Deadline: Moe’s rumour mill turning on house Jaidyn Leskie’s vanished from
Rumours of the Jaidyn Leskie house being turned into a childcare centre reminded some of the pool commemorating Harold Holt.
Police & Courts
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Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.
Name games: when Roberta met Domaszewicz
Unkind people have made fun of the naming of the Harold Holt Memorial swimming pool for years, just because the PM drowned at Portsea.
Some locals around Moe are bemused by the rumour that the site of the house where little Jaidyn Leskie vanished in 1997 has been turned into an early learning centre, a place for small children.
The inconvenient fact that sorta spoils a good story is that the Little Saints child centre is at 152 Narracan Drive, Newborough. That’s next door to the house that was occupied in 1997 by Jaidyn’s mother’s then boyfriend, Greg Domaszewicz, at number 150.
It was there that he babysat the toddler on the winter night the little boy disappeared.
Domaszewicz was and still is the only person police suspected of placing Jaidyn’s body in the Blue Rock Dam, where it was found six months later.
He was charged and acquitted of homicide but would later say in an interview that Jaidyn died because of his (Domaszewicz’s) “stupidity”, suggesting the possibility of an accident.
Domaszewicz was represented at trial by the late Colin Lovitt QC, one of the most aggressive and brilliant barristers in the crime business. After the acquittal, a young reporter asked Lovitt what it was like to have his client “found innocent”.
Lovitt growled a reply to the effect: “My client hasn’t been found innocent. He has been found not guilty, which is a very different thing”.
One person who understood the difference between innocence and acquittal was Roberta Williams, of gangland fame.
For some reason Domaszewicz got to make the acquaintance of Roberta and her drug dealing, murdering husband Carl.
Police who were tapping the Williams’ phone calls were amused to hear the obliging Domaszewicz offer to babysit Roberta’s small children.
After Domaszewicz made this generous offer, there was silence on the line for a beat before Roberta blurted: “You’re (expletive deleted) joking, aren’t ya!”
Candidate grabs crook in Tigerland
Deadline doesn’t do politics. Crime has quite enough treachery, sniping and backstabbing for us. But the two worlds met in Richmond on Saturday when trouble started while a political candidate was handing out political pamphlets with a couple of Vietnam Vet volunteers.
A large male of rugby-playing appearance was sprung pinching a motorbike by two police officers, one of them female.
They chased the offender on foot but that tactic backfired when the big bro turned on them.
The motorcycle enthusiast hails from the Pacific but he was apparently no pacifist.
As our source put it: “He goes off tap and is giving it to the coppers”.
In the confusion, it seems the police pepper spray ended up incapacitating the policewoman, this friendly fire giving the alleged offender a temporary advantage.
At that stage, says our source, the political candidate and two Vietnam vets stepped in. They overpowered the suspect, who was taken away for a long chat at a nearby police station.
Peace descended on the streets of Tigerland, the candidate dusted himself down and cheerfully went back to electioneering.
A clue? He’s not a Green. More khaki. And obviously doesn’t mind a blue.
Bandido riders on radar
A lot of police work is going into the Bandidos bikie gang lately.
It had been thought that the club might have been losing ground since their strongest days of about a decade ago when they had a ton of pull on the outlaw biker scene.
It had looked as though they had been left behind by the Comancheros, the rejuvenated Mongols and the evergreen Rebels, all with big membership numbers.
Defections of key players — most to the Mongols — certainly indicated that but a sweep of arrests in the past fortnight shows they are still in the thoughts of organised crime detectives.
In recent weeks, the gang has been linked to a Ballarat firebombing, the bashing of former bikie strongman Jason Addison and some extortion activity.
Another milestone in spooky Worledge case
Eloise Worledge would have turned 55 last Saturday, but she remains forever young, frozen in time in a few faded photographs of the pleasant little girl who vanished from her family’s house in Beaumaris overnight on January 12, 1976.
The death of her mother, Patsy, early this year following that of estranged husband Lindsay Worledge in 2017, means all but one of Eloise’s immediate family has gone. Her little brother Blake, first to realise Eloise was missing, was killed in a road accident at Nunawading in 1997.
But the case still haunts Australia, especially Melbourne. It has always seemed strange, as well as tragic.
One former Beaumaris local, Jane, who was a university student in 1976, was on the local beach with her boyfriend a couple of months after Eloise’s disappearance.
A dark-haired woman who looked familiar approached the couple as if she wanted to talk. Jane had a camera with her and asked the friendly woman to take a photograph of her and her boyfriend, which she did. She handed back the camera then stopped to chat, which was when Jane realised it was Patsy Worledge.
The conversation, Jane has often said since, was “bizarre”. Her impression was that Patsy was caught up in the fame of her daughter going missing. Jane later told her family that Patsy was “gloating” over how famous she was and how in demand she was.
According to Jane’s daughter, “Mum felt the entire thing was really suss, and eventually they kind of moved on to shake her (off).”
Afterwards, Jane was troubled by the fact that Patsy did not mention the actual abduction or of the necessity to spread the word to find what happened to Eloise. She seemed more intent on being the star of her own terrible drama.
Police always suspected an “inside job” because they concluded that the window through which Eloise was supposedly taken had been opened from inside her bedroom.
Police suspicions hovered for a long while over Patsy’s recently estranged husband, Lindsay, who had drunk a huge amount at a boozy lunch in the hours before Eloise disappeared.
Certain police befriended Patsy afterwards but they never uncovered anything that benefited the investigation.
Something to complain about
There’s been a lot of talk about how to handle protesters who glued themselves to a Picasso painting in Melbourne.
One popular suggestion was for authorities to leave them stuck to the art for an extended period so they could have a good think about their tactics.
The pair can probably count themselves lucky they weren’t subjected to the treatment meted out to some activists a few decades ago.
Back then, police would fill a bus with unlucky demonstrators and head to the back of Kororoit Creek Rd in the heart of the western suburb’s refinery district.
There, they’d be told to disembark and find their own way home.
A vintage bust
Plenty more police work left to do on a huge haul of ecstasy imported into Melbourne in fine wine bottles.
Two men were arrested after more than 300kg of liquid ecstasy was uncovered in bottles of 2016 Bordeaux sent from France, via air cargo.
The label “2022 MDMA” would have been more accurate.
Investigators from the Victorian Joint Organised Crime Taskforce will surely have their sights on who else was involved in the huge shipment.
It seems they don’t quite believe that a Roxburgh Park man, 25, and a 21-year-old from Cranbourne, both already in custody, were the only players.
The consignment would have been worth tens of millions of dollars when sold at street level. Enough to buy a truckload of real vintage wines.
Coward punch thug to spend years in jail for vicious Southbank attack
A man who dealt a catastrophic coward punch to his victim during a cocaine-fuelled night out looked at his loved ones in disbelief after learning he would spend years behind bars.
‘She was preyed upon’: Mushroom victim’s family demand answers
Rachael Dixon’s grieving parents have spoken for the first time since their daughter’s death, alleging a trusted friend took advantage of her at a health retreat in regional Victoria.