Notorious Illawarra criminal Belinda Van Krevel will spend the next two Christmases behind bars after she was slapped with a minimum 15-month jail term on Tuesday for stealing an elderly woman’s handbag.
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Magistrate Michael Stoddart labelled the 37-year-old’s conduct on the afternoon March 16 “pathetic” and rejected lawyer Stewart Holt’s last-minute bid to have Van Krevel assessed for a community-based sentence in lieu of jail.
“It was a bag snatch, not a grab or a tussle,” Mr Holt said in submitting that the court would find the offence fell towards the bottom end of the scale in terms of severity.
He said Van Krevel risked losing her NSW Housing unit if she was jailed.
However, Magistrate Stoddart said no sentence other than full-time prison was appropriate given the serious nature of the crime, Van Krevel’s poor criminal record and the fact she was already on court bonds for unrelated offences at the time.
“Anyone reading these facts would be alarmed at what happened here,” he said in Wollongong Local Court on Tuesday afternoon.
“A 72-year-old lady is in a cafe, leaves her bag on the chair and you just come along and take advantage of that. It’s just pathetic your behaviour.”
Van Krevel became a household name in 2001 when she was tried and found guilty of soliciting her then-lover Keith Schreiber to kill her father Jack Van Krevel with a tomahawk.
She was released from custody after spending six years in jail, however her life continued to be punctuated by run-ins with the law, including two years behind bars for the repeated stabbing of another partner in a unit at Rockdale in 2013.
She made headlines again last year after her most recent boyfriend, Glenn McKechnie, was convicted of assaulting and stalking her and sent to jail.
Around the same time Van Krevel herself was charged with pawning a stolen mobile phone and methylamphetamine possession.
She was serving good behaviour bonds for both offences when she carried out the bag snatch
Polcie arrested Van Krevel on March 20. She was twice released on bail and twice skipped scheduled court appearances, leading to her arrest last Wednesday, at which time she was remanded in custody.
She will be released on parole in February 2019.
