Forever Nine by Denise Hofman & John Kidman

Author:Denise Hofman & John Kidman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Australia, True crime, Denise Hofman, John Kidman, Michael Guider, Samantha Knight, Tess Knight, Neil Tuckerman, Darren Sly, Lane Cove National Park, Phil Cornford, Bondi, Peter O’Meagher, Bill Knight, Rena Kilbride, child abduction, paedophilia, convicted child molester, child killer
ISBN: 9781743468920
Publisher: Five Mile Press
Published: 2013-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Serendipity

In his mid-40s, Tim Guider had finally managed to settle down. He’d met the love of his life, Peta, and they had a five-year-old boy together, named TJ. He’d also won critical acclaim for his paintings. Several had been commissioned by the likes of telco giant Optus, and a couple had even featured in the prestigious Sulman Prize exhibitions.

Life was good but old habits were hard to break.

In late 1997, Guider had trouble on his mind. On 11 November, he bumped into a mate he hadn’t seen since his rough and ready days in Western Australia during the 1970s, Solomon Redibaum. Tim told Redibaum he was planning a ‘stick up’ and asked if he wanted to lend a hand.

Redibaum agreed. It was a bank job. Tim reckoned they could earn somewhere between $200 000 and $300 000. He already had another guy who was interested, and a gun.1

The trio spent the next few days collecting the equipment they needed and staking out their target, a small St George branch at Warriewood, on Sydney’s northern beaches. With everything at the ready the following Monday morning, however, the group was forced to abort the heist when two uniformed policewomen blundered onto the scene.

Tim switched to ‘plan B’, a raid on the Westpac bank on Castlereagh Street in the CBD. They went for a ‘dry run’ later that day but he again changed his mind, deciding they would return to Warriewood and go through with the St George job after all.

The next morning, Redibaum pulled into the Franklins car park opposite the bank just before 9.30 a.m. Tim and a second gunman, Filipe Tongilava Uhila, got out and strolled over to a couple of seats on the footpath and pretended to read newspapers. As the doors slid open and the two men readied themselves to strike, they were hammered from all sides by armed police.

Tim’s mistake had been to trust his getaway driver. Redibaum had, for some time, been registered by the police as a criminal informant. He’d contacted them almost immediately following their chance meeting the previous week and Tim had been clueless to it. He’d walked into an ambush.

The carefully co-ordinated sting meant the would-be bandits were prevented from actually staging the hold-up but they had nonetheless been caught red-handed and poised to launch. Between them, they were packing pretty well all the classic tools of the trade: a semi-automatic pistol, a knife, an imitation handgun, balaclavas, rubber gloves, a set of two-way radios and a police scanner.

It would soon become apparent that Redibaum had also been wearing a wire during a series of somewhat conspiratorial conversations they’d had in the days before they were caught.

With Tim’s extensive record, there was no prospect of him winning bail. Since 1976, he’d been convicted on 16 counts of robbery, eight of them while armed. So, with the arrests done and dusted, Dee Why detectives simply focused on the task of preparing a brief of evidence for the courts. While important, it was

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