Deadline: 9News Melbourne viewers treated to gold star photo bombing in live beach cross
9News Melbourne viewers were treated to some gold star photobombing with an incredible mix of a live cross from a beach and a shisha pipe being smoked in ankle deep water.
Victoria
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Australia’s top crime reporters Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.
Piping Hot
It has nothing to do with crime but we were taken by this unusual piece of photo-bombing on Nine News the other night.
Reporter Amber Johnston was doing a bayside hot weather live cross when this mystery man holding a hookah pipe decided he wanted a piece of the action.
Know your product
There were reports last week that the drug-testing station at the Beyond the Valley music festival was detecting more than just unsafe gear.
It was also showing how those gobbling down pills and snorting powders were not necessarily getting what they paid for, one example being ketamine sold as cocaine.
Of course, if it’s quality control and ethical practices you’re after, the drug trade probably isn’t the place to expect it, especially at the retail consumer end.
With some drug transactions, however, it isn’t just the buyer who needs to beware.
Word reached Deadline a while back that one dealer paid the ultimate price for some shonky sales work.
His customers bypassed the Consumer Affairs Victoria route and took direct action, resulting in a late-night attack that has put him out of business… permanently.
Dog Acts
Justice can be rough out in Melbourne’s Wild West.
Deadline has been told of one horrific tale which left a young man severely injured from top to bottom after thug life collided with a vigilante response.
The story goes that a bloke lying in bed one night recently was roused by his wife screaming and the sound of crockery being smashed downstairs.
Investigating the row, the householder found his spouse throwing everything but the kitchen sink at a young bloke who she’d spotted trying to squeeze in via a dog door.
Unfortunately, he had become stuck, and the man of the house wasn’t about to put out a bowl of Chum for the visitor.
Instead, he gave him a thorough seeing-to, before finding out the nocturnal visitor might not have been slipping and sliding inside to steal the car keys.
We’re told the real reason the unhappy youth wanted to get inside was that some armed punks had apparently been chasing him over some unknown beef.
The posse proceeded to dish out a fearful flogging to the youth’s bottom half.
He must now wish he was more of a whippet and less of a labrador, so at least he would have slid through the hatch and copped only one set of vigilantes at a time.
Keith Bares his teeth (allegedly)
There’s been a welcome breakthrough in the cold case murder of Meaghan Louise Rose on the Sunshine Coast back in 1997 that has some of the same elements as the Michelle Buckingham killing at Shepparton in 1983.
The body of Ms Rose, a 25-year-old disability and aged care nursing assistant, was found at the bottom of a cliff at Point Cartwright in what was initially thought to be a suicide.
But, last year, there was increasing interest in what one Keith Lees, now 72, might know about it.
A vehicle belonging to the mystery man was found at the top of rugged Cape Nelson in Victoria’s southwest around the time inquiries intensified, perhaps suggesting the possibility he had taken his own life down among the white pointers and abalone poachers of that lonely stretch of coast.
Investigators were having none of either suicide scenario and uncovered confirmed sightings of the missing driver around the state in the weeks after his abandoned car was found.
The trail went quiet for a long time.
Right up until last week, when the very same K. Lees was arrested in the Sydney suburb of Dural.
It seems he did not greet the development of the investigation as enthusiastically as the Rose family did.
As well as being detained on the murder warrant, he is facing a charge of trying to bite police.
The similarity with the Buckingham case, the stabbing death of a teenage girl, is this: after half a lifetime, a suspect was tapped on the shoulder interstate by the law’s long arm.
It will, of course, be up to a judge and jury to decide if there are any other similarities between the two violent deaths.
There will be no jokes about Hannibal Lecter anti-biting masks until after Teethy Keithy has had his day(s) in court.
Good Golly, Miss Dolly
THE female body reported to police near Smithton in Tasmania recently wasn’t, strictly speaking.
It was recognisably female and it was found near Smithton but it wasn’t a flesh and blood body, as such.
In fact, it was made of plastic and rubber and the like, being a sex doll that had been abandoned by its owner — obviously someone who can’t commit and moved on with hardly a backward glance.
Smit, he looks like Tonaayy!
The bad news for Jarod Smit is that he’s in remand on a murder charge over a fatal shooting at a Rye house last month.
The good news is that he’ll start as a raging favourite for any future celebrity look-alike contest held behind prison walls.
Because everyone that sees him can’t help thinking Smit is a “spit” of that excellent all-rounder Tony Armstrong, footballer turned media host, late of ABC breakfast television.
From Fiji to Frankston, beware fake cabbies
The “fake taxi” trap revealed last week in a disturbing rape case in the Fijian city of Nadi is a reminder of everything that can go wrong after midnight in certain places, although Fiji hasn’t traditionally been high on the list of scary destinations.
That case, involving a young Virgin Australia airline staffer being picked up by an unregistered taxi, is one of the few we hear about.
It reminds Deadline of the ordeal suffered by a friend’s son (not to mention his family back in Melbourne) after he jumped into a supposed taxi near a hotel in Bogota, capital of Colombia in South America.
Within minutes the driver had turned off the main roads and driven somewhere quiet, then pulled over and produced a pistol.
He didn’t just rob the young Aussie of his possessions and his wallet.
He took him to an ATM and forced him to withdraw all the cash he could get.
Then he demanded he call home and get his parents to deposit more money in the account by electronic transfer.
Once this was done, the robber held the Australian until he could take that money, too.
By this time, both the victim and his parents were terrified about what could happen next in a lawless place where life is cheap and the murder rate off the scale.
The good news is that the bad guy let the boy go, sadder and wiser and poorer, and he got home to Melbourne safely.
LA fires keep Jim Courier away from first night of AO
Nine commentator Jim Courier was absent from the opening night of the Australian Open, kept away by the devastating fires tearing through Los Angeles.
Man hit in head with machete in terrifying St Kilda carjacking
A man was struck with a machete during a carjacking at the Carlisle St and Barkly St intersection on Sunday night.