Justice unfrozen

Editorial: Danielle Ford

Photography: Grant Condon

A woman is awoken during the night and brutally raped by the two masked men in her own home as her five daughters sleep soundly just down the hall.

It’s a scene many would think was straight out of a horror movie, but on the night of 22 July 1990, this is the reality a 38-year-old Ballarat woman woke to find herself facing.

On this night, a then 26-year-old Brett Braddock, along with a second offender whose identity remains unknown to police, broke into the woman’s home, entered her bedroom and placed a hand over her face to wake her.

Confused, the woman questioned the two men about who they were.

One of them replied: "I am your secret admirer, take off your pants."

The two men then brutally raped the woman after threatening the lives of her daughters if she tried to fight them or scream.

The two men took turns restraining the woman while the other raped her before leaving the bedroom with a final threat — “Lie still and don’t tell anybody or I will kill the kids”.

Shaking and upset, the woman went to her oldest daughter’s bedroom and told her what had happened and later told her own mother about it.

Fearing the men would act on their threats against her children, the women decided not to call the police.

It wasn’t until her daughter, concerned for her mother’s wellbeing, spoke to a neighbour about the incident that police were alerted to the attack.

Despite a dedicated and thorough effort by local detectives from the Ballarat Crime Investigation Unit, no offenders were ever identified and the case remained unsolved.

That was until a few small pieces of DNA evidence frozen for decades helped police track down and charge one offender almost 30 years later.

Semen, taken from the woman’s nightie and sheets, was stored in a freezer facility at Victoria Police’s forensics hub in anticipation of advances in DNA technology in the future.

Sexual Crime Squad Detective Senior Constable Phil Drews, who has been the lead investigator on this case since late 2018, said Victoria Police started freezing DNA samples from homicides, sexual assaults and armed robberies early in the 1980s due to a worldwide buzz about DNA evidence being used to solve investigations in the future.

Det Sen Const Phil Drews

“A group of people in the forensics team had the foresight to freeze DNA from major crimes so that when the technology advanced, it could be used to help solve crimes,” Det Sen Const Drews said.

In 2011, these DNA samples were analysed to create profiles and were added to the National DNA Database.

Among these samples was the seminal evidence collected from the woman’s bed. It was tested in 2012 but no match was found on the database.

This meant police had to rely on good old-fashioned detective work to link this DNA profile to an offender.

In 2016, the Sexual Crime Squad’s Cold Case Team took the case file out and started looking into it.

They set about collecting as much investigation-related material as possible.

“They were able to get a lot of useful information, including a thorough victim statement through the Victims of Crime Assistance Tribunal, which proved to be very helpful in building a base for the investigation,” Det Sen Const Drews said.

It wasn’t until late 2018 that Det Sen Const Drews took over the investigation when the previous detective transferred out of the unit.

Having all the base information gathered, Det Sen Const Drews set about creating a list of persons of interest (POIs).

“The victim statement proved to be invaluable,” he said.

“She stated that one of the offenders referred to himself as her secret admirer and mentioned her having a 16-year-old daughter.

This led me to think it was someone who knew her, not well enough that he was concerned she would recognise his voice, but enough to know details about her life.

“Because of this, I focused my search for POIs in the local area because I thought it might have been someone who lived near her.”

Given the brutality of the crime, Det Sen Const Drews also decided to approach the investigation by looking into people who had previous dealings with police.

“I tracked down all the old attendance registers from the Ballarat area from the years around 1990,” he said.

“Attendance registers are records of people who were arrested and interviewed by any police member. They have information about what they were arrested for and interviewed about.”

Using historical police records, DNA evidence that had been frozen for 30 years and good, old-fashioned detective work, Det Sen Const Phil Drews was able to identify and charge a man for a horrific rape committed in 1990.

From these records, seven POIs were identified. One stuck out to the detective.

“He lived right next door to the victim at the time of the offence,” Det Sen Const Drews said.

“He was arrested about a year after the incident for a fairly minor offence in the scheme of things, but the fact he lived right next door and would have seen the woman and her children daily stuck out to me.”

After requesting a full criminal history of the POI, a history of more serious offending was discovered and Det Sen Const Drews organised for a letter requesting a voluntary DNA sample to be delivered.

This POI was Braddock, who was now living in the small regional town of Sea Lake.

When the local police officer served the letter, Braddock agreed to provide a voluntary DNA sample.

“When he easily agreed to give the sample, I thought he might not be the person we were after because, if he did it, why would he be so willing to give a sample?” Det Sen Const Drews said.

“But after comparing his voluntary sample with the historical DNA, it showed an extremely strong match. It's 100 billion times more likely he was the contributor to the DNA taken from the bed.”

With DNA evidence linking Braddock to the crime, Det Sen Const Drews headed to Sea Lake on 2 April 2019 to arrest him and take him in for questioning.

“We were able to get him to talk about his connection to the victim. He could recall police coming to his house the day after the offence took place and speaking to his wife,” Det Sen Const Drews said.

“He was adamant from the start that he had no personal relationship with the victim and that he had never been to her house.

“I think he did this in an attempt to distance himself from the crime, but he ended up implicating himself further as we were then able to ask him ‘If you didn’t know her and had never been to her house, why was DNA that matches yours found in her bed?’.”

With no explanation to offer, Braddock was charged and appeared before the County Court in Melbourne on one charge of burglary with the intent of committing sexual assault, two charges of aggravated rape, one charge relating to the act of committing the rape and another for aiding the co-offender.

Despite claiming to have no recollection of committing the horrific offence, Braddock pleaded guilty to all charges on 6 July 2020.

“His defence team had a forensic expert review our full case file to see whether our DNA evidence held up to scrutiny,” Det Sen Const Drews said.

“Due to the way our forensic team records all handling and storage of evidence, they were unable to find any weaknesses and, at that point, Braddock was ready to offer a guilty plea.

“This was a great result, not just for the case, but for the victim. It meant she didn’t have to give evidence at a trial or at a committal hearing.

She is still very traumatised by that night, so I was really glad she didn’t have to re-live that trauma in a courtroom.

Braddock was sentenced on 5 August 2020 to 12 years and two months jail with a non-parole period of nine years.

“I’ve kept in contact with the victim and it was a huge relief to her when he was sentenced,” Det Sen Const Drews said.

Investigations to identify the second offender are still ongoing.