes outside a nearby factory.
Mr McDonald got out of the police van and began shining his torch into the bushes. What he saw in the torch beam was a man later identified as Mad Max crouching down and pointing a 9mm pistol directly at him from about three metres away.
Mr McDonald instinctively raised his hands to protect his face as Mad Max fired two shots.
Mad Max then ran off, with Mr McDonald in hot pursuit.
Mr McDonald fired off two shots at the fleeing Mad Max and it was only when he then attempted to cock his revolver with his right thumb that he realised it had been shot off.
Mad Max escaped that night and continued his chosen line of work as a burglar — which is why Sergeant Brian Stooke and Senior Constable Peter Steele were on patrol in an industrial area of Cheltenham on the night of June 18, 1985.
The two officers pulled over a suspicious vehicle shortly before midnight to check if it was the man responsible for a recent spate of burglaries in the area.
It was and Mad Max made a run for it on foot, but stopped and turned and fired as Sgt Stooke gave chase, hitting Sgt Stooke in the chest and Sen-Const. Steele in the shoulder, the force of which flung Steele’s police weapon out of reach.
A second bullet severed Sgt Stooke’s spinal cord and paralysed him. Mad Max then stood over the helpless Sgt Stooke and pumped two more shots into his chest at close range.
“Once I fell in the road I had no idea where he was,” Sgt Stooke, later told the Herald Sun.
“With each shot I thought, ‘am I going to survive?’ and ‘is the next one going to finish me off?’ I knew I was seriously injured at this stage. I realised I was paralysed.”
Remarkably, Sgt Stooke recovered and continued as a Victoria Police officer until 2007, with the last 22 years of his 34-year policing career being in a wheelchair paralysed from the chest down as a result of his 1985 encounter with Mad Max.
Police arrived in force just minutes after Mad Max shot Sgt Stooke and Sen-Const. Steele.
That resulted in further gunbattles in the Noble Park area in the early hours of June 20, 1985, with Mad Max running at police and shooting Sgt Ray Kirkwood in the shoulder, another round from Mad Max’s Magnum .357 grazed Constable Graeme Sayce.
“It caught us completely off-guard as most people run away from the police. They don’t normally run at them,” Constable Sayce later told the Herald Sun.
“He was in a double-handed combat stance and briefly, in my mind, our eyes locked.
“I remember the muzzle flash and thinking ‘this is not good’.”
Later that night, dog squad handler Sergeant Gary Morrell was following Mad Max’s trail when Mad Max shot him in the hand from a distance.
Mad Max then disappeared and wasn’t seen again for eight months — despite the massive manhunt for him. Evidence suggests he escaped the initial intense dragnet for him by climbing into the roof space of a house and hiding there for several days.
Police ended up chasing many false leads about Mad Max’s whereabouts during the months following his shooting spree.
One of many leads resulted in the now Sgt MacDonald and the then Sgt Kapetanovski heading up to Wallan to check a report that Mad Max was hiding out in a house connected to bikies.
The Herald Sun later revealed that tip came from the now dead amphetamine cook Robert Slusarczyk — and that Slusarczyk was paid a $50,000 reward after his information proved to be correct.
Sgt MacDonald yesterday spoke to the Herald Sun about the fatal shooting of Mad Max and the circumstances leading up to it.
He said the role of he and Sgt “Kapa” Kapetanovski was to secretly keep the house under surveillance in the hope of establishing whether the tip about Mad Max being there was correct, with a view to calling in the special operations group if it was.
While they were doing so a man drove out of the driveway one morning with a couple of young children as passengers.
“We didn’t know it at the time, but it was Mad Max, Mad Max actually ran some kids to school,” Sgt MacDonald said yesterday.
“Kapa and I had driven on ahead of him and as he drove past there as nothing we could see that meant we could say it was Mad Max.
“The bloke driving looked younger than Mad Max and his hair was different, it looked like he was wearing a wig.
“After he dropped the kids off at school he headed out of town towards Melbourne.
“As we followed him down onto the freeway he was doing 80kmh in a 100kmh zone so it was very awkward to follow him without him knowing so we decided we were going to have to pull him over and find out if it was him or not.”
They had two unmarked cars with them for the surveillance operation, so they could regularly swap vehicles so as not to arouse suspicion. Sadly, their ballistic vests were in the other car.
“We ended up pulling up alongside him as he drove and Kapa has shown his police ID and indicated to him to pull over and we pulled up behind him,” Sgt MacDonald said yesterday.
“I was driving so Kapa has got out of the passenger seat and has gone to the driver’s side and I have got out of the driver’s side and gone to the passenger side of his vehicle.
“We are both standing back behind the line of the front seat; it was a panel van, with our shotguns out.
“Putting it together afterwards, from what Kapa told me, Kapa asked the driver to put both his hands out the window.
“He put his right hand out, holding his wallet. Kapa said ‘I don’t want to see your licence; I want to see both your hands’. So he’s brought his hand back in and then he has come out straight away holding a 9mm Browning.
“He has shot backwards to the right, sort of over his shoulder, he’s fired two shots and hit Kapa twice, once in the upper arm, broke his bone.
“Then in a reflex action Kapa has put his left hand up to protect him and that ended with his left hand taking the second shot.
“It took the tip of his finger off. He had wounds in his forehead; perhaps from a bit of bone that was shot off.
“If he hadn’t put his hand up he probably would have been shot through the eye socket.
“While this is happening I have gone to the passenger side and I have seen the door is locked but the window is open. It’s open enough that I can get a hand in to unlock the door.
“So it was my intention to unlock the door and confront him with the shotgun. Once Kapa has been hit he hasn’t been able to use his shotgun.
“I can remember the driver just glancing round to the left and being aware that I was there, but not much more than that.
“Ever since then there’s like a few seconds that I have never been able to remember or picture or see again. I still have that blank — and that would be when he’s firing at me and I am firing at him.
“I would have been about a metre away and staring at his 9mm Browning as it was going off.
“Then I remember the back wheels of his car skidding on the gravel as it was taking off.
“I can remember I fired two shots at the side of the car and then as it drove off firing three shots through the back window.
“I was still standing. I stayed on my feet the whole time.
“It wasn’t until our forensic people came up with photographs and said there were two shots in the side of his van, and that one had gone through the door in front of the door handle and the angle it has gone in to where it hit the other side of the car meant the door was more than half open.
“I don’t remember opening the door, but I must have.
“And there was broken glass in the floor well of the car from the side window so I would say, and I am only piecing this together from what our forensics team found, so my first shot and his first shot at me have probably crossed because that side window was broken and he was shot in the right forearm with the shotgun.
“His first shot hit me on the right hand side just under the collarbone and just above the first rib. It went through without hitting the bone. It went straight through and is probably sitting in a paddock up there somewhere.
“I knew I had been hit, it was like hot compressed air sort of hit me, but I wasn’t game to look down and see what the injury was.”
Despite being badly wounded, Sgt MacDonald was still able to fire three more shots from his pump-action shotgun as Mad Max fled.
“After he has driven off I didn’t see where the panel van went but found out later it went straight off the road to the left through the paddocks, it went for about a kilometre and a half, smashing through fences, probably while he was dead” Sgt MacDonald said yesterday.
“It was an automatic so I would say he’s planted his foot and his weight on the accelerator has just kept it going until it eventually stopped and stalled.”
An autopsy later revealed Sgt MacDonald’s shotgun blasts hit Mad Max in the back of the head, killing him almost instantly.
Sgt MacDonald and Sgt Kapetanovski stopped a passing motorist and got him to follow them to a nearby farmhouse, with Sgt McDonald driving, so they could use the phone to call for help — no mobile phones back then and they couldn’t get through on their police radio.
“We stayed at the house. They landed the police helicopter there,” Sgt MacDonald said yesterday.
“Listening to the tape of the radio conversation afterwards, the observer in the helicopter, Bruce Hall, you can hear him coming up on the air.
“The hierarchy wanted him to stay in the air, but he knew what the ambulance medicos were saying, which was they needed a helicopter to get us to hospital, that time was of the essence.
“I found out afterwards it was more for me than Kapa because I had a collapsed lung and they were afraid of the other one collapsing and me not being able to breath.
“So Bruce Hall said ‘look the members’ welfare is more important’ and virtually turned the radio off and he got a bit of a smack for that later, but I am glad he made the decision to land and take us to hospital.”
Details on how to donate to the fundraising trek to help veteran officers with mental health problems — and how to buy raffle tickets with a first prize of a return premium economy trip to London — are at www.headtoheadwalk.org.au —
keith.moor@news.com.au
Originally published as Pavel ‘Mad Max’ Marinof’s wild shooting spree in Melbourne