Collar bomb hoaxer gets 10 years
The man who strapped a hoax collar bomb around Sydney teenager Madeleine Pulver’s neck has been jailed for at least 10 years.
Paul Douglas Peters had no reaction as Judge Peter Zahra imposed a maximum sentence of 13 years and six months in the District Court in Sydney this morning.
Peters, 52, had pleaded guilty to aggravated breaking and entering and detaining with advantage over the incident on August 3 last year.
He entered the Pulver family home at Mosman, on Sydney’s lower north shore, armed with an aluminium baseball bat and the fake bomb, which he attached around Ms Pulver’s neck after cornering her in her bedroom.
A document attached to the fake device demanded an unspecified sum of money and said tampering with it would cause it to explode.
The incident sparked a 10-hour police operation before the device was confirmed as a hoax.
Peters has been in custody since he was arrested in the US a couple of weeks later and extradited to NSW.
During sentence hearings, the judge was told Peters had no memory of attaching the collar bomb and now believed his actions were “bizarre and stupid”.
A forensic psychiatrist said he suffered from “major depression“ in the months before the incident and had taken on the role of a character in a book he was writing.
But crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen, SC, said Peters got the wrong house when he targeted Ms Pulver and then lied about not being able to remember the incident.
She submitted he meant to target a neighbour of the Pulver family after he suffered financial losses and described it as “an act of urban terrorism”.
