Bendigo crimes: Baby Zayden Veale-Whitting, Maldon, Vicki Jacobs murders
From a police officer love triangle that ended in murder to a baby beaten beyond recognition, here are the seven most shocking crimes to rock the community of Bendigo.
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From a police officer love triangle that ended in murder to a baby beaten to death in his cot by a violent home invader, these are the shocking crimes which have rocked Bendigo.
Faraday school kidnapping, 1972
Four children who were absent from class at Bendigo’s Faraday Primary School on
October 6, 1972 unwittingly escaped the grip of two kidnappers who snatched their
six classmates and teacher from the one-room school before deserting them in the
bush.
Armed with a rifle, kidnappers Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde hoped to
exact a $1m ransom from the attack as they herded students Robyn, Jillian
and Denise Howarth, Lynda and Helen Conn, Christine Ellery and their teacher, 20-
year-old Mary Gibbs, into the back of an old bread van.
Eastwood and Clyde drove their captives to a hidden car they had waiting in
Lancefield where they deserted the group to attend a ransom drop they arranged
earlier in the day with The Sun’s chief crime reporter at the time, Wayne Grant.
Miss Gibbs seized her chance to free the group when the kidnappers failed to return
to the van when she used her platform-soled high leather boot to smash out one of
the van’s back windows.
“When they didn’t come back before dawn, I thought it is now or never and began
kicking at the door,” Ms Gibbs told The Sun in 1972.
“I don’t think we could have got out without the boots.”
Eastwood went on to attempt two failed prison escapes before his release in 1993
when he wrote a book on the Faraday School kidnapping, Focus on Faraday and
Beyond: Australia’s Crime of the Century — The Inside Story.
The Maldon police officer love triangle murder, 1983
An illicit romance turned deadly on June 22, 1983 when esteemed Maldon police
officer, 33-year-old Lindsay Forsythe, was fatally shot in the abdomen at close range
after he was lured to an abandoned farmhouse while on duty.
Mr Forsythe managed to shoot his attacker three times during the fatal ambush,
allowing investigators to deduce 37 years later that it was fellow officer, Senior
Constable Leigh Lawson, behind the trigger.
Mr Forsythe moved to Maldon with his wife, Gayle, and their two small children in
1979.
Lawson was working as a traffic officer in Castlemaine before he took Forsythe’s
place at Maldon police station while he took leave in 1982, at which point Lawson
began his secret affair with Gayle while his own marriage to a policewoman
deteriorated.
Over the Queen’s Birthday long weekend in June 1983, Lawson and Gayle enacted
their fateful plan to lure Forsythe to the isolated farmhouse where Lawson ambushed
him in the dark.
The pair were jailed for murder and manslaughter.
Forsythe is believed to have been aware of the couple’s affair.
He posthumously received a Valour Award at the Maldon police station in 2019 for
his bravery during the attack that ended his life.
Lawson is also believed to be a suspect in an Endeavour Hills abduction and murder
cold case that was carried out a month before Forsythe’s murder.
Vicki Jacobs murdered as she slept with her son, 1999
Six-year-old Ben awoke to find his mother, Vicki Jacobs, shot point blank in the head
and body by a mystery assailant in the early hours of Saturday June 12, 1999 as
they slept next to one another on a sofa bed in her commission flat near Bendigo.
Vicki’s murder has been shrouded in unanswered questions and links to the Hells
Angels biker gang from the outset, with investigators pursuing the possibility that she
was killed for testifying against her former husband in a double murder trial at the
time.
The then 37-year-old mother gave evidence in court against her former husband,
convicted motorcycle gang killer Gerald David Preston, during proceedings over a
South Australian doubler murder in August 1996.
While the motive remains a mystery, Preston is believed to have been hired by the
Hells Angels to kill mechanics Les Knowles, 37, and his employee Tim Richards, 28.
Vicki’s loved ones told the Herald Sun at the time the single mother lived in fear
throughout the trial, but turned down police protection so she could stay in contact
with them.
An inquest into Vicki’s murder heard she may have been murdered at her ex-
husband’s request after Preston’s hate-filled diary entries in which he called her a
“dog” and a “maggot” surfaced during hearings.
The murder of baby Zayden Veale-Whitting, 2012
Young mother Casey Veal awoke in the early hours of June 15, 2012, to find her
home broken into and her baby son, 10-month-old Zayden Veal-Whitting beaten to
death beyond recognition.
Zayden’s attacker, then 21-year-old Harley Hicks, murdered the sleeping baby in his
cot using a makeshift baton fashioned from electrical tape and copper wire amid an
ice-fuelled frenzy.
He then tried to blame the attack on his twin brother, Ashley Hicks.
Casey and her partner at the time, Mathew Tisel, reported that their house had been
robbed after finding missing possessions, their doors open and their cars ransacked.
Drawing back a blanket that covered baby Zayden as he slept, Casey discovered he
had been callously beaten.
The couple began CPR on Zayden before paramedics rushed him to hospital where
he was pronounced dead.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Kaye described Hick’s malicious attack on Zayden
to a Bendigo courtroom as “an appallingly violent and callous murder of an innocent,
helpless, 10-month-old infant”.
Hick’s lengthy criminal history was aired before the court, during which it was
revealed he was serving a community corrections order for an armed robbery with
warrants out for his arrest when he murdered Zayden.
Hicks was found guilty of murder, as well as aggravated burglary and theft after a
five-week Supreme Court trial in Bendigo where he was sentenced to 32 years in
prison.
Krystal Fraser murder at Pyramid Hill, 2004
23-year-old Krystal Fraser was just days away from giving birth when she
disappeared from her room at Bendigo Hospital on Friday June 19, 2009, never to
be seen again.
The young mum-to-be, who also suffered from an undiagnosed mental impairment,
was granted a day pass to spend some time out of the hospital before the planned
birth of her son, whom she was to name Ryan, but Krystal never returned.
Instead, Krystal boarded a train at Bendigo to return to her Pyramid Hill home, where
she called her mother, Karen, to arrange plans for the following week.
She made her way from Pyramid Hill station to Albert Street to visit a friend before
walking home at 9.30pm.
Krystal’s phone received a call from a phone box 30kms away at Leitchville at
midnight that night.
But, her last known whereabouts were confirmed by pings off mobile towers near
Leitchville and Gunbower at 3am on Sunday, June 21 before she vanished.
Karen Fraser told the Herald Sun last year that Krystal could not have been more
vulnerable when she disappeared.
“She was nine months pregnant. Couldn’t drive. Didn’t have a car. She didn’t leave
here on her own. Somebody came and got her that night,” Ms Fraser said.
A 61-year-old man, who has since died, was arrested in February 2018 over
Krystal’s disappearance but was released without charge.
The housemate murder of Samantha Kelly, 2016
Kangaroo Flats woman Christine Lyons attempted to make her dream of having a
family of her own a reality by ordering her husband to murder her friend and
housemate, Samantha Kelly, in 2016.
Unable to conceive children herself, Lyons, 47, aimed to assume custody of Kelly’s
four children after telling friends and loved ones that the 39-year-old Bendigo woman
had walked out on her own children.
Ms Lyons was accused in court of manipulating her then-lover, 44-year-old Ronald
Lyons, to carry out the killing following her failed attempt to fatally drug Ms Kelly on
January 22.
The next day, Lyon’s ex-husband, Peter Arthur, fatally struck Ms Kelly with a
hammer in a bungalow behind the house where all four adults lived with Ms Kelly’s
children.
Her body was found in a shallow grave three weeks later, her housemates at the
centre of investigators’ suspicions all the while.
A former aged care nurse, Ronald Lyons was found guilty of attempted murder and
assisting Peter Arthur after the fact, but was acquitted of murder.
Christine Lyons was jailed for a maximum of 30 years, while Ronald must serve nine
of his 12-year sentence before he is eligible for parole
Peter Arthur is serving a minimum 13-year jail term.
The Bendigo Prison riot, 1987
An armed prison inmate who dubbed himself an “anti-nuclear warrior” in August
1987 held five people hostage inside Bendigo Prison for almost two days in a
desperate bid to draw attention to his cause.
Threatening to kill himself along with each hostage unless demands of prison reform
and media condemnation of nuclear weapons were met, 43-year-old John Dixon-
Jenkins originally seized 9 hostages on August 20.
Dixon-Jenkins released four hostages shortly after the siege began, before releasing
the remaining five, three jail employees and two inmates almost two days later.
A former child psychiatrist, Dixon-Jenkins was in 1984 sentenced to a six-year stint
in jail for a spate of bomb hoaxes.
Australian media referred to him as the “mad bomber” after he threatened to hijack
and blow up a harbour ferry in 1983 to publicise his concerns about nuclear
weapons.
Dixon-Jenkins was also believed to have had an incendiary device strapped to him
while carrying a handgun throughout the Bendigo Prison ordeal.
Police at the time believed he fashioned both weapons himself inside the prison.
85 inmates were incarcerated inside the medium-security prison at the time.
The siege also forced two local primary and secondary schools to close, while all
remaining inmates were locked inside their cells.
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