Some of Steven Vendervelden’s most memorable cases could be scripts from tragic black comedies. So absurd are some of the facts, they feel more akin to a Quentin Tarantino classic than real-life scenarios.
Sitting in an armchair in the loungeroom of a friend’s house in Fremantle, Vandervelden looks happy, relaxed, and miles away from the nefarious world in which he spent so many years chasing some of America’s most wanted.
For 34 years, he dedicated his life to solving complex, often cross-border crimes – and he had to use a significant amount of courage, creativity, and innovation to do it.
Vandervelden qualified as a lawyer in the 80s, when Wall Street was thumping and huge salaries were being thrown at law graduates to lure them into the fray of big finance, mergers and acquisitions.
Vandervelden, though, had other ideas.
“I had four or five job offers, and one was from a Wall Street firm, which, in 1987, was paying $70,000 a year. I elected to take a job as a prosecutor instead, making a little more than $28,000 a year,” he says.
“I never wanted it to be about the money. I enjoyed being able to sleep at night knowing I had done something that was positive and for the public good.”
For five of his 34 years in the public service, Vandervelden was Deputy Chief of the Homicide Bureau.
“I could tell you stories all day long,” he says.
Of all the homicide stories (and there are many), there is one that sticks in his mind – primarily because it highlighted to him the importance of not giving up and testing different angles.
A 14-year-old girl had been raped and murdered in Westchester, New York, and the case had gone cold. One day, however, Vandervelden picked up the file and decided to give it another look with fresh eyes.
It was the late 90s, and the use of DNA to solve crimes was still in its infancy. Vandervelden and his colleagues could still only ask – rather than compel – suspects to volunteer their DNA.
One of the early suspects, who had been 16 at the time of the murder, had adamantly refused to offer his DNA. After further digging, Vandervelden discovered this suspect also had an alibi witness.
So they paid this witness a visit. When they got there, the witness said: “I know why you’re here – because of the incident that happened on New Year’s Eve a few years back.”
As it turns out, the witness was referring to an entirely different incident on a different date with a different victim. Vandervelden also knew of another unsolved rape and murder in the area. The dots joined, and it was at this point he realised they might be looking at a serial killer.
“I asked the lab to essentially run the DNA of the three samples from the three victims, and it came up a hit that the same person had raped and murdered them,” he recalls.
In the meantime, the 16-year-old suspect had landed in jail for committing reckless endangerment for shooting a gun outside. Because of this, they were able to access his DNA. And, sure enough, it was his DNA on the three murder victims.
“He was just about to get out of jail. So, he was a serial killer that, you know, but for me picking up a file one day and saying – ‘You know what? Let’s see if I can solve this’ – would have gotten away with it.”
Sticking it to the mob
After homicide, Vandervelden’s next stop was the organised crime unit, with infamous mobs such as the Chinese Triads, Dominicans, Colombians, and Albanians in his sights, as well as gang-affiliated groups such as the Bloods, the Crips, and the Latin Kings.
There is one case which stands out from the others. And – spoiler alert – it’s wild.
In the late 90s, a gang was terrorising New York neighbourhoods through a series of home invasions. They would enter the homes in the early hours of the morning, disable the alarms and cut the electricity. They knew the inhabitants were home, and that’s just how they wanted it.
Once inside, the gang would tie up the victims and ask for keys or combinations to safes. If these weren’t volunteered, the gang would torture the victims and use force, if necessary, to escape with the loot. They would then always call for a car to come and pick them up.
Two weeks after an elderly couple had been violently relieved of millions of dollars’ worth of valuable coins, the gang committed a similar crime in the same area. But this time they made a mistake.
“The first mistake was that the safe they were expecting to be in the house was not in the house. [The victims] owned a restaurant, and so the safe was in the restaurant,” recounts Vandervelden.
“They then tortured these people for valuables, and they were in the house for three and a half hours. And so, about 6.30am, they had taken all the jewellery and other things they had located in the house, made a phone call, got picked up, and left.”
Vandervelden and the police got together to figure out how they could solve these crimes. A witness had seen the gang members – faces covered, wearing gloves. They were clearly professionals. They also had Albanian accents. But that was about all they had to go on.
Then Vandervelden had a brainwave.
“Because the crimes had taken place from about three in the morning to 6.30 in the morning, I decided to do something that I think was the first time it had been done in the United States at the time,” he says.
“I decided to dump the cell towers, because the only piece of evidence I was certain of is that a phone call was made to be picked up at about 6.30am. I looked to see if I could find the same phone or phones being used during that time period. We were very fortunate, of course, that the crimes didn’t happen at three in the afternoon to six at night, where the number of calls would have been unbelievable, and the repetitiveness of certain phones would have been frequent.”
Vandervelden and his team found two active phones being used during that time period on the dates in question. The phones were subpoenaed.
In the meantime, while Vandervelden and his team were waiting for the subpoena results to come in, three men were stopped by police on the highway in the middle of the night. The driver of the vehicle was told to open the boot. As he opened it, the policeman walked to the back of the car to inspect it, and the driver took off.
A safe tumbled out of the boot and onto the highway as the men made a dash for it. A few miles down the road, the trio ditched the car and headed into the woods on foot. Dogs and helicopters were brought in to find them.
One of the men was caught. And what did he have in his phone? The two subpoenaed phone numbers. And the men had just committed another home invasion, hence the safe.
So now Vandervelden had a dilemma.
“On the one hand, you can identify who those individuals are,” says Vandervelden.
“Once identified and once you have probable cause, you could do search warrants at their homes and, upon doing so, you could prosecute them based on whatever evidence you’ve accumulated.
“The downside is that if you’re wrong about the location they’re hiding proceeds, or they’ve gotten rid of the proceeds and the evidence is limited upon the search warrants, they will know the police are onto them and will change the way they do things – or maybe stop doing them.”
There are reasons to go in that direction regardless, says Vandervelden, but there is another, riskier direction.
“The other option is to try to catch them in the act. Put tracking devices on their cars. Listen to their conversations, to their planning, and hope we will catch them as they’re about to do something,” he explains.
“But there’s a huge risk there. That either they change what they’re doing or that somebody could get hurt.
And clearly the last thing you want to ever see happen is somebody getting hurt.”
But, as is true to Vandervelden’s character, he took the risk.
They listened into the calls on the subpoenaed phones. The gang members spoke about the coins, the jewellery, the victims. Then they started scoping out a new target in the area.
The new target was an older couple who had owned a pharmacy in the Bronx since the 1930s. Since then, each time someone paid in cash, they had brought it home and stored it in their garage. They had amassed a small fortune.
Unbeknownst to the gang scoping out the home, a couple of weeks earlier, the couple had moved the bulk of the fortune – around $700,000 – into the boot of their Jaguar while they carried out some renovations on their property. Another $50,000 was stored in the safe.
The night the gang struck the police had somewhat lost track of them. They had become suspicious that they were being watched and mixed up their modus operandi. They used walkie talkies instead of phones. They used different cars. They then broke into the house.
In a bizarre coincidence, as they were breaking in, police were called to an unrelated burglary a few streets away and came into the neighbourhood with lights and sirens blaring.
The gang made a break for it, thinking the police were there for them. There was no time to call for a pickup. So how did they get away? They stole the Jaguar with the $700,000 in the boot.
Unfortunately for the gangsters – a few kilometres down the road and completely oblivious to the bounty in the car – they abandoned the stolen Jaguar and were picked up by an accomplice.
The other key mistake they made, says Vandervelden, chuckling at the memory, was to leave a balaclava in the Jaguar, sprinkled with a convenient amount of dandruff. The crooks were arrested shortly afterwards once a DNA hit was obtained. Bail was set at $50,000.
“Just when you think the story is almost over, one of the friends of one of the defendants shows up at the jail to bail out his friend with the stolen $50,000 they had taken from safe,” says Vandervelden, shaking his head.
“The people who were in charge in the jail that night, one of the guys was a captain, and it turns out he had been collecting money all his life. So, when this money shows up at the jail, he sees notes from the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s and he’s like, this is really unusual – $50,000 cash just spanning time.”
Unbeknownst to the gangsters, they had just handed over, in the form of musty old cash, a key piece of evidence linking them to the run of home invasions. It was case closed. And it makes a great story.
The power of creativity
Vandervelden has always had a passion for telling stories from behind the lens of a camera. Even when he was working with forensics teams at gruesome murder scenes, he’d sometimes take the camera and frame the shots for maximum impact.
So, when it came time for a career change, it was a no-brainer.
Vandervelden had been a teaching assistant at the International Center for Photography in Manhattan, something he did as a side hustle at night whilst prosecuting. In exchange, he was able to use a studio for his own projects. He started doing fashion shoots, and word of mouth spread quickly.
After years of honing his skills and experimenting with his passion, Vandervelden is now a globally renowned dance photographer, working with some of the world’s best dance companies. Often, though, he doesn’t charge professional dancers – he knows that most of them aren’t swimming in cash.
It’s his work shooting the stars of the West Australian Ballet and STRUT Dance that brings him to Perth this time around, before he springboards to Cambodia, Japan, South America and beyond.
His work is simply breathtaking, and his ability to play with light and form creates images the brain sometimes struggles to makes sense of. Working with dancers such as West Australian Ballet’s Principal Artist Juan Carlos Osma, whose body pushes the limits of what is physically possible, has become his trademark.
And he’s very, very good at it.
Vandervelden has long found an outlet in creative pursuits; an escape from the heaviness of his professional life.
“It was always a fantastic outlet, and it gave me the ability to focus on other things,” he says.
“I’ve always told people that, you know, when I’m in the studio and I’m working with dancers or acrobats or whatever it may be, there’s no stress. I could live forever in the studio.”
But Vandervelden is quick to clarify that his creativity was not used solely behind the camera.
“I use creativity all the time when I’m in the studio, but I used creativity all the time to catch the bad guys, too,” he says.
“It’s thinking outside the box. I would say to any prosecutor, or any lawyer, that you can put your head in the box, and you can research things all you want, but when you’re dealing with real life stuff, you’ve got to think, alright, how am I going to solve this? What is my evidence? What can I do in this particular case?
“It’s the same thing in the courtroom. What witnesses am I putting on the stand and who’s going to be my first witness? Who’s going to be my last witness? The best lawyers are the ones who think creatively.”
Something that comes less naturally, perhaps, is Vandervelden’s ability to promote himself, but one of his daughters has assisted him with creating and building an Instagram presence to showcase the breadth and depth of his genius.
And while Vandervelden is clearly relishing his new life as a full-time creative, it must be asked: does he miss the thrill of the chase after so many years as a prosecutor?
“It’s sort of nice to escape it at this point in my life, but I do still miss it, yeah,” he admits.
“When I see a case like [the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson], I miss it. I love the chase – let’s catch the bad guy! I love that aspect of it. It was fantastic, yes, and I do miss that excitement.”
Note from the author:
Since this interview with Steven, it turns out that he really did miss it … he is still taking the world by storm with his photography but has also recently started a new role as Special Counsel to the United States Attorney of the District of Columbia. We wish him all the very best in his new role.
To see more to Steven’s photography work, you can follow him on Instagram: @vandyphotography
This article originally appeared in Issue 52, December 2025, of the Brief magazine, produced by the Law Society.
Issue 53 is due to be published and posted to Law Society members in late June 2026.
