A FORMER Albury rugby league star was one of two ex-policeman jailed yesterday for a violent robbery they blamed on financial strain and on medication including the controversial sleeping aid Stilnox.
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Former NSW anti-theft squad officer and ex-Albury Blues coach Brett Terence Gale, 44, had pleaded guilty with fellow former detective Wayne Alfred Duckworth, 47, to one count each of robbery in company with personal violence.
Both were sentenced to four years jail.
A balaclava-clad Gale, and Duckworth, robbed the Park Ridge Tavern south of Brisbane in the early hours of November 5 last year, netting more than $63,000.
Gale, also a former first-grade player with Sydney’s Western Suburbs club, and an Australian schoolboys representative, forced a terrified female employee to the ground and held a metal bar to her head.
Duckworth, meanwhile, taped another employee’s hands together.
A male tavern employee, whose hands were also bound, allegedly hatched the plan to rob the pub with Gale, who then recruited Duckworth.
The employee allegedly turned off an illuminated XXXX beer sign outside the tavern to signal to the pair that the alarm had been switched off and security guards had left.
Justice Kerry O’Brien yesterday told the Brisbane District Court the incident was “obviously premeditated” and “a serious example of its type”.
“It must have been a terrifying experience for them (the women),” Justice O’Brien said.
The sentence for Gale, of Sandgate in Brisbane, was suspended after 12 months.
Duckworth, of the Gold Coast, had his term suspended after 10 months.
Justice O’Brien said the jail time imposed reflected Gale’s greater involvement in the crime.
He said he accepted that Gale and Duckworth had been under financial strain when they committed the offence, and had been suffering from a major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder respectively.
Defence barristers for both men told the court during sentencing submissions early this month that their clients had at the time of the robbery been taking, among other medications, Stilnox.
Australia’s medicines authority has recently ordered the manufacturer of the sleeping pill to upgrade its warning about mixing the pills with alcohol following reports of bizarre and dangerous behaviour.
Gale’s defence barrister, Stephen Zillman, said his client’s “judgement and reasoning were affected by a mixture of illnesses and substances”.
