A man driven to act on child abuse rumours, amid fears police wouldn’t, ambushed, kidnapped and ultimately executed a young dad.
After seven days of deliberation, a Victorian jury on Friday found Albert Thorn, 57, guilty of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Bradley Lyons.
Two men, Rikki Smith, 26, and Jordan Bottom, 25, were found not guilty of murder, but the pair were found guilty of the assault and false imprisonment of Mr Lyons.
Mr Lyons, 30, a supermarket worker and father of three, was ambushed in bed shortly after returning home from a morning shift, beaten, and stuffed into the boot of a car on December 2, 2018.
Four men, including Thorn and Smith, stormed the family home, taking Mr Lyons by surprise after receiving “the nod” from his wife Jana Hooper.
The night prior, Hooper had been found unresponsive and seemingly having a seizure by her children who called police for a welfare check.
The jury was told the call was logged but, due to “human error”, it wasn’t handed off at the local police station’s shift change.
Police did not arrive that night, and Hooper would detail suspicions she was drugged by Mr Lyons to friends and associates.
For several weeks, allegations Mr Lyons had been sexually abusing children had swirled around the community in the eastern Victoria town of Lakes Entrance where he lived.
Concerned police would not act on the allegations, a plan was formed inside a disused water tank on Thorn’s farm and enacted the following day.
Caught on CCTV footage from neighbour’s house, Thorn and Smith had already pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr Lyons in his bed.
Thorn had also pleaded guilty to kidnapping, admitting he drove his mum’s Toyota Corolla, with Mr Lyons restrained in the boot, to his Nyerimilang farming property.
Bottom, who was living in a caravan on the property, would later tell police he was woken by Thorn who said he had a “present” for him in the boot.
All three men had denied what police allege happened next.
Mr Lyons was left in the boot for hours as the trio, alongside co-conspirators Hooper and Nick Stefani, discussed what would happen next.
Witness Patricia Amey told the court she heard them discussing extracting a confession from Mr Lyons before dumping him along with the recording at a police station.
“I can’t remember exactly what I said but it would have been something like, ‘You’re a bunch of f--king idiots and you can’t be f--king doing this’,” she said.
“I’ve gone to argue the tape wouldn’t hold up in court even if you got a confession because you're tormenting him.”
She left shortly before midnight alongside Hooper and Stefani – both jailed late last year on kidnapping and assault charges.
Sometime later, the trio removed Mr Lyons from the boot, strapping him to a massage table – where he was tortured in an effort to “extract a confession”.
He was then driven to an unnamed bush track near Double Bridges in East Gippsland, where a shallow grave was dug and he was shot in the back of the head.
Both Bottom and Smith had admitted to police they were present in the car and at the gravesite when Mr Lyons was killed but denied murdering him.
An investigation into his disappearance was launched on December 11, after Mr Lyons’ Queensland-based brother reported him missing.
He told police he hadn’t heard from his brother for more than a week, and he had stopped showing up to work.
Thorn, Stefani and Hooper were quickly identified as suspects using the neighbours CCTV footage but it took months to work out what happened after Mr Lyons was taken from the home.
A breakthrough came in February the following year when Thorn’s neighbour, retired Australian Federal Police officer Kerri-Lee Wheelan, contacted police.
She told the court he had reached out to her, saying he feared for his safety and wanted to tell his side of the story “in case anything happens”.
The trio were arrested weeks later in mid-March and Mr Lyons’ remains were recovered after Bottom agreed to lead police there because “it was the right thing to do”.
Lawyers acting for both Bottom and Smith had argued their clients didn’t know Mr Lyons was going to be murdered, saying they were following instructions from the older and violent Thorn.
The had argued while their clients were involved in the circumstances surrounding Mr Lyons’ murder, both men thought the plan was to scare him out of town.
On the other side of the bar table, Thorn’s counsel had argued Mr Lyons left the property alive with Bottom and Smith and he did not know what they were planning to do.
He told the jury his client was a “kidnapper, not a murderer”, and had played a limited role in a plot to remove Mr Lyons and dump him out of town or at a police station with a confession.
But prosecutors, led by Raymond Gibson KC, had argued that each man had been “complicit” in the murder, regardless of who ultimately fired the fatal shot.
“In this case we say that motive is very clear,” he said.
“This was nothing short of vigilante action, people taking the law into their own hands and dishing out vigilante justice.”
Thorn, Bottom and Smith were remanded into custody and will return to court at a later date for sentencing.
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