Chapter 17

Stooks and the forgotten bullet

Even though on Tuesday 18 May, journalist John Silvester had written an article in the Age reporting that ‘police said Hodson was a carpenter and had built secret cupboards and storage areas for some of Melbourne’s biggest drug dealers’,1 the police processing the crime scene and searching the house didn’t think to check Terry’s house for such hidden storage areas, known in the trade as ‘stooks’.

After the police had processed the scene and cleared it, they gave Person D back the keys to the Harp Road house. She took her boyfriend with her when she returned, and while she was there, she found the missing fourth shell casing.

They’d gone into the back room, and Person D lay down on the floor to show her boyfriend where the Hodsons’ bodies were found. She said, ‘As I was down on the floor, I saw a shell, under a side table against the wall with a small seat pushed under it.’

Given that she knew its possible value as evidence, you might think she’d hand the casing over to the police. But she didn’t.

‘I don’t know why I didn’t call the police straight away,’ she later wrote in her statement.2 She’d spoken to Homicide detective Charlie Bezzina earlier that day and dobbed Andrew in for taking the gun from the crime scene. She decided to go and visit Andrew to tell him that she’d told the police about the gun and that he’d have to hand it over to them. While she was at his house, she gave him the shell casing and told him to hand it over when he handed over the gun. Killing two birds, so to speak.

After her session on the floor mimicking the position of the Hodsons’ bodies, Person D searched the house, knowing that it contained a number of ‘stooks’. Even though the police had processed the crime scene, these stooks were built to fool the coppers, and fool them they had.

Having the house to herself, Person D raided the stooks. First there was the one in the ceiling of the TV room that held the sawn-off shotgun. Then there was the one at the end of the passageway near the TV room that was more like a hidden room; that was where Terry stored the drugs and the guns that he sold on to others. There was another stook in one of the bedrooms, behind a bookshelf. There was one in the kitchen in the fridge cavity where Terry kept drugs and money, and there was one in the garage where Terry kept tins of money. There was a stook in the toilet and one in a pelmet over a wall mirror where Terry kept drugs. She also removed the drugs from the toilet stook. The house was a veritable treasure trove.

After she told police about the stooks, crime scene examiner Senior Constable Peter Cox returned to Harp Road to examine the hidden cavities. He photographed the cavity above the step in the TV room and the concealed space next to the study. He also photographed items from these.

Well, the items that hadn’t been taken.

 

As the investigation of the Hodson murders proceeded, Detectives Cameron Davey and Charlie Bezzina met with Person D, who told them about the gun Andrew Hodson had removed from the crime scene. The two detectives then paid Andrew a visit and took the gun and the magazine. He also handed over the shell casing Person D had found when she was lying on the floor.

On 11 June, the police went back to Person D for another statement. The gun and the bullet casing had already been handed to forensics for testing.3 In her written statement, she described how she and Andrew came to find the gun. On Sunday 16 May 2004, they arrived at the Hodsons’ house and found their bodies in the back room. Person D knew that Terry Hodson always had a gun with him, but at first she didn’t think to look for it. ‘Andrew asked me where it was and I said that if it wasn’t in the room with him, then the only other place he would keep it was in the bedside table. So Andrew and I both went into the main bedroom and I opened the top drawer and pulled out a gun. It was a black hand-gun and I think it is an automatic. I gave it to Andrew and he took it and put it down his pants. I said to him, “Shouldn’t you hand it over?” and he said, “No, I’ll take it because Dad wanted me to have this.” He put it down the front of his pants. Then we went back to the kitchen area and waited for the police.’4

Considering that it only took the police six minutes from notification of the murders at 6.24 p.m. to arrive at the Harp Road house,5 the question needs to be asked whether this search for the gun took place before they called the police or after. A relative said that Person D phoned between 6.25 and 6.30 p.m., so there’s also a phone call to fit into that six minutes.

The detectives asked her boyfriend for his version of events. He said they’d hooked up in March. He’d met her years earlier when he was doing the nightclub scene to ‘chase sheilas’, but things had hotted up when she saw a picture of him in a photo from a friend’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. She told the friend to tell him to give her a call.

He knew about Andrew taking the gun from the crime scene. ‘Andrew grabbed the gun from the dresser drawer in the bedroom and stuffed it down his pants. He has later told me that he was walking funny at the scene because the gun was down his pants. He didn’t say why he took it.’ The boyfriend didn’t approve. He said there were ‘only two things that came from guns: trouble and dead people’.

Andrew Hodson was subsequently charged and convicted for removing the gun from the crime scene.6

The boyfriend said at 6 p.m. that night, he’d got a call from Person D telling him that the Hodsons were dead. ‘I just hung up the phone and drove straight there. I arrived at Harp Road at 6.30 p.m. on the dot.’

When the police pointed out that the call records showed he’d been phoned at 6.20 p.m., not six, the young man said that he must have made a mistake.

His story about finding the shell casing differed from Person D’s. He said that they found the casing while she was cleaning the floor – which at least sounded far less weird.

‘She was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the tiles,’ he said. After they noticed the shell, ‘we put it straight into a clip lock bag and rang Charlie Bezzina from the Homicide Squad’.

In Detective Cameron Davey’s statement, there was no mention of them notifying Homicide after finding the bullet.

 

In the aftermath of the Hodson murders, the rest of Melbourne’s underworld didn’t stay idle. If Carl Williams was upset at the paltry $50,000 that Lewis Moran had allegedly put up for his murder, he would have had to be chuffed with the rumoured $300,000 that Mario Condello was later accused of offering.

It was the beginning of a hitmen’s tit for tat.

On 9 June 2004, two would-be hitmen were arrested at the cemetery in Brighton, a couple of minutes’ walk from Mario Condello’s house. Carl Williams was also arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder Condello.7

Condello pledged forgiveness to the media, and told one journalist that for the first time he’d ‘heard the birds singing in the trees’. But while he might have heard chirping, he was also plotting his own revenge. On 17 June, Condello and his lawyer, George Defteros, were arrested for conspiracy to incitement to murder Carl Williams and his father, George. The charges against Defteros were dropped, and Condello was murdered in his driveway a day before he was to face trial.

A couple of months later, Carl Williams was sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison for trafficking a commercial quantity of drugs.8

 

Then, on 30 September 2004, the chief commissioner of Victoria Police, Christine Nixon, sacked me.

I’d known something like this was coming since early June. After the Hodsons were murdered, the charges against me for burglary and trafficking were withdrawn at the Melbourne Magistrates Court. I’d decided to stay away from court that day to avoid the media circus. So I was digging trenches and listening to the news of the action at court on radio when I was visited on site by a couple of senior members of the Ethical Standards Department, who handed me a ‘Notice of Intention to Dismiss’. This was a new policy introduced by Chief Commissioner Nixon.

I was given ten days to provide a written response in my defence, which I did. The Chief Commissioner then had 30 days to consider my response. The Commissioner made application for an extension of time to consider my response, but the eventual notice completely disregarded several matters I’d brought to the Commissioner’s attention.

The notice of dismissal expressed concern over my association with Tommy Ivanovic and my association with Terrence Hodson.9 It read in part:

I, Christine Nixon, Chief Commissioner of Police, having regard to:

• your integrity;

• the potential loss of community confidence in the force if you were to continue as a member of the force;

• having supplied you with a written notice pursuant to s.68(2) of the Police Regulation Act 1958; and

• having taken into account all submissions made by you; am reasonably satisfied that certain aspects of your relationship with known criminals [Tommy Ivanovic] and Terry Hodson, make you unsuitable to continue as a member of the force. I believe that the findings I have made significantly undermine your integrity. I also believe that there is potential for loss of public confidence in the force were you to continue as a member.

I reach this conclusion having regard to your relationship with both [Tommy Ivanovic] and Hodson. However, I am also reasonably satisfied that you are unsuitable to continue as a member of the force when considering your relationship with Hodson viewed alone. Accordingly, I dismiss you pursuant to the powers vested in me by s.68(1) of the Police Regulation Act 1958.

Your dismissal is effective from this 30th day of September 2004.

 

To be dismissed by letter after my long career in the police force was a slap in the face.

The Police Association stepped up straight away and offered their assistance. I presented my case to them, and they offered to help me fight the dismissal all the way to the Supreme Court.