Chapter 14

Harp Road, Kew

Andrew Hodson told police that he visited his parents at home on Saturday 15 May. He said that he and his twelve-year-old son got there at 12.30 p.m. They stayed about half an hour, then Andrew told police that he ‘went somewhere for a couple of hours then returned’.1 When he arrived back later in the afternoon, he said that he stayed until about 6.30 p.m. ‘Everything was fine. Mum and Dad were happy although Dad was complaining of a sore back. They made no mention to me about any concerns. They had no plans to go anywhere over the weekend. They never mentioned anyone coming over to visit.’

A number of neighbours who lived near the Hodsons heard loud noises around 6 p.m. on the Saturday evening. If Andrew’s statement was correct, he’d still have been at the house at the time.

Neighbour 1: ‘At some time between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. that afternoon whilst I was in my backyard, I heard a loud, sharp sound. It was an unusual sound. I’d describe it as like a crack. Not long after the first crack, maybe a second or a couple of seconds later, there was a second crack sound. I heard either two or three crack sounds in total. The sound got my attention because it was so unusual. I didn’t know what the noise was. It was not a car backfiring.’2

Neighbour 2: ‘I heard what sounded like a shot about 6.15 p.m., which was early evening but didn’t pay any attention. You hear bangs and cars all the time on our busy street.’3

At 9.36 p.m. that night, Carl Williams rang Darren Lunny from Channel 9 to talk about the Hodson–Moran threat to his life. Since Lewis Moran had already been gunned down, only the Hodson part of the threat was left. Except that by then, the Hodsons were probably dead as well.

Unlike in the movies, the exact time of death can never be estimated to the minute, or even the hour. If the bangs and cracks heard earlier by neighbours were indeed the sounds of the shots that killed the Hodsons, then Williams might have been simply ringing Lunny on a Saturday night to chew the fat. If the Hodsons were killed a little later in the evening, then the phone call might have been an alibi of sorts.

At first, Williams grizzled about the police not taking his death threats seriously. ‘And then with the threat to kill, like you know with the other one, the one they threatened to kill me, or well, [an informer] went to see Terry Hodson and offered fifty thousand to Lewis Moran. So obviously they [the police] were aware of that… of what was going on…’

He also told Lunny that he’d been threatened by a cop the last time he’d been arrested. ‘And then, when they did arrest me, the copper said to me, “Ya gonna be killed. We’re gonna kill ya, maybe not today, but ya gonna be killed. We’re gonna get ya. Mark my words. You dog. We’re gonna kill ya.”’

Carl Williams took offence to the alleged police death threat and lodged a complaint with the chief commissioner. He lodged four complaints in total – all of which, according to him, were ignored.

With the clock ticking towards 10 p.m., Williams then whinged about how Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon had had him banned from Crown Casino, and talked again about how his life had been threatened by a police officer. A suspicious person might think Williams was trying to keep Lunny on the phone.

 

A neighbour’s statement: ‘The following day, Sunday, 16 May 2004, I spent all day outside in the garden. At some time after dark, I was still in the front garden working. I had the outside light on. It was after 6 p.m., but I’m not certain of the exact time. While in my front garden, I heard a man yelling and swearing, saying the f-word a lot. The yelling was coming from the direction of the west. I initially thought that there must have been a domestic, but there was only one voice: a man’s voice. There was about three bursts of this yelling and I thought it sounded like a man was outside because it was so loud. The yelling lasted for a couple of minutes.’

Andrew Hodson had just discovered his parents’ bodies.

 

When Sergeant Paul Ritchie arrived at the Harp Road house at 6.30 p.m., he said, ‘Andrew Hodson appeared to be in a highly agitated state. He stated: “My parents have been fucking killed! Call ESD. This is an ESD matter.” Hodson also smelt strongly of intoxicating liquor. He also stated the premises had security video cameras operating.’4

One can only imagine the screaming and yelling around 6 p.m., then the methodical ransacking, gun-searching, drinking and cocaine-snorting that preceded the ‘agitation’ police saw half an hour later.

Following closely on the heels of the local constabulary were officers of all ranks. When Inspector Peter De Santo arrived, Andrew Hodson was quick to point the finger: ‘Fucking Dale’s done it!’ he declared.5

Superintendent Dick Daly and Senior Sergeant Murray Gregor arrived just before 8 p.m. According to Dick Daly’s statement, Andrew had calmed down.

‘I don’t blame you blokes for what has happened,’ he said, ‘but you have to make sure that you get that bloke.’

Just after 8 p.m., Daly spoke to Person D, who had talked to the Hodsons on Friday. ‘I tried to ring them today. There was no answer. I came around. Andrew was here putting the rubbish out. I had the remote. We opened the garage door and the dogs were in the garage. We went around to the courtyard. The door and gate were unbolted. I heard the TV. I looked in and saw them lying on the floor.”’ Daly said that after giving her comprehensive overview, Person D ‘became very emotionally upset’.6

Crime scene examiner Peter Cox got to the Harp Road house at 8.25 p.m. on Sunday, 16 May 2004. He walked up the driveway, passing Christine Hodson’s red Holden station wagon and Person D’s car parked behind. As he walked past the cars, his movement activated a sensor above the garage door and a floodlight lit up the driveway.

Like the long line of cops to arrive at the murder scene before him, Cox entered through the open garage door. It was a large double garage with workbenches, tools, wood and other household items. Cox saw the time-lapse video recorder on the top of a shelf in the garage. He found no tape in it, but he took swabs from the stop and eject buttons.7

After an examination of the garage, Cox entered the house to begin the collection of forensic evidence inside. The house was well kept and tidy, and there were no outward signs of the carnage that had occurred in the room out the back. There were also no signs of forced entry. Did that mean Terry or Christine had let their killers into the house?

Cox found all the windows locked; there were security grilles on the windows at the front and side. The gate to the side yard was padlocked.

Since the Hodsons had video surveillance of their house courtesy of the police-installed system, Cox located the videos, which could be vital evidence, even though the one from the machine – the most recent – was missing. In a linen cupboard in the hallway were six videotapes labelled for the days of the week, and an empty video case labelled ‘Saturday’. The fact that Saturday was missing suggested that the killer had known the intricacies of the surveillance and had known where to find the recorder in the garage. Cox collected the remaining videos as evidence. He also found two more sets of videocassettes. The first set had Monday through to Saturday, and the second set, found next to another time-lapse recorder, had Sunday through to Friday.

In the lounge room, four drawers had been pulled out of a dresser and stacked neatly. Had the killer searched the house?

In the kitchen, Cox noted an alert system that lit up when the sensors were activated in both the lounge room and the driveway. The unit had been muted. On the kitchen table was an empty bottle of Cascade beer. Cox swabbed it for fingerprints. With little more to see in the main section of the house, he made his way through a small extension area that was used as a bar room. Through the bar room was the entry to the TV room.

That was where Terry and Christine lay, dead.

There was no sign of forced entry in the TV room, and Cox set about his examination. First, he did fibre trace lifts from the backs of the two bodies. He worked around the bodies, collecting their cigarette butts and swabbing their wine glasses. Then he moved outside to the garden. There was a fence separating the yard from a fernery and garden bed area, which Cox entered through an open gate. In the soil and mulch near the back boundary fence, he found some scuffmarks, which he thought could have been made by the heel of a shoe. A pot-plant near the marks had been partially knocked over. Could someone have escaped over the back fence?

Cox took soil samples to match against the shoes of possible suspects. He also took a trace evidence lift from the top of the fence. Not only were there scuffmarks in the soil, but Cox also found scuffmarks on the horizontal uprights of the wooden paling fence, and a vine growing along the fence looked as if it had been pulled out of the way. The house next door had an overgrown garden, but while a later examination showed corresponding scuffmarks on the other side of the fence, this was the home of an elderly woman.

Cox finished his examination of the crime scene, not realising that he’d be back two days later to examine all the hidden cavities in the house – but not before most of their contents had been removed.8

 

An hour and a half after Cox arrived at the crime scene, so did the Deputy Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Dr David Ranson. With a career spanning three decades, Dr Ranson was an eminent expert in the field of forensic pathology. Ranson had been contacted by Senior Sergeant Charlie Bezzina of the Homicide Squad. Accompanied by Bezzina and the state coroner, Graeme Johnstone, Ranson was shown into the Harp Road house. Like everyone else that night, he entered through the garage door and made his way through the lounge room into the TV room out the back, where the bodies of Terry and Christine Hodson still lay.

Dr Ranson noted that Christine was ‘dressed in pink and white slippers, white trousers with star logos on the back pockets, and a pink top. Extensive blood staining could be seen at the sides of the pink top and the sides of the arms. The arms were flexed at the elbows with the hands lying underneath the chest between the front of the chest and the floor. The hair was blonde in colour and two areas of apparent skin defect could be seen over the back of the head which was uppermost. There appeared to be some blackening around these defects. Blood was also present in this area. Extensive blood was present over the floor around the face…’

Dr Ranson made a cursory examination of Terry Hodson’s body. He too noted the spent cartridge that Andrew Hodson had thought was a calling card: not on the back of the head, though, but on the back of the right shoulder of Terry’s dark-blue shirt. A further spent cartridge lay on the floor to the right side of the head. Another spent cartridge could be seen on the floor on the right side of the body, adjacent to the skirting board beneath a small table on the far side of the room. Ranson noted two cigarette butts on the floor – one near Terry’s hand, and one near Christine’s right shoulder. It looked as if they had both been smoking when they had been shot.

Ranson reported well-developed rigor mortis in both bodies. Lividity was also well formed, and he concluded that it was consistent with them dying where they now lay. Their body temperatures were the same as the ambient temperature. They had been dead for a while. Unlike TV forensic pathologists, real-life experts are loath to narrow down the time of death because there are so many variables, and any anomaly could lead detectives in the wrong direction.9

 

At 9.42 p.m., Senior Constable Alan Pringle arrived at the Harp Road crime scene. Pringle was a firearm and toolmark examiner attached to the Victoria Police forensic laboratory at Macleod. While Pringle gathered up important evidence about the shooting deaths, he was to miss an obvious piece of evidence that Person D would find a couple of days later in bizarre circumstances.

Like Ranson, Alan Pringle saw the cigarette butts on the floor – one near each of the bodies. Pringle collected the cigarette butts, which were later found to have DNA consistent with having been smoked by the Hodsons.

Pringle saw the three cartridges noted earlier by Dr Ranson. He collected the cartridge case from Terry Hodson’s right shoulder, another from the floor near Terry, and another from under the side table. That was three fired cartridge cases, but there had been four head shots.

During the evening, Forensic Officer Peter Ross arrived at the crime scene. While he swabbed Andrew Hodson’s hands for gunshot residue, Andrew explained that he’d touched his mother and father on the back of the head and kissed them both on the head. If Ross found that strange, considering the head injuries and the extensive bleeding around the heads, he didn’t add it to his notes. He found no traces of gunshot residue on Andrew, but if the Hodsons were murdered the night before, that meant that whoever killed Terry and Christine had the chance to go home and wash or shower, which would remove all traces.

Around 2 a.m., Andrew Hodson took one of his parents’ German shepherd dogs, Rosie, to a vet in Bundoora. Police had called first and asked the vet to collect a blood sample from the dog. When Andrew Hodson arrived, he told the vet that his parents had been killed. The on-call vet examined Rosie and concluded that she appeared fit and healthy and displayed no signs of being concussed or poisoned. The vet took a blood sample, which police collected the following Monday.

Earlier in the evening, another vet had examined Molly. Unlike Rosie, Molly was listed as ‘tremoring, panting and appeared very agitated’. The vet found dilated, minimally responsive pupils and bruising consistent with blunt trauma to the head. The vet concluded that Molly ‘may have been suffering the expected response after a major stress event or physical trauma. Intoxication was considered as the main differential.’ The vet collected a blood sample.

The examination of the guard dogs was important, because much would later be made of who the dogs would and wouldn’t react to. Even senior police officers in their statements said that if they were going to visit Terry, they made sure he had the dogs tied up or put out the back before they ventured up the driveway. One neighbour interviewed in the days following the murders said that the Hodsons’ dogs barked a lot and nearly drove her insane. However, on Saturday night, she didn’t hear them bark at all.

The Hodson children all agreed that Molly was the aggressive one, while Rosie was younger and friendlier. It made sense that if an intruder did need to subdue the dogs, then Molly would pose the greater threat.

No mention was made of Christine Hodson’s nine-year-old poodle, Ty.

As a point of interest – and I’m no expert – if Molly the dog was ‘intoxicated’ when examined, and the Hodsons were killed possibly as early as 6.30 p.m. on Saturday evening, when the neighbours reported hearing shots fired, how long would the drug stay in her system?