Deadline: Wife killer Borce Ristevski hits prison milestone

If deceitful wife killer Borce Ristevski is scratching off the days on his cell wall, he’ll have noticed he’s notched up a milestone this month.

The law had to have a second go at sentencing Borce Ristevski. Picture: Eugene Hyland

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Borce Ristevski counts down the days

If lying, deceitful wife killer Borce Ristevski is scratching off the days on his cell wall then he knows he has as many behind him as he has ahead. Because, this month, he is half way through his time.

Of course, if the law hadn’t had a second go at sentencing him, Ristevski would have been out of jail some time next year.

It took the courts two tries to come up with anything like a just sentence for the notably unremorseful killer.

First time around, a court handed Ristevski just nine years for the 2016 manslaughter of his wife Karen, with a minimum of six “on the bottom”. When that sentence was appealed, on the unsurprising grounds that it was manifestly inadequate, appeal judges bumped it up to 13 years, with a minimum of 10.

Ristevski carrying the coffin of the wife he killed. Picture: AAP

Time flies. Ristevski is now half way through the new minimum, given he had “time served” from being held in custody before his trial. In just five more years, he will be out and about.

Karen Ristevski’s body, of course, was found in bush near Macedon, in January 2017, eight months after she disappeared from the couple’s Avondale Heights home, a “mystery” built on her husband’s elaborate charade that she had walked out after a disagreement.

Ristevski, then 55, was originally sentenced to nine years after pleading guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter just before his murder trial was to begin.

One appeal judge, Justice Phillip Priest, said the original nine-year sentence was “far too low” to reflect deterrence and a just punishment. You could say that, Captain Obvious.

Justice Priest noted that Ristevski’s “deceit” was reprehensible, in that after killing his wife and disposing of her body, he had acted as a pallbearer at her funeral and falsely comforted her relatives and friends.

Including, of course, his own daughter. What a hero.

It’s a small world

The nation’s police assistant commissioners had a major conference in Melbourne this week on the scourge of organised crime.

As they met for a group photograph out the front of Victoria Police Crime Command in Spencer St, there was an unlikely passer-by.

Biochemist Shane Charter of Essendon supplements scandal fame sauntered by, en route to somewhere.

It was earlier in the week that the Herald Sun revealed Charter had been charged by Echo taskforce detectives from the same building for testosterone trafficking.

Feathers fly as stool pigeons sing

In exotic bird circles, the cat is well and truly among the pigeons — not to mention the parrots, macaws and cockatoos. This follows the arrest in Australia of a Danish national suspected of being part of an international smuggling ring.

That arrest has apparently led to raids on bird breeders and dealers in the Newcastle and Maitland areas. The talk among bird fanciers is that seized birds have been transferred to specially prepared quarters at Taronga Park zoo and Featherdale wildlife park in Sydney’s western suburbs.

This, rumour has it, could be the start of a long process in which sophisticated DNA tests indicate which birds have been legitimately bred from existing imports — and which haven’t.

Birds of a feather flock together and all that, but the pecking order is under strain from Federal Police and wildlife and agricultural authorities.

The cat has been set among the pigeons in exotic bird circles. Picture: David Caird

Talk among “birdos” is that one of them has sung like a canary, levelling allegations about others in order to save his own skin. Mobile telephone records will be of great interest to investigators.

The suggestion that an insider would turn stool pigeon has ruffled feathers among wealthy people who indulge a taste for exotic pets by buying birds from breeders who mysteriously produce rare exotic species not seen in Australia until recently, a fact that can be due only to egg smuggling.

Photographs of particular macaws spotted on social media in the recent past are suddenly of great interest. Rumours are rife that a particular millionaire racing identity has macaws whose pedigrees are far more mysterious than those of his racehorses.

It seems that colourful birds attract colourful owners who consider themselves smarter than the average bear. But if they end up getting their wings clipped, everyone will know they are birdbrains, after all.

Not that the real-world penalties for wildlife smuggling are anything like those handed out for drug and gun running, which is why bird smuggling is up with illegal “chop chop” tobacco in the reward-to-risk ratio for crooks.

Pig semen shampoo and other porkies

Exotic birds are not the only creatures that Danes smuggle for fun and profit. Apart from eggs, they go for bacon: the modern-day Vikings are big on pigs, and some tell porkies about porkers.

In fact, two Danish pig experts in Western Australia are not long out of jail for illegally importing pig semen from Denmark concealed in shampoo bottles.

Torben Soerensen was sentenced to three years, while his co-conspirator Henning Laue copped two years after pleading guilty to breaching Australian quarantine and biosecurity laws.

A Perth court was told boar semen was smuggled from Denmark multiple times over eight years until the authorities snuffled them out in March 2017.

Prosecutors said the contraband semen was used in GD Pork’s artificial breeding program to produce elite breeding sows, giving the company an edge over law-abiding pig producers who did not breach biosecurity laws.

It was a Danish pork outfit, of course, that tempted the then Prime Minister Paul Keating to invest big money in a Hunter Valley pig farm before political pressure saved his bacon by forcing him to sell out before the whole thing went belly up.

The financially-ambitious Keating and his financial partners might have been dazzled by the outrageous success of various folks who made untold millions from the modern poultry industry.

Fowl rumour had it that the chicken bandits cheated with their secret breeding programs, smuggling poultry semen from America to establish the chicken farms that supplied fast food franchises.

Unlike the Danish pig conspirators in Perth, the chicken barons allegedly got away with it. Further proof that behind every great fortune is a crime.

Christopher Jarvis’ burnt out car at Thunder Point, a popular coastal lookout in Warrnambool.

If you go down to the woods today...

It sounds like everyone got a big surprise at Framlingham Forest in the state’s south-west a little while back.

“Fram” is an Indigenous Protected Area, guarded with a passion by members of the local Aboriginal community.

It is also believed to be where the body of missing Wangoom father Christopher Jarvis was taken after his disappearance and suspected murder in 2006, an investigation which has hotted up recently.

Before recent public revelations of movement in the case, some plainclothes detectives discreetly went looking for any trace of where the burial place of Mr Jarvis might be.

That led to some fraught moments in the forest when a couple of unknowing young local men came across the cops and wanted to know what they were doing.

One local Indigenous elder told the Warrnambool Standard that the young men had been gathering sticks to make traditional weapons.

The upshot of it was that things seem to have escalated sharply to the point where the police raised the stakes and produced their own traditional weapons.

Matters were resolved peacefully but the whole thing seems to have caused some kind of diplomatic incident in the area where there’ve been allegations of a lack of consultation.

Two men have been charged with the murder of Mr Jarvis, whose vehicle was found burning at the local Thunder Point beauty spot.

They are 70-year-old former policeman Steve Johnson, of Wangoom, and Warrnambool man Glenn Fenwick, 59.