Murder spree ends with siege, a TV interview and more bloodshed
JOURNALISTS huddled around a camp fire to keep warm, while up the road, cops waited outside a farmhouse. Inside, sat three sadistic murderers and two child hostages. Everyone waited. And then the phone rang.
Our Criminal History
Don't miss out on the headlines from Our Criminal History. Followed categories will be added to My News.
THE night air had begun to cool - eventually it would drop well below 10 degrees Celsius. It was eerily quiet.
A group of some 20 or so journalists huddled around a camp fire to keep warm. Up the road, police officers waited with bated breath outside a farmhouse.
It was Tuesday night, March 30, 1993.
A four-day murder spree spanning two states had led them all here - Hanging Rock, a homestead at Cangai, northwest of Grafton.
Inside, sat three sadistic murderers and their two child hostages.
Everyone waited.
A Current Affair presenter Mike Willesee was beamed live into households across Australia. He had the exclusive, a “breathtaking piece of journalism”, as he spoke with the mastermind behind the chilling murders that unfolded just days ago.
“This is Michael Willesee, Leonard (Leabeater)?” Willesee said.
“Oh, hello Michael,” Leonard replied.
“Well they’re going to kill me and I ain’t going out without a fight. We’re here to die.”
A few hours later, a .410 shotgun round rang out over the rolling hills of Hanging Rock station.
ROBERT Mark Steele had always wanted to be a policeman.
The boy with the cheeky smile idolised their family friend who worked in the police force.
They nicknamed him the “gentle giant”. He grew up to be very tall for his age, always happy and adventurous. He was a sports-loving kid from the bush.
He had won trophies for cricket and football, and he was proud of his achievements. He had to be proud of himself because his father never was.
But on Christmas Eve, 1984, then 13-year-old Robert was hit by car while pushing his bike along the side of the road.
His skull was fractured and his hip was injured so severely it left him with one leg shorter than the other.
He was left intellectually impaired, and his hopes of ever becoming a police officer were quashed in an instant.
The gentle giant ran away from home.
He had no friends. No one to go to. He admitted he was a “loner”. He found refuge at a halfway house where he would come to meet the head nurse — a man named Leonard Kevin Leabeater.
Leonard was 18 years older, with a receding hair line and wild unkempt hair. Locals suspected him of being a pedophile, but Robert saw otherwise.
“We sort of clicked straight away,” Robert later said.
“I had nowhere else to go and Len helped me. He helped improve my body and mind.”
The pair became inseparable. They would later be labelled as Leonard and his Lieutenant.
They moved into a house together in Sydney’s west at Warwick Farm.
Leonard began training up “his champion” to become a fighter and entered him into organised street fights. Robert grew to love inflicting pain on others.
Eight years later in August 1992, Leonard, Robert, and their new friend Raymond Bassett, found an ad in the Yorke Peninsula Times newspaper to move into a run-down, 19th century sandstone building in the small South Australian town of Bute.
Bute had a population of just 300 people, and these three strangers could not help but stand out. Leonard had recently been charged with sexually assaulting two teenage girls near Adelaide and Bute was to be the perfect sanctuary.
The three men planned to renovate the former local hospital into a hostel for the intellectually and psychiatrically impaired. It had been a lifelong goal of Leonard’s.
But their plan to convert the 15-room building was opposed by the local police and council.
Leonard was brooding. He told locals that the council and the police were victimising him.
Eight months later, in March 1993, the three men suddenly left town, telling one person they had “to settle the score with some people”.
A DARK maroon 1970 Holden Monaro rolled through Mount Isa.
No one took a second glance at the three men inside. Why would they?
No one could have known of the stockpile of guns and ammunition they planned to use for their “murderous rampage” down to South Australia.
Mark Barlow, a 27-year-old Sunshine Coast helicopter pilot, might have seen the men inside that Holden Monaro.
He was travelling on a Husqvarna 610 dirt bike on his way to the Northern Territory.
Someone spotted him talking to a man in a dark maroon Holden Monaro. A week later, Mark’s decomposing body was found lying inside his swag near Corella Creek, with a shotgun blast to his head.
It was to be the gentle giant’s first kill.
Meanwhile in Mackay, 14-year-old Deborah Gale told her mother she was just going out to dinner with some friends for the night. Nothing unusual. Sue would wake the next day to find her daughter had never returned.
She had jumped into the dark maroon Holden Monaro, headed towards the town of Dalby, west of Toowoomba.
Everyone at the Dalby caravan park knew ‘Robbie’, ‘Raymond’ and ‘Debbie’ well. They seemed like normal, decent, friendly people.
So when Greg and Rita Lasserre were asked by their four children, Lorraine, 13, Trevor, 11, Tonia, 9, and Robert, 6, if they could go on a picnic with them to Lake Broadwater, 30km south of Dalby, they of course said yes.
The dark maroon Holden Monaro trundled in along the dirt road next to the wide, blue lake. Robbie was in love with this young girl from Mackay. They planned to become Australia’s Bonnie and Clyde. The gentle giant grabbed her hand to help her out of the car.
The pair started kissing and cuddling on the ground. A gust of wind picked up and unexpectedly blew dirt in her eyes. She barely had time to wipe away the dust, when she was shot in the head.
Robert sat on top of her with wide eyes, the smoking sawn-off shotgun in hand, the Lasserre children staring at what just occurred.
Leonard had ordered his lieutenant to kill her.
He was becoming jealous of their relationship and so convinced Robert she was going to rat them out to the police.
“She was going to the cops,” Robert later said.
“I did have a strong emotional attachment to her, but as far as I’m concerned, I ain’t going to jail for nobody.”
They stashed her body in a trailer and set it alight. The men put the Lasserre children in the back of the dark maroon Holden Monaro and took off.
On Sunday afternoon, a grazier found 13-year-old Lorraine and six-year-old Robert on the side of the Leichhardt Highway, 100km west of Dalby. They were alive. But the other two children, Trevor and Tonia, were not with them.
The three men were now on the run. Police were searching for that dark maroon Holden Monaro, with the two child hostages on board. And they knew it. They needed to find another car.
Miners Anthony Percival, 50, Robert Miller, 38 and Gordon Currell, 50, simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Their bodies were found scattered around Bakers Creek falls, 25km east of Armidale, with bullets through each of their heads. Their car had been stolen.
Police were now hot on the gunmen’s tails.
A local service station employee tipped them off when he spotted the three men and two children driving towards Hanging Rock station. Police now had them surrounded.
“EVEN if you’ve got a legitimate beef with the cops, Leonard, it’s a bit tough to go and kill a 14-year-old girl and three miners,” Mike Willesee asked Leabeater.
“Well, I suppose you got an argument there but at the same time I had to be ensured that the police hated my guts,” Leonard responded.
“That’s the way me and Robbie wanted it. We want to be taken out.”
They had been holed up in the farmhouse for close to 24 hours now. The gunmen had released their two child hostages, claiming Leonard’s religion forbade him from killing children under 12. Bassett had surrendered.
THE siege ended two hours later when Leonard took his own life.
Raymond was sentenced in the Supreme Court in Armidale to 14 years jail with a non-parole period of eight years for the murder of Anthony Percival.
The Lasserre children returned home to their parents in Dalby, never being able to forget the horror they had experienced.
As for Robert, he became the youngest person to be sentenced to spend the “term of his natural life” behind bars.
The gentle giant reportedly smiled when they handed down the sentence.
In December 1994, Robert was found dead in his prison cell after taking his own life.
* If you or someone you know is experiencing difficulties call Lifeline 13 11 14.
Originally published as Murder spree ends with siege, a TV interview and more bloodshed