After robbing multiple banks, escaping from prison, and killing a man and stealing his identity, one of Australia's most prolific violent criminals is set to be jailed for another suite of crimes.
Alexander Robert Macdonald, 76, will be sentenced on Monday after pleading guilty to two lucrative bank hold-ups in regional NSW in the 1990s.
He committed the first about a year after breaking out of a Queensland jail in 1995 while serving a 22-year sentence for armed robbery.
The wanted man stepped out of the shadows and into a Commonwealth Bank branch in Coonabarabran, wearing a balaclava and armed with a sawn-off shotgun, agreed facts tendered in court state.
After bank staff put nearly $19,000 in cash into his bag, Macdonald grabbed a 22-year-old woman and used her as a human shield to safely reach his motorbike.
"No alarms, no police. I will let her go when I am free," Macdonald told staff of the northwest NSW branch.
The woman was let go without injury once he reached the getaway vehicle and took off.
About two months after the October 1996 robbery, Macdonald picked up a sawn-off shotgun and stepped into an ANZ branch near Port Macquarie on the mid-north coast.
Staff this time handed over $78,000 before Macdonald again took a hostage to protect his escape route.
"Walk quickly but don't attract attention to yourself," Macdonald told the 36-year-old he used as cover to exit the bank in Laurieton.
Macdonald had switched vehicles and escaped Laurieton in a lime green Subaru ute.
The pair of bank hold-ups came after Macdonald's most violent and cunning crime.
Soon after breaking out of prison, he moved to Melbourne and placed a newspaper ad purportedly for a general hand to work in the West Australian mining industry.
After interviewing candidates, he and Ronald Joseph Williams began driving west on February 25, 1996.
But Williams, 47, never made it to the mines.
Macdonald later confessed to shooting Mr Williams twice in the head in late February or early March 1996, stripping his body of identification and burying it on Cheyne's Beach, near Albany.
Assuming the dead man's identity, MacDonald moved north to Carnarvon then hitchhiked back to Victoria.
There, he bought a yacht for $20,000 cash and made $40,000 worth of renovations, intending to sail to another country to avoid arrest, a WA court was told in 1997 following his arrest in Victoria.
Macdonald pleaded guilty to Mr Williams's murder and another armed robbery in Busselton, south of Perth.
He served 25 years in WA prison for the crimes before being forced to return to Queensland to serve the 10 years remaining on the sentence he cut short in his 1995 escape from the Borallon Correctional Centre, near Ipswich.
When his Queensland sentence expired in March, NSW Police applied for Macdonald's extradition so he could finally face court for Coonabarabran and Laurieton hold-ups.
Representing himself, the career criminal pleaded guilty to both robberies on August 6.
He will face the Port Macquarie District Court for sentence on Monday.
SOURCE/AUTHOR : AAP NEWS/Tom Wark in Sydney
Venues
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!
Leave a Comment