Robbed of more than money

This story gives an idea of the impact a crime can have on victims, even if no one is physically injured.

Being held up changed Ian Stapleton's life. He was bar manager at the Nambucca Heads Bowling Club in December 2004, when it was robbed at gunpoint by Ric Anson and David Wilcox, assisted by a small woman. This was one of many clubs the two men had hit in five months, and they had it down to a fine art.

They chose small places without security cameras, struck at closing time, and terrorised staff and patrons into doing what they wanted. No one was shot but lots of people got hurt inside: Anson and Wilcox left a trail of trauma and misery in communities up and down the North Coast, with over 60 victims involved in all their robberies. "I didn't sleep well for months," Stapleton says. "For a while I used to wake up every morning and see the guns being pointed at our heads."

The robbery lasted for about half an hour, and because of his position at the club, Stapleton had a gun on him for virtually the whole time. He reckons he was told 20 times he'd cop it if anything went wrong. The three edgy criminals, in balaclavas and dark clothes, were constantly on at him and other staff to get the keys and open the poker machines, the ATM and the safe. At one stage he got too close to the woman and she whacked him across the ribs with the barrel of her pistol.

Afterwards he went to doctors and psychologists, and it took a long time to get his life back together. That night still comes back to him when he hears it referred to. He doesn't like going out in the evening much any more. When he does go to a club, sometimes he gets a cold shiver and thinks, "I've got to get out of here".

The drama began about 9pm, when a patron arrived at the club and noticed a few people crouching down behind a white van. When he got inside, he said he thought a vehicle was being stolen, and four people charged outside. Ian Stapleton was one. Another was patron Bob Pearse, who suddenly found a gun being pressed against his head. The men were forced back into the club, where they and the others - about 20 in all - were made to lie on the floor.

"Who's the boss?" asked Wilcox, a very large Maori carrying a sawn-off rifle.

Stapleton replied: "That's me. Take whatever you want."

Wilcox: "Who else works here?"

Pearse: "I used to."

"Shut the f--- up," said Anson, the second male robber. He was a skinny Anglo, shorter than Wilcox.

Another staff member, Crisja Visser, had to hand over some keys. She was nervous and shaking, and dropped them.

Wilcox said, "You're taking too long. F---ing hurry up."

Pearse tried to comfort a woman lying near him, who was upset and crying. This involved some movement on his part.

Anson poked him in the back of the head with his revolver and said, "You just lay there still or I'll blow your f---ing head off."

The female robber agreed: "Shut the f--- up or I'll kill you." She was, Pearse later recalled, pretty nervous, waving the weapon around all over the place and saying she was going to kill everybody.

As the robbery was occurring, Wilcox demanded that everyone surrender their mobile phones, and announced, "We're not here to hurt anyone. We want the club's money, they're insured. If everyone does what they're told, no one will get hurt."

The people on the floor were not to know this, but it was what Wilcox and Anson said at all their stick-ups. They also liked to lock their victims in the coolroom, and proceeded to do this at Nambucca Heads once they'd gathered all the money they could find. They turned off the fans and allowed the people some bits of cloth to keep warm, and locked the door. A few minutes later, those inside cleared all the bottles from the fridge that lay between the coolroom and the bar area. Bob Pearse crawled through, hoping the robbers had gone. They had, along with $32,000. For the people of Nambucca Heads, the robbery was over, but the after-effects were just beginning.

Bob Pearse was there that night with his spouse, Pam Crane. They had particular problems afterwards because she got over it more quickly than he did.

"It was bad at the beginning," she says. "We had counselling and I started to move on. But he still had trouble sleeping; he thought about it all the time. For a year or two, each of us couldn't understand the other's attitude. It was that bad we almost split up." When they later went to court to give evidence when Wilcox was on trial, it brought the whole thing back. "Bob was horrific," she remembers. She'd thought she'd be all right, but when she was in the witness box and a barrister showed her one of the balaclavas, "I just melted".

The police set up Strike Force Brickwork to catch the modern-day bushrangers, whose targets stretched from just south of Sydney right up to Queensland. Soon Wilcox's partner was no longer of interest to them: in January 2005, Ric Anson was shot dead in his bedroom by bikies trying to rob him of the proceeds of his robberies. Wilcox was of interest to the investigators but they were unable to get enough evidence to charge him and the taskforce was shut down later in 2005.

After Anson's death, Wilcox did some more robberies with a new colleague. But without the support of the fiery Anson, his heart doesn't seem to have been in it, and one turned into something of a farce. The target was the Pacific Palms Bowling Club at Smiths Lake. The two robbers walked in wearing balaclavas, and the night manager, Andrew Lean, thought they looked very casual. "The fat bloke said, 'Everybody get on the ground,' " Lean later recalled, but "his voice was not very assertive or loud". In fact, Lean was not impressed at all, and recalled that the fat guy with the beer gut "spoke in a docile manner, not aggressive at all". He thought, "Who are these idiots?"

Making an effort, Wilcox pointed his gun at patron Phil Scott-Young, who said, "Are you kidding?"

Clearly, this was not going as smoothly as previous hold-ups. But it got worse.

"I had a closer look at the gun and it appeared to be plastic," Lean said, so "I bolted through the back storage area of the bar". He ran outside to a nearby house and raised the alarm.

Meanwhile, back inside the club, things were not getting any better for the robbers. Staff member Sally Davies recalled, "Phil just kept saying, 'Get that shit out of my face, no one comes in here and tells me to lie down'. I yelled out at Phil, 'Just shut up and lay down'. The next thing I saw was, Bobby [Sorbello, a patron] picked up the chair he was crouching behind and hurled it [at the man] . . . I slipped Darren [Fazio, a patron] my mobile and told him to ring 000."

Wilcox and his partner had had enough, and left the premises empty-handed.
On Valentine's Day 2006 police received a phone call from Wilcox's girlfriend, a long-time drug addict named Mandy Sutton, who was not connected with the robberies. She was upset because he hadn't given her a card. To add insult to injury, he'd gone out on this of all days, and she suspected he was with another woman. So she decided to tell the police about his criminal activities. The Robbery and Serious Crimes Squad reactivated Brickwork, this time involving Detective Sergeant Douglas Revette and Detective Senior Constable Chris Laird.

They found it extremely hard to assemble a case against Wilcox, who over the years had beaten various charges, including attempted murder.

"He thought of himself as Newcastle royalty, untouchable," Revette says. "Whenever we tried to persuade people to testify against him they would invariably say, 'Why bother, he'll beat the charges, he always does. And then he'll come after me.' "

Detectives set up listening devices in the Wilcox and Sutton house in Shoal Bay and then proceed to "rattle his cage", in the hope this would produce verbal evidence. They arranged for an artist's picture of Wilcox to be published in the Newcastle Herald and identified him as a suspect in the robberies.

They stopped him in the street and asked him to take part in an identity parade. (He refused.) And then, in May 2006, they issued a summons for Sutton to appear at the NSW Crime Commission. Two days later they heard Wilcox telling Sutton if she gave evidence against him he would train in jail every day and when he got out he would kill her and her family with his bare hands.
On May 9, the day Sutton was due at the Crime Commission to give evidence against Wilcox, he bought her three points of ice which she took, rendering her incapable of travel. The next day, Wilcox and Sutton fled their home. Wilcox was arrested by police when he visited his brother in Mayfield a week later.

Sutton was a nightmare for police to deal with. For some of her court appearances as a witness, she had to be arrested the day before to make sure she'd be available and drug-free the next day. When Wilcox finally came to trial, she stood up in the witness box and refused to say much at all. She was charged with perjury and skipped bail in late 2008.

In an investigation lasting almost a year, Strike Force Brickwork eventually persuaded many of the duo's victims to give evidence. "It was nice to deal with so many decent people for a change," Detective Laird observes. "With a lot of major crimes, the perpetrator, the victim and even the witnesses are all criminals. Here the victims could have been members of our own families." Some 20 people from Nambucca Heads gave evidence, and while the experience was terrifying for some of them, it was also cathartic.

David Wilcox did what he could to delay the court process. For one trial he even shaved his head and reduced his weight, presumably in an attempt to alter his appearance. He was convicted of robberies at Tahmoor and Dungog, and there was a hung jury in the trial for the robbery at Nambucca Heads. He later pleaded guilty to this and several other offences, including one arising from his attempt to stop Sutton giving evidence. Last December he was sentenced to a long period in jail. He will be eligible for parole in 2020.

To different degrees, most of the people who were at Nambucca Heads that night have got their lives back together. Many of them started to go back to the club. According to Pam Crane, it was like getting back in a car after an accident: not easy, but a good thing to do if you can. These days, she says, everything's fine in her relationship with Bob Pearse.

Ian Stapleton has never worked in the hospitality industry since the night of the robbery. A doctor suggested he take medication to help him cope, but he turned to exercise instead. This reawakened an old enthusiasm, and he now works very happily in the personal fitness industry.

"I guess that was one good thing that came out of it," he says.

-- Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 2009

(See also the accompanying story on the death of Wilcox’s partner Ric Anson.)