Truth is stranger than fiction - part II (the 'law' comes a calling)

 

Thanks for coming over for Episode 2 of KATcapers riveting true-crime docu-drama 'Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction'!  Geez that was a tongue twister!!!

 

I'd be lying if I haven't got a slight chuckle out of shocking you all with my tale of drama and excitement on the suburban streets of Ascot Vale circa 1982.

 

The 'friend' mentioned in the post is a reader of my blog.  She is a life long friend and a 'victim' at least in the sense that she's my friend...murderers get less time than we've been friends!  She will no doubt have a conniption (or a quiet chuckle) when she finally logs onto KATcapers and sees that our commando crawl is being relived in all its glory for the entertainment of the blog sphere.

 

Ascot Vale is actually infamous to any Melbournite educated in crime family lore as the childhood home (and parental locale) of a certain family made famous by the original Underbelly show.  Yes folks the Moran family compound was down the street from us...I shall make a note to do another post about my childhood recollections of one J. Moran.  As a bit of a teaser consider how incongruous it is that the house connected with criminals of such repute was painted SALMON.PINK!!!!

 

Scary huh!  Imagine him as a 10year old...even scarier!!

Anyway, back to the events post-shooting.....

 

You were left with the image of two hapless youngsters, one of whom had a blinder of a headache.  Come to think of it, my girlfriend probably had a headache too as in all the excitement she probably didn't eat for most of the day!

 

I recall that my dad turned up at the hospital and he was even more confused than everyone else as he had come straight from work.  He had been told I'd been shot but wasn't filled in on the specifics so one of the first questions he asked me was "why were you at school" to which I think I stared at him in total bewilderment.  You see, the sniper incident that I'd been the victim of wasn't the only experience we'd had involving idiots with air rifles!  We attended a Catholic Secondary School in a suburb of Melbourne that is adjacent to a bunch of Housing Commission towers....and in an equally unfortunate incident the year before a pupil had been shot through the window!!!!!!

 

So, my poor confused father put two and two together (Libby + Sniper = Those bloody degenerates in the Housing Commission) and unfortunately came up with the wrong number.  No dad, didn't happen at school, happened in our OWN.SUBURB!!! 

 

Now don't get me wrong I didn't grow up in South Central Los Angeles:)  Ascot Vale was (and is) a very nice suburb.  Please don't come hunting for me lovely law-abiding residents of Ascot Vale!

 

Clutching my urine sample jar containing my very own bullet we were driven home. 

 

Fast forward to our family home that evening (although could have been a few nights later can't remember) and there am I (and my trusty co-victim of crime) being interviewed by two Detectives from the local command (ooh I love whipping out the lingo).

 

Isn't is strange how some things stay with you?  In this case I have a VERY strong recollection that I was wearing a dressing gown that my mother had made me that involved quilted fabric of an unnatural variety and a zipper!!!  For goodness sake, why can't my memory of my five seconds of fame being interviewed by the fuzz involve some cute outfit?????

 

Did I say that the two detectives had identical looks of scepticism on their faces?  No, well they did.  Not only that, they grilled the two 11year olds about the "older brother" that lived in the house (that would be my girlfriends big brother...the one with the Cold Chisel album).  They had decided that we were covering up an accident of our own making and that we'd actually been playing with the air rifle that presumably belonged to Mr Cold Chisel and it had gone off.

 

Fortunately I had early signs of being a stubborn "take no prisoners" kind of gal and I recall explaining to B1 and B2 (that's a reference to a children's TV show if you're scratching your head) that our retelling of the event made COMPLETE sense considering that I was taller than my friend and the bullet hit ME and not her...therefore it must have come from someone up on the hill in the houses behind her street (you know if I had the ability to use Google Maps in blogger I'd be getting all CSI on you and pointing out the EXACT location!).

 

B1 and B2 fobbed us off and went off on their way to investigate crimes that they actually believed happened and we were left with my parents who were slightly peeved at the unhelpful attitude of our local constabulary.  Since it was 1982, the recourse for those who felt they weren't getting a fair suck of the sap (or suck of the sauce bottle according to K. Rudd's version of the saying) didn't involve saying something about in on the interweb....no my mother just rang the local community paper.

 

Possibly because it was the holidays and local news stories were thin on the ground we featured!  Yes, snipers shooting at youngsters minding their own business in a suburban street was a HOT story for the Essendon Gazette that week.

 

My mum recalls that the publication of this article prompted renewed interest from the local constabulary...no doubt they were unimpressed to be on the receiving end of some criticism that the culprit was not being pursued!  Go mum!!

 

Regardless of their motives (and I doubt their change of heart would have occurred without the publicity) they reviewed the transcript of our interview and decided that it would be good PR to at least go and engage in the time-honoured art of door knocking.  That Google Map would come in handy because sure enough, they chose to door knock in the street up on the ridge behind my friends house...right above where we were walking along her road that fateful day.

 

As they chatted with residents the clues began to emerge, apparently there had been instances of birds being shot by a guy in a house down the street...he liked to take pot shots from his back yard at the seagulls on the reserve!!!!

 

The 'Force' converged on the suspects house (I'm sure it wasn't really wasn't that dramatic but it sounds good) in time to spot the aforementioned suspect putting a bag in the boot of a car.............................yes folks, he must have read about that pissed off mother of five that was coming gunning for him and was in the process of making good his getaway.

 

I'd like to think there was some reading of rights/arm twisted behind his back/see above Miami Vice image of police force but all I know is that he was taken in for questioning and later charged with a few counts from the crime statute that all boiled down to 'you shot me you stupid idiot'!!!!

 

We had another, much friendlier visit from the Detectives who I recall praised us for our powers of deduction (okay maybe not) and some months later I had to face the prospect of testifying in the court case.  Thankfully a few minutes before the case was to go to trial the police prosecutor informed me (and my parents) that he'd pleaded guilty so I was off the hook.  I think we went out for a milkshake:)

 

He got six months and I can't even tell you what his name was.  Some time later I got $500 for pain and suffering through a Victorian Government victims of crime initiative.  It was a token gesture as there was thankfully no lasting effects from the incident. 

 

We will never know why he went from shooting at birds to shooting at us.  After all, I hadn't developed my well honed skills of pissing people off yet!!!!  Basically he was just a DICKHEAD!

 

So there you go, riveting stuff heh?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Truth is stranger than fiction - the shot in the head episode

In my Liebster Award post the other day I mentioned in passing that I'd been shot in the head.

Illuminating as this may be to those of you who despair of my various quirky personality traits (thanks for putting up with me), I realized that this casual admission may have you scratching your own heads in curiosity!

In the interests of saving you sleepless nights worrying about my post-traumatic stress disorder and how so much can now be explained, I figured I would fill in the blanks:)

Backtrack to the summer of 1982 (my memory is a bit dim but I think it was the Christmas break between Year Seven and Year Eight) and I was hanging out at my best friends house which happened to be across the road from a big sporting reserve.

Down Under was a big hit for Men at Work but I have no recollection of listening to it at my friends house...in fact I seem to remember listening to Cheap Wine getting a lot of time on the turntable!  As I said, time has dimmed the specifics:)

We'd been left alone in her house, her mum from memory had gone to work.  My strong memory is that we needed some milk (for what I don't recall) and so we trundled out of her house and walked along her street (that would be the street facing the reserve) and returned about 10 minutes later with the milk and probably some sort of lollies (my memory of being partial to some form of sweet from the milk bar is still VERY strong!!!!)

She was walking on the side closest to the houses, I was on the outer side of the footpath.

Cue something whizzing past my head followed by something else hitting the side of my head really hard.  Felt like a rock and bloody hurt!

I seem to recall my first thought being that I'd been hit by a rock from a slingshot.  In those days, slingshots weren't uncommon and my own father had one that he used to scare of stray cats, dogs and probably children!

Somehow we got back to my friends house (seem to recall some scrambling a la commandos) and went inside.  Looking in the mirror I could see a bloodless disc on my left temple surrounded by a small amount of blood.  Yes folks it wasn't like the movies...no profusion of blood to speak of, just a little bit that was easily sorted out by a piece of paper towel.

By this stage my sensible friend was on the phone to 000 trying to impress upon the dubious call taker that we were indeed in a crisis and in need of an ambulance.  Times have hopefully changed because in this instance the call taker thought we were playing a joke (it was school holidays) and refused to believe we needed an ambulance.....

My head was kind of thumping by this stage and my friend decided that we needed to do a commando run down the street to a neighbor who she thought would be home.  Imagine his surprise when we showed up on his doorstep claiming we'd been attacked!!  He could see we needed help though so kindly agreed to take us to the hospital.

The triage nurse must consider this one of her strangest encounters - two 11/12 year olds with no clear understanding of what had happened and one of them with a hole in her head!!!  An x-ray established that I did indeed have a bullet lodged in my forehead, an inch from my temple and a couple of centimetres from my eye.

Funnily enough, when my friend called my house (from a pay phone of course) my brother laughed when he took the message and was still laughing when he passed it onto my mother (who was also out somewhere and got the message when she came home...no helicopter parenting going on in our neck of the woods!!!!)  As my mother departed for the hospital she apparently told him he would be in danger of losing his life if he was having her on:)

Some time later in the care of the lovely nurses and doctor at the RCH I had an air rifle slug removed from my forehead under local anaesthetic.  It felt like someone rustling around in my head for a missing key...painless but pressure.

The bullet was put in a urine sample jar and it was subsequently taken by the police as evidence.

In a follow up post I'll recount the bizarre interview we had with the police and how the culprit was nabbed!

If you look closely I do have a scar from this nefarious incident.  It's faint but it's there.  I didn't suffer any ill effects and look back with only vague humorous recollections....thankfully!!

So there you have it, truth is indeed stranger than fiction...and in this case a lot less bloody!!

Grateful for our neighbors

We've lived in our current house for nearly five years. 

When we moved in, we were new to the suburb and had made the big leap of moving 'over the bridge'...that would be the infamous Spit Bridge.  Famous in Sydney for it's narowness and tendency to be a huge monster of a bottleneck!

Our immediate neighbors on either side of us were quickly befriended...they are both older couples with adult children.  They have been in varying degrees substitute parents, grandparents, friends, helping hands and great BBQ companions over the last five years.

The suburb has also experienced an influx of young families and had a baby-boom in the time we've been in residence so we're fortunate to have met neighbors a bit further afield...over the back fence and to the right type of distance or just around the corner.

I am so grateful to have met so many lovely neighbors and try to catch up with them as frequently as our busy schedule allows.  Last night, one of our neighbors hosted a ladies evening at her place.

She wasn't selling anything, she had no hidden agend...it was just a chance to catch up over a glass of bubbly and copious amounts of wicked chocky and shoot the breeze.

We had a lovely evening and the conversation traversed many and varied topics from books, TV shows (The Slap got a mention of course!), babies, children, schooling, husbands, labour experiences (always a huge hit) and everything else you could imagine we could share.

As I am still rigidly sticking to my Siberian diet my contribution was 'in that spirit' but a little bit wicked nonetheless - Pineapple with bashed mint and caster sugar and Strawberries with balsamic drizzled over them...plus a bowl of yummy blueberries unadorned as they were delicious on their own (and I couldn't think of what to add to them except chocky!!!!)

There are times when I feel incredibly lonely without having my family and friends that live interstate around.  But then I am buoyed by the fantastic neighbors that I am surrounded by and I feel comforted and 'at home'.

So thanks to Maxabella and her Grateful Saturday for forcing me to reflect on something like this that I am truly deeply grateful for :)