Anthony Pitt fighting for right to call 1800 sex lines from jail

He’s a psychopath serial rapist and he’s fighting for the right to call 1800 numbers from Victoria’s sex offenders prison.

The Ballarat mine shaft where Anthony James Pitt imprisoned a teenage girl.

Andrew Rule and Ashley Argoon with the latest crime buzz.

Sex psychopath courts attention

A lot of people in jail might be victims of circumstances but Anthony James Pitt isn’t one of them. He is a psychopath described by police as “intelligent and cunning.”

Pitt is a serial rapist who specialised in abducting and raping teenage girls.

His crimes include locking one girl in the boot of a car and imprisoning another in a mine shaft for 20 hours.

Anthony Pitt is in jail for the abduction and rape of a teenage girl in Ballarat.

Now he is back in court again — fighting a legal action for the right to call 1800 numbers from the sex offenders’ prison at Ararat.

On May 25, Judicial Registrar Keith will conduct a Supreme Court hearing of Pitt’s claim, which proves that the justice system is available to all, even deviants complaining that they can’t use 1800 sex lines in jail.

Pitt’s argument is based on the 1983 case of Raymond v Honey, which establishes that “a convicted prisoner, in spite of his imprisonment, retains all civil rights which aren’t taken away expressly …”.

Pitt was only 10 weeks out of prison in 1998 when he kidnapped a vulnerable Ballarat teenager he had groomed by offering her a “job” picking wildflowers.

When the girl vanished on November 27 that year, she was lucky on two counts.

One was that local police believed her parents when they said it was out of character for the 16-year-old to go missing, and so the investigators didn’t automatically dismiss it as another teenage runaway.

The other bit of luck, following from that, is that they searched the girl’s bedroom and found a “business card” that Pitt had given her.

When the police went to Pitt’s rented room in Ballarat East, they found it plastered with images of children and other material indicating he was a deviate.

Investigation revealed Pitt had leased an old mine shaft, which had a lockable grate across its entrance.

A police officer found Pitt and his victim in this tunnel.

At 8am the next day they cut the lock and Senior Sergeant Peter Anderson went into the tunnel with a torch.

Deep underground, he found Pitt with the terrified girl, whose first thought was that the man behind the torch was another offender that Pitt had invited to rape her.

The rapist, formerly known as Leslie Norman Pitt, was jailed for a very long time.

Police obtained DNA samples which in 2016 led to his conviction over two cold cases — the rape of a 15-year-old in Mildura in 1987 and of a 17-year-old in Frankston in 1988.

It’s not the first time Pitt has attempted to use the legal system. In 2008 he sued Victoria Police for mistreatment. He lost.

With luck, he will leave Ararat in a box well before he gets a parole date.

‘Film producer’ misses final cut

In the end, James Blake Blee got his flight out of Cairns — but not in the direction he was expecting to go.

He was arrested at the Far North Queensland airport last Wednesday afternoon with a one-way ticket to Singapore and about $35,000 in mixed currencies. Two days later, he did fly out of Cairns — but to Sydney, in handcuffs.

Police and prosecutors are interested in the fact that a dying skin diver found in the water near a ship docked in Newcastle Harbour earlier last week was in fact a crew member of Blee’s on a recent boat trip back from Indonesia to Darwin.

James Blake Blee is escorted through Cairns airport by Queensland Police officers. Picture: Brendan Radke

Then there’s the fact Blee had been filmed with the diver, allegedly, when they bought hi-tech diving equipment of the sort used by the doomed man, who was suspected of having worked with drug traffickers before.

The fact that 54kg cocaine was also allegedly found — some of it still apparently lodged inside the submerged hull of the ship Areti, a Marshall Islands vessel which arrived from Argentina on Sunday — has led police to draw certain conclusions.

Blee, described as a charter boat operator and “film producer”, is represented by a real filmmaker, the Gold Coast criminal lawyer Chris Nyst, who wrote the cult crime classic Gettin’ Square.

With clients like this one, there’s no mystery about where Nyst finds storylines.

The (alleged) skin diver ploy is not new, according to crime identities with long memories. Attaching containers to hulls has occurred to various entrepreneurs before, sometimes successfully.

Diving and desperados are a dangerous combination. There was the case in Bass Strait when a young abalone poacher died of the bends after surfacing too fast.

His “skipper” stored the body in the boat and towed it back to Melbourne from South Gippsland to unload the incriminating abalone before coming up with a cover story to explain the dead diver.