On the run in suburbia for nearly 30 years: Former fugitive ‘Dougie’ finally opens up

This story is part of the November 16 edition of Good Weekend.See all 11 stories.

One Sunday afternoon in September 2021, a man walked into Dee Why Police Station, on Sydney’s northern beaches. He looked to be in his 60s, with a short silvery beard, neatly trimmed, and was dressed in a smart brown jacket and black jeans. “My name is Darko Desic,” he told the duty officer, in a thick eastern European accent. “I believe you’ve been looking for me.” He had escaped from prison nearly 30 years ago, he explained, and had been on the run ever since. Now he wanted to hand himself in.

Nonplussed, the officer asked for Desic’s name again.

“Darko Desic. I’ve been on Australia’s Most Wanted. I’m here to hand myself in.”

The officer began searching for Desic on his computer. “I can’t find any trace of you,” he said.

“Please, look again,” Desic replied.

Still no results. The policeman told Desic to stay put, and disappeared into a back room. Half an hour later, he emerged with another officer, holding what appeared to be a photocopy of an old newspaper article. They looked at Desic, then at the article, then back at Desic. “He’s got the same eyebrows,” one of them said, incredulous. “That’s him,” said the other one. They took Desic to another room, where he was fingerprinted and processed. At one stage, a female inspector appeared. “You’ve done well,” she told Desic. Desic asked why. “To be on the run for that long,” she replied.

At six o’clock that evening, Desic was arrested, charged with escape from lawful custody, and driven to Sydney Police Area Command, in the city.

A few days later, details about his case began to emerge. According to police sources, the Yugoslav-born Desic had been imprisoned in Grafton Gaol, in 1991, for growing marijuana. But fearing that he would, upon his release, be deported to Yugoslavia, then in the midst of a civil war, he escaped, using a hacksaw and bolt cutters. He spent the next 29 years at large, living mostly in Avalon, on Sydney’s northern beaches, where he worked for cash, labouring and doing odd jobs. Terrified of being discovered, he didn’t apply for a driver’s licence or a bank account, and never registered with Centrelink or Medicare; when his teeth became rotten, he tried pulling them out with pliers. When the pandemic hit, his work dried up, and the house he was living in was sold. He began sleeping in the sand dunes behind the beach. He gave himself up, as one newspaper put it, “to get a roof over his head”.

Desic’s story became global news. Journalists scrambled for interviews. Talent agents came knocking. Filmmakers got in touch: apparently Russell Crowe wanted to make a movie about him. He became a folk hero in Avalon, where locals knew him as “Dougie”. Indeed, the more famous “Dougie” became, the more friends he had. On TV, people came forward to say that they had seen him every day, walking down the main street or sitting at cafes, drinking coffee. Everyone suddenly knew him, and everybody loved him.

One of the “Free Dougie” bumper stickers seen on vehicles around Sydney’s northern beaches.Credit: Peter Rae

But most of it wasn’t true. He rarely strolled down the main street: he was scared of being spotted. And he never drank coffee: he couldn’t afford it. The truth was that no one really knew “Dougie”. How could they? He had been a virtual ghost for 30 years, living by omission and erasure. He was a feint, a gap in the narrative, hiding in plain sight, clothed in shadows and half-truths. But “Dougie” wasn’t Darko, and Darko’s story was more fascinating than any possible fiction.

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“You want coffee?” Desic asks. “A cigarette? Cold water with lemon juice?” We’re sitting at the kitchen table of a timber, one-bedroom house in the country that Desic has been minding for a friend. There is a bed at one end of the room, a sink and fridge at the other, and a bathroom off to the side. “Very simple, mate,” Desic says. “This is all I need.” By his bedside is a laptop which he uses to practise coding, and, leaning against the wall in the corner, an acoustic guitar. “I taught myself classical guitar,” he tells me. He likes rock ‘n’ roll, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, and the blues, too. But his favourite is the 1940s gypsy-jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt. “Django burned his hand, and he only played with two fingers, which gave him a different flavour,” Desic explains. “Impediment, he turned into advantage. Brilliant.”

Shortly after he handed himself in to police, in 2021, a court ruled that Desic serve the remaining 19 months of his sentence, plus another two months for escaping. He was told that after that, he would most likely be deported. His lawyer, Paul McGirr, protested, telling journalists that Desic had been “a model citizen for 29 years” and that throwing him out of the country would be “un-Australian”. Besides, Yugoslavia, the country of his birth, no longer existed, having broken apart in the Balkans wars of the 1990s. After much lobbying, the government granted Desic a permanent visa, in February, 2023. But he hasn’t been issued an Australian passport, so he can’t travel back to Croatia. “I would like to visit my family,” he says, rolling a cigarette. “It’s a long time since I see them.”

Desic was born in 1957, in a picturesque fishing village called Jablanac, on Croatia’s Adriatic Coast. “Beautiful childhood,” he says. “Best memories.” His father, Vinko, was a machinist; his mother, Anica, taught at the local school. In 1962, the couple had another son, called Predrag. When Desic was nine years old, the family moved to the port city of Rijeka, where he completed high school. Desic was a gentle kid, shy and reserved, and very bright: “I was good at writing and poetry.” But when he was 15, his mother died of breast cancer. “She was only 35,” he says. “That affected me very badly.”

After school, Desic wanted to become a professor of literature and philosophy, but at his father’s suggestion he studied engineering, graduating with honours in 1978. After that, he began his compulsory military service, training in an artillery regiment. Yugoslavia at that time was a federation of socialist republics, held together, since the end of World War II, by strongman Josip Broz Tito. “Tito was a dictator, but benevolent,” Desic says. In the army, Desic became a commissar. “That’s the guy responsible for communist education.” He was given a list of prescribed texts, none of which made much sense to him. “I realised, ‘This is like a religion. There is no substance to it ...’ But I have a gift of a gab, and I become good at it.”

In 1981, he left the army and got a job in logistics with Dow Chemical, which operated a petro-chemical facility on Krk island, off the coast from Rijeka. But his mother’s death still haunted him. “I wanted to get out of Croatia to forget about all the pain that I suffered,” he says.

Passport photos from Desic’s immigration documents from the mid-1980s.Credit: National Archives of Australia

In 1983, he went travelling, to Switzerland, Germany and Australia, where he lived for a time with his second cousin, Milica, in Sydney, and visited his uncle, Nikola, on the NSW north coast. Nikola knew the owner of the Newport Arms Hotel, on Sydney’s northern beaches, and Desic got a job there, picking up glasses. He met another young staffer called David Pascoe. “Darko was an intriguing sort of fella,” Pascoe tells me. “Quite reserved. His English wasn’t the best, and he was finding it hard to make friends.” Pascoe took him under his wing. “We’d go out after work, go to the beach, have a fire and take some beers.”

Desic quickly fell in love with Australia. “There are many nice places which I want to visit!” he wrote when applying for a visa extension. But his mental health became precarious. “I had a nervous breakdown,” he says. He became hyper-vigilant and acutely sensitive. “Hearing, colours become more prominent. You notice birds. They lift a leg – some of them are left, some of them are right, same as us.” In 1986, he returned home to be with his family.

The situation in Yugoslavia had drastically deteriorated. The economic crisis that had been sparked by Tito’s death, in 1980, had spiralled out of control. “Inflation was running rampant,” Desic remembers. He got a job as a mechanic for Jadrolinija, a Croatian shipping company, but his annual wage went from nine million dinars in 1987 to 45 million in early 1988. “You could not get coffee, you could not get detergent. You had to go to Italy to get them.”

The federation was also unravelling. Croatia was agitating to secede; meanwhile, in Belgrade, an outspoken Serb nationalist named Slobodan Miloševic was becoming a key player in Balkans politics, pushing for a greater Serbia. “Something was brewing,” Desic says. In 1987, he was sitting in a cafe in Rijeka when he got talking to a friend. “This guy, he says, ‘Darko, there is going to be a war here.’ ” After speaking to his father, Vinko, Desic decided to leave. He began saving money, and booked a ticket to Australia. In April 1988, Vinko drove him to the station in Rijeka to catch a bus to Belgrade. It was cold and grey. The two men hugged. Vinko said: “Son, one day you will want to come back but you won’t be able to.” Desic climbed onto the bus, turned around and waved goodbye to his father. It was the last time they would see each other.

‘I wanted to buy a house in the country … But I was greedy, and I made a mistake.’

Darko Desic

Desic arrived in Sydney during a heatwave. He was 30 years old, fit and good-looking, with thick, wavy hair and an easy smile. He stayed for six months at a hostel in Avalon, and reconnected with Pascoe. Almost immediately he found work as a storeman for a furniture company in Botany, driving forklifts and packing orders. “One thing about Darko,” Pascoe tells me, “he wasn’t a bludger.” He was also determined to stay in Australia. Shortly after he arrived, Pascoe introduced Desic to a friend of his named Sue Bennett; a few months later, they got married in a civil ceremony at Dee Why. “I like her, but, to be honest, it was a marriage of convenience,” Desic tells me. “It meant I could stay here.” Afterwards, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Neutral Bay.

Desic began living with Bennett and Pascoe in a fibro house on Barrenjoey Road in Avalon. He was keen to get ahead, and impatient to make money. “Darko had high expectations,” Milica, Desic’s second cousin, would later tell an immigration official. “He wanted to prove himself to his father.” [Desic and Bennett divorced in 1991.] Desic got an idea to make money. On his first trip to Australia in the early 1980s, he had met a man called Chris, who lived on a mountain on the NSW north coast, an “old hippy” who flew hang gliders and kept a collection of dried frogs in a box. “Very strange guy, but interesting,” Desic says. Chris was a professional dope grower, and had explained to Desic how it worked. “All I needed was a bike to get into the bush, some seeds, and a tent,” Desic says.

In late 1988, Desic bought a secondhand Honda 600 motorbike and headed to Dorrigo, inland from Coffs Harbour, where Chris had grown his pot. He went into the rainforest, found some space, and planted some seeds. But when he came back later, hardly anything had grown. He planted a second crop, but that also failed. “I learnt that rainforests are wet but not fertile.” He then talked to other growers. “They told me, ‘You go there after the logging trucks, when they move on they clear the area – they burn the stuff, ash makes the soil fertile.’ And of course, no wallabies come in. Why? Because they haven’t got nothing to eat.” The following year, he heard about an old logging coupe outside Kempsey, and tried his luck there. “It was a gold mine,” he says. “I grow so much, I could not pull it all out.”

Desic hid cash from his drug sales in a drum, which he buried near a lighthouse. Police were eventually alerted to his plantation, in remote bushland north of Kempsey, in 1990.Credit: Harrison Vial/illustrationroom.com.au

Soon he had several plots scattered throughout the forest, some up to 10 kilometres apart. All were isolated and remote, and only accessible by motorbike. He developed a system: plant in October; cull the male plants at Christmas (only females produce “heads”, the most prized part of the plant); harvest in March. “It’s all about timing,” he says. When the harvest came, “I’d stay in the bush for two weeks, camping, until I picked and dried everything.“

“Darko was always coming and going [from Avalon],” Pascoe says. “I assumed he was growing, because he always had plenty of dope. But he never smoked much himself.” Instead, Desic focused on his fitness, especially hapkido, the Korean martial art, which he had begun learning at a studio in Dee Why.

Desic became quite the gardener. Drenched in the thick, wet heat of a north coast summer, his plants grew like trees, three metres tall and drooping with sticky, resinous heads the size of corn cobs. In 1989, he harvested 50 kilograms, which he divided up and buried in plastic drums throughout the forest. Whenever he organised a sale in Sydney, he would drive north and collect the requisite amount. He sold mainly in large quantities: five or six kilos at a time. “Less risk dealing with only a few people.” The crop that year made him $80,000 ($200,000 in today’s money). He bought a new motorbike, a Honda 750 thumper, for $6000, and invested in shares. “Westpac, Pacific Dunlop, TNT,” he says. He also hid cash under his house, and buried $60,000 in a drum near Palm Beach lighthouse, together with some black opals he’d bought in Lightning Ridge. “I wanted to buy a house in the country, in Sawtell,” he tells me. “Ninety thousand dollars. Beautiful house. I said, ‘I’m going to buy that, and then I’m going to buy a house at the Palm Beach!’ ” He laughs drily. “But I was greedy, and I made a mistake.”

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A police photo of Desic, taken in the early 1990s.Credit: Police Media

In March 1990, Desic was camped at the base of a low hill in remote bushland, about 70 kilometres north of Kempsey. It was the end of the harvest, and he had about 50 kilograms of pot drying out on tarpaulins. But in a critical lapse in judgment, he had placed his tent and motorbike within sight of a dead-end dirt road called Davis Creek Road. At about 3pm, he was spotted by a farmer, who called the police. According to Desic, when the police arrived, he bundled up as much dope as he could in the tarpaulin, and took off up the hill. (The police later claimed that Desic was gone by the time they arrived.) At the top of the ridge, he abandoned the bundle and tumbled down the other side. The police collected the drugs, then returned to Desic’s campsite, where they seized his motorbike, camping gear and the remaining marijuana. Desic, meanwhile, found himself alone, somewhat the worse for wear, at the bottom of the hill. He walked all that night on a backtrack to reach the Pacific Highway, where he hitched a ride to Kempsey. There he found a phone booth near the cemetery and called his housemate, a Chilean man named Fernando. “Cops take my bike,” Desic tells me. “But I still have my car, Ford Laser, in Avalon. I say, ‘Fernando mate, get my car and collect me in Kempsey and I give you $1000.” Six hours later, Fernando pulled up at the cemetery in the Ford Laser, and Desic jumped in.

Back in Avalon, Desic worked fast. His car, like his bike, had been registered in his name. “Another mistake,” he says. “Now they know who I am.” He sold the Laser immediately and bought a second-hand Subaru. The next day he went to Palm Beach and dug up his cash and opals, which he transferred to glass jars and stowed beneath the car seats. He then headed north, where he still had a veritable vault of marijuana – tens of thousands of dollars’ worth – buried in drums in the forest. “I thought, ‘I wanna go for it again!’ ”

He settled in Coffs Harbour, where he got a harvesting job at Pike’s banana plantation, and rented a unit next to Big Mamma’s pizza joint. “You know Big Mamma’s?” he asks me. “Just down from the Big Banana. You know the Big Banana?” He also started going by the name Damian, which would have been a canny ruse had he been able to remember that his name was meant to be Damian. “People would say, ‘Hey Damian,’ and I would just look ahead. Then they go ‘Hey Damian!?’ ”

Early one afternoon, Desic lay down on his bed. At one point, he noticed that it had gone unusually quiet outside.

He stayed in Coffs for nine months. He put most of his money and the opals in a drum that he buried in bushland behind Pelican Beach. As an insurance policy, of sorts, he began buying gold from the Perth Mint, which he also placed in the drum. (He claims to have eventually accumulated 34 ounces – a full kilo.) The months passed equably enough. He started surfing – “I was not great surfer!” – practised his hapkido and enjoyed sunset drinks down by the jetty. He kept mainly to himself, though he did occasionally chat to the owner of the plantation, a former World War II fighter pilot who took a shine to him, on account of his accent and work ethic.

Early in the afternoon of December 21, 1990, Desic lay down on the bed in his room. He had twisted his knee and couldn’t walk. At one point, he noticed that it had gone unusually quiet outside: “Almost a sense of like, forest time.” The next thing he knew, two policemen burst through the door. (Desic believes he was turned in by a man he had met months before at a local hostel, and who suspected he was dealing drugs.) Inside the unit police found a set of scales, a bag of Dynamic Lifter fertiliser, a wad of share certificates, and an empty carry bag that reeked so powerfully of marijuana that it almost rendered them unconscious.

The police drove him to the station in Coffs Harbour. On the way, one of them, a portly 33-year old detective named Steven Zahn, turned to Desic. “You can be out very quickly,” he told him. “You can be out before Christmas.”

Desic realised that Zahn wanted money. (Zahn would be convicted six months later for soliciting and accepting a bribe from a woman in Kempsey.) As they approached the station, Zahn doubled down: “It’s your last chance,” he said. Desic didn’t budge. “I’m not that stupid,” he tells me. “Cops get their money and I get the same shit. So I just tell [Zahn] to f--- off.”

Desic was convicted of cultivating a prohibited plant and of possessing 21 kilograms of cannabis, with an estimated value of $110,000 (about $250,000 in today’s terms.) He was sentenced to three years and eight months, and sent to Grafton Gaol in the Clarence Valley, about seven hours’ drive north of Sydney. Built in 1893, Grafton Gaol embodied the grimmest of Victorian penal traditions, from its castellated brick facade to its forbidding gateway, a black, oval-shaped portal that seemed to ingest new arrivals like the mouth of an ogre. “Back in the day, the jail had a terrible reputation,” says John Heffernan, who served as the governor there from 2002 to 2005. “You only had to mention it to a prisoner and he’d break out in sweats.”

Desic was a model prisoner: “There was never any drama with Darko,” recalls one guard. But one night in mid-1992, using a piece of hacksaw he hid in a toilet, Desic cut through a metal bar in his cell.Credit: Harrison Vial/illustrationroom.com.au

Desic was placed in minimum security, an L-shaped complex surrounded by a 10-metre-high brick wall topped with razor wire. Outside the main complex was a small farm, where prisoners could work for minimal pay, and which was encircled by a chain link fence.

From the very start, Desic was a model prisoner. “He mixed with all sorts,” says a prison guard who worked there at the time, who I will call Ray. (As a serving correctional officer, Ray is not permitted to talk to the media.) “There was never any drama with Darko.”

Desic became a “sweeper”, an inmate whose job is to clean up and carry out other domestic tasks, for which he got paid a nominal wage. At one point he helped Ray, who was the activities officer, to organise a fun run that raised money for the children’s ward at Grafton Hospital. He also held hapkido classes, until the guards realised it probably wasn’t a great idea to teach prison inmates combat techniques. An early file note on Desic reads like Pollyanna’s school report, with his “attitude to authority” described as “excellent”, along with his “industry and capacity, general conduct, dependability, cooperation, appearance and hygiene”.

‘Being in jail didn’t intimidate Darko. But going back to Yugoslavia did.’

David Pascoe, friend

But as his term progressed, Desic’s thoughts turned elsewhere. Civil war had broken out in Yugoslavia: Croatian soldiers, woefully undergunned, were fighting the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army. Every day brought news of some fresh horror. Croatian towns were looted and burned. Civilians raped and murdered. In November 1991, in the village of Vukovar, 200 Croatian prisoners of war were executed by Serb paramilitaries and buried in mass graves. Immigration officials told Desic that once his term expired, in 1994, he would be deported. “Being in jail didn’t intimidate Darko,” says David Pascoe, who visited Desic in jail. “But going back to Yugoslavia did.”

Desic wrote increasingly frantic letters to the Immigration Department, begging to stay in Australia. “Please … the part of Yugoslavia that I come from is under civil war and I hope that you will understand why I am quite anxious about that matter.”

In late 1991, he was transferred to Cessnock Jail, on the NSW Central Coast, where an immigration officer told him that his appeal against deportation had failed. Not only that, but he’d be charged $130 for every day he spent in immigration detention. “I was pissed off,” Desic tells me, rolling another cigarette. “I remember saying, ‘That’s it, I’m gonna escape.’ ”

A few days later, he obtained a small metal file through a friend called Tony – “I don’t know how he get it and I didn’t ask him.” That night, he began hacking at the metal grill on his window. But it was loud. A prisoner in the adjacent cell began yelling, “Stop that f---ing noise!” Pascoe visited him shortly after. “I remember Darko saying, ‘I gotta get back to Grafton. I’ll never break out of here.’ ”

One of the advantages of being a model inmate is that your requests are more likely to be met. A change of cells. A better job. “They want to keep the peace,” Desic says. Shortly after his aborted escape from Cessnock, he asked to be transferred to Grafton, “to be with my friends”. The authorities agreed.

Back in Grafton, he immediately began plotting another breakout. Not long before his arrival, two other men had attempted to escape while working on the farm. One had been caught in a sewer, the other while trying to scale the fence. Both had tried during the day. “Idiots,” Desic says. He would escape during the night, when no one could see him, and when he would have a good six hours before anyone knew he was gone. But he would need to be fit, so he began training. “Push-ups. Pull-ups. Hundreds of them. And I run all day. Guards are just looking. They think, ‘Another crazy man.’ ”

He secured occasional access to the maintenance centre, which was beyond the main brick wall. “That place had everything,” Ray says. “A grinder, bolt-cutters, saws.” Minimum security inmates could take the tools to work on the farm, but they had to be signed back in at the end of each day. Somehow – Desic is reluctant to tell me exactly how – he got hold of a 10-centimetre-long piece of hacksaw, which he hid in the toilet. (Desic didn’t use drugs – his urinalysis was always clear – so guards rarely searched his cell.) As a “sweeper”, he had access to cleaning agents, which he began using to bleach his prison greens. “They turn blue, like worker’s clothes.” In what seems to be, in retrospect, an act of monumental chutzpah, he also purchased new running shoes. “You could buy things like that though the jail,” Ray tells me. “So one day Darko got this brand-spanking pair of joggers, called Nike Air Icarus, a purple running shoe with a turquoise swoop. I said, ‘Holy struth, Darko, they look like they’re going 100 miles an hour just in the box! I hope you’re not going to do a runner?’ ”

A few nights after cutting the bar on his cell window, Desic wriggled through and dropped to the ground. He then scaled the side of a jail maintenance room, where he stole bolt-cutters to cut a hole in the prison fence.Credit: Harrison Vial/illustrationroom.com.au

The window in Desic’s cell had three horizontal metal bars. In late July, 1992, he spent an entire night sawing through the lowest one, holding the bar with a blanket to muffle the sound. He filled the cut with putty from the workshop. A few nights later, it was time to go. At 2am on July 31, he bent the bar back (“training was paying off”). Behind the bars were louvres. Grabbing them in the middle, he pulled down until they popped out of their brackets. Next was a woven metal grill. “Easy,” he says. “Aluminium rivets. I pop them out.” He wriggled through, legs first, and dropped three metres to the grass. He then headed towards the maintenance centre.

About 15 metres away, he came to a mesh fence. He had fashioned an ersatz rope from his bed-clothes to help climb over it. But astonishingly, he found the fence gate unlocked. (Ray says this was not uncommon. “At night we’d do patrols. If someone was sneaking around, the last thing you want to do is let them know you’re coming by making noise locking and unlocking gates.“) Desic continued on and soon found himself on the roof of the maintenance room. He shimmied down a drainpipe in the corner, went to the door of the building and found that it, too, was unlocked. “Unbelievable,” he says. “I go in, grab bolt-cutters, then go to [the fence around the farm]. Cut flap and go through.” From the outside, he pulled the flap back, “so if a screw sees it at night they don’t know it has been cut”. He then hid the bolt-cutters in the bushes and began running toward Grafton Bridge. Just like that, he was free.

Darko more recently: “I want to be left, you know, on my own,” he says now.

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Ever since he was a boy, Desic liked being by himself. Getting lost in his mind, thinking, observing. And reading. He loves Dostoevsky – particularly Notes from Underground, which he rates above Crime and Punishment – and philosophy. In the days I spent with him, he frequently embarked on long, occasionally cryptic, digressions about Socrates, Aristotle and Galileo, about the difference between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and how his life had changed after reading the Taoist classic, The Secret of the Golden Flower. And meditation. He taught himself meditation, and controlled breathing. If he hadn’t been a prison escapee, he would have made an excellent monk.

He was worried about walking around the streets, in case he witnessed a car accident and had to give a statement to police.

But even monks need money. After escaping from Grafton, Desic hitched to Coffs Harbour to retrieve the drum of money, gold and opals that he’d buried in the bush behind Pelican Beach. But it was gone. “I look for it, can’t find it. Look for it again.” Was he digging under the right tree? Yes, definitely. “Try again, try again. I’m desperate now. Sweating – you never sweat like that.” After a few hours, he gave up, exhausted. It took him the next three days to bus, hitch and walk back to Sydney.

At first, he lived away from the northern beaches. But he soon gravitated back to Avalon. All his friends were there, after all. It was beautiful too, even by the standards of Sydney’s northern beaches, all bottomless blues, greens and sparkling whites. There are sheer cliffs at both headlands and rainforest behind; at dusk, the salt spray hangs like mist over the dunes. It is thoroughly middle-class today but back in the 1990s, rents were cheaper and the locals less bougie. Desic paid $50 a week in a share house up the north of the beach near what was then a small, shopping trolley-laden creek, with five or six surfers who left him blissfully alone.

He was broke, but registering for unemployment benefits was out of the question, both ideologically (he didn’t believe in handouts) and practically (he didn’t have any identification). He caught up with David Pascoe, who wasn’t entirely surprised to see him back in town, and who got him some labouring work. Also working for Pascoe was a man named Dean Cunningham. Cunningham found Desic fascinating. “He was friendly but guarded,” Cunningham says. “There was something about his demeanour, something secretive.” After about a year, Pascoe took Cunningham aside. “Dave showed me this newspaper clipping about Dougie escaping. I went to Dougie and said, ‘I know what’s going on, but don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone.’ ” The three men worked on some of the area’s most exclusive properties. One day, they turned up at Kerry Packer’s sprawling beachfront estate at Palm Beach. “And there’s KP, waving to us from the balcony. I thought, ‘Wow, imagine if he knew he had a prison escapee trimming his hedges.’ ”

“I believe you’ve been looking for me”: 29 years after escaping, Desic turned himself in to local police. Having served the rest of his sentence, Desic now lives a quiet life alone with his cat: “She likes me, she understands me.”Credit: Harrison Vial/illustrationroom.com.au

Desic became a master of dissimulation and deflection: “I’m Croatian,” he would say if anyone asked. “Do a bit of this, bit of that.” He began living by his own peculiar logic, in that liminal zone between fatalism and vigilance. He exercised almost paranoiac caution with some things while taking extravagant risks with others. He was worried about walking around the streets, for example, in case he witnessed a car accident and had to give a statement to police. Yet when his hapkido grandmaster, Sung Soo Lee, made him an instructor in the mid-1990s, he was quite happy to teach at his dojo in Dee Why – just three doors down from the police station.

He even dabbled again in dealing. “One time I drove him up the coast,” says Cunningham. “We got to Dorrigo and drove down a fire trail as far as we could go. We’re in the middle of the bush and Dougie hops out and disappears. Half an hour later, he comes back holding two huge garbage bags packed with stuff. On the way back to Sydney, he says, ‘If we get pulled over by the cops, I’ll get out and run. I won’t take the bags. Just say you picked me up by the side of the road and don’t know what’s in the bags.’ ” Fortunately for Desic, they weren’t stopped.

One of Desic’s biggest concerns was his health. He never had Medicare or health insurance. When his teeth became rotten, he removed them himself. “I tried pliers, but it’s hard to get a grip.” Instead he used his fingers. “You just go slowly.” He wiggles his front tooth with his fingers to show me. “Takes a few days to get loose. But then it will pop out.” One day, while labouring, he got his hand caught under an earth-mover. It tore the skin off his fingers and exposed the bone. He convinced his boss to lend him his Medicare card and went to Manly hospital. “Doctor looks at card, then looks at me. Said, ‘How you got English name but you got accent?’ I said that because of the war in Croatia I change my name, because there would be [anti-Croatian] elements in Australia that would look for me.” The doctor was sceptical. “But he tells me: ‘Lie straight – if you can.’ It was his way of saying, ‘We know you are lying, but it’s OK.’ “

On weekends, Desic would go out with Cunningham and his girlfriend, Lora. He was funny and good-looking, and dated women often. “A saxophone teacher, an accountant,” Desic says, wistfully. But he couldn’t tell them who he was. “If people knew, my luck would run out.” At one stage, he went out for six months with a lawyer from Sydney’s upper north shore. “She just got divorced. I was 37, she was 36. She had a BMW, big house, all this stuff. It got serious. She says, ‘My father wants to meet you.’ OK. Few weeks later, I found some excuse and split.” Desic insists that he never fell in love. “You can’t get attached, because then you get hurt.” But Cunningham remembers differently. “Oh no, Dougie fell in love,” he tells me. “In about 1995. Lora and I met her, and she seemed nice.” According to Cunningham, Desic was head over heels. They shared a house in Newport. “But then we realised she was trying to get his money, not that he had any. He was spending everything he had on her.” Before long, they broke up. “Dougie asked us to come and pick him up with all his stuff. He was devastated.”

One day in the late 1990s, Desic came home from work. His housemate was on the couch, watching TV. He looked up at Desic and said: “I just saw you on Australia’s Most Wanted.” Desic came clean. “I assume he tells a few friends. But nothing happened.” A day or two later, Desic got a call from his brother Predrag. He and his father had also seen the episode on TV, in Croatia, where the program was syndicated. Until then, Desic had kept his situation a secret from his family. He implied to me that it wasn’t worth worrying them, but I also got the sense that he was ashamed. His father, meanwhile, didn’t seem to care: he just wanted Desic to come home. “When I got out of hospital for my hand, Dad was disappointed, almost. You know why? He wanted me to get caught, to go back.”

There were other close calls. He was sitting at a bus stop on the northern beaches in the mid-1990s when a policeman drove up beside him and stopped. “Darko?” he asked. “Darko Desic?” Desic didn’t react, and the policeman drove on. Another time, a policeman showed up at his door in Avalon. Desic went pale. “Don’t worry, sir, this has nothing to do with you,” the policeman said. “There has been a murder in the street and we’re canvassing the locals.”

‘Suddenly there was this famous person in Avalon. Everyone wanted to have parties and for Dougie to go along.’

Shell, Desic’s onetime neighbour

In the mid-2010s, Desic got a better job, as a stonemason. But when COVID came, the work dried up. People didn’t want tradespeople in their homes. He became isolated. Many of his friends had long since left: Dave Pascoe moved to the city. Dean Cunningham and Lora settled up north. Desic found himself living with two other men in a house that was so rundown, the bathroom had no roof: they used an umbrella to keep the rain out. But they were good neighbours all the same. “Dougie was always checking on me,” says Shell, an elderly woman who lived next door to the men. When a storm cut off Shell’s electricity for two weeks, the men threw an extension cord over her fence and let her share their power. “I tried to pay them but they wouldn’t accept it.”

Shell had no idea about Desic’s background until it hit the news. What happened afterward horrified her. “Suddenly there was this famous person in Avalon. Everyone wanted to have parties and for Dougie to go along. But he’d spent so much of his life laying low, he didn’t know how to handle it.” One man who Desic had known for years positioned himself as a kind of media broker, arranging for Desic to go on TV and tell his story. Apparently, he wanted a cut of whatever profits eventuated. “This guy, he got, like, a f---ing power trip,” Desic says. “Loved to be on TV, [being] recognised everywhere. ‘Oh, you were the guy who helped Dougie.’ ”

Now all Desic wants is the company of animals, namely the horses in the paddock below and a resident cat which he feeds every night. “She’s always with me, she likes me, she understands me.” As for the future? His father died in 2020, so there is no urgency to return to Croatia. But he would still like to see his brother, Predrag. For a long time, Desic dreamt of buying a hunter’s hut in the mountains back home. “They’re selling them because they don’t hunt any more,” he says. “It’s protected, bears and wolves, everything.” The huts are made of stone and have fireplaces; some are furnished. “Before Croatia joining EU, I could’ve bought a beautiful one for $40,000. One maybe 10, 15 kilometres from the place my brother lives with his family.” Now he’s not sure he can even get out of Australia: he has yet to be granted a passport.

In the meantime, he reads, plays guitar, meditates. “I’m healthy, I’ve got enough food. I’ll go tomorrow, get more.” He’s free. But he would be freer if he were alone. “You have your story, I hope. Now I want to be left, you know, on my own.” He is firm but polite. “Can you do this one thing for me?”

Hear more from Darko Desic in his exclusive TV interview with A Current Affair, Monday night at 7pm on Nine.

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