Chapter 2

Back at the beginning

I was born in the safe cocoon of a small town called Yackandandah, about twenty minutes away from Wangaratta in country Victoria. We lived on a farm. My dad was a JP and owned the local butcher shop; my mum was a nurse and later the town mayor.

I was the youngest in a family of four, with one brother and two sisters. My big brother left home for an apprenticeship when I was just ten, and one of my older sisters got married, leaving just me and my other sister to be teenagers together. My childhood was idyllic. We never went without anything. Our folks were busy with civic duties, the shop and the farm, and we were left to our own devices a bit. Not that there was a lot of opportunity for mischief – the only waywardness available to us farm kids was the mischievous and illegal use of our trail bikes.

We had a close family relationship with the local policeman, Senior Constable Kevin Smith, who had clipped me behind the ear a couple of times for trail-bike tomfoolery. If he saw me and my mates out on our bikes, he never bothered chasing us, because he knew who we were. The way he dealt with it was to give Dad a ring, and then I’d cop it from both of them. Nonetheless, Smithy was a good bloke and I liked him. He was even the barman at my sister’s eighteenth birthday. Mine too. The fact that Smithy could clip us all across the ears then turn up at our family’s social functions holding a six-pack rather than a grudge was something that all the kids really admired. So I guess, if I think about it, Smithy was the role model for who I wanted to be.

On rare trips to Melbourne with my family, I always watched for policemen directing city traffic. I was mesmerised by what they did. My dad and my uncles were all butchers, and my brother and lots of cousins had followed in their footsteps. But me, I really wanted to break the mould. As a teenager, I did work experience at the Wodonga Hospital, and knew that it was going to be a toss-up between ambulance officer, fire fighter and cop.

After I finished school, I did exams from police forces all around Australia, and got accepted by all of the ones I applied for. In the end, I chose Victoria Police. I imagined I’d see lots of action in the city, although I had no idea what it would really be like. And I wanted action; as much as I admired Smithy, I didn’t want to be the one man in a one-man country police station.

 

I joined Victoria Police in 1988 when I was just nineteen years of age. Right from the start, I wanted to be the best cop I could be. I was keen to get ahead, and equally keen to do the hard yards to get there. I was never a short-cut kind of person.

Growing up in Yackandandah, I didn’t realise how sheltered my life was until I did nightshift around Kingville in Melbourne’s western suburbs in 1989. As a young constable, my eyes were opened in ways I’d never imagined: my first cot death; prostitution; a junkie collapsed in an alleyway; druggies doing unspeakable things for drug money; suicide; death.

You never forget your first death notification. My first death knock was to the family of a fireman who’d died in a car accident on Christmas Eve. From the doorway where I stood, hat in hand, I could tell the guy came from a nice family. Mum and Dad opened the door and saw us in uniform. For a moment, I think they thought we were there to ask for their son in a professional capacity. Then their eyes opened wide with the realisation that we were about to change their lives forever.

It wasn’t so much a learning curve as a learning cliff dive with a thin bungee cord. I saw so much before I turned twenty. And I coped the same way most cops coped back then. We went to the pub.

Debriefing down at the pub after work became not only a popular pastime but also a necessary one. My work buddies were as quick to listen to my horror stories as I was to theirs. It helped to talk about things that had made an impact – not that we talked about events in an emotional way, because we didn’t, but the retelling of the experience seemed to demystify it. And if that didn’t help, there was always the sliding scale of horror to give you perspective. If I was feeling crappy about delivering a death message, the bloke on the barstool next to me might have gone to a triple-fatal collision and delivered three death messages to the same family. What you saw might have been bad, but your mates’ stories were a constant reminder that things could always be worse.

In the bizarre police universe, we didn’t talk about how we felt about delivering the death message or attending the cot-death baby, but in a way, just saying it meant that nothing really built up inside. At least, nothing we’d ever admit to.

I can’t even imagine what our drinking conversations might have sounded like to civilians listening in.

My second death message was the polar opposite of the first, and it illustrated the diverse nature of the people cops dealt with. I had to do a death knock to tell a woman her son had been killed. As soon as she opened the door and saw two police officers on her doorstep, her face twisted with loathing.

‘Fuck off,’ she sneered. ‘I hate coppers.’

‘Ma’am, I need to deliver some news…’ I was persistent. I had to be.

‘Fuck off,’ she said, almost spitting at us.

‘Ma’am, your son has been killed,’ I said, hat in hand.

‘Fuck off,’ she said, slamming the door in our faces.

And that was that.

 

In Yackandandah, no-one locked their front door. We trusted our neighbours. We thought that all people told the truth. When you join the police force, you imagine that everyone is like that – decent people who respect the order of things. But within a couple of years, my thinking about the world had changed. It didn’t take me long to lose that trust, and it was a long struggle to get it back.

In one early experience, I picked up a weedy drug dealer who’d been caught shoplifting. At the police station, he swore black and blue that he’d give me information on lots of local crime if I’d help him with bail. My superiors encouraged me to go with it, so I helped him organise bail and arranged to meet the guy the next day. Of course, he didn’t show up, and I was left shaking my head, feeling like an idiot. I’d learnt a hard lesson.

Another time, I pulled a guy over in the western suburbs. He was driving a hotted-up car, and we got him on a .05 charge. We took him back to the station and put him in an interview room to ask him some questions. It later turned out that the car was stolen and the guy’s ID was false. But until this information came through on the computer check, the guy spun us all sorts of yarns.

In a break in the interview, a more senior officer asked who we had in the interview room. He recognised the name and asked if we’d searched the man.

‘No,’ I said, my stomach sinking.

The senior officer walked into the interview room and demanded the guy strip.

Obligingly, the guy peeled off layers of clothes. Each layer revealed a new weapon, including a gun strapped under his armpit, a scabbard with a lethal-looking knife, and an odd-looking weapon in one of his pockets – two handles strung together with a piece of wire for strangling your victim and possibly slicing into their throat. Until that moment, I didn’t even know what a garrotte was!

I felt sick to think that at any time during the interview, he could have pulled out one of those weapons and killed us.

That was definitely the start of my you-can’t-trust-anyone stage, but I knew I’d have to learn to pull back from that. You can’t live life without trusting most people – you just have to get better at picking the ones you can trust and the ones you can’t. I needed to be able to tell the difference.

While a lot of cops spend time in quiet suburban police stations, I went from Yackandandah to the western suburbs of Melbourne without much space in between. My way of learning on the job was to identify the detectives and senior officers whose qualities I admired, then watch how they operated. I made mental notes of the traits of the good detectives. The detective who read the newspapers every morning over four cups of coffee before he hit the streets wasn’t the detective I wanted to be. The detectives who took over the corner of the office, surrounded by piles of recovered stolen goods that they were processing – they were the ones I wanted to be like.

There is a huge difference between reactive and proactive policing. If you were interested, you could catch crooks every day of the week. And you didn’t do it sitting at your desk reading the newspapers. I spent a while stationed at Brunswick, where I’d make daily visits with my partner to the Sydney Road second-hand dealers and go through their books. We’d randomly pick names and addresses from their registers and go round and see people who’d sold stuff to the dealer. Many of them were crooks, and we charged them.

But it wasn’t all catching crooks.

One time, I talked a guy off the Moreland Road bridge. He was on the other side of the rails threatening to jump, and a bunch of cops had spent ages trying to talk him down. Finally, I got close enough to lurch forward and grab him. Work gave me a commendation for saving him, but my mates ribbed me about it, because the guy ended up being a crook and they all joked that I should have let him jump.

After Brunswick, I did a stint at D24, the police communications unit, which taught me a lot about Melbourne geography. Being from the country, I had little idea of the outer suburbs, but I soon learnt. The six months I spent there gave me a good understanding of how that area worked and how to utilise the resources available.

While D24 wasn’t seen as the pinnacle of policing, the division offered promotions to attract officers to go there. I met a lot of people who were there purely for promotion – a quick stepping-stone to something better. I understood that. I too had entered the police force with a burning desire to better myself and get promoted. My goal was to be a detective sergeant – a rank that was senior enough to still catch crooks. The perception was that any rank higher than a sergeant meant you spent a lot of time buried under piles of paperwork, polishing a seat with your bum.

While the police force has its share of petty jealousies, I think that I was well respected among my colleagues. I made sure I put in as many working hours as the best of them, and I was right there alongside others working as hard as me.

There used to be an automatic promotion after five years from constable to senior constable. Then the automatic promotion was removed and the non-promotion period shortened to four years. As soon as promotion opportunities came my way, I did everything I could to earn them. I transferred back to the country in 1991, both to get a wider range of experience and because I longed for home, country air, footy and folks I knew. I went to Wangaratta, about twenty minutes from my mum and dad’s place.

The police at Wangaratta had created a group to target drug crops and dealers and any criminal activity that arose from drugs. I was put into that group and went into plain clothes. Even so, the situation in Wangaratta was nothing like what I’d seen on the streets of Brunswick. The people in Wangaratta were nice, and it was refreshing to get a dose of humanity. No-one lied to you; no needle-addled junkies offered sexual favours in interviews in exchange for leniency. No-one carried a concealed garrotte. In fact, the people growing the drug crops were often farmers fallen on hard times.

I was refreshed and revived by the time my year there was up.

 

On the very day I qualified, I typed out an application for a more senior position. I soon got short-listed for a couple of jobs and was offered a senior constable position in the Protective Services Group (PSG) based at the old Russell Street police station. I started there in 1993. As the name suggests, the PSG protected witnesses, helped out other squads and sometimes went out on location to keep the peace at events like bikie rallies.

One of the first people I protected at a safe house was Wendy Peirce, wife of notorious criminal Victor Peirce. Wendy had been placed in witness protection after she gave evidence implicating her husband in the Walsh Street police shootings. On 12 October 1988, Constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, were gunned down after a routine call to check an abandoned car in Walsh Street, South Yarra. As a result of Wendy Peirce’s statement, four men – including her husband – were committed for trial.1

While I was one of the many police protecting her, most of us weren’t allowed to speak to her, so I gained little insight into her nature or the coming trial. I did, however, learn a huge lesson when, during the pre-trial hearing, she changed her story and denied ever seeing her husband with a gun. Without her testimony, there was nothing to link Victor Peirce to the murder weapon, and he and the others were found not guilty.

I tucked that knowledge away in the back of my mind: you can never rely on crooks who have something to gain. Their statements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

A typical day at the PSG would begin with a couple of hours of physical training. We might then be called in to do a line search for one of the detective squads. Or if there was a bikie event in a country town, a bunch of us would go and mingle with the bikies in an attempt to keep some kind of order. We had a ball: plain clothes, overnight expenses paid, use of a work car – fun times.

Despite the adventures, it was hard to get crook-catching out of my system – the PSG was more focused on protection than arrests. When I was away on trips, I couldn’t help myself; I kept arresting lawbreakers, which, ironically, was frowned upon, because it meant laying charges and then being called back to the country for days at a time to give evidence in the court cases.

Looking after protected witnesses taught me about the kind of people who ended up in that situation. Mostly, we were protecting people who had turned on their families or close friends for personal gain. It also taught me something about the criminal mind. While most of us would never turn on family or friends, and would die to protect the ones we love, these people were raised differently from us.

Being so keen to understand these things, I regarded every experience as something I could learn from. In my childhood in Yackandandah, human nature was a pretty simple study. Honest, kind, well-meaning people were easy to understand. It was the ones with the hidden agendas, always out for themselves – they were the ones I didn’t understand, but I knew I had to try, in order to do my job.

Protecting people like that was a thankless job. We protected them and they resented us. When we provided nice meals and clean accommodation, they hated us because they wanted McDonald’s and freedom – and often drugs. The ones we dealt with were after something and were trying to manipulate us. And we wanted their testimony, so we manipulated them in return.

I think it boiled down to survival. They were often people dealing their way out of their own criminal charges. Once everything else was stripped away, the people we dealt with were trying to survive and thrive in any way possible, whatever it took.

After a while, all good cops get a sixth sense when it comes to crooks. Arresting them, protecting them, studying them – I learnt to spot them a mile off.

 

In my early days in the police force, I was heavily into playing football in the Victorian Football Association at Brunswick. I was also focused on my fitness and trained hard. I competed in triathlons and was very health-conscious – which luckily didn’t stop me being there till the end at most of the post-game drinking sessions. The cop motto – work hard, play hard – might have been written with me in mind.

Every Wednesday during the footy season, police teams would play each other and also teams from the fire brigade, the navy and the army. Senior members of Victoria Police ran the draw and it was taken very seriously. I was seconded into the Western police footy team when I worked out that way. It was not only a fantastic opportunity to get cops fit and introduce a bit of competition, but it was also an invaluable time to network. Everyone who had any spare time would go to the games. During footy time, I met a lot of contacts, including detectives as well as uniform cops, and I reckon my career flourished as a result of my enthusiastic participation. So enthusiastic was my participation that I to went my wedding in a tuxedo with twelve stitches under my left eye, courtesy of a semi-final the week before I walked down the aisle.

Hanging out with detectives was different from hanging out with uniform cops. Talk to the uniforms and they told you about the domestics they’d attended and complained about their crowded rosters. But propping up the bar with the local detectives, listening to them talk about their cases, gave me a burning desire to be part of their world. One guy at Brunswick called Ray Dole had been promoted to uniform, but had come from the legendary squads like the Armed Robbery Squad and the now disbanded Major Crime Squad. Guys like Ray – and there were a lot of them at Brunswick – were quick to identify the spark in the young cops coming through who might become good detectives. They saw that spark in me and included me in their group.

Between the uniforms and the detectives, there was a real us-and-them attitude, and I wanted to be with them. I listened to all their stories and I knew that the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) was somewhere I wanted to be. I also knew that I was being groomed by seasoned detectives. With the footy, I got to socialise with even more of them. Footy was the entrée into the group before I’d earned the title of detective. That was why I jumped at a plain-clothes job in special duties.

And that was where I first met Dave Miechel.

At that time, there weren’t a lot of witnesses in protection, so I was sent as a senior constable out to Moonee Ponds special duties. Dave Miechel was a constable back then. By chucking off the uniform and getting into plain clothes, we were in fact stepping up to the first level towards being detectives. Our motto was simple – catch crooks. And Dave Miechel was a very good crook catcher. Without getting paid overtime, Dave and I never left work if there were leads to follow and crooks to catch.

There was a look that undercover officers needed to adopt. While I’d always be spotted as a cop just because I seem to have that clean-cut look about me, Dave could blend in with the best of them; with his unshaven face and his ponytail, he didn’t look like a cop at all. When we needed someone to walk through a pub or some place where we didn’t want to spook anyone, Dave was our man.

While Dave and I had a lot of similarities, there were also differ-ences. Unlike most cops, Dave didn’t give much away about his life outside the police force. Spend eight hours on surveillance with another human being and you chat about all kinds of stuff, but with Dave it was different. Most of his talk was about his motorbike, and some sort of hotted-up car that he was doing up from scratch. I didn’t ask a lot of questions; we didn’t have a lot in common. Also, we were incredibly busy and had jobs on the go all the time. Mostly, we talked about the job. So while we spent a lot of time together, I’m not sure that I knew Dave Miechel much better by the time we parted company. The next time we worked together would be at the Drug Squad.

 

After Moonee Ponds, I went back to Brunswick as a senior constable in 1994. I did well on the Criminal Investigation Branch exam and applied for a position at the Brunswick CIB. I knew a lot of the detectives there, and was thrilled when I got the job; there was an elite feeling to joining the ranks of the CIB.

My welcome to the squad was held at the local pub. We celebrated by drinking a beer or twenty, and at the end of the night, I was a full-fledged, if rather drunk, detective.

In one of my early jobs as a detective, I got called to a block of units in Brunswick. People in one of the lower units had complained of water overflowing from an apartment above. When uniform had knocked on the door of the upstairs flat, an Asian man had answered, dazed and covered in blood. The uniforms had arrested the bloodied man and put him in the van, then called the CIB to the scene. Uniform police had guarded the entrance to the flat, but hadn’t gone inside. That was our job.

Policing is like a gory version of Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get. There’s a bit of an adrenaline rush as you step into the unknown. We saw the source of the overflowing water as soon as we entered the bathroom – there was a headless female body in the bath. The dead woman’s unrecognisable head was found pulped in the toilet. Her throat had been cut out and stuffed into her handbag.

The scene was clearly a homicide case, and we called in the Homicide Squad. The Homicide Squad detectives arrived, all wear-ing their trademark sweeping coats, and there was an atmosphere to their arrival, an electricity. With great professional interest, I watched them do their job. The Homicide Squad detectives were the elite investigators. Observing them, I had a realisation – I wanted to be one of them.

 

My first Christmas as the most junior CIB detective, I was rostered to work all the shifts that the other blokes wanted to spend with their families. I also copped the 1997 New Year’s Eve shift, and we got called to a murder.

At a local nursing home called Brunswick Lodge, staff had discovered the body of a 95-year-old resident, Kathleen Downes. At the scene we found Mrs Downes half lying on the bed. There was a small amount of blood from a wound in her throat. She was wearing a nightie, which was pulled up, and her underwear was around her ankles. Luckily, the medical opinion was that the elderly woman would have died quickly. The Homicide crew called to investigate the Downes murder case wanted to tap into the local knowledge, and I was seconded into the Homicide Squad for the investigation.

Notorious serial killer Peter Norris Dupas would eventually be the only suspect in the killing. Detectives would find two unexplained phone calls from his house to the nursing home five weeks before the murder; it turned out that the killing occurred on the anniversary of Dupas’s ex-wife leaving him. While Dupas never admitted the murder, in a jailhouse discussion he allegedly mentioned ‘the old sheila down the road’ while discussing another murder close by.2

But when Kathleen Downes was murdered, Dupas hadn’t come onto the police radar. And although the squad didn’t find her killer, I stayed on in Homicide. There was one main difference between CIB and Homicide: as a CIB detective, every case was different and there was a huge variety to the work. At the Homicide Squad, every case we were called to was a dead body. That mean that all of our cases were serious, and a lot were high profile. There were only about fifty murders in Victoria each year, so a lot of our cases hit the news, which helped cement Homicide as the elite squad.3

One murder took us to a little house in the country. The victim was about the age of my mum, and she’d been killed with a huge kitchen knife. The husband was in custody by the time we got there, but the blood spatter around the house told the story: as his wife tried to flee, the husband stabbed her over and over again, spraying her blood all around the walls. Of course, it didn’t tell the whole story – just the death part. The wider story was that a family of teenagers had just lost their mum to murder, and their father to jail.

The guy in the interview room was sane. He had no explanation; reckoned he just snapped during an argument. The realisation of what he’d done had hit home. By the time we questioned him, he was a broken man.

Cases like this one really made me wonder. Sure, there were psychopaths out there – Dupas being typical of this type of offender – but what made someone snap?

While these were the kinds of questions I asked myself, they weren’t widely discussed among the squad. We liked to find a motive – a lack of motive was why the Kathleen Downes murder remained unsolved for so long – but aside from questioning the sanity of the offender for legal reasons, we didn’t really spend much time dealing with the why. Mostly, we needed hard evidence; reasons why aren’t necessary for an arrest or a conviction. The Homicide Squad was a reactive squad – they killed, we caught.

And we didn’t have time to question the whys before someone else took a knife or a gun to a loved one or a stranger, and our phones rang in the middle of the night.