Chapter 18

Dale vs Chief Commissioner of Police

Although forces within the police seemed determined to focus on me, Homicide detectives would eventually interview 150 potential suspects about the Hodson murders. Such was the wide-ranging effect of Terry’s informing and life as a drug dealer.

One lead that hit the press two weeks after the murders was that the ABC had a document containing Terry Hodson’s informer number – 4/390. It apparently said: ‘4/390 (Hodson) met on Tuesday in garage with [name deleted] who wanted 4/390 to knock Carl Williams for Lewis Moran for $50,000.’1 Detectives couldn’t ask Lewis Moran about this, because he’d been gunned down on 31 March – six weeks before Terry and Christine.

Journalists soon found themselves on the other side of the fence, answering questions rather than asking them. A respected crime reporter at the Herald Sun, Geoff Wilkinson, told detectives that on 1 June, he’d been approached by another journalist, Jeremy Kelly, who showed him a document written by Dave Miechel, dated 3 June 2002 and marked Highly Protected. It was an information report from Terry Hodson’s informer management file. Kelly asked Wilkinson’s opinion as to whether the document was genuine. Having contacts high up in the police force, Wilkinson rang Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Simon Overland directly and reported the presence of the document. He handed a copy to police and then helped Kelly with his story.2

Apparently, Kelly had requested a copy of the document from Carl Williams, who obligingly got his dad, George, to fax it to him.

 

One suspect the Homicide Squad put a lot of effort into chasing was a guy I’ll call Mr T. In September 2004 while Mr T was in custody in Melbourne, Cameron Davey and another detective from the Homicide Squad flew to Queensland and executed a search warrant on his house. They found 31 pages of MDID information reports from Terry Hodson’s informer management file. The reports were old ones from 2002 and contained the old informer number, 4/390, which I’d changed after I got to the MDID.

Some of the faxed copies found at the house had ‘duplicate’ written on them, which indicated that they were from our working copies, while others had ‘original’ on them, indicating that they were from the officer in charge of the folders – in other words, from the files we gave to our bosses. One of the information reports hadn’t come from either.3 A trace on the fax number the documents came from led straight to Tony Mokbel.

A notorious killer later shot Mr T with a gun Carl Williams had given him.

 

In November 2004, the Victorian government announced that it had established an Office of Police Integrity (OPI) to investigate police corruption. I was the first person dragged into their new office in the city.

Their operation was a bit of a shambles. They wanted to question me about the alleged stealing of the blue folder containing Terry Hodson’s information, but I had to show them how to use their recording system before we could get started. Then it turned out that they didn’t even have a formal oath. I half made up an oath myself at the beginning of the questioning.

I told them I didn’t know what happened to the blue folder. I was always suspicious of the story that it had disappeared from our office. The MDID office was crammed with blue folders. If they couldn’t find Terry’s, then maybe it was under a pile – or maybe it never went missing at all. Jim O’Brien had a copy in his office, and we all added paperwork to it in the week after the Oakleigh arrests. Superintendent Biggin wrote in his statement that he’d handed over the other informer information file to Dick Daly on the Monday after the break-in. There were only ever two files, and they’re both accounted for in the statements of senior police officers in the aftermath of the drug house break-in, so when was I supposed to have leaked them?

Acting Superintendent John Shawyer was already in the office on duty when the folder supposedly went missing. No-one actually said they saw me come into MDID offices and take it. But I was getting used to Victoria Police not needing any evidence before pointing the finger.

In any case, from the moment Hodson was caught at the scene with the Drug Squad detective who had arrested most of the people he’d informed against, his cover was blown. His identity had been confirmed, and no blue folder was going to change that.

But the OPI had already made up their minds. The supposedly stolen files were the source of the information against Terry, and I was to blame. They set up an inquiry under former judge Tony Fitzgerald to find out how the documents had been leaked. In February 2005, Fitzgerald reported that he couldn’t determine how the file had got out, but he observed that the documents had come from police sources and named me as ‘the most obvious suspect’.4

 

On Friday 25 February 2005, Herald Sun reporter Peter Mickelburough wrote an article entitled ‘Ex-detective only suspect’. Attached to the article was a quarter-page-sized photo of a smiling Terry and Christine Hodson.

But rather than saying I was the only suspect in the murder of the Hodsons, as the title suggested, the article said that Tony Fitzgerald had conducted an enquiry and found I was the most likely suspect in the so-called theft of the blue folder. Mickelburough reported that the state opposition was calling for a royal commission into police corruption, organised crime and the underworld killings.

 

So how did Terry’s informer files get into criminal hands? When police traced the document George Williams had faxed, the trail led back to his associate David McCulloch, and eventually to the real source, which had nothing to do with me.

After a long battle with Victoria Police, who seemed determined to resist releasing information, I finally subpoenaed a document that read: ‘An investigation has been conducted into how McCulloch came to be in possession of a copy of IR 44 from the Hodson Informer Management File and it has been established that this particular Information Report was provided to persons outside the Victoria Police legitimately, for an unrelated legal matter.’ In other words, the information report had probably been attached to a brief – just as they were in the bad old days, before I pointed out the danger to our informants.5 But the media said nothing about this, even when my lawyer exposed it in court. The idea that a procedural stuff-up had allowed criminals to get hold of Terry Hodson’s file wasn’t the kind of news the media wanted to report. If I’d stolen the file, it made a better story.

 

On 1 June 2005, I challenged my dismissal from Victoria Police by Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon. I also said that her public statements against me suggested a ‘reasonable apprehension of bias’.6

I was horrified to have been charged with the robbery in the first place, but despite this, my loyalties lay with Victoria Police. At first, I’d been bitter, but then the cop part of me understood that they had to go through due process. Back then, I trusted due process. I fully expected that the Oakleigh robbery would play out through the court, the truth would be revealed and I’d be back doing my job as a detective. Silly me.

But once the Hodsons were murdered, there was no due process. Terry’s statement was the only evidence Victoria Police had. His death prompted them to drop the first set of charges against me, but it also left that initial case hanging. While some would suggest that I wanted Terry dead, the opposite was true. I looked forward to my day in court that would expose his story for what it was – an uncorroborated yarn to save his own skin. This was proved when the charges were dropped.

If they had anything else at all, do you think they’d have dropped the charges?

In the end, I won the dismissal case, but lost the war. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I couldn’t be a member of Victoria Police any more. I’d seen coppers who’d been charged with things before, and those who won returned to work under a cloud. No matter what happened, I realised that things could never be the same again. I was also bitter about the way Victoria Police had treated their own. I’d spent ten days in prison, and there was no reason for that.

So I realised that once I was vindicated, I couldn’t stay. Straight after I won the case, I handed in my resignation.

 

Around the time that Christine Nixon dismissed me, it had become apparent that my family and I were in real danger living in Melbourne. The gangland wars were in full swing, and Victoria Police were using every opportunity to raise my name through the media. Many criminals had also got to know my private address, so I felt insecure and anxious in my own home.

I decided to move my young family away from the danger zone in Melbourne, and we basically went into hiding in north-east Victoria. I lived back with my parents in Yackandandah, where I felt my family could be safe and I could protect them.

Over the months that followed, I regained my composure and began to search for some employment that would be better than the menial jobs I’d been doing. After all the derogatory media exposure, I knew it was unlikely that anyone would offer me a job, so I looked for a business I could buy that would keep me busy. Fortunately, I was accepted to take on the Anderson family’s franchised APCO service station in Wangaratta, and I threw myself into building up the business. But if my police career was over, I soon found I hadn’t put it behind me.