A young father was ambushed, kidnapped and eventually executed by a vigilante who wanted to crack down on rumors of child abuse in a small coastal town.
After seven days of deliberation, a Victorian jury on Friday found 57-year-old Albert Thorn guilty of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Bradley Lyons, a native of Lakes Entrance in eastern Victoria.
Two men, Rikki Smith, 26, and Jordan Bottom, 25, were found not guilty of murder, but the pair were found guilty of assault and false imprisonment of Mr Lyons.
Lyons, 30, a supermarket worker and father of three, was ambushed shortly after returning home from a morning shift, beaten and stuffed in the trunk of a car on December 2, 2018.
Four men, including Thorn and Smith, stormed the family home and surprised Mr. Lyons after getting “the nod” from his wife Jana Hooper.
The night before, Hooper had been found unconscious and seemingly having a seizure by her children who called the police for a welfare check.
Bradley Lyons went missing from Lakes Entrance in December 2017. He was killed because of child molestation rumors
His remains were discovered in March of the following year along a dirt road near Double Bridges
The jury was told that the call was recorded but was not passed on to the shift change at the local police station due to ‘human error’.
The police did not arrive that night, and Hooper would recount the suspicions that she had been drugged by Mr. Lyons to friends and associates.
For several weeks allegations that Mr Lyons has sexually abused children have been circulating in the community in the town of Lakes Entrance, in eastern Victoria, where he lived.
Concerned police would not respond to the allegations, a plan was drawn up in a disused water tank at Thorn’s farm and carried out the following day.
Caught on CCTV from the neighbour’s home, Thorn and Smith had already pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr. Lyons in his bed.
Thorn had also pleaded guilty to kidnapping and admitted driving his mother’s Toyota Corolla, with Mr. Lyons strapped in the trunk, to his farm in Nyerimilang.
CCTV from a neighboring property captured the moment an injured Mr. Lyons was placed in the trunk of Thorn’s mother’s Toyota Corolla. Photo: Supreme Court of Victoria/Victoria Police.
Bottom, who lived in a trailer on the property, would later tell police he was woken up by Thorn saying he had a “present” in the boot for him.
All three men had denied what the police subsequently claimed.
Mr. Lyons sat in the trunk for hours while the trio, along with co-conspirators Hooper and Nick Stefani, discussed what would happen next.
Witness Patricia Amey told the court she overheard them talking about coercing a confession from Mr. Lyons before dumping him at a police station along with the recording.
“I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it would have been something like, ‘You’re a bunch of idiots and you can’t do this,'” she said.
“I’ve come to argue that the tape wouldn’t hold up in court, even if you got a confession, because you’re tormenting him.”
Albert Thorn is upstairs.
Jordan Bottom is upstairs
She left shortly before midnight along with Hooper and Stefani – both jailed late last year on charges of kidnapping and assault.
Some time later, the trio took Mr. Lyons out of the trunk and tied him to a massage table – where he was tortured in an attempt to “force a confession.”
He was then driven to an unnamed woodland 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 that they were in the car and at the gravesite when Mr. Lyons was killed, but denied killing him.
An investigation into his disappearance was launched on 11 December after Mr Lyons’ Queensland resident brother reported him missing.
He told police that he had not heard from his brother in over a week and that he stopped showing up for work.
Thorn, Stefani and Hooper were quickly identified as suspects from neighbors’ CCTV footage, but it took months to figure out what happened after Mr. Lyons was taken from the house.
A breakthrough came in February of the following year when Thorn’s neighbour, retired Australian police officer Kerri-Lee Wheelan, contacted the 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 “just 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 that their clients were unaware that Mr. Lyons would be killed, saying they followed the instructions of the elderly and violent Thorn.
They had been arguing while their clients were involved in the circumstances surrounding Mr. Lyons’ murder, both men thinking the plan was to run him out of town.
An aerial view of the Nyerimilang estate in Thorn, where Mr Lyons was left tied up in the boot of a car for hours. Photo: Supreme Court of Victoria/Victoria Police.
Across the bar table, Thorn’s counsel had argued that Mr. Lyons had left the premises with Bottom and Smith and that he had no idea what they were up to.
He told the jury that 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 any man was “compliant” in the murder, regardless of who ultimately fired the fatal shot.
“In this case, we say the motive is very clear,” he said.
“This was nothing short of vigilante action, people taking law into their own hands and handing out vigilante justice.”
Thorn, Bottom and Smith were remanded in custody and will return to court for sentencing at a later date.