Dane Sweetman is a neo-Nazi axe murderer.
He’s also:
1) out on parole;
2) allegedly responsible for a violent assault on patrons at The Tote Hotel (71 Johnston St (cnr Wellington St.) Collingwood).
Released in early October of last year, it appears not to have taken very long — about three months — for Sweetman to find himself back in trouble. If the report is correct — and you can find a rather tedious discussion of it here — then Sweetman has no doubt broken his parole and will be going back into custody.
But who’s Dane Sweetman anyway?
Neo-Nazi axe-murderer due for release
By Mark Buttler and Paul Anderson * September 10, 2005
A NEO-NAZI axe murderer who boasted of waging a bloody race war on Melbourne streets will be free within weeks.
Dane Sweetman, who bashed Asians and gays, and firebombed synagogues, was granted parole after a hearing in June. It was his first bid for parole and will save him from another five years in jail.
Sweetman, 36, will be released from Fulham Prison, Gippsland, on October 3.
He has been behind bars since 1990 when he killed Adelaide man [and fellow neo-Nazi] David Noble with an axe at a party to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
A year later, on the day he was sentenced in the Supreme Court, he sparked a security furore by plunging a home-made knife into the dock.
Sweetman also has convictions for a sex offence, attempted murder, malicious wounding, possessing a pistol, intentionally causing serious injury and assault with a weapon.
The Herald Sun learned of Sweetman’s impending release through independent sources.
Adult Parole Board secretary David Provan said releases were not made public unless it was in the public interest, such as the recent freeing of notorious pedophile Brian Keith Jones.
Mr Provan said the board granted parole to Sweetman so there would be a period in which he could be monitored. A source said Sweetman started his jail term as an uncooperative, violent and foul-mouthed prisoner, but had kept out of trouble in recent years.
Another source said Sweetman still believed in the neo-Nazi movement.
The source said Sweetman was a feared individual who, he hoped, would walk from prison a changed man, but had a reputation of contempt for authority.
“He has shown contempt for the system. I would not like to be his parole officer,” the source said.
“I have heard Sweetman is still very feared within the prison system, and still holds true to neo-Nazi views.”
The source said Sweetman was known to harbour a hatred of police. Sweetman became a neo-Nazi while in prison in the years before the Noble murder. He and fellow extremists in Pentridge Prison formed a group called The Guard.
Internet references suggest that he may have supporters in the community.
On one website [bovination: google cache] where people can post their views about sex, religion and politics, a person has written under the name Dane Sweetman: “I’ve noticed that letters in the paper in support of the war are usually from Jews in Jewish enclaves. I’d like to see another holocaust. Any takers?”
It is highly unlikely Sweetman personally posted the message because prisoners do not have access to the internet [and is therefore largely irrelevant].
Sweetman’s hate-filled jail diaries said he wanted to kill drug users, doctors, teachers, police, priests, pornographers and homosexuals.
He boasted that the day after his 1989 release, he firebombed a synagogue. The next day he attacked a man at a Thornbury halfway house, believing he was gay.
He bragged of launching a brutal attack on a woman in Fitzroy because she had an Asian boyfriend.
Sweetman’s freedom ended when he and Martin Darren Bayston attacked the English-born Mr Noble at the Hitler birthday celebrations at a Pascoe Vale South house.
Things got out of hand when Mr Noble said that they didn’t make women like Sweetman’s girlfriend in England, and asked if he could borrow her for the night.
Sweetman, on bail over the Thornbury assault, responded by embedding an axe in Mr Noble’s head.
Mr Noble apparently pulled the weapon out and said: “I’ve got a hammer in my head.”
Bayston then got a boning knife from the kitchen and stabbed Mr Noble 18 times.
His body was left in the backyard until morning when his legs were severed and the remains stuffed in a car boot and dumped near the Yarra River at Kew.
Some devotees of Melbourne’s punk scene have long memories of Sweetman.
On the Melbourne Punx Forum website, contributors recently spoke of Sweetman and others trashing a gig at a Melbourne venue and assaulting staff and patrons.
And so we come full circle?
More background on Sweetman is provided in Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters: A Crime Companion by John Silvester and Andrew Rule.
DANE Sweetman was a small-time criminal and full-time loser when he embraced the racist world of neo-Nazis while serving two years jail for armed robbery. His love of violence was ingrained. He had been found guilty of attempted murder by age 16.
But it was while in jail in the late 1980s that Sweetman found a violent cause to match his vicious nature. As far as he was concerned, he was no longer just another head case, he was a political freedom fighter. He covered himself in tattoos, including swastikas, Nazi skinheads, KKK and Native White Protestants Supreme. From within jail, Sweetman wrote to colleagues urging them to violence and providing plans on bomb-making. In one letter, Sweetman told a Nazi sympathiser how a group of Right-wing fanatics had a secret organisation called “The Guard” in Pentridge prison in 1987. “Give the dogs what they deserve, full-on racial warfare, there is no stopping us when we’ve started,” he wrote. From jail, Sweetman provided detailed plans for a car bomb. “I’ve seen them blow the entire back end off a Commodore,” he wrote. In his rambling jail diary, “Dance of the Skin, Reflections of a Neo Nazi Skinhead”, Sweetman gave an insight into the mind of a disturbed racist. He said that while in prison in the 1980s he developed his Manifesto for Racial Warfare. He declared he wanted to kill drug users, pushers, homosexuals, doctors, teachers, police, child molesters, priests and pornographers.
“We recruited men within the jail and even some in blue for the purpose of information. There are many screws (prison officers) who espouse our Guard philosophy, some are Klan (Ku Klux Klan).” In his diary, Sweetman claims responsibility for a secret war on the streets of Melbourne. He admitted a series of crimes, including murder, arson, stabbings, bashings and street assaults. “The day after my release (in December, 1989) we set about and thus fire-bombed the St Kilda Road Synagogue. The Yids were furious.” He said his group returned the following day and daubed the synagogue with racist taunts and Nazi slogans before throwing more fire bombs. “We then made our petrol bombs right there on the street. It was a job well done.”
He said that soon after his release he began to walk around the city. “The place was awash with yellow, black and mongrel brown faces.” He gloated over details of his gang attacking two Asian men in the city and using a razor to slash one’s throat. He wrote about attacking another man because he suspected he was a homosexual. Sweetman said he brought gloves and balaclavas at a city army disposal shop for the job. His gang wrapped the man’s head in a sheet and beat his genitals with a baton and Sweetman jumped on five of his ribs. Like many of his German Nazi heroes, he was hypocritical about homosexuality. He had already been charged with the sexual penetration of a male under 16. As a payback against the man who informed police of an assault, Sweetman wrote, he built another bomb. “l sat the bomb at the base of the front door, I lit the fuse and ran…”Later that night we drove back to the scene. The house was a scene of utter destruction, the front door was nowhere to be seen, the veranda had a huge gaping hole in it and the brickwork surrounding the door was blackened and ruined. The paper said no-one was hurt which was unfortunate as we wanted to see as many hurt and maimed as possible.”
He wrote with pride of kicking a young woman in the street because she had an Asian boyfriend. By the time he was 22, he had been charged with attempted murder, malicious wounding, intentionally cause serious injury, possession of a pistol, assault with a weapon, armed robbery, assault by kicking and murder.
When police arrested him as a teenager, they went to his room and found the walls covered with posters from horror movies, and kit creatures from horror movies. They also found two sawn-off shotguns and a canister of cyanide in a secret storage area. A policeman, who wrote a report on Sweetman in the early days, stated with bureaucratic understatement: “The defendant appears to be pre-occupied with violence”.
In 1991, on his birthday, December 19, he was sentenced to 20 years with a minimum of 15 for the murder of David Noble. He expected a longer sentence. Sweetman murdered Noble with an axe at a party to celebrate Hitler’s birthday on April 20, 1990, and then cut the legs off the body before dumping the remains in the Boulevard, Kew. He stunned the court when he produced a prison ‘shiv’ and slammed it into the bench, saying he had it to kill a police witness. Sweetman is due out of jail in November 2005, but few believe he is reformed. He has a written hit list of 11 witnesses and police he intends to attack. “Your day is coming,” he wrote. But while Sweetman has vowed war against the world, mainstream prisoners are tired of him.
His predatory sexual behaviour in jail has resulted in him becoming an outcast. On December 30, 1994, five of Australia’s toughest prisoners went to see Sweetman. The committee was a murderer, a drug dealer, an armed robber and two brothers with violent records. “They told Sweetman that he was a boy raper and a dog. They said they knew he was providing sweets and canteen goods to a group of younger prisoners in return for sexual favours,” a prison source said. “He was told he was to be put off (murdered).” Next day he put himself into protection in Barwon prison. But on seven occasions notes were put under his cell door telling him he would be killed. In March 1995, he was moved to the protection unit in K Division in Pentridge. Fellow inmates included Paul Denyer, the Frankston triple murderer, multiple rapist and double killer Raymond “Mr Stinky” Edmunds, and Hoddle street mass murderer Julian Knight.
