By Cam Lucadou-Wells
A removalist stole his boss’s van and then made up a story that he’d been carjacked, a court was told.
Russell Whitmore, 37, was also charged with stealing his landlord’s leaf-blower in Beaconsfield and hawking it to a Cash Converters store.
The landlord had earlier dropped off the leaf-blower and garden equipment for the share-house tenants to “tidy up the garden”, Dandenong Magistrates’ Court was told on 19 August.
When the $269 leaf-blower went missing, the landlord found it at Cash Converters in Narre Warren.
It had been traded in under Whitmore’s name for $60.
Whitmore had just started working for a South East removalist business when his boss turned down his request to take the Hiace for a trip to Queensland.
After doing a job in Brighton that morning, Whitmore called in to say he was driving the van back to the depot.
That afternoon, he didn’t answer calls before claiming the van broke down on Thompson Road in Carrum Downs.
The boss sent his son to help but Whitmore and the van couldn’t be found.
At a home in Cranbourne, Whitmore rang police to tell them he’d been carjacked 25 minutes earlier.
He claimed he had broken down 10 kilometres away on Glasscocks Road. As he sat inside the van, he was threatened with a shotgun by three unknown “dark skinned” men.
They forced him to lay on the road as they stole the Hiace, he said.
With his phone out of power, he walked several hours to Cranbourne to call triple-0 – contradicting his earlier story he’d been carjacked 25 minutes earlier.
Phone records showed Whitmore was in Cranbourne the whole afternoon, police told the court.
Whitmore was also charged with assaulting a victim with a plastic pole and stealing most of their clothes in a Mont Albert motel car park in August 2020.
He demanded money, and then the victim’s wallet and bank card. When the victim said he didn’t have them, he was told to “take off everything”.
Whitmore grabbed the stripped man’s jumper, pants, shoes, a cable and charger, and told him to “get the f*** out of here”.
In just his underpants, the victim fled to a nearby 7-Eleven and asked a stranger for their phone to call police.
Whitmore was also charged with a petrol drive-off in Narre Warren North, giving a false name to PSOs, resisting arrest and ice possession.
A defence lawyer said Whitmore grew up in a dysfunctional home in Queensland. At a young age, the promising BMX rider became “inured” to drugs and crime.
In Victoria, he found stability as a truck driver and family man until he succumbed to ice addiction.
Whitmore’s performance on a recent CCO “leaves a lot to be desired”, his lawyer conceded.
He had been remanded in custody since August 2020.
Magistrate Greg Connellan disagreed with the lawyer’s submission that Whitmore’s 377 days in remand was “excessive”.
The term was “not excessive but more than enough” for a “nasty” assault with a weapon, a car theft from an employer and a “serious” false report to police, Mr Connellan said.
Whitmore was sentenced to 377 days’ jail, which had been already served.
