By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
THEY were crimes that resonated throughout Greater Dandenong. Journal police reporter Lachlan Moorhead looks back at some of the darker stories that have unfolded in the Journal.
1983 – FREDERICK WILLIAM BOYLE
EDWINA Boyle disappeared from her Dandenong home in early October 1983.
Her husband Frederick William Boyle always told his two daughters that their mum had run off with a truck driver and was living under another name.
She wasn’t found until 23 years later in 2006 when her skeleton was discovered in the barrel that Frederick Boyle always kept by his side.
Whenever he and his daughters, Careesa and Sharon, moved house, the barrel moved with them.
The barrel can even be seen in family photos taken at birthday parties since ’83, next to people enjoying themselves.
He told anyone who asked that the barrel was full of toxic glue that he used in his job as a carpet layer.
In February 2008, a Victorian Supreme Court jury found Frederick William Boyle guilty of murdering Edwina on the night of 6 October 1983, when she was just 30 years old.
The court found that Boyle has strangled her with a necktie and shot her in the temple with a .22 rifle.
The Boyles met in Wales in 1972 and soon migrated to Australia, but he is believed to have started an affair after his kids were born.
He unsuccessfully claimed that he came home to find his wife dead in bed.
In his testimony Boyle said he “was not going to let her remains be thrown down the tip like bloody garbage”.
1993 – JOHN LASCANO
THREE years before Martin Bryant’s Port Arthur massacre thrust the issue of gun control into the Australian spotlight, there was John Lascano.
On 21 August 1993, Lascano walked into the Springvale gun shop and shot three people dead before setting the store on fire and making off with guns and ammunition.
Lascano was convicted the next year of killing the gun shop owner Paul Taylor, his 17-year-old daughter and a shop assistant.
An initial article about the fire was published in the Dandenong Journal on 23 August 1993 which said that three victims were “found in the debris after the explosion-riddled blaze began at 12.15pm and was brought under control about 30 minutes later.
“Police immediately treated the deaths as suspicious and the homicide squad was called in,” the article read.
Chief Superintendent John Balloch of Frankston police said at the time that murder was one of the likely possibilities.
2000 – JULIAN MICHAEL CLARKE
SPRINGVALE solicitor Keith William Allan hired the wrong bloke.
Law clerk Julian Michael Clarke had a gambling addiction that needed to be fed.
After Mr Allan hired him for his firm – Keith W. Allan and Associates – in 1995, Clarke began stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the business to satisfy his penchant for a punt.
By May 2000 the Law Institute was knee-deep in an investigation into the firm’s disappearing funds and Clarke needed a fall guy.
Clarke figured it would be easy to pin the crimes on his employer and he paid drug dealer Costas Athanasi about $93,000 to organise the murder. For help, Athanasi sought a favour from long-time friend Sudo Cavkic.
Keith William Allan was killed on 28 May and his body has never been found.
The killers almost got away with the murder had it not been for curious police officers who stopped Cavkic as he travelled from Mount Macedon in the dead lawyer’s Mercedes Benz on his way to meet Athanasi.
Senior Constables Michael Strongman and Travis McCarthy saw Cavkic pass their police car at 2am on a near-deserted road and decided to follow him.
They arrested Cavkic in a dead end street in Altona Meadows and found a spade in the back seat and a tin of petrol in the front.
In 2005 the Victorian Court of Appeal overturned
Clarke, Athanasi and Cavkic were convicted at their murder trial in 2004 but their convictions were overturned in 2005.
They went to trail again in 2007 were again found guilty and sentenced to terms ranging from 28 ½ to 24 years.
2007 – LIEP GONY
IT WAS 2001 when Liep Gony and his family fled war-ravaged Sudan for Australia in search of safety.
Six years later in September 2007 the 18-year-old died in hospital after he was bashed and left unconscious on a sidewalk in Noble Park.
In 2009 Clinton David Rintoull, 25, was sentenced to 20 years’ jail with a non-parole period of 16 years for murdering Gony.
Rintoull’s co-offender, Dylan Giuseppe Sabatino, 22, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was jailed for 10 years with a non-parole period of six years.
Gony’s death sparked a media debate when then immigration minister Kevin Andrews publicly questioned the Sudanese community’s ability to assimilate with Australian society.
The then-minister said African refugees were forming gangs, getting involved in nightclub fights and drinking in public parks.
Samuel Kuot, president of the Sudanese Community Association of Australia at the time, hit back, saying Mr Andrews’s comments were discriminatory and had inflamed feelings against his community.
At his funeral, Liep’s mother Martha Ojulo told mourners that her son had regarded himself as Australian, not Sudanese.
