Andrew Rule: Life on the run for Australia’s most wanted
The fugitive legend is one of the most powerful stories we tell each other and history is studded with tales of the ones that got away, but some criminals still meet a deservedly bad end.
Andrew Rule
Don't miss out on the headlines from Andrew Rule. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Two of Australia’s most extraordinary fugitive stories are linked to the same car park underneath a sprawling shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
It was there that Russell “Mad Dog” Cox’s 11-year reign as the nation’s most wanted man ended in a hail of bullets, a scene straight out of Al Capone’s Chicago.
That was in the winter of 1988 when a crew of armed robbery detectives driving past were diverted to Doncaster Shoppingtown after staff there noticed a suspicious vehicle near where an armoured cash car was expected.
HOW MOKBEL FOUND HIMSELF IN THE SHARK TANK
VICTIM SAYS JONATHAN DICK WILL STRIKE AGAIN
HOW AUSTRALIA’S MOST FAMOUS FUGITIVES WERE CAUGHT
The story goes that a sharp-eyed detective peered into the car and saw a prison library card in the name of Raymond Denning, wanted nationwide after escaping from Goulburn Jail a week earlier.
The detectives were on high alert to apprehend Denning but did not know he had hooked up with Australia’s most-wanted, Cox, who had been on the run since his ingenious jailbreak from Katingal high security unit at Long Bay in 1977.
Within minutes, the police had recaptured Denning but Cox was harder to corner. The detectives riddled his getaway car with dozens of shots to stop him speeding out of the car park. By a miracle, he wasn’t injured. But it would take the crew some time before they realised how big a fish they had.
The prisoner refused to talk, apart from commenting they would be over the moon when they identified him.
After fingerprint checks proved he was Australia’s most wanted, the detectives had celebratory drinks in their office then insisted on getting “victory” snapshots posing with their stony-faced captive.
There is plenty more to the Cox saga, which would eventually end better than most careers in crime — especially the ill-fated Denning’s, who overdosed on heroin after turning informer.
The other fugitive story connected to the Doncaster shopping centre began two years ago in the car park where Cox’s run ended.
David Dick, a popular and pleasant 36-year-old carpenter and suburban cricketer, was cutting through the basement car park early on the morning of February 3, 2017.
He was hurrying to catch a bus to work, but someone who knew his routine was waiting for him.
As Dick stepped out of a car park lift, he was attacked with a sword. It was calculated, vicious and fatal. He was left bleeding to death while his attacker calmly stepped back into a lift and left the scene, carrying the weapon.
Police and the victim’s horrified family were baffled by the attack. David Dick was a blameless man with no enemies. Who would want to kill him?
It wasn’t until after security footage of the suspected attacker was screened that the dead man’s family received the second terrible shock: the unknown attacker was almost certainly David’s older brother, Jonathan Dick.
The suspicion hardened when Jonathan’s old blue Ford Fairmont sedan was later found abandoned in a street in Ivanhoe East, a short drive from Doncaster. A local householder supplied security footage of a man walking down the same street and matching the killer’s description: a solidly-built man, about 176cm tall with brown hair.
It turned out that Jonathan Dick, then 38, had been missing for two days from the rundown house where he had lived alone for several years at Seymour, north of Melbourne. His neighbour told reporters of a solitary man who disappeared that week and had not been seen in Seymour since.
Police at first were confident the missing man would be found quickly — on the road or at railway or bus stations or with relatives or friends interstate. As weeks turned into months, it seemed increasingly likely he had committed suicide in some hidden spot.
But all that changed early on the morning of August 23 last year, when a former classmate of Jonathan Dick’s stepped on to the footpath outside his family house in Church St, Keilor. It was just before 7am and the rear vision camera on a passing garbage truck caught a glimpse of sudden violence.
A man in a red top and blue jeans attacked the terrified resident with a hammer. The victim suffered head wounds but was not badly hurt. He recognised the attacker as Jonathan Dick, who had grown his hair shoulder length since his brother’s murder 18 months earlier.
Dick ran away, heading south. Again, he vanished. He hasn’t been seen since … at least by anybody willing to tell police about it.
His mother, Carol Cloke, grieving for two lost sons, again publicly appealed for Jonathan to give himself up before anyone else was hurt.
She and her surviving son, Simon, fear further deaths or injuries — including that of Jonathan, who has suffered from delusional behaviour for some time.
“I miss him so much and so does his brother Simon,” Carol Cloke said in a statement police released after the Keilor incident. “I would like you to reach out, Jonathan. We’re here to help you and I love you.”
Police urged the public to watch for the wanted man but not to approach him. Police also underlined the obvious probability: that someone might have been helping him stay out of sight.
Still, six months after the last sighting, and two years after David Dick’s murder, the whereabouts of Jonathan Dick are as big a mystery as in the first week.
He is the latest in a long line of fugitives. Some stay out of sight for years then surface. Others disappear forever, which poses a question: have they died in secret or under another identity — or got away with committing the perfect crime?
The fugitive legend is one of the most powerful stories we tell each other. From Bonnie Prince Charlie to John Dillinger, from Lord Lucan to Brenden Abbott the “Postcard Bandit”, history and pop culture are studded with tales of the ones that got away.
Russell Cox was one of a long line of Australian law-breakers who stayed on the run so long he became a modern legend that echoed the bushranger days.
But the man who is now probably Australia’s most wanted is a much inferior crook, one Graham Potter. That is if he is even still alive.
Potter is ordinary-looking but not normal. He is like the mild-mannered monster Elmer Crawford, who in 1970 killed his pregnant wife and three children in cold blood then staged their exit by rolling them over a seaside cliff near Port Campbell in the family Holden.
If the car had not got stuck on a hidden ledge, Crawford might have got away with his plot to inherit his wife’s property. But the car’s swift discovery meant police came looking for its owner at the family house in Glenroy in Melbourne’s northwestern suburbs.
It turned out that the self-taught electrician had made an electrocution device to kill his wife without signs of violence, then used it and bashed his children to death with a hammer — all part of a plan to imply his wife had killed the children then driven over the cliff in a murder-suicide.
Crawford left the Glenroy house the day the bodies were found and has never been seen since. He probably escaped overseas with his nightmare secret.
Graham Potter shared Crawford’s propensity for grotesque violence. In February, 1981, the 23-year-old Wollongong coal miner met a teenage shop assistant during his own buck’s night and killed her at his flat. He cut off her fingers and head to make identification difficult.
Potter threw the girl’s naked body from a cliff then disposed of the head and fingers in a garbage bag. Two days later, the body was found. A month later, a man bushwalking with his dog found the rest.
A jury ignored Potter’s story that strangers had killed the young woman and forced him to dispose of her. He was jailed but released after only 15 years, in 1996, still maintaining his innocence.
For some reason the woman he was engaged to when he committed the murder married him in jail and they moved to Tasmania in 2002. In 2008, he was arrested for his alleged supporting role in the importation of $440 million of cocaine and ecstasy by a mafia group.
Potter had met mafia drug runner Pasquale Barbaro in prison and worked for him outside, running errands and eventually agreeing to kill someone for $100,000.
As a hitman Potter made a good coal miner. He couldn’t even organise a getaway car that worked. Which is lucky, because police were watching him as he bungled his attempt at killing a mob target.
Potter was charged along with Barbaro and others in 2008 over the huge drug importation but jumped bail in 2010 and vanished.
Either Potter the bumbling “hitman” has proven a genius at disguise and hidden in plain sight or he has come to a deservedly bad end.
If he is still alive, he has spent nine years without leaving any sort of electronic trace from mobile phone, credit card or toll road charge.
Potter has more than police chasing him. The inference he could inform on mafia figures suggests he does not have a bright future.
While Russell Cox was on the run, he reputedly bought a farm in rural Queensland secretly with his partner, Eva Dean, and masterminded a series of armed robberies. The couple even travelled overseas on false documents before the shootout in the car park at Doncaster.
But Graham Potter is hardly up to Cox’s cunning.
Despite dozens of reported “sightings” of nondescript middle-aged men who look like Potter, the last confirmed sighting of him was at Tully in far north Queensland in late 2010. That was when he and two other drifters happened to be pulled over by police and all bolted for the bush.
Tully is saltwater crocodile country. If the mafia haven’t got Graham Potter, the betting is that a croc did.
As for Russell Cox, he and Eva Dean married and lived happily ever after in Queensland after his release from Grafton prison in 2004. An author is planning a book about him but Cox isn’t talking.
Racing rogue’s real world alliances brought rough trot in jail
Disgraced harness trainer-driver Rod Weightman started to associate with serious crooks after he was disqualified on doping charges in 2004. And he soon found out such alliances can make you a jailhouse target.
How families help suburban killers sneak through the cracks
When a wife or mum “goes missing” many children, having lost one parent, don’t want to lose the other. But how do they block out a truth too terrible to contemplate and accept a barely plausible story?