Deadline: Buck naked Sunbury burglar has some explaining to do

A burglar is facing a rather embarrassing court date, after allegedly breaking into a Sunbury home stark naked and leaving a present — a brand new stool in their kitchen.

Buck naked Sunbury burglar has some explaining to do.

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

Naked burglar’s code brown

There are a million stories in the naked city but the one about the naked burglar in need of toilet training will be aired when he faces a rather embarrassing court date.

The 40-year-old has been charged over a bizarre incident in which he allegedly broke into a Sunbury home, buck naked, on June 11.

He was chased away by an outraged male homeowner, allegedly after climbing into a couple’s comfy bed at 1.15am while in some kind of altered state, whether due to psychosis or drug use is not known at this point.

As if that wasn’t strange enough, those who lived at the property soon discovered their visitor had left behind a most unwelcome present: a brand new stool in the kitchen. But not of the wooden variety and definitely not one you’d want to sit on.

This is not exactly a rare type of incident. It is a fact of police life the world over that burglars evacuate their bowels at crime scenes rather too often.

The alleged burglar left an unwanted present in the couple’s kitchen.

Deadline once attended a court appearance in Warrnambool where the accused had left a “log” in the victim’s open fireplace while robbing the place.

Theories abound about the phenomenon.

There is one train of thought that intruders find the experience of entering another’s home causes excessive anxiety and stimulation.

Another is that it is some kind of disrespectful gesture aimed at their victim. Perhaps it’s a little of both.

Anyway, back to the adventures of the naked man at Sunbury.

Police say they don’t believe his alleged actions were sexually motivated. He will be getting a Magistrates’ Court summons at a later date, so he can tell it to the beak.

Maybe he should take a doggie doo bag.

Catalytic cash converter crushed

Some crimes sneak under the radar. Cattle theft is one and purloining catalytic converters from cars is another.

Cars and cows both have horns but that’s where the similarity ends.

Catalytic converters are the ingenious widgets fitted to modern vehicles (conventional internal combustion motor-powered ones) to clean up harmful emissions.

It happens that the converters contain very expensive metals, which is why cunning thieves pinch them to scavenge the metal and cash it on the black market. It’s the automotive version of the time-honoured dodges of stealing copper wire or roofing lead.

Last year, thieves paralysed the St Vincent’s soup fleet of vans by stealing the catalytic converters from them, a dirty lowdown trick that confirms the saying about honour and thieves.

Catalytic converters are made from expensive metal, enticing thieves. Picture: Getty Images

But there is some chance of poetic justice for catalytic converter thieves: in America, one was killed in the act when he made the mistake of tampering with a vehicle that had someone asleep inside it. The scared driver woke up and drove off, accidentally running over him.

None of that deterred the man last week charged with more than 200 offences following a big investigation into catalytic converter thefts across Melbourne.

Transit Divisional Response Unit detectives arrested the 40-year-old South Australian in an allegedly stolen MG car at a Springvale car park on Tuesday.

Police allege the crow eater stole more than 70 catalytic converters with an estimated value of $270,000.

The man has been charged with 212 offences including theft of a motor vehicle, theft from a motor vehicle and any other thefts the police thought might stick.

He was also charged with drug offences, naturally.

If the charges are proven, it will be further proof of what will surely become known as the Deadline Law: Most Crime Is Drug Related.

Investigation of the one-man catalytic cash converter crime wave began in April following reports that one of the gadgets was stolen from a vehicle in Noble Park. Police linked that to thefts across 10 suburbs including Dandenong, Springvale, Burwood, Highett, Chadstone and Brunswick between April and June.

The same man is facing separate charges after a van allegedly rammed an unmarked police car at Dandenong North on June 16.

A police officer shot at the man driving the van, who was lucky he wasn’t wounded or killed. So he has been charged with recklessly exposing a police officer to risk by driving, and conduct endangering serious injury.

If all the allegations are proven in court, it will be the catalyst for a decent spell inside for the cash converter.

Were cops looking too far north for south?

It’s a year this weekend since Colleen South drove from her hometown of Adelaide to northwest Victoria and vanished.

It took five weeks for two police forces not to find her. That was finally done by a farmer who saw her body under a tree in an otherwise clear wheat paddock just 1429m from Colleen’s car, which was spotted within hours of her abandoning it on a back road near Wycheproof.

Colleen fell through the gap between South Australian and Victorian police. By the time both forces took her disappearance almost seriously, it was far too late.

Missing woman Colleen South with her daughter Veronica. Picture: Supplied

As the Sunday Herald Sun has noted, there was no attempt to use trained search dogs to find her, despite police being offered their services for the cost of the petrol to bring them to the district.

No one will ever know if prompt action and a proper search might have saved Colleen, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in a system that can throw dozens of officers into a search and find nothing but overtime bills.

Of course, Colleen South isn’t the only lost soul. She vanished only seven weeks after tram inspector Christos Pittas was lost — and never found — on a walk at Dinner Plain near Mt Hotham.

That was another case where dogs were offered but declined, something a coroner might consider in future. The coroner currently probing Colleen South’s death is looking at police “policy” and procedures in that case, which probably covers poor attitudes and sluggish response times.

When Colleen’s worried niece, Farah Mak, contacted Insp Gerard de Vries at Swan Hill about her missing aunt, he responded with words she recalls as: “Oh, Farah, she’s probably been picked up by a passer-by and they’re living off the grid somewhere.”

Sadly, this wasn’t just one isolated foolish comment from one senior officer. According to some unhappy locals, it reflected a rather offhand attitude.

One Birchip couple report that during the unsuccessful search for Colleen, they sat next to an off-duty policeman in a Birchip pub.

Christos Pittas went missing on a walk at Dinner Plain near Mt Hotham.

“He was asked his thoughts on the Colleen South missing case,” reports one of the pair. “He said: ‘She’s not out there. We have looked. She’s been spotted in Mildura. She’s hiding or running away from something or somebody’.”

At that stage, the missing woman was lying dead virtually within sight of her car.

Since then, police command will have heard that a tracker dog is credited with saving the lives of four Colombian children who spent 40 days and nights alone in the Amazonian jungle after surviving a light plane crash last month.

Could a bent banana republic have something to teach us?

Can’t keep a good man down or a bad one inside

Gun crime reporter Geoff Wilkinson slipped out of retirement for a guest comeback to the Herald Sun at the weekend, breaking the story that oxygen thief William Craig Forde is appealing to be released from jail.

The serial sex offender, convicted for raping four women, is appealing his indefinite jail term within days of the state government voting against a special law to keep triple killer Paul Denyer in prison for life.

As “Wilky” reports from his secret hideaway, where he has several betting accounts and a savage three-legged dog codenamed “Quaddie”, Forde was sentenced to a rare indefinite prison term in 2007 and will return to court in August to seek release.

A recent meeting of lawyers from the Office of Public Prosecutions and Legal Aid is believed to have agreed on funding for an appeal.

The good news, though, is that if the adult parole board has any say in Forde’s future, he might find it hard to make the cut. The details of his abduction and repeated assault of a 23-year-old woman over 30 hours and 800 km do not bear repeating and do not fade with time.

Forde had only just been released from jail after serving less than 16 years for three earlier rapes when he committed the abduction. There was a time, of course, when extremely and permanently dangerous prisoners were given what crims used to call “the key” — shorthand for Detained at the Governor’s Pleasure.