Andrew Rule: Hillbilly vigilantes led by Albert Thorn tortured innocent man

The collection of cretins and imbeciles who kidnapped an innocent man they believed to be a paedophile called themselves the Australian Freedom Fighters, but one detective had a different title for them: “drug-f---ed white trash.”

If there’s any justice, Albert Thorn will die in prison. Source: Facebook

It would have been a mercy if Bradley Lyons had passed out from blood loss, dehydration and shock.

But there was no mercy. He was conscious when the pack of human hyenas, who’d already tortured him for 18 hours, dragged his bound body out of a car boot in remote bushland.

The lynch mob made him watch as they dug a crude grave. When they fired a shot from a sawn-off shotgun near him, he must have prayed that his ordeal was over — and that they would abandon him there, terrified, broken and bleeding but half alive.

They didn’t. The next shot was into his skull. They dropped his body into the makeshift grave, tossed dirt and debris over it and dragged a log across the top.

Two days later, the leader of the pack held a barbeque at the property where they’d tortured the murdered man, as if to celebrate some sort of victory.

That’s how twisted they were. Especially the older man, who could have stopped it but instead led the others into more sickening depravity.

His name is Albert Thorn. If there’s any justice, he’ll die in prison. He deserves every bit of his 32-year minimum.

The judge gave Thorn “life” when he sentenced him last week, exactly five years after the crime. But some might think his co-offenders, and Brad Lyons’ treacherous wife, got off lightly.

Vicim Bradley Lyons with his treacherous wife Jana Hooper on their wedding day. Source: Facebook

When Albert Thorn was 14, he kicked 28 goals for Nungurner in the Tambo Valley football competition. It made him one of the best six scorers in the league in the 1980 season, a good sign for a kid who had to win kicks in the same team as East Gippsland’s champion junior.

But that glimmer of promise was as good as it got for “Bert” Thorn. Like Julian Knight, like Raymond “Mr Stinky” Edmunds, like Victoria’s worst multiple murderer Paul Steven Haigh and many other mindless killers, he was an adopted boy who lost his way in adolescence.

Albert had been adopted, along with a baby girl, by an air force couple, Jim and Beverly Thorn, shortly after his birth in 1965.

The family moved to Gippsland from Laverton when he was 10. He went to secondary school at St Patrick’s College in Sale, then Nagle College in Bairnsdale.

“St Pat’s” was later exposed for harbouring five paedophile teachers who molested dozens of boys, many in the 1970s.

At 18, Thorn went to Western Australia and worked on commercial fishing boats. He returned to his parents’ East Gippsland property when his father was dying, sometimes working as a deckhand on Lakes Entrance trawlers.

In recent years, the way his lawyers tell it, Thorn was a “stay-at-home carer” for his elderly mother and two young daughters. The girls’ mother had died of cancer not long before the Lyons atrocity in late 2018.

Whether Thorn was a provider or a parasite is a matter to ponder. He was certainly no prize. Conscientious carers probably don’t spend most of their time and money on booze and drugs.

Albert Thorn was jailed for 32-years. Source: Facebook

The Thorn property is at Nyerimilang, near where the Tambo River runs into coastal lakes west of Lakes Entrance.

The Nyerimilang name is linked to the gracious historic property overlooking the lake nearby. But there’s nothing gracious about the Thorn place, a rural slum scattered with sheds, caravans, cars and eyesores like the old concrete tank that Thorn used as a bunker to “party” with like-minded cretins much younger than himself.

Apart from drinking and drugs and heavy metal music, the former St Pat’s boy was obsessed about paedophiles.

“The tank” was a key element in a sinister chain that escalated from sordid gossip to premeditated murder after Thorn appointed himself leader of a vigilante group he grandiosely called the Australian Freedom Fighters.

Unfortunately, part of Thorn’s circle was Bradley “BJ” Lyons, who in 2011 had married Jana Hooper, then 28, taking on her four children by various fathers.

Lyons, then 23, and Hooper went on to have three more children. At age 16, one of Hooper’s older daughters had a baby, making Jana Hooper a hillbilly “granny” at 35.

Lyons and Hooper and their growing brood lived at 53 McCullough St in Lakes Entrance: a crowded household that must have annoyed respectable neighbours, especially when police came to settle their regular fights.

Adding what might well have proved a fatal complication, a former boyfriend of Jana Hooper’s younger sister lived in a flat in the backyard. This was Nick Stefani.

It wasn’t much better at Thorn’s place, where one Jordan Bottom lived in a caravan on the property with a girlfriend. A disgusted investigator summed up the group as “drug-f***ed white trash.”

Tens of thousands of careful legal words have described what happened on December 2 and 3 in 2018. But the story behind the story highlights the truth of Mark Twain’s line that a lie can go around the world before “the truth gets its boots on.”

Hooper found a willing listener in Nick Stefani. Picture: Facebook.

For reasons known to herself, Jana Hooper had concocted rumours that her husband had fathered her 16-year-old daughter’s baby and had impregnated her 14-year-old.

Some people in Hooper’s orbit believed her.

She herself had been a victim of sexual abuse in a dysfunctional life all the way back to her father’s sudden death when she was six.

Hooper had a willing listener in Stefani, the younger man living in the backyard.

Although he was only 24 in 2018 (30 years younger than Thorn), Stefani had “form” for firearms offences. Not everyone trusted him around young girls as much as Jana Hooper seemed to.

Stefani might have had his own sordid motive to poison opinion about Lyons. But it was Thorn who decided Lyons should be the target of vigilante “justice” for rumoured under-age sex with his step daughters.

It was Thorn who had a giant tattoo of crossed six-guns on his back with the words AUSTRALIAN FREEDOM FIGHTERS.

It was Thorn who assembled his followers to ambush Lyons at the McCullough St house on the afternoon of Sunday, December 2.

It was Thorn who bought duct tape and balaclavas on the way to abduct Lyons. And it was Thorn’s shotgun that killed him.

But there were several others in it up to their tattooed necks. Others apart from imbeciles like Jordan Bottom and Rikki Smith, the pair who were ultimately acquitted of murder despite being in the execution party with Thorn.

One Jayden Ball drove Alec Harvey to the house to join Thorn, Stefani and Smith in the crew that ambushed Lyons after he got home from his early shift at a supermarket on that bloody Sunday. Unusually, in his circles, Lyons worked to feed his family.

While Lyons was napping in a bedroom, the abductors walked into the house.

The grotesque tattoo emblazoned over Thorn’s back. Picture: Facebook

Jana Hooper let them in and “gave the nod” to indicate her husband was inside. She was a party to the plan, although her lawyer would later successfully argue she didn’t know it was a murder plot — and that she deserved leniency because she claimed one of her grandfathers was part-Indigenous.

The four grabbed Lyons, punching and hitting him with a metal pole. Stefani jammed a gun barrel in his mouth and burned his eye with a lit cigarette. They bound his hands.

Thorn reversed his mother’s Corolla into the carport so they could put the bleeding man in the boot.

Thorn drove to the Nyerimilang property. When he got there he banged on the door of the caravan parked there, telling Jordan Bottom he had “a present” in the boot.

To her credit, Bottom’s girlfriend wanted nothing to do with the abduction. Neither did two other people who knew about it. But none of them contacted the police. One short call any time in 18 hours would have saved Brad Lyons’ life.

Jana Hooper called people but she lied, saying “BJ’s gone” and suggesting he’d left her to flee interstate.

At the same time Stefani couldn’t help boasting they were going “to get a confession out of BJ about what he did to the kids.” He and Hooper told vile lies that Lyons had made pornographic paedophile videos for the dark web.

Albert Thorn is led in to the Supreme Court to stand trial for murder. Picture: David Crosling

Thorn’s crew left the trussed man in the boot in the heat all that afternoon, ignoring his piteous pleas for help. Stefani and Hooper had also gone to Nyerimilang but left just before midnight.

Thorn, Bottom and Smith dragged Lyons out of the boot. They strapped him to a metal table in a shed and tortured him for hours.

They poured hot water on him, jabbed him with a gun and ran a chainsaw above his head. Their drug-addled “plan” was to force him to confess to sex offences then dump him at a police station.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, one female friend had told Thorn and Stefani (correctly) that a forced confession would never stand up in court. They’d argued with her but the dawning realisation that she was right probably signed Lyons’ death warrant.

After hours of torture, they bound Lyons elaborately and threw him in the boot and drove for 40 minutes to a bush track near Double Bridges for the final evil act.

Meanwhile, Stefani and Hooper destroyed the blood-soaked mattress and scrubbed the bedroom at the house. But they missed a small blood splash in the hall, eventually spotted by police.

Later, Thorn cut up the torture table and cleaned his shed, painting the floor.

After Lyons’ brother reported him missing a week later, police came with search warrants. When they found the startlingly clean bedroom in contrast with the filthy state of the rest of the house, alarm bells rang. The same with Thorn’s freshly-painted shed floor.

It was a matter of time before investigators broke the weakest link. Jordan Bottom led detectives to the bush grave on March 14. Like his co-offender Rikki Smith, Bottom was acquitted of murder.

Bradley Lyons’ murder leaves more questions than answers. Under the law, the victim’s alleged activities are irrelevant but people ask if he was a sex offender.

The police say he wasn’t. More importantly, his step daughters say he wasn’t and spoke up for him at his funeral. The girls felt that Thorn and Stefani had robbed them of both parents.

In their mother’s case, that’s not for too long. Jana Hooper is well into her minimum sentence of just over four years, half what Stefani got.

Bradley Lyons’ poor mother told a court that every night she sees the terrible things done to her son as vividly as if she’d been there.
Hers is a life sentence with no remission.