Malcom the Murderer

A side note to my Barrington Tops trip is the story of Malcom Naden.

As most of you know Malcom Naden has been on the run from police for around 8 years, wanted for 2 murders among other things. What I didn't know is that he was hiding out in the vicinity of Barrington Tops. In the immediate vicinity. So close that the police were camped out in a neighbouring house and nearly ran us off the road when they got news of a sighting. Malcom has since moved on.

I casually mentioned this to my boss a couple of days later when Malcom made news again by breaking into a home about 100km from Barrington Tops, and got quite an interesting story in return - it turns out that my boss has quite an intimate history with Malcom.

Before Malcom went on the run, he lived in Dubbo, where my boss worked for Taronga Western Plains Zoo. When my boss first moved to Dubbo, he lived on site in the zoo keepers house. He occassionally heard noises in his roof and assumed he had possums, and he occassionally noticed that things had been moved in his absence and assumed it was the cleaners. He was wrong. For months, Malcom had been living in his ceiling cavity, coming downstairs when my boss left the house for the day by climbing out of the man hole and down the pantry shelves below it.

The uninvited guest was only found out when one of the cleaners happened to tell my boss that she thought the friend he had staying with him was a bit odd and my boss, armed with his martial arts training and a security guard, walked in to the house to find Malcom in his lounge room. The zoo was shut down for two days while the police searched for him, but he got away.

When the house was fingerprinted, it turned out that Malcom spent his days sitting on the couch, watching tv, going through my boss' belongings, and stealing food out of the fridge.

Creepy, eh?