19

The Milkbar Cowboy

Multiple murderers come in all shapes, sizes and genders. But none could have been more conspicuous than Berwyn Rees. A mountain of a man – 6 ft 2 in (188 centimetres) tall and weighing in at 24 stone (152 kg) – Rees was your regular jolly giant, straight out of a fairytale. But that’s where the fairytale ended. There was nothing jolly about big Berwyn. He was a cold-blooded killer, and by the time his rampage of senseless murder came to an end there were two innocent customers of a retail gun shop and a policeman dead.

For just over three years the first two murders remained unsolved. Detectives didn’t have a solitary lead to go on. No one saw a thing. It was Rees’s obsession with guns that finally brought him unstuck, but before the day was over, a third victim – a policeman – lay mortally wounded beside his patrol car.

At the time of the gun shop murders Berwyn Rees was 28, single, unemployed, and living with his parents at the Ponderosa Caravan Park at Tomago, near Newcastle in coastal New South Wales. A loner who had never been brought to the attention of the police, Rees didn’t drink, smoke, have a girlfriend – or any friends at all, really.

He was a member of the Belmont Pistol Club. His only pleasure in life seemed to be his obsession with firearms – especially pistols. Anyone who knew Rees knew that he was a ‘gun freak’, and if they didn’t know anything about guns they would give him a wide berth for fear of being bored to death on the subject.

Where he lived, in the annexe attached to his parents’ caravan, Rees kept a library of gun books and magazines. A detective described it as being bigger and more comprehensive than the police ballistics library.

But Rees’s desire for guns – especially pistols – was far from fulfilled. While he had a selection of rifles, and several target pistols he used at the club, he wanted more. But he couldn’t afford the deadly treasures he desired, so he decided to get them another way: he would steal them.

For all his physical shortcomings Rees was intelligent and cunning, and he devised a plan to get hold of some guns with the minimum chance of getting caught. In his father’s old Valiant, he drove around the gun stores in the Sydney metropolitan area for months until he found the right one: Nivison’s Gun and Fishing Shop in Bronte Road, on the fringes of the main shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. It was perfect for Rees’s plans, as the manager worked alone.

On the morning of 4 August 1977, Rees hired a car through Hertz in Newcastle and drove to Bondi Junction. With a balaclava pulled over his head and a sawn-off Brno .22 calibre rifle in his hand, he entered the gun shop and, over the counter at gun-point, ordered the manager, 26-year-old Raymond James, a married man with a 3-year-old daughter, to raise his hands in the air.

When James instead ducked down behind the counter for a loaded .357 Magnum which was kept there for just such an occasion, Rees calmly told him to forget about grabbing any guns and to come out from the counter and lie on the floor. With the rifle held to his head, James did as he was told.

Aware that while the balaclava could disguise only his face, Rees was also acutely aware that his mammoth girth and height would be a dead giveaway in a police line-up. With this in mind, he had decided long before he got anywhere near the gun shop that any witnesses would have to be killed.

Just after Raymond James lay down on the floor of the shop as instructed by Rees, 26-year-old Christopher Greenfield, who worked as a butcher nearby, entered the shop. At gun-point, Rees ordered Greenfield to lie on the floor alongside James. Rees then pulled the shutters, locked the front door and put the CLOSED sign up in the widow.

Then Rees casually walked back to Raymond James and shot him once in the back of the head at point-blank range, killing him instantly. Terrified at what had just happened before his eyes, Christopher Greenfield pleaded for his life, but he too was also murdered with a single shot to the back of the head.

After he had rearranged the bodies so that they couldn’t easily be seen by prying eyes peering through the front door window wondering why the shop was closed in the middle of the day, Rees opened the gun safe with keys from James’s pocket. He loaded 18 pistols and as many boxes of ammunition as he could carry into a large box and took them to the boot of the rental car, which was parked directly out the front.

Then Rees returned to the shop and picked out some holsters that would suit the pistols he had stolen, idled through other cowboy paraphernalia, taking a piece here and there that took his fancy, collected more boxes of ammunition and bundled them all into the boot of the car. He returned again to the shop and pulled the front door locked behind him and then slipped into the traffic as it headed north into Bondi Junction. Incredibly, no one had seen a thing.

Rees drove his car to Mount Sugarloaf, about 19 kilometres from his Tomago caravan home, threw the gun shop keys into a dam and hid the guns and ammunition under rocks. He then took the car back to the Hertz office in Newcastle and caught a bus home, arriving just in time for dinner with his parents – a lamb roast with potatoes, peas and beans and lashings of gravy.

The bodies were discovered seven hours after the murders, when two young men went to the shop to make a purchase. They saw that the front door was locked even though the lights were on and it was late-night trading. They peered through the window and saw the body of one of the men lying face down behind the counter, so they notified police.

From the following day on, once every two weeks Berwyn Rees drove his father’s old Valiant up to the furthest reaches of Mount Sugarloaf, far away from the homes of the locals and the feral squatters’ shanties, and out of earshot of any pesky bushwalkers. Here he played with his new toys.

Complete with cowboy hats and holsters he practised aiming and fast draws and blasted away at anything and everything, pretending that he was shooting at imaginary Indians in the wild west until the landscape resembled a war zone, with its splattered rocks and trees stripped of leaves and bark.

But the carnage of the wilderness and the noise of gunshots couldn’t go unnoticed forever. Slowly civilisation was closing in on remote Mount Sugarloaf, and it was only a matter of time before Rees’s activities attracted attention.

On 24 November 1980, three years and three months after Rees had murdered the two young men in the gun shop in Bondi Junction, some Forestry Commission workers and Telecom employees working on Mount Sugarloaf heard what they thought were gun shots and called Sergeant Keith Haydon at the tiny nearby Beresford police station.

Haydon, a likable country cop with three teenage boys, wasn’t too concerned. People often took rifles up the mountain and fired off a few shots into the wilderness. It would no doubt result in him confiscating the rifle, taking the offenders’ details and letting them off with a warning, as he usually did.

Haydon drove alone up the winding scrub road – it wasn’t much better than a track – to the top of Mount Sugarloaf, where he found Berwyn Rees leaning against the old Valiant. Haydon asked Rees what he was up to and was told that he (Rees) was just having a bit of target practice with his rifle. The policeman took down Rees’s details in his notebook and asked to see the rifle, which Rees said was lying on the back seat of the car. When Haydon reached through the open back window of the Valiant to have a look, Rees produced a .38 revolver from his pocket and shot him several times in the side.

Leaving Haydon for dead, Rees took off in the Valiant – but he returned shortly afterwards to collect the incriminating notebook and the police officer’s handgun. Noticing that Haydon was still moving, Rees shot him again, this time in the head, at point-blank range, killing him instantly. Then Rees carefully drove his car back down the dirt road, at the bottom of which he was pulled over by a Forestry Commission employee, Clifford Hogbin.

Having heard the shots, Hogbin was concerned about what was going on up there. But when he confronted Rees, he was told that he (Rees) knew nothing of the shots and was on his way home. Rees demanded to pass, and Hogbin reluctantly allowed him to do so (after writing down the registration number of Rees’s car) – this undoubtedly saved his life.

Hogbin drove on up the mountain until he came upon Haydon’s body lying near the police car. Now aware that he had just had a conversation with Haydon’s killer, Hogbin got on the police car radio and called a mayday that launched a massive search for Rees and the old yellow Valiant.

A few kilometres from Mount Sugarloaf, Highway Patrolman Constable Alexander Pietruszka sighted the Valiant and flagged it down. With his pistol drawn and aimed squarely at Rees’s head, Constable Pietruszka ordered the cop killer out of the car. As he alighted from the vehicle Rees produced a gun and pointed it at the police officer’s head. He dared Pietruszka to shoot – otherwise, he said, he would kill Pietruszka.

As both men stared at each other down the barrels of their pistols, Constable Pietruszka tried to talk Rees into laying down his weapon and surrendering peacefully. It seemed to work. But as Rees slowly lowered his gun he caught the officer off guard and shot him twice in the stomach.

In terrible pain, Pietruszka fell to the roadway as Rees unleashed another barrage of bullets at him. Somehow, they all managed to miss – the young constable desperately rolled across the roadway with bullets ricocheting off the bitumen all around him.

With the chamber empty and the barrel still smoking, Rees walked over to the wounded policeman and stood over the top of him reloading, preparing to kill him. But as Rees slotted in the last bullet and snapped the chamber shut, a police car almost ran over them and four officers jumped out and crash-tackled Rees to the ground.

Back at the station, Rees coolly confessed to killing Sergeant Haydon, and when told that his pistols had been traced back to the Bondi Junction gun shop hold-up, confessed to those murders in great detail too.

Detective Sergeant John MacGregor, a veteran of the CIB Homicide Squad, told the press just how cool Rees was when police questioned him after his capture:

‘He had no remorse, no contrition,’ MacGregor said. ‘He was one of the coolest men I’ve dealt with – he just said he realised they could identify him to police, so he had to shoot them.

‘I’ve met this kind of frightening callousness in heavy crims, but Rees had no record, no police troubles. Rees was not only calculating and merciless, he was intelligent for an amateur – he tried to make the shop look as though professionals had cleaned out the 16 pistols and the thousands of rounds of ammunition.’

Constable Pietruszka and the forestry worker Cliff Hogbin were considered the two luckiest men alive. Both had escaped death by only seconds. Rees told police that he had thought about going back up the track to the top of Mount Sugarloaf and killing Hogbin before he could raise the alarm about the dead police sergeant.

Not so lucky were Berwyn Rees’s elderly parents. What their boy did destroyed them. They had not the slightest idea that their son was anything other than what they saw – a loving yet lonely man who had a passion for guns. And of course they did not know that in the big box in his bedroom annexe he kept a cache of stolen pistols for which he had executed two young men in cold blood.

On 12 April 1981, in the NSW Central Criminal Court, Mr Justice Begg sentenced Berwyn Rees to three terms of life imprisonment and another 10 years for the wounding of Constable Pietruszka.

On 22 September 1995 Rees appealed his sentence and had it redetermined to a maximum of life and a minimum of 27 years. He will be eligible for parole on 23 November 2007. But that does not necessarily mean he will be freed.

There are a lot of long memories waiting for the day Berwyn Rees applies for parole. And these people will be only too happy to remind the Parole Board of Rees’s crimes, and of how he so cruelly destroyed three lives. They will try to convince the board that Berwyn Rees should spend the rest of his life behind bars. And given the circumstances, few would argue with their right to do that.