Postcard Bandit was caught by TRG while washing clothes

Hanging up in the Territory Response Group office is a framed wanted poster of the Postcard Bandit, signed by him with a few choice swear words. Read the story of how he was caught after six months on the run, with a pistol and a pizza.

The Postcard Bandit Brenden Abbott has a less than glamerous capture Art: Stuart Thornton

WHEN Brenden Abbott got down on his knees and crossed his ankles the Territory Response Group knew they had got their man.

It’s little known that one of Australia’s most notorious criminals, the Postcard Bandit, spent his final days of freedom in the hot and humid Top End.

Abbott had intended to try and escape overseas through the then isolated frontier township of Darwin.

However that never eventuated, he was captured in the middle of the mundane task of washing clothes on May 1998.

He had been on the run for six months after escaping from Sir David Longland Prison at Wacol, Queensland with a number of other inmates and was caught as he walked out of a Stuart Park laundromat.

Bank security camera shot of holdup in 1990 with the gunman believed to be Abbott.

Superintendent Shaun Gill was a member of the TRG at the time as a constable.

He remembers the intense effort that went into the investigation to find Abbott and his accomplice Brendon Luke Karl Berichon.

Berichon, a former prisoner, had been the man on the outside that had helped the inmates escape custody.

Berichon wound up behind bars after he shot and wounded two Melbourne police officers in the 90s.

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Abbot had been wanted for a number of bank robberies and prison escapes throughout Australia.

He garnered his nickname, the Postcard Bandit, as it was thought that he would taunt police by sending pictures of himself out the front of cop shops and enjoying the life of freedom.

However that particular story has been debated with other versions of events also being reported.

Abbott in happier times.

Supt Gill said when crime and intelligence officers across the country got wind that it was likely Abbott was on his way to Darwin, the NT police force kicked into gear and stationed officers on roads leading into to the Territory.

The plan was to catch him out in the open, before he had made it to Darwin.

“Along with crime and intelligence we came up with some plans to intercept them,” he said.

“We actually sent teams throughout the Northern Territory to remote roads where we thought they could possibly drive in with the view of stopping them before they came into Darwin.

“As a contingency we also left a team in Darwin in the event that they’d already got here.

“When you’re dealing with intelligence there’s no 100 per cents.

“You’re dealing with the best guess you’ve got with the information in front of you.”

Information then came to police indicting that the two fugitives had in fact already made it to Darwin.

They were doing what they did best hiding in plain sight blending in with the general public.

Without social media, police had to rely entirely on the media to disseminate information and images of the wanted men to the general public.

Abbott in the back of a divvy van pictured on his way leaving the Darwin Magistrates Court after being caught by police in Harriet Plc.

It’s a common misconception that you can come to Darwin, or any remote town for that matter and disappear.

In actual fact, you’re more likely to get spotted as the locals don’t know who you are and suspicions are raised about what you’re doing.

One day police got a call from the staff at the Top End Hotel who recognised Berichon from the wanted posters.

Cops staked out the hotel and found Abbott coming and going from the room.

They then followed Abbott to the laundromat and watched as he put clothes in the wash and then went to the nearby grocery store and bought a pizza.

“Somebody thought they spotted him doing his washing at a laundromat and so the police being police, we were going, ‘well we don’t know if that’s really true but we’ll check it out anyway’, they sent the TRG there and when they saw this person walking out they were thinking, ‘it’s about 80 per cent we reckon it Brenden Abbott’,” he said.

Abbott in a Gold Coast hotel swimming pool. Photo: File

“So they confronted him at gun point and he put his hands on his head and crossed his legs and he just went down on his knees like he’d just got out of jail.

“So they knew it was Brenden Abbott.”

While Abbott was gutsy in his line of crime and during his several escapes from custody; he went down without a fight, despite having a loaded gun on his person.

“He just gave up straight away. When they searched him he had a bum bag and had a loaded pistol in the front,” Supt Gill said.

“His intention was to run or shoot if he wanted to, but luckily we surrounded him and there was plenty of people armed to do it.”

Darwin cops had successfully caught a man officers around the country had spent months chasing.

But it wasn’t a time to celebrate, yet. There was still the job for finding Abbott’s mate Berichon.

Abbott under arrest being escorted to Woodford Correctional Centre in Brisbane, on May 6, 1998.

The rush to find Berichon was on and it was up to the crime and intelligence units to figure out where in Darwin he was staying.

In the end the investigators found an address in a notebook that belonged to Abbott.

The page with the address had been ripped out but the writer had written hard enough on the paper to leave an indent on the next page.

“They managed to bring it up and got an address at a location in Darwin,” he said.

“Based on that, it was some excellent intel work and some excellent investigation, the TRG surrounded this address and he was there with his girlfriend.”

The police negotiators were called into get Berichon to surrender peacefully.

“So they just sat there and negotiated with him and TRG surrounding him for hours and hours and eventually he just gave up.”

Supt Gil said it was a particularly interesting job as it was based all on intel and excellent detective work.

Superintendent Colin Smith outside Darwin City Laundry in where escapee Abbott was apprehended. Picture: Susan Brown

Hanging up in the TRG room is a framed wanted poster of Abbott.

It’s been signed by Abbott with a few choice swear words.

“Those days we used to put out wanted posters and Abbott signed the wanted poster for us and put it in the TRG office and we still have it there now.”

Abbott was released from Wacol prison, Queensland in 2016 after serving 18 years of his 25-year sentence for robbing three banks in Brisbane and the Gold Coast in the 1990s.

After his release, Abbott was immediately served with an outstanding warrant over his 1989 escape and role in the Fre­mantle Prison riot of that year and extradited to Western Australia.

He is now serving out his sentence for WA armed robberies, plus and additional five months for his escape, making him eligible for parole in WA in 2026.

Earlier this year Abbott launched an appeal of his sentence but last month but it was rejected in the Court of Appeal in Western Australia.