TRUE CRIME
A WOMAN IS AWOKEN DURING THE NIGHT AND BRUTALLY RAPED BY 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.
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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.
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”.
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.
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.
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,
POLICE LIFE | WINTER 2021
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. “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 investigationrelated material as possible.
