Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
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Locked up for life
Bronson Blessington was just 14 when he committed one of Australia’s most shocking crimes. But is it right to put a child behind bars indefinitely?
Bronson Blessington was declared an “animal” never to be released for his role at age 14 in the savage 1988 murder of Janine Balding in Sydney. After 28 years in prison, his deep remorse and rehabilitation are clear to his supporters. Should he still be behind bars for a crime committed as a child?
THE PRISONER ambles into the visiting area. A white boiler suit covers his lumbering frame, pocketless and tied at the back to stop contraband being passed between us.
His ruddy-cheeked face is boyish, his skin curiously unlined. Only the greying hair reveals he is now entering middle age. “Hello mate,” he says, looking down at his KT26 joggers, prison-green and fastened by velcro, before lifting his gaze, squinting and smiling awkwardly. “I’m Bronson.”
He’s heavy, bloated even, and looks completely different from the photos I’ve seen: a cherubic, blond-haired 13-year-old schoolboy; a strapping young man flexing his biceps in the prison yard.
His hulking frame fairly swallows the small metal stool bolted to the floor of the visiting area of the Mid North Coast Correctional Centre, just outside Kempsey in northern NSW. He sits, legs spread wide, palms on his thighs, hunched over opposite me.
After the introductions, he admonishes himself. “I used to be 100 kilos and cut. I used to do lots of physical activity. Aaah, mate, I’ve let myself go, haven’t I?”
He then shuffles off to the vending machines, returning with a packet of chips and a Coke – a treat only permitted during visits.
So, this is “pure evil”.
Bronson Blessington is now in his 28th year in prison: two-thirds of his life. He was just 14 years old in 1988 when, with four other homeless youths, he took part in the abduction, rape and murder of 20-year-old building society teller Janine Balding, a savage, cold-blooded killing that devastated her family and transfixed the nation.
It was a crime “so barbaric”, his sentencing judge urged he “never be released”. For 175 years, since NSW was a convict settlement, no one so young has faced incarceration for the term of his natural life.
Janine Balding with fiance Steven Moran at their engagement party.
Such was the continuing public outrage against Blessington and his cohorts, the NSW Parliament in 1997, 2001 and 2005 passed three pieces of retrospective legislation to ensure he and other notorious offenders – a roll call of the state’s worst rapists and murderers – stayed behind bars forever. “These animals are reviled and shunned by anyone who has heard of their heinous crimes,” the then NSW police minister Paul Whelan announced as he introduced the first of the bills. “There is not a person in our community who does not need protection.”
BUT ANGLICAN PRIEST Simon Manchester, a senior minister at North Sydney’s St Thomas’s Church, believes Whelan’s epithet is badly misplaced. Reverend Manchester got to know Blessington more than a decade ago, after the prisoner wrote to him complimenting him on a sermon he heard on the radio. He says Blessington is deeply penitent and thoroughly rehabilitated. “He is soaked in scripture,” he says. “He has pointed hundreds and hundreds to Christ.”
For more than 20 years, Blessington has ministered to fellow prisoners, holding Bible study classes in the prison yard and counselling new inmates on the folly of a life of crime.
“I’m ashamed, really ashamed, about what I did,” says Blessington. “I pray every night for the Baldings. I’ve shed so many tears; the pain and suffering I’ve put them through … I’ve changed, but … The Lord does that to a man if he takes Him into his heart. I’m a new person, for sure.”
Over several months, I meet Blessington in person three times. We speak over the phone occasionally – Blessington can ring me, but he complains that I keep answering the phone and hanging up on him. In fact, he is hearing my voicemail. Such has been his isolation, he finds the technology hard to fathom.
Blessington 15 months after his arrest, at age 16.
Blessington comes across as gentle and deferential. He speaks softly and peppers our conversation with quotes from the Bible. He talks about dreams in which demons and angels are battling, of divine intervention saving him from beatings by other inmates.
There are also tales from inside, often delivered with the patois of the penitentiary. The hatred of “dogs” (informers); his “classo” (security classification); his cell getting repeatedly “ramped” (raided by guards).
“When I arrived at Long Bay [jail in Sydney], a lifer told me, ‘You’ll be harder than these walls before you know it,’ ” he says.
But mostly, he speaks about a life lost: of a fractured childhood, of a grand love affair cut short, of a bottomless remorse for that day in September 1988 when his 14-year-old self could have – should have – walked away from a harrowing sequence of events.
As he entered puberty, Bronson Blessington was a seething mess of resentment and anger that had been building since his parents’ split when he was just six. He was deeply traumatised by their divorce and developed a destructive and fruitless fixation on reconciling them. He and his younger sister lived with their mother, Barbara, who became so exasperated with his misbehaviour and constant attempts to sabotage her relationships with men, she dispatched him off to his father, Steve. The pair drifted from one caravan park or boarding house to another, one school to another, as Blessington’s father chased work on fishing trawlers and in abattoirs.
THE YOUNG BRONSON sniffed petrol, stole, truanted, and got into fights with other students. Illiterate, he refused to attend special needs classes. At age 13, he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having the mental age of a nine-year-old.
Frequently left alone, Bronson was sexually assaulted by three different men: two pensioners at a caravan park at Tea Gardens on the NSW Mid-North Coast and later by an acquaintance of his father in Goulburn in the state’s Southern Tablelands. Bronson winces while recollecting the assaults in the caravan park: “They’d grab me when I’d go down to the shower block. I’d try to head it off, go at different times and that, but I couldn’t avoid them. They went at me, did everything you could imagine. Once it hurt so much, I passed out.”
A young Blessington (centre) at Minda Detention Centre
In a phone interview, Bronson’s father Steve Blessington, now retired and living on the Gold Coast, says that he was unaware of the extent of the abuse – only that Bronson was “touched up by a guy when we were at Tea Gardens”.
By the time they had moved to Sydney and his son had enrolled in year 8 at Blacktown High in the city’s west (his 13th school over his young life), Steve says Bronson was “completely out of control”. “The police came around with him one night. They’d caught him up at the Cross selling marijuana. I said, ‘What can I do? Can you take him?’
“They said they couldn’t do anything. So I told Bronson, ‘If you don’t do the right thing, I’m going to put you in a boys’ home, and we’ll see if you like that.’ The next night he went out until the morning and I said, ‘Right, that’s it.’ ”
The NSW Department of Community Services (DOCS) wouldn’t help, so Blessington was sent to an adult drug rehabilitation centre by his father. There, the teenager sat in on all-day counselling sessions where he heard eye-popping tales of intravenous drug use, sex and crime. DOCS finally agreed to his father’s demand to place him in a refuge, then a home for wards of the state on the NSW Central Coast.
His stint in the facilities hardly tempered his wayward conduct. Blessington and other boys would head out most evenings and create mischief. One night, he was arrested after stealing a pair of sunglasses from a parked car, for which he copped a $20 fine and a good behaviour bond.
With Blessington unwanted by any member of his family, the authorities had no alternative but to place him in a juvenile detention centre. Devastated, he rang his mother, now living in Queensland with a new boyfriend, begging her to let him come home. She told him to wait six more months to “prove yourself”.
He soon took up another offer. A boy at the detention centre, Scott Agius, was about to turn 16, and suggested that, instead of going on the centre’s planned bushwalk, they abscond to celebrate his birthday on the streets of Sydney. The 14-year-old readily agreed.
“It was the worst mistake of my life,” reflects Blessington, of the chain of events that would follow. Barely a week later, and less than a month after he stole the sunglasses, Janine Balding was dead.
WHEN BLESSINGTON disembarked from a train at Sydney’s Central Station in early September, 1988, he had little money and no plans. Scott Agius introduced him to a bunch of hardened street kids, including a 16-year-old with a long criminal history, Matthew Elliott, and a 15-year-old thug called Wayne Wilmot. The teens boasted that they led the most feared gang in Sydney and invited him to their squat in Flemington, in Sydney’s inner west.
Blessington immediately impressed with his skills at pilfering food, alcohol and cigarettes and his ability to use his fists. While giving boxing tutorials, Blessington landed a punch full flush on the face on another youth, Wayne Purchase. The blood on Purchase’s face set off Elliott, high on amphetamines, who started slamming Purchase with a hollow sledgehammer.
Elliott urged Blessington to do the same. “It was absolutely dreadful,” Blessington recalls. “We hit him with everything we had. I thought we’d killed him.” Purchase survived, but by the time the police arrived, the youths had already done a runner. “I didn’t feel no remorse, but,” Blessington adds. “What we did next to Ms Balding …”
His voice trails off. His body slumps and visibly shudders as he returns to the events of that Thursday afternoon in September all those years ago, when with Wilmot and Elliott, he met up with a bunch of vagrants at Central Station, including an intellectually handicapped 15-year-old girl, Carol Ann Arrow and an older man known as “Shorty”.
At Central, according to a police confession from Stephen “Shorty” Jamieson, Elliott and Wilmot would cravenly suggest, “How about we go and get a sheila and rape her?” It was a claim that would later become one of Australia’s most infamous crime headlines, suggesting that Balding’s abduction was a premeditated “thrill kill”.
I ask Blessington if the rape was planned. He looks at me and firmly replies, “No, the plan was to steal a car.” A pause. “No one said, ‘Let’s rape a girl’ at the train station … Jamo [Jamieson] wasn’t even there.”
(In a baffling and bizarre feature of the case, Blessington and the other co-accused all insisted after their arrests that Jamieson – 22 at the time, with an IQ of 65 – wasn’t with them. They identified another homeless man, Mark “Shorty” Wells, as their accomplice. Wells, a schizophrenic and self-described Satanist, was tracked down in Brisbane more than a year after the murder. In court, he said that the reason he’d known certain details of the crime was because of a dream conjured during a séance. Wells was never charged. In 2006, Carol Ann Arrow reportedly said Jamieson was present. Jamieson, also jailed for life without parole, maintains his innocence and says his police confession was coerced.)
The gang spent the rest of the day riding the train network, drinking a bottle of rum stolen by Blessington from a liquor shop, yelling at school children and flashing a copy of Penthouse magazine at passengers. Blessington tells me he had begun taking “speed pills” supplied by Elliott.
As dusk fell, they got off at Sutherland station, in Sydney’s south, and found an unlocked car in the car park, but couldn’t start the ignition. Elliott, the ringleader, suggested they instead follow a woman to her car, snatch her keys and drive off. Their first intended victim, Kristine Mobberley, shut the car door fast enough to escape, driving straight to the local police station. Disastrously, the cops went to a car park on the other side of the train station.
Balding was next: as she approached her Holden Gemini, Blessington asked her for a cigarette. Upon being rebuffed, he pulled out a knife and forced her into the back seat; Elliott took the wheel, driving west along the F4 freeway. At some point, Elliott moved from the front seat to the back and raped Balding, while Wilmot drove, with Arrow also upfront. They pulled off the road at Minchinbury, in Sydney’s west.
“[Elliott] said, ‘Bronson, have a go …’ So I got out and raped her, too,” Blessington recalls.
Elliott started panicking that Balding would identify them. With Blessington’s help, he pushed the terrified woman through fencing lining the highway into a paddock. “I took her legs, Elliott took her shoulders,” recalls Blessington. “The idea was we would tie her up and leave her there.” But then, “our feet started sinking in the mud. We saw there was a dam and Matthew [Elliott] said, ‘Let’s drown her.’ ”
Blessington held Balding under the water while Elliott punched her stomach. “He did it so she would swallow water and die quickly,” he says.
I ask Blessington what was going through his mind. “There was no rage or anything inside me. It was like I was outside myself. I just felt … nothing.”
After stealing Balding’s jewellery and ATM card (they had forced her to give them her PIN), they drove to nearby Mount Druitt shopping centre, withdrew cash and abandoned the car. They returned to the city and, in Hyde Park, boasted of the murder to two girls. But a day later, suddenly gripped by the enormity of the crime they had committed, Blessington and Elliott drove another stolen car to western Sydney’s Cobham youth detention centre.
They found a youth worker whom Elliott trusted and confessed to the beating of Wayne Purchase. Police were called in. The next day the pair admitted, unprompted, that they knew that Janine Balding – at that stage reported missing – had been raped and murdered, but insisted they did not participate. (Elliott had told Blessington to blame Scott Agius, but Agius had left the group after the beating of Purchase and tried to convince Blessington to do likewise. Agius also had an iron-clad alibi.)
The confession was damning enough to raise deep suspicions among police that they were more seriously involved. The pair took police to the dam where Balding’s body lay half-submerged. “I remember, when they took me to the crime scene, all I could think was, ‘I can’t believe this is a dead body,’ ” says Blessington.
“Why was that all I could think about? I mean, I had killed her. But all I could think about was, ‘So this is what a dead body looks like.’ ”
Over a coffee at the beachside Sydney suburb of Coogee, I catch up with Blessington’s former lawyer (now a retired District Court judge) Kevin Coorey, who, during two trials over two years, was
at the epicentre of a media firestorm surrounding the case.
Janine Balding was a vibrant young woman from Wagga Wagga who had come to Sydney to work as a bank clerk. She had already bought a home on the NSW Central Coast with her fiancé, with plans to start a family. The end of a young life full of such promise in such violent circumstances revolted the public, especially when it became defined by Jamieson’s chilling confession and ape-like appearance, the result of foetal alcohol syndrome.
What’s more, Balding’s abduction, rape and murder bore disturbing similarities to the infamous Anita Cobby slaying, which had happened just four kilometres away and only two years earlier. Cobby, a nurse and beauty pageant winner, was kidnapped by a group of five men as she walked home from Blacktown train station, bundled into a car, battered and gang-raped, her body mutilated before she was finally killed.
I ask Coorey why he didn’t submit a defence of diminished responsibility, given Blessington’s youth and mental deficiencies: after Blessington’s arrest, a court-appointed psychiatrist said he suffered from a “conduct disorder of adolescence [that] fits the criteria for a defence of diminished responsibility”, a formally recognised mental illness.
In his damning “never to be released” sentencing judgment, Justice Peter Newman pointedly noted that the psychiatrist’s report was never raised by Blessington’s legal counsel.
“You can’t run that defence when you are pleading not guilty,” explains Coorey. “It’s a contradiction.”
Blessington paid a heavy price for his perjury, denying himself a custodial sentence of less than 10 years if the diminished responsibility defence had succeeded, as many believe it would have.
During the trial, Blessington was “very quiet”, Coorey recalls. “He hardly ever spoke.” He was a “good head” shorter than his co-accused Elliott, barely 150 centimetres tall and 45 kilograms. “Bronson looked like a child, and that was the hard part. It was hard to comprehend.”
The public, too, had difficulty accepting that teenagers could commit such heinous crimes, which are not as uncommon as you might like to think. According to the most recent figures produced by the Australian Institute of Criminology, there were 83 youths under 18 charged with homicide – mostly murders – in the five years to 2012, or about 16 each year. Of those 83, 11 were aged 14 or younger, an average of slightly more than two per year.
In most cases, such juvenile homicide trials are conducted away from the scrutiny of the media. The Balding trials could not have been more different.
As the hearings were held, Janine’s mother Beverley (who died in 2013) led a high-profile campaign for the reintroduction of the death penalty. When the guilty verdict was handed down by a jury, the applause from the public galleries was thunderous, recalls Coorey. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In sentencing, Justice Newman said Blessington was extremely young, had a “trivial” criminal record – just the offence for the stolen sunglasses – and good prospects for rehabilitation. Nonetheless, the crime was “so grave”, a life sentence was appropriate for him, as well as Elliott and Jamieson. (Wilmot and Arrow were convicted as accessories to murder. Wilmot served seven-and-a-half years before being paroled, Arrow was released on a good behaviour bond.)
Newman’s added recommendation that “none of the prisoners [handed life terms] should ever be released” captured the headlines but carried no legal force. At that time, a prisoner given life had the right to have their sentence assessed and possibly downgraded after eight years in jail.
It was this prospect of successful appeals that prompted the NSW government to introduce the three pieces of retrospective legislation, at least one of which was directed solely at Blessington. Under the changes, Blessington is only eligible for release if he is on the verge of death or profoundly physically or mentally incapacitated.
Such laws mean that Blessington has been subjected to a penalty that did not exist at the time he carried out his crimes. His sentence, the United Nations ruled last year, broke international treaties that Australia has ratified, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
David Balding, Janine’s brother.
THE BALDING FAMILY,however, don’t want to hear about the rights of child murderers like Blessington. There was no second chance for Janine. When I arrive in Wagga Wagga for an arranged interview, Janine’s father, Kerry, is angry and questions my motives. “Why are you buggerising around with that scum?” he asks.
Speak to David Balding, Janine’s brother, about the crime and his eyes redden almost instantly. He was just 10 when his sister died. “She was kind, loving, always looked out for me,” he says. The burden of sorrow that engulfed the family has never lifted. That Janine’s killers are never to be released brings a measure of comfort. “It changes you forever,” he says. “[Blessington] knew exactly what he was doing. Just because he’s tied up and locked up. I don’t care. Stay where you are.”
I ask David about Blessington’s professed remorse and rehabilitation. He responds by asking whether Blessington still maintains “Shorty” Jamieson is innocent. He does, I reply.
For David, this is evidence that Blessington is insincere, an apparent reference to Jamieson’s damning confession. “He’s still lying. Whether he’s lying to protect himself, he’s still lying.
“They are where they belong. They don’t deserve sympathy. They don’t deserve anything … let us get on with our lives.”
Australia and the US stand alone among Western democracies in incarcerating juveniles for life without parole. Even in the US, renowned for its punitive justice system, the tide is turning as a series of Supreme Court rulings has found that mandatory life terms for juveniles breach the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment”.
Underpinning the judgments have been advances in neurological science that show juvenile brains are profoundly different from adults.
A poorly developed pre-frontal cortex means young people are impulsive risk-takers. They have difficulty understanding the consequences of their actions. They reject authority but have a powerful need for acceptance by their peers.
Equally, children have a remarkable capacity to be rehabilitated, not least because their brains are still in a maturing process. “Those who commit the most egregious of crimes as juveniles are just as likely to become reformed as those responsible for lesser offences,” says Shobha Mahadev, from the Children and Family Justice Centre at Chicago’s Northwestern University.
Blessington’s rehabilitation began while awaiting trial in western Sydney’s Minda Detention Centre, where he got to know a Christian pastor from Cabramatta, Jack Begnell. After his conviction, at age 17, Blessington was baptised in the detention centre’s swimming pool. He began hosting Bible study classes. “The whole place was on fire with God,” he recalls.
I stop Blessington midway through his account and remind him that, at that time, he was still lying about his central role in the crime, and that his falsehoods cruelled any chance his claims that Jamieson was innocent would be taken seriously. Who could believe anything he said?
“I was lying,” he admits. “And I’ve seen Shorty pay for that. I believed 100 per cent I was transformed, but I was still being sinful.”
Not for the first time, Blessington then suggests I should do a profile of Jamieson, not him. His plight is the far greater injustice, he implores. “How has he got through it all? Shorty has been punished since he was in his mother’s womb,” he says with genuine anguish, referring to Jamieson’s pre-natal exposure to alcohol.
True repentance came later, not long after Blessington was sent to Long Bay. In the middle of his first appeal against his conviction, aged 18, he confessed to Begnell. “Jack told me, ‘You know what you have to do.’ So I wrote to my lawyer and told him I was guilty and to withdraw the appeal.”
Just as Christianity gave Blessington the opportunity of redemption, he was equally sustained by his relationship with a young woman, Kim Ly, whom he first met in Minda. She was a member of Begnell’s youth fellowship. Over the years, a friendship built on a shared faith became a love affair that lasted more than a decade. “She was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was amazing, a blessing,” he says. “I thought to myself that, through Kim, God was telling me something. Why was she in my life? Why were we in love? It was a sign that He saw a life for me outside prison and that one day I would get out of here.”
Ly stood by Blessington as he launched appeal after appeal against the gravity of the sentence, and the couple made plans for life outside. There would be children. They would set up their own ministry. Blessington maintained a strict exercise regimen, lifting weights in the prison yard.
In 2007, when the High Court dismissed an appeal against the retrospective laws passed by the NSW government, Blessington’s world came crashing down. The last legal avenue to appeal his sentence was closed.
“I told Kim we should split up. There was no point going on. She needed to find someone else. We were never going to have a family … I was devastated. It tested my faith … The truth is, I’ve never really got over it.”
Blessington stopped training and started putting on weight. The impassioned proselytiser always seeking out new converts became more of a loner. “He just collapsed,” says one prisoner who was with him at the time. “He’d just stay in his cell. Maybe walk the yard a few times, then go back to bed. He ate a lot. I remember telling him, if he kept it up, he’d have a heart attack and cark it. He told me he didn’t care if he did. It was really sad. He was really bloody decent. He helped me out, and a lot of other inmates.”
Blessington may not be the fired-up evangelist of the past but, says the former prison chaplain at the Mid North Coast Correctional Centre, Andy Thomas, he still mentors younger prisoners. “I was intrigued and amazed at the way he carried himself,” Thomas says. “What he is going through is worse than a death sentence. Yet still he perseveres and tries to live a good life. There are many men who have committed heinous crimes and after 20 years they are released if they display good behaviour … Bronson was just a boy at the time.”
For all his adult life, Bronson Blessington has never gazed at the night sky. He often asks for pictures of the cosmos, says Thomas. Each day, he spends at least 17 hours alone in a small cell, always in the protective custody wing of prisons, surrounded by the most hardened criminals. He watches TV, reads his Bible and listens to religious music. He makes jewellery boxes from matchsticks – each taking months to complete.
His mother and sister haven’t visited him for more than a decade, although they speak occasionally on the phone. He rarely sees his father. Begnell, who visits most weekends, is a rock of support.
With his legal options exhausted, the only hope of release is if the NSW governor accepts a mercy petition.
Ask Blessington about a life outside prison and he speaks with great excitement. “Well, I would need someone to be with me for about two years. I can’t do much for myself. I’ve been inside since I was 14 …
Teen killer of Janine Balding applies for clemency
“I’d set up a ministry and the purpose would be to help young people. Tell them what happened to me and make sure it doesn’t happen to them. I’d give myself over to the Lord 100 per cent. It’s going to be incredible!”
Moments later, though, he is crestfallen as he assesses his prospects. He tells me most of his relatives had lived a long time. “My Pops died when he was in his 90s. Mate, I just could not do another 40, 50 years inside.
“I’d be better off if they hanged me.”
Blessington in his 40s with pastor Jack Begnell.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2016/locked-up-for-life/
Bronson Blessington was just 14 when he committed one of Australia’s most shocking crimes. But is it right to put a child behind bars indefinitely?
Bronson Blessington was declared an “animal” never to be released for his role at age 14 in the savage 1988 murder of Janine Balding in Sydney. After 28 years in prison, his deep remorse and rehabilitation are clear to his supporters. Should he still be behind bars for a crime committed as a child?
THE PRISONER ambles into the visiting area. A white boiler suit covers his lumbering frame, pocketless and tied at the back to stop contraband being passed between us.
His ruddy-cheeked face is boyish, his skin curiously unlined. Only the greying hair reveals he is now entering middle age. “Hello mate,” he says, looking down at his KT26 joggers, prison-green and fastened by velcro, before lifting his gaze, squinting and smiling awkwardly. “I’m Bronson.”
He’s heavy, bloated even, and looks completely different from the photos I’ve seen: a cherubic, blond-haired 13-year-old schoolboy; a strapping young man flexing his biceps in the prison yard.
His hulking frame fairly swallows the small metal stool bolted to the floor of the visiting area of the Mid North Coast Correctional Centre, just outside Kempsey in northern NSW. He sits, legs spread wide, palms on his thighs, hunched over opposite me.
After the introductions, he admonishes himself. “I used to be 100 kilos and cut. I used to do lots of physical activity. Aaah, mate, I’ve let myself go, haven’t I?”
He then shuffles off to the vending machines, returning with a packet of chips and a Coke – a treat only permitted during visits.
So, this is “pure evil”.
Bronson Blessington is now in his 28th year in prison: two-thirds of his life. He was just 14 years old in 1988 when, with four other homeless youths, he took part in the abduction, rape and murder of 20-year-old building society teller Janine Balding, a savage, cold-blooded killing that devastated her family and transfixed the nation.
It was a crime “so barbaric”, his sentencing judge urged he “never be released”. For 175 years, since NSW was a convict settlement, no one so young has faced incarceration for the term of his natural life.
Janine Balding with fiance Steven Moran at their engagement party.
Such was the continuing public outrage against Blessington and his cohorts, the NSW Parliament in 1997, 2001 and 2005 passed three pieces of retrospective legislation to ensure he and other notorious offenders – a roll call of the state’s worst rapists and murderers – stayed behind bars forever. “These animals are reviled and shunned by anyone who has heard of their heinous crimes,” the then NSW police minister Paul Whelan announced as he introduced the first of the bills. “There is not a person in our community who does not need protection.”
BUT ANGLICAN PRIEST Simon Manchester, a senior minister at North Sydney’s St Thomas’s Church, believes Whelan’s epithet is badly misplaced. Reverend Manchester got to know Blessington more than a decade ago, after the prisoner wrote to him complimenting him on a sermon he heard on the radio. He says Blessington is deeply penitent and thoroughly rehabilitated. “He is soaked in scripture,” he says. “He has pointed hundreds and hundreds to Christ.”
For more than 20 years, Blessington has ministered to fellow prisoners, holding Bible study classes in the prison yard and counselling new inmates on the folly of a life of crime.
“I’m ashamed, really ashamed, about what I did,” says Blessington. “I pray every night for the Baldings. I’ve shed so many tears; the pain and suffering I’ve put them through … I’ve changed, but … The Lord does that to a man if he takes Him into his heart. I’m a new person, for sure.”
Over several months, I meet Blessington in person three times. We speak over the phone occasionally – Blessington can ring me, but he complains that I keep answering the phone and hanging up on him. In fact, he is hearing my voicemail. Such has been his isolation, he finds the technology hard to fathom.
Blessington 15 months after his arrest, at age 16.
Blessington comes across as gentle and deferential. He speaks softly and peppers our conversation with quotes from the Bible. He talks about dreams in which demons and angels are battling, of divine intervention saving him from beatings by other inmates.
There are also tales from inside, often delivered with the patois of the penitentiary. The hatred of “dogs” (informers); his “classo” (security classification); his cell getting repeatedly “ramped” (raided by guards).
“When I arrived at Long Bay [jail in Sydney], a lifer told me, ‘You’ll be harder than these walls before you know it,’ ” he says.
But mostly, he speaks about a life lost: of a fractured childhood, of a grand love affair cut short, of a bottomless remorse for that day in September 1988 when his 14-year-old self could have – should have – walked away from a harrowing sequence of events.
As he entered puberty, Bronson Blessington was a seething mess of resentment and anger that had been building since his parents’ split when he was just six. He was deeply traumatised by their divorce and developed a destructive and fruitless fixation on reconciling them. He and his younger sister lived with their mother, Barbara, who became so exasperated with his misbehaviour and constant attempts to sabotage her relationships with men, she dispatched him off to his father, Steve. The pair drifted from one caravan park or boarding house to another, one school to another, as Blessington’s father chased work on fishing trawlers and in abattoirs.
THE YOUNG BRONSON sniffed petrol, stole, truanted, and got into fights with other students. Illiterate, he refused to attend special needs classes. At age 13, he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having the mental age of a nine-year-old.
Frequently left alone, Bronson was sexually assaulted by three different men: two pensioners at a caravan park at Tea Gardens on the NSW Mid-North Coast and later by an acquaintance of his father in Goulburn in the state’s Southern Tablelands. Bronson winces while recollecting the assaults in the caravan park: “They’d grab me when I’d go down to the shower block. I’d try to head it off, go at different times and that, but I couldn’t avoid them. They went at me, did everything you could imagine. Once it hurt so much, I passed out.”
A young Blessington (centre) at Minda Detention Centre
In a phone interview, Bronson’s father Steve Blessington, now retired and living on the Gold Coast, says that he was unaware of the extent of the abuse – only that Bronson was “touched up by a guy when we were at Tea Gardens”.
By the time they had moved to Sydney and his son had enrolled in year 8 at Blacktown High in the city’s west (his 13th school over his young life), Steve says Bronson was “completely out of control”. “The police came around with him one night. They’d caught him up at the Cross selling marijuana. I said, ‘What can I do? Can you take him?’
“They said they couldn’t do anything. So I told Bronson, ‘If you don’t do the right thing, I’m going to put you in a boys’ home, and we’ll see if you like that.’ The next night he went out until the morning and I said, ‘Right, that’s it.’ ”
The NSW Department of Community Services (DOCS) wouldn’t help, so Blessington was sent to an adult drug rehabilitation centre by his father. There, the teenager sat in on all-day counselling sessions where he heard eye-popping tales of intravenous drug use, sex and crime. DOCS finally agreed to his father’s demand to place him in a refuge, then a home for wards of the state on the NSW Central Coast.
His stint in the facilities hardly tempered his wayward conduct. Blessington and other boys would head out most evenings and create mischief. One night, he was arrested after stealing a pair of sunglasses from a parked car, for which he copped a $20 fine and a good behaviour bond.
With Blessington unwanted by any member of his family, the authorities had no alternative but to place him in a juvenile detention centre. Devastated, he rang his mother, now living in Queensland with a new boyfriend, begging her to let him come home. She told him to wait six more months to “prove yourself”.
He soon took up another offer. A boy at the detention centre, Scott Agius, was about to turn 16, and suggested that, instead of going on the centre’s planned bushwalk, they abscond to celebrate his birthday on the streets of Sydney. The 14-year-old readily agreed.
“It was the worst mistake of my life,” reflects Blessington, of the chain of events that would follow. Barely a week later, and less than a month after he stole the sunglasses, Janine Balding was dead.
WHEN BLESSINGTON disembarked from a train at Sydney’s Central Station in early September, 1988, he had little money and no plans. Scott Agius introduced him to a bunch of hardened street kids, including a 16-year-old with a long criminal history, Matthew Elliott, and a 15-year-old thug called Wayne Wilmot. The teens boasted that they led the most feared gang in Sydney and invited him to their squat in Flemington, in Sydney’s inner west.
Blessington immediately impressed with his skills at pilfering food, alcohol and cigarettes and his ability to use his fists. While giving boxing tutorials, Blessington landed a punch full flush on the face on another youth, Wayne Purchase. The blood on Purchase’s face set off Elliott, high on amphetamines, who started slamming Purchase with a hollow sledgehammer.
Elliott urged Blessington to do the same. “It was absolutely dreadful,” Blessington recalls. “We hit him with everything we had. I thought we’d killed him.” Purchase survived, but by the time the police arrived, the youths had already done a runner. “I didn’t feel no remorse, but,” Blessington adds. “What we did next to Ms Balding …”
His voice trails off. His body slumps and visibly shudders as he returns to the events of that Thursday afternoon in September all those years ago, when with Wilmot and Elliott, he met up with a bunch of vagrants at Central Station, including an intellectually handicapped 15-year-old girl, Carol Ann Arrow and an older man known as “Shorty”.
At Central, according to a police confession from Stephen “Shorty” Jamieson, Elliott and Wilmot would cravenly suggest, “How about we go and get a sheila and rape her?” It was a claim that would later become one of Australia’s most infamous crime headlines, suggesting that Balding’s abduction was a premeditated “thrill kill”.
I ask Blessington if the rape was planned. He looks at me and firmly replies, “No, the plan was to steal a car.” A pause. “No one said, ‘Let’s rape a girl’ at the train station … Jamo [Jamieson] wasn’t even there.”
(In a baffling and bizarre feature of the case, Blessington and the other co-accused all insisted after their arrests that Jamieson – 22 at the time, with an IQ of 65 – wasn’t with them. They identified another homeless man, Mark “Shorty” Wells, as their accomplice. Wells, a schizophrenic and self-described Satanist, was tracked down in Brisbane more than a year after the murder. In court, he said that the reason he’d known certain details of the crime was because of a dream conjured during a séance. Wells was never charged. In 2006, Carol Ann Arrow reportedly said Jamieson was present. Jamieson, also jailed for life without parole, maintains his innocence and says his police confession was coerced.)
The gang spent the rest of the day riding the train network, drinking a bottle of rum stolen by Blessington from a liquor shop, yelling at school children and flashing a copy of Penthouse magazine at passengers. Blessington tells me he had begun taking “speed pills” supplied by Elliott.
As dusk fell, they got off at Sutherland station, in Sydney’s south, and found an unlocked car in the car park, but couldn’t start the ignition. Elliott, the ringleader, suggested they instead follow a woman to her car, snatch her keys and drive off. Their first intended victim, Kristine Mobberley, shut the car door fast enough to escape, driving straight to the local police station. Disastrously, the cops went to a car park on the other side of the train station.
Balding was next: as she approached her Holden Gemini, Blessington asked her for a cigarette. Upon being rebuffed, he pulled out a knife and forced her into the back seat; Elliott took the wheel, driving west along the F4 freeway. At some point, Elliott moved from the front seat to the back and raped Balding, while Wilmot drove, with Arrow also upfront. They pulled off the road at Minchinbury, in Sydney’s west.
“[Elliott] said, ‘Bronson, have a go …’ So I got out and raped her, too,” Blessington recalls.
Elliott started panicking that Balding would identify them. With Blessington’s help, he pushed the terrified woman through fencing lining the highway into a paddock. “I took her legs, Elliott took her shoulders,” recalls Blessington. “The idea was we would tie her up and leave her there.” But then, “our feet started sinking in the mud. We saw there was a dam and Matthew [Elliott] said, ‘Let’s drown her.’ ”
Blessington held Balding under the water while Elliott punched her stomach. “He did it so she would swallow water and die quickly,” he says.
I ask Blessington what was going through his mind. “There was no rage or anything inside me. It was like I was outside myself. I just felt … nothing.”
After stealing Balding’s jewellery and ATM card (they had forced her to give them her PIN), they drove to nearby Mount Druitt shopping centre, withdrew cash and abandoned the car. They returned to the city and, in Hyde Park, boasted of the murder to two girls. But a day later, suddenly gripped by the enormity of the crime they had committed, Blessington and Elliott drove another stolen car to western Sydney’s Cobham youth detention centre.
They found a youth worker whom Elliott trusted and confessed to the beating of Wayne Purchase. Police were called in. The next day the pair admitted, unprompted, that they knew that Janine Balding – at that stage reported missing – had been raped and murdered, but insisted they did not participate. (Elliott had told Blessington to blame Scott Agius, but Agius had left the group after the beating of Purchase and tried to convince Blessington to do likewise. Agius also had an iron-clad alibi.)
The confession was damning enough to raise deep suspicions among police that they were more seriously involved. The pair took police to the dam where Balding’s body lay half-submerged. “I remember, when they took me to the crime scene, all I could think was, ‘I can’t believe this is a dead body,’ ” says Blessington.
“Why was that all I could think about? I mean, I had killed her. But all I could think about was, ‘So this is what a dead body looks like.’ ”
Over a coffee at the beachside Sydney suburb of Coogee, I catch up with Blessington’s former lawyer (now a retired District Court judge) Kevin Coorey, who, during two trials over two years, was
at the epicentre of a media firestorm surrounding the case.
Janine Balding was a vibrant young woman from Wagga Wagga who had come to Sydney to work as a bank clerk. She had already bought a home on the NSW Central Coast with her fiancé, with plans to start a family. The end of a young life full of such promise in such violent circumstances revolted the public, especially when it became defined by Jamieson’s chilling confession and ape-like appearance, the result of foetal alcohol syndrome.
What’s more, Balding’s abduction, rape and murder bore disturbing similarities to the infamous Anita Cobby slaying, which had happened just four kilometres away and only two years earlier. Cobby, a nurse and beauty pageant winner, was kidnapped by a group of five men as she walked home from Blacktown train station, bundled into a car, battered and gang-raped, her body mutilated before she was finally killed.
I ask Coorey why he didn’t submit a defence of diminished responsibility, given Blessington’s youth and mental deficiencies: after Blessington’s arrest, a court-appointed psychiatrist said he suffered from a “conduct disorder of adolescence [that] fits the criteria for a defence of diminished responsibility”, a formally recognised mental illness.
In his damning “never to be released” sentencing judgment, Justice Peter Newman pointedly noted that the psychiatrist’s report was never raised by Blessington’s legal counsel.
“You can’t run that defence when you are pleading not guilty,” explains Coorey. “It’s a contradiction.”
Blessington paid a heavy price for his perjury, denying himself a custodial sentence of less than 10 years if the diminished responsibility defence had succeeded, as many believe it would have.
During the trial, Blessington was “very quiet”, Coorey recalls. “He hardly ever spoke.” He was a “good head” shorter than his co-accused Elliott, barely 150 centimetres tall and 45 kilograms. “Bronson looked like a child, and that was the hard part. It was hard to comprehend.”
The public, too, had difficulty accepting that teenagers could commit such heinous crimes, which are not as uncommon as you might like to think. According to the most recent figures produced by the Australian Institute of Criminology, there were 83 youths under 18 charged with homicide – mostly murders – in the five years to 2012, or about 16 each year. Of those 83, 11 were aged 14 or younger, an average of slightly more than two per year.
In most cases, such juvenile homicide trials are conducted away from the scrutiny of the media. The Balding trials could not have been more different.
As the hearings were held, Janine’s mother Beverley (who died in 2013) led a high-profile campaign for the reintroduction of the death penalty. When the guilty verdict was handed down by a jury, the applause from the public galleries was thunderous, recalls Coorey. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In sentencing, Justice Newman said Blessington was extremely young, had a “trivial” criminal record – just the offence for the stolen sunglasses – and good prospects for rehabilitation. Nonetheless, the crime was “so grave”, a life sentence was appropriate for him, as well as Elliott and Jamieson. (Wilmot and Arrow were convicted as accessories to murder. Wilmot served seven-and-a-half years before being paroled, Arrow was released on a good behaviour bond.)
Newman’s added recommendation that “none of the prisoners [handed life terms] should ever be released” captured the headlines but carried no legal force. At that time, a prisoner given life had the right to have their sentence assessed and possibly downgraded after eight years in jail.
It was this prospect of successful appeals that prompted the NSW government to introduce the three pieces of retrospective legislation, at least one of which was directed solely at Blessington. Under the changes, Blessington is only eligible for release if he is on the verge of death or profoundly physically or mentally incapacitated.
Such laws mean that Blessington has been subjected to a penalty that did not exist at the time he carried out his crimes. His sentence, the United Nations ruled last year, broke international treaties that Australia has ratified, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
David Balding, Janine’s brother.
THE BALDING FAMILY,however, don’t want to hear about the rights of child murderers like Blessington. There was no second chance for Janine. When I arrive in Wagga Wagga for an arranged interview, Janine’s father, Kerry, is angry and questions my motives. “Why are you buggerising around with that scum?” he asks.
Speak to David Balding, Janine’s brother, about the crime and his eyes redden almost instantly. He was just 10 when his sister died. “She was kind, loving, always looked out for me,” he says. The burden of sorrow that engulfed the family has never lifted. That Janine’s killers are never to be released brings a measure of comfort. “It changes you forever,” he says. “[Blessington] knew exactly what he was doing. Just because he’s tied up and locked up. I don’t care. Stay where you are.”
I ask David about Blessington’s professed remorse and rehabilitation. He responds by asking whether Blessington still maintains “Shorty” Jamieson is innocent. He does, I reply.
For David, this is evidence that Blessington is insincere, an apparent reference to Jamieson’s damning confession. “He’s still lying. Whether he’s lying to protect himself, he’s still lying.
“They are where they belong. They don’t deserve sympathy. They don’t deserve anything … let us get on with our lives.”
Australia and the US stand alone among Western democracies in incarcerating juveniles for life without parole. Even in the US, renowned for its punitive justice system, the tide is turning as a series of Supreme Court rulings has found that mandatory life terms for juveniles breach the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment”.
Underpinning the judgments have been advances in neurological science that show juvenile brains are profoundly different from adults.
A poorly developed pre-frontal cortex means young people are impulsive risk-takers. They have difficulty understanding the consequences of their actions. They reject authority but have a powerful need for acceptance by their peers.
Equally, children have a remarkable capacity to be rehabilitated, not least because their brains are still in a maturing process. “Those who commit the most egregious of crimes as juveniles are just as likely to become reformed as those responsible for lesser offences,” says Shobha Mahadev, from the Children and Family Justice Centre at Chicago’s Northwestern University.
Blessington’s rehabilitation began while awaiting trial in western Sydney’s Minda Detention Centre, where he got to know a Christian pastor from Cabramatta, Jack Begnell. After his conviction, at age 17, Blessington was baptised in the detention centre’s swimming pool. He began hosting Bible study classes. “The whole place was on fire with God,” he recalls.
I stop Blessington midway through his account and remind him that, at that time, he was still lying about his central role in the crime, and that his falsehoods cruelled any chance his claims that Jamieson was innocent would be taken seriously. Who could believe anything he said?
“I was lying,” he admits. “And I’ve seen Shorty pay for that. I believed 100 per cent I was transformed, but I was still being sinful.”
Not for the first time, Blessington then suggests I should do a profile of Jamieson, not him. His plight is the far greater injustice, he implores. “How has he got through it all? Shorty has been punished since he was in his mother’s womb,” he says with genuine anguish, referring to Jamieson’s pre-natal exposure to alcohol.
True repentance came later, not long after Blessington was sent to Long Bay. In the middle of his first appeal against his conviction, aged 18, he confessed to Begnell. “Jack told me, ‘You know what you have to do.’ So I wrote to my lawyer and told him I was guilty and to withdraw the appeal.”
Just as Christianity gave Blessington the opportunity of redemption, he was equally sustained by his relationship with a young woman, Kim Ly, whom he first met in Minda. She was a member of Begnell’s youth fellowship. Over the years, a friendship built on a shared faith became a love affair that lasted more than a decade. “She was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was amazing, a blessing,” he says. “I thought to myself that, through Kim, God was telling me something. Why was she in my life? Why were we in love? It was a sign that He saw a life for me outside prison and that one day I would get out of here.”
Ly stood by Blessington as he launched appeal after appeal against the gravity of the sentence, and the couple made plans for life outside. There would be children. They would set up their own ministry. Blessington maintained a strict exercise regimen, lifting weights in the prison yard.
In 2007, when the High Court dismissed an appeal against the retrospective laws passed by the NSW government, Blessington’s world came crashing down. The last legal avenue to appeal his sentence was closed.
“I told Kim we should split up. There was no point going on. She needed to find someone else. We were never going to have a family … I was devastated. It tested my faith … The truth is, I’ve never really got over it.”
Blessington stopped training and started putting on weight. The impassioned proselytiser always seeking out new converts became more of a loner. “He just collapsed,” says one prisoner who was with him at the time. “He’d just stay in his cell. Maybe walk the yard a few times, then go back to bed. He ate a lot. I remember telling him, if he kept it up, he’d have a heart attack and cark it. He told me he didn’t care if he did. It was really sad. He was really bloody decent. He helped me out, and a lot of other inmates.”
Blessington may not be the fired-up evangelist of the past but, says the former prison chaplain at the Mid North Coast Correctional Centre, Andy Thomas, he still mentors younger prisoners. “I was intrigued and amazed at the way he carried himself,” Thomas says. “What he is going through is worse than a death sentence. Yet still he perseveres and tries to live a good life. There are many men who have committed heinous crimes and after 20 years they are released if they display good behaviour … Bronson was just a boy at the time.”
For all his adult life, Bronson Blessington has never gazed at the night sky. He often asks for pictures of the cosmos, says Thomas. Each day, he spends at least 17 hours alone in a small cell, always in the protective custody wing of prisons, surrounded by the most hardened criminals. He watches TV, reads his Bible and listens to religious music. He makes jewellery boxes from matchsticks – each taking months to complete.
His mother and sister haven’t visited him for more than a decade, although they speak occasionally on the phone. He rarely sees his father. Begnell, who visits most weekends, is a rock of support.
With his legal options exhausted, the only hope of release is if the NSW governor accepts a mercy petition.
Ask Blessington about a life outside prison and he speaks with great excitement. “Well, I would need someone to be with me for about two years. I can’t do much for myself. I’ve been inside since I was 14 …
Teen killer of Janine Balding applies for clemency
“I’d set up a ministry and the purpose would be to help young people. Tell them what happened to me and make sure it doesn’t happen to them. I’d give myself over to the Lord 100 per cent. It’s going to be incredible!”
Moments later, though, he is crestfallen as he assesses his prospects. He tells me most of his relatives had lived a long time. “My Pops died when he was in his 90s. Mate, I just could not do another 40, 50 years inside.
“I’d be better off if they hanged me.”
Blessington in his 40s with pastor Jack Begnell.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2016/locked-up-for-life/
