A kind-hearted fugitive who was on the run for 30 years reunited a family with their lost treasure as a final good deed before giving himself up.
Darko ‘Dougie’ Desic was recently returned to jail to serve out the rest of his sentence for supplying marijuana after breaking out of prison in 1992.
Desic handed himself in to Sydney police after being left penniless, homeless and jobless when his cash-only handyman work dried up during Covid.
But before he surrendered to Dee Why police, he asked a friend to find the owner of a gold medal he had found while living rough on Avalon Beach.
And as a result, he made sure the treasured medal found its way back to an Anzac war hero’s family.
Fugitive Darko Desic asked a friend to find the owner of a gold medal he stumbled across while sleeping rough on Avalon Beach. It was found to belong to the family of war hero Ernest May (pictured)
Darko Desic, 64, (pictured) escaped from Grafton jail in 1992 and fled to Avalon on Sydney’s Northern Beaches where he worked for cash as a stonemason known as ‘Dougie’ and escaped detection for decades
The Great War victory medal was awarded in 1919 to Ernest Charles May who was inspired to enlist by the sacrifice of Anzacs at Gallipoli, A Current Affair reported.
Mr May earned the medal after being wounded three times while fighting on the frontlines in France and miraculously survived being buried for two days in a collapsed trench.
He was then gassed with poison mustard gas, badly injuring him again before he went deaf from helping fire huge shells from massive cannons.
In 1962, 50 years after his return from France, Mr May gave his medals to his nephew, John Paul Bell, in Melbourne.
Mr Bell moved to Sydney as an adult and lost the prized victory medal, which by now was on his keyring, while walking on Avalon Beach.
When Desic became destitute in 2020, he lived on the sand at Avalon and happened to find the medal in the dunes where he was sleeping.
Before he was locked up again, his last act was to ask friend Scott Mathewson, who lives at Whale Beach, to find who the medal belonged to.
‘He said: ‘I think this belonged to a very, very brave man”,’ revealed Mr Mathewson.
Ernest May (pictured) earned the medal after being wounded three times fighting on the French frontline and miraculously survived being buried for two days in a collapsed trench
Darko Desic used a metal hacksaw to cut through the bars on his jail cell windows at Grafton prison (pictured) before stealing bolt cutters from a shed to get through the fence to freedom
Mr Matthewson asked for the help of Northern Beaches media which led to Mr Bell opening his local Pittwater Life magazine to see a photo of his uncle’s war medal staring back at him.
Darko Desic, 64, (pictured 30 years ago) has a minimum of just over one year and a one month to serve of his outstanding sentence before he can apply for parole
Desic, now 64, is set to be released on parole as early as August 2022, but there are concerns he will be deported to Serbia – even though he fears for his safety there.
It was the fear of being sent back to his homeland which first sent him on the run and turned him into a fugitive for three decades.
In the middle of the night on August 1, 1992, he used a metal hacksaw to cut through the bars on his jail cell windows and squeezed out into the prison yard.
He then broke into a workshop and grabbed a pair of bolt cutters to get through the prison fence to freedom.
He then went on the run before ending up in Avalon where he worked cash-in-hand doing odd jobs for the beachside suburb’s wealthy locals, earning their love and respect in the process.
Both Mr Mathewson and Mr Bell believe Mr May would have understood Desic’s choices and see the unlikely intersection of their long stories as a tale of ‘mateship’.
They hope Desic will be allowed to remain in Australia when he is released.
Friends of Desic, who was well regarded during his time living around Avalon, have raised $34,000 to help fund his legal costs via GoFundMe in the hope he will be allowed to stay in Australia when he is finally released.
