escalating violence in our community Become a member of the Sensible Sentencing Trust

Mouseover links for full page descriptions

Offender Databases Eugene Young

Eugene Kenneth Young

Alias

.

Offences

A string of bank robberies in Queenstown and Auckland between December 1997 and June 1998
Cultivating cannabis while on parole from the robberies in February 2008
A substantial list of other convictions for cannabis cultivation, cannabis possession, possession of pipes, wilful damage driving while disqualified, breaches of periodic detention and community work etc

Victims

.

Offender Affiliations

.

Gang affiliations

none known

Age

Born 1969

Current Location

Prison

Parole/Release Dates

Sentenced to ten years in June 1998
Released February 2005
Sentenced to three years in February 2009

Background
From a Dominion article 26/06/1998
The serial bank robber who terrorised the staff and customers of eight banks did it all for the love of a woman, the sentencing judge heard yesterday.

Eugene Kenneth Young was sentenced in Wellington District Court to 10 years imprisonment for each of eight charges of aggravated robbery, with the sentences to be served concurrently. Mr Young, in the dock on his 29th birthday yesterday with his family gathered in the public gallery, received his sentence from Judge Patrick Keane quietly. The woman whom the court was told he loved, an overseas tourist who had travelled the length of New Zealand with him, was not in court. She had been unaware their holiday was being financed by bank robberies from Queenstown to Auckland.

Defence counsel Peter Tomlinson told the court that Young's companion had been unable to "understand his emotional states". The woman, who is still in New Zealand, was said to be startled and upset at learning of his crimes, and did not wish to be identified. Mr Tomlinson said Young's offences stemmed from lies he had told the woman about the amount of money he had and his access to funds, "in order to impress her and stay with her".

"In the end he was caught by his own lies. He'd lied to her, the first person he had become involved with on more than a superficial level for some time." Mr Tomlinson said Young's fear of losing the woman was founded in the death of his mother when he was 7, and the subsequent loss of his father to alcoholism.

Judge Keane told Young: "Your offending may not have involved actual violence. It did involve terror. Your method may not have been highly sophisticated. It was highly effective. "Luck, as well as good police work, brought your offending to a halt." Afterward, Detective Sergeant Shane Cotter, of Wellington, who was in charge of the investigation, said: "The sentence was within the range we expected for the amount and nature of (Young's) offending." Six of Young's eight robberies were of Westpac Trust branches. Westpac Trust security and investigations manager Terry Mortensen said: "Irrespective of the length of the sentence, some of his victims will still be suffering when he is released."

---

Corrections and Additional Information
We endeavour to make this database as accurate as possible, but we are at the mercy of whatever information we can find in various online and offline archives. We rely on the public - that is, people like you - to fill in the gaps that we cannot. If you wish to submit additional information or a correction to this file CLICK HERE . Privacy: Trust policy is that all sources are treated as strictly confidential unless we are explicitly told otherwise. If you wish to see a file removed from this database certain conditions must be met by the offender set out HERE Note that this does NOT apply for those that are the primary offender in a murder, rape, or any sexual offending involving minors. We do not enter into correspondence regarding the guilt/innocence of offenders. Such correspondence is not responded to, especially if the offender concerned has a number of prior convictions

Back to Top