EXCLUSIVE
The serial rapist brother of TV star Denise Roberts has walked free from jail despite being a high risk offender who enjoys hurting woman and has a potential diagnosis of ‘sexual sadism’.
Andrew Cole – also known by a variety of names including Robert Cole and Andrew David Robertson – is a convicted rapist and armed robber who made national headlines by crash dieting to squeeze through the bars and escape from Sydney‘s notorious Long Bay Jail.
He was recaptured within three days of his extraordinary January 2006 escape.
Then aged 36 – and 14kg lighter than the 70kgs he had been when incarcerated – Cole was locked up, again, in maximum security at Silverwater prison. Cole was eventually released from prison in June 2008.
The following month, he committed a serious sex offence against a woman whose home he broke into at 2.30am and forced his way in the bedroom of her children, aged four and seven.
This was the last time until now that the sexual predator, who has repeatedly reoffended while in parole, was outside jail.
Serial rapist Andrew Cole is seen under arrest at Maroubra police station three days after his extraordinary ‘crash diet’ escape from Long Bay jail. Cole is the brother of Packed To The Rafters actress Denise Roberts who based the Hugh Jackman role in Corelli on him
Cole’s Long Bay cell where he lost 14kg as he chipped away at bricks and then slipped through the bars leaving prison guards to find a pillow, clothing in washing bags, and socks filled with tissues in his bed to simulate a body
Chilling sexual assault
In what a judge would later describe as ‘chilling’ and a ‘gross violation’, Cole tightly tied the wrists of the woman, AC, blindfolded her and threatened to harm her family if she didn’t perform a sex act upon him.
According to a NSW Supreme Court judgment, Cole asked AC’s daughter to show him where her parents were, and she obliged. AC was woken and heard Mr Cole say, ‘just keep quiet and you won’t get hurt.
AC saw Cole standing next to her daughter and holding the family’s pet dog. Cole told the daughter: ‘get on the bed face down. Don’t look at me’, then demanded money from AC who gave him $30 from her purse.
Mr Cole then tied AC up, covered her mouth with a gag and blindfolded her. Mr Cole threatened AC and said, ‘Don’t be a hero, you’ve got a young family, you don’t want them to get hurt’.
Andrew Cole is a serial rapist and violent offender whose prison romance was the basis for movie star Hugh Jackman’s breakout role in TV series Corelli, written by Cole’s actress sister Denise Roberts
AC freed her arms but when she attempted to call emergency on her mobile, he threatened her, re-tied her even tighter, so that when Cole agreed to untie her because of the pain, he couldn’t do it and used scissors.
He kept AC blindfolded, and he sprayed what smelled like bleach around AC’s home because he did not want his DNA detected.
He told her if she didn’t agree to a sex act while still blindfolded, he would ‘do [her] children’, then required she remain with him for hours.
Around 6.00 am, she asked him to leave, saying she wouldn’t call police. Refusing to leave her children behind, she drove him to Hunters Hill, then immediately on to a police station.
Cole was sentenced for offences of take/detain for an advantage, and aggravated sexual assault to a maximum of 14 years expiring on July 30, 2024.
Judge Peter Berman said ‘it was difficult to imagine a more serious offence. There were children present … and (Cole) took advantage of that by threatening them with sexual assault in order to obtain the complainant’s cooperation’.
Last year, the State of NSW applied to have Cole placed under a three-year extended Supervision Order on release, with strict conditions.
NSW Supreme Court Justice Dina Yehia conducted hearings to determine if Cole posed an unacceptable risk to the community of committing a serious offence.
Actress Denise Roberts (left and right in Packed to the Rafters) wrote and produced the 1995 TV series Corelli based on Cole’s prison affair starring Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness
Her Honour’s judgment noted Cole and Denise Roberts grew up in Papua New Guinea, had an an alcoholic and abusive father and their mother left when Cole was young.
He engaged in drug and alcohol abuse, fights, and truancy as a teenager, and after leaving school worked as a bar attendant, on a cattle station, in a hardware store and and as a labourer.
The famous prison relationship
‘In the 1990s, the defendant began a relationship with a custodial psychologist’, Justice Yehia’s judgment says, and Cole ‘reported that the psychologist provided him with naked photographs of herself to help him develop more appropriate sexual fantasies.
‘The defendant has a history of interacting inappropriately with female custodial staff including exposing himself and propositioning female staff.’
Denise Roberts, known for acting in the medical soap GP and series, Packed to the Rafters, wrote and produced the 1995 TV series Corelli based on Cole’s prison affair with the jail psychologist as a tale of love, intrigue, betrayal and murder.
Denise Roberts wrote, produced and acted in Corelli with Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness who married the year after starring in the TV series based on Roberts’ brother’s prison romance
After meeting on the 1995 series Corelli, Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness married, had two children and then split in 2024
Louisa Correlli (Deborra-Lee Furness) is hired at an all-male prison where she forms a connection with Kevin Jones (Hugh Jackman), a hardened criminal. Denise Roberts had a part in it as as prison warden Helen Buckley.
A famous romance was sparked between Jackman and Furness. They married in 1996, they adopted a son in 2000 and a daughter in 2005 – until their well-publicised split late last year.
Andrew Cole, now aged 54, has an extensive criminal history since committing his first sex offence in 1988 when he grabbed a woman walking her dog at 11.25pm by the throat at knifepoint.
He asked if she wanted to be raped, threatened to cut her throat and face and kill her dog, and ran the blade of the knife down her right cheek and on her forehead before she escaped.
Two months later, while awaiting trial for that assault, he forced his way into a woman’s car and forced her to drive around for nine hours until 6am, then raped her repeatedly and forced her to withdraw $1,500 in cash from a bank.
Arrested days later, he escaped the following year while being taken to Westmead Hospital for treatment, but was almost immediately recaptured.
Robert Cole, as he was then known, lost 14kg and squeezed through the bars at Long Bay jail to pull off one of Australia’s most audacious escapes
He served six years before his December 1994 release and during this time had the relationship which inspired Corelli.
In April 1995 while on parole, he committed three robberies in company, was sentenced to three years, released in 1998, and again while on parole committed armed robberies, using a black replica handgun.
Denise Roberts continued to support her brother while he was incarcerated, visiting him in Long Bay Prison Hospital where the siblings conversed in Tok Pisin, the PNG language learnt in their youth.
On January 18, 2006, he placed a pillow, clothing in washing bags, and socks filled with tissues in his bed to simulate the shape of a body.
He’d removed the perspex pane of his window and chipped away with an implement at a section of brick wall below the window while losing weight in the weeks prior to his escape.
After squeezing himself through a tiny gap between the brick and iron bars, he climbed a roof, scaled a seven-metre high wall, and made it through the razor wire, cutting himself.
At the time Cole was blond, with a tattoo of a skull on his left upper forearm and an Indian tattoo on the right of his back.
He was apprehended on January 21, 2006 at Bondi Junction’s Oxford Street mall in the city’s east, despite an attempt to disguise himself by painting a black goatee on his face with mascara.
Three days after his famous ‘crash diet escape’, Cole was arrested at Bondi Junction, returned to jail, released again, then committed his chilling rape of a woman in front of her young children
Charged with escape, he was released in 2008, and reoffended against the mother-of-two, AC, eight weeks later, committing the sexual assault which kept him in prison again until last year.
In assessing Cole for release, one psychiatrist said he had ‘alcohol, cannabis, stimulant and opioid use disorders, in addition to antisocial personality disorder of which “deceitfulness and impulsivity have been chronic features’,
The psychiatrist also ‘raised the possibility’ of a sexual sadism diagnosis.
A second practitioner said Cole had ‘a high level of psychopathy and he poses a high risk. You need a very rigorous approach to managing those conditions, and I think with him substance misuse is so central that if he’s taking substances it’s an “act now” situation’.
Cole has been released under a December 2024 order with multiple conditions, including wearing an electronic monitoring anklet, not taking prohibited drugs, not possessing a weapon, nor pornographic, violent and classified material.
He must also not change his name from Andrew Cole, and must be photographed within a week if he significantly changes his appearance.
