Chapter 27

Star witness

On 19 January 2009, Cameron Davey again made the drive out to Barwon Prison to talk to the man he obviously saw as his star witness.

By then, Carl Williams hadn’t seen the light of day without bars since October 2004 and wasn’t looking to do so any decade soon.1 While he maintained that his last statement was accurate, he told Cameron Davey he had something to add.

‘There were a number of reasons I did not tell the police all I know about the Hodson murders in my last statement,’ he wrote. ‘I did not think police would be able to charge anyone because of the lack of traceable phone calls, Rod Collins was still out of jail and because I did not want to get charged with the murders. I didn’t want to be a dog and be a protection prisoner, but my attitude has changed.’

Clearly, in the preliminaries, Williams had fessed up to giving a gun to a shooter who used it to try to kill another gangland figure.

He then moved on to the meeting he said he’d had with me in Hillside to organise the hit on Terry Hodson. According to Williams’s story, I’d pulled up in my blue ute and we drove off to chat about hitmen. The fact that I’d never owned a ute, blue or otherwise, didn’t deter the cops from drinking in the killer’s every word.

Williams told Cameron Davey that even though I’d already organised a hitman, it was taking too long, and I asked him to get me another one. ‘Dale told me that he had to get Hodson and he had to get Hodson before Dale’s committal. Dale said he didn’t want to go back to jail. He said he had been in isolation and it was tough. He said he had someone on the job but it was taking too long to get Hodson… I do believe Dale was still hoping that the job on Hodson would be carried out by whoever else he had put in place, but I think he wanted the job done and was worried the other person was not going to get it done in time… I told Dale that I would try to help him. I didn’t want to commit until I could confirm that someone could do the job for me. I think at the time that Andrew Veniamin was dead, but Rod Collins was always asking for work and I thought he might do it. Rod was in the back of my mind as someone I could use for a job like this.’

And the price?

‘I don’t know if I asked him or he just told me the figure to do the job was $150,000. He never mentioned where he was getting the money from.’

Now I’m no expert in how these things work, but two hitmen? At $150,000 a pop? How was I, a guy who at that time was working for a minimum wage digging ditches to support my family, supposed to come up with that kind of cash?

Williams continued: ‘I told him that if I could arrange for someone to do it for him, then the money was to be dropped off at my mum’s place in the bin which is inside the gate. The money was to be paid on completion of the job. My mum’s place was at Primrose Street, Essendon.’ He said he’d told me that we could communicate by ‘safe phone’ so that it would leave no trace.

Williams also claimed that the Hodson job meant nothing to him personally, although he’d been recorded on phone taps talking about how Lewis Moran and Terry Hodson had a hit out on him, and within weeks of that conversation, Moran and Terry had been gunned down.

Williams said that I’d handed him an envelope with a picture of Terry Hodson in it, and his address: ‘I’m not sure how long after the meeting I had with Dale it was that I met Rod in person. It would have been quickly, as in within a couple of days, because I had the envelope that Dale had given me. I should also say that I wouldn’t have met with Rod just to discuss this, because quite frankly, I didn’t run around organising things for Dale and wasting my time. I can’t remember now but Rod and I may have been planning to meet and catch up anyway.’

Carl Williams and his street cred: Yeah, I’ll organise hits, but I’m no ex-cop’s lackey.

While he was happy to admit organising the hit on Terry, Williams was at pains to distance himself from the murder of Christine Hodson. ‘I should add that the contract related to Terry Hodson. There was never any contract on his wife and I never mentioned Terry’s wife to Rod. Dale never mentioned Terry’s wife to me either.’

Williams insisted that, while he’d phoned me to let me know about the hit, he didn’t say when it would happen because he didn’t know. ‘If Dale had an alibi, it was not through the information that I gave him.’

He went even further, declaring: ‘I didn’t know when the Hodsons were going to be murdered. He wasn’t my enemy and so I had no reason to know when it was going to happen and I wasn’t even sure if Rod could do it… I wasn’t worried about being linked to the Hodson murders because they weren’t my enemies.’

He went into great detail about how I allegedly phoned him to say I’d put the money in his mum’s wheelie bin. He happened to be at his mum’s at the time and he went outside and collected it. He said he then bundled it all together and arranged to meet with Rod Collins to hand over the entire amount. In his account, Williams unwittingly revealed how casually he could talk about murder.

‘I said to him, “What happened with the sheila?” He said, “That’s not for you to worry about.” That was the end of the conversation. I asked him about the sheila because I didn’t think she needed to die and she wasn’t a part of the contract. Having said that, I didn’t push it any further. I didn’t keep any of the money for myself as I was travelling pretty well at the time.’

So, according to Carl Williams, he never introduced me to Rod Collins and never told me who had done the hit, or told Collins who had ordered it. This was the exact opposite of the statement Collins had offered earlier.

Williams covered for his lack of knowledge about the finer details of the Hodson murders by saying that he and Rod Collins had never discussed them afterwards.

‘I don’t know how Rod got into the [Hodsons’] house and he has never told me. I never provided any information to Rod about any security systems at the Hodson house because I didn’t know about any security at the house and Dale never told me about any security at the house. I think I have heard through the media that security tapes were taken from the Hodson house, but I didn’t tell Rod about the tapes because I didn’t know about them. Rod never told me what happened to the tapes that were taken from the house.’

As a detective, I knew that a confession had to fit the circumstances of the crime scene. I wonder if the case had moved so far away from actual evidence that this no longer mattered.

Terry and Christine were shot, mid-cigarette, watching TV in their back room. They were surrounded by guard dogs who’d alert them to any intruder. Rod Collins admitted going to the Hodsons’ home once before to buy drugs, but Terry would hardly have let him in, certainly not to watch TV with him and his wife. With constant visits from the Ethical Standards Department and increased video surveillance around the property, you’d imagine that Terry would have been very reluctant to admit one of Melbourne’s most notorious hitmen into his home.

It also doesn’t fit that a casual acquaintance would know to remove tapes from both the garage and the back room. That was someone with insider knowledge. And it must have been someone with insider knowledge who’d be granted entry not only to the house but also to the back TV room.

 

Williams signed his statement at 2.36 p.m. on 19 January. Oddly, he signed another six-page statement just nine minutes later – which meant that either he was a fast talker and Cameron Davey was a fast typist, or these statements were made at another time and brought back for his signature.

Despite being convicted of various drug offences, three murders and conspiracy to commit a fourth, Carl Williams hadn’t spent Christmas 2008 in prison. Instead, he’d been taken out of Barwon to an ‘undisclosed location’ to spend Christmas with Cameron Davey, Sol Solomon and possibly his girlfriend or possibly some prostitutes – or possibly both, depending on whose story you believe. During their little holiday, Williams gave the detectives ‘unsigned’ statements. These were later put together by Cameron Davey so that when they were taken back to Barwon for Williams to sign, they were all set to go.

That’s how Carl Williams could sign both statements on 19 January, nine minutes apart. It would seem that during their getaway, the police had helpfully provided him with some information so that he could get his statement straight – he even admitted this.

‘This previous statement was accurate to the best of my memory without my memory being refreshed. The police have requested that I make an additional statement. The police have advised me that they will supply me with additional information which may refresh my memory. This statement will contain any further information that I can remember after the police have supplied me with this information.’2

It must have taken hours for the police to play him tapes of listening devices and help him draw tenuous links to support his story. One recording has him talking to Nicola Gobbo about an ‘adviser’. Even though Williams can’t think of why Nicola Gobbo would refer to me as his adviser, he helpfully concludes that it must have been me she was talking about.

Williams also helpfully told Cameron Davey that in the frequent calls between him and Rod Collins, every time either of them mentioned the weather, they’d probably be referring to the Hodson murders.

At times, it even bordered on the ridiculous.

Carl Williams claimed he received a text message from Collins that read: ‘Hello buddy, catch you tomorrow for sure my friend. Just been tired buddy – catches up to all at some stage mate. Take care see you soon RC.’ Williams’s interpretation: ‘This is possibly a coded message in relation to the murder of the Hodsons but I can’t be certain.’3

Carl was rather sanctimonious in his declaration that it wasn’t his habit to discuss murders over the phone in ‘uncoded’ conversations. That might be why the police didn’t bother playing him the taped conversations with his buddy David McCulloch in the days after the Hodson murders, where Williams sounded genuinely surprised about them.

After Carl Williams sat down with police to piece together his story – with their help – it took the Petra Taskforce four weeks to arrest me.