They thought they got away with pack raping two 15-year-olds they were sure would stay silent forever. They were wrong.
THE leader of the pack is out there, in the suburbs or some country town. He’s in his 40s now, probably with a family of his own. If he has teenage daughters, you can bet he’s careful where they go and who they’re with. He knows bad things can happen – he and his mates used to rape girls that age in the 1970s. It was sport to them, like wild dogs killing sheep.
Maybe he thinks about it sometimes when he’s mowing the lawn or washing the car, or when a schoolgirl walks past. Or last thing before he goes to sleep.
No one outside the gang knows exactly how many girls they lured into cars, abducted and violated. There were a lot of gang rapes in the 1970s, and not all were investigated, let alone solved. Often, the victims and their families became part of a conspiracy of silence – gagged by fear, shame and the prospect of blame.
And so the gangs got away with it until something stopped them: they were caught, or close enough to it to be scared off, or they tired of their brutal game. A few of ‘the boys’ might have committed other violent crimes and ended up in jail, but the rest faded back into suburban anonymity. Family men with secrets. It would be a lot to presume that many, if any, feel remorse about what they did. But they must wonder in quiet moments whether the past can ever reach out for them.
The answer is that it can. This is the story of how a terrified schoolgirl has become a driven and determined adult, hunting a gang of men who raped her when she was 15.
She has traced the man who betrayed her by delivering her and her friend to the gang. This time, she guesses, he will betray the same gang. He just doesn’t know it yet. Nor does he know that a detective who has worked on the case for ten years has been watching him for weeks.
ON the first Tuesday of November, 1976, the rest of the world was watching the United States presidential election: Jimmy Carter versus Gerald Ford in a cliffhanger. But in Australia, the Melbourne Cup pushed the White House off the front page. Even the worst Cup Day weather in memory couldn’t stop the race that stops a nation. More than 78,000 turned up at Flemington.
It was a day of portents, humid and oppressive, as if the tropical wet season had strayed south. By early afternoon, thunderclouds blacked out the sun. Anxious drivers turned on headlights even before the first cloudburst hit. Hundreds of cars were stranded in flooded streets. The wind uprooted trees and stripped roofs. Then the rain hit again, turning Flemington into a paddy field of ruined shoes and shattered hopes.
It was the wettest Cup in history. The deluge would stick in people’s minds for years. The betting ring was swamped with money for a New Zealand mudlark called Van Der Hum, a dour plodder backed to favouritism who duly splashed his way into racing folklore by winning the slowest Cup in decades.
Hundreds of police were rostered to watch the race crowd. One was Richard Parsons, a 26-year-old constable in uniform, seconded from Footscray. Twenty-six years later, as a veteran detective, he remembers how wet it was and that he found a warm welcome and a few drinks when he finished his shift, at a party hosted by Melbourne socialite Peter Janson in a double-decker bus.
There were other attractions on that public holiday. At Festival Hall in West Melbourne, not far across the industrial sprawl between the docks and the muddy Maribyrnong River, thousands of teenagers queued to get into a concert, Cup Day Rock.
The old boxing stadium was a primitive but popular venue. Just nine days earlier, some of the biggest Australian acts of the 1970s had packed the hall for the annual Rocktober concert. Now it was full again. The Cup Day concert featured Mark Holden, a cleancut pop idol who tossed carnations into the crowd and drew adoring teenage girls who’d seen him on Countdown. Where girls go, boys follow. Not all of them clean-cut.
The concert ended about 5pm. Ushers opened the back doors into Rosslyn Street to ease the crush around the main doors at the front. The crowd poured into wet streets under a sullen sky.
Among them were two girls, schoolmates who’d caught the train in from the eastern suburbs. They were in third form at high school and had not long started going out by themselves. Donna, curly-haired and vivacious, was dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a blue Lurex cardigan. Angela opted for the hippie look: ‘treads’ sandals, a long skirt, earrings. They were friends, but not best friends.
Waiting in the street were three youths in a station wagon. Donna had first met two of them at the Rocktober concert nine days before. The shorter, better-looking one she knew as Wayne Thompson. He was fair, with browny-blond hair, cut short in a modified version of the sharpie style. He wore the uniform of the time: a polo shirt with a penguin logo and tight Staggers jeans.
Wayne’s mates were both called John. The one Donna had met twice before had pale skin and dark hair with longer ‘tails’ at the back. The three were in the front bench seat of the fawn-coloured station wagon, probably a Holden, the back packed with tools and building equipment. At 18, they were working men with adult tastes in alcohol, cigarettes and sex.
Donna knew the car. It was the one in which the obliging Wayne had given her a lift to Flinders Street station after the Rocktober concert. The same car that, a few nights later, he had driven all the way from the western suburbs to Box Hill to meet her. She had skipped a ballroom dancing class to meet him and one of the Johns that night – and had agreed to meet them the following Sunday, October 31.
That Wayne would drive across town to see her impressed Donna. He was older, had a car and money, and came from somewhere else: among her peers, that made him desirable. She didn’t realise it might also make him dangerous.
But there were clues. During the week, a stranger, calling himself ‘Tony’, telephoned Donna at home asking her to a party.
He said Wayne had given him her number. This confused her.
She wondered why Wayne would hand out her number. She refused.
On October 31, she took the train to the city. Wayne met her at Flinders Street station. With him was his supposed ‘brother’, John, who, Donna later found out, was not related to Wayne at all. This tendency to fudge names puzzled Donna but did not make her suspicious.
They then drove west, across the Dudley flats and the Maribyrnong River and beyond, through suburbs she had never seen. To a deserted picnic area, where there was a public toilet block near a creek, some boulders and scrubby trees. There they met friends of Wayne’s, including one called ‘Tony’.
It was a trial run, Donna was to realise later. She was naive. She half expected to have sex with Wayne, as she thought of him as her ‘boyfriend’. But when he pushed her to ‘turn it on’ for Tony, she was upset.
Tony forced himself on her and Wayne took photographs, as if she was a trophy. She was angry and humiliated but not scared. She did not yet grasp she was being set up as a target for the gang by being branded a ‘slut’.
Which is why, two days later, when Wayne got out of the station wagon outside Festival Hall, she listened to him when he apologised for his behaviour. He said he would make it up to her by taking her and her friend to a party.
At first, Donna played it cool. She said, ‘I know what your parties are like,’ referring to the Sunday incident. But Wayne was persuasive and plausible. That was why, as she realised much later, it was his job to ‘chat up’ vulnerable girls picked out of the crowd at concerts. It was the gang’s modus operandi.
Donna took the bait; she and Angela agreed to go. As soon as he closed the deal, Wayne smoothly switched things: he said that as his car was already full, the girls could get a lift with his friends. He assured them his mates were trustworthy.
On cue, a gleaming red Torana pulled up next to them. It was a two-door manual with black bucket seats, a billiard-ball on the gearstick and a transfer with the word ‘Torana’ in big white capitals across the top of the windscreen. Four young men were in the car. The driver wore a hat. A big man leaned forward in the passenger seat and unlatched it so Angela could climb in between the pair in the back. Donna realised she was expected to sit on the big man’s knee in the front. She was taken aback at first but having to squeeze in seemed so clearly uncomfortable and temporary that it reinforced the impression that the party was nearby.
Wayne assured her he would drive ahead and lead the way. She believed him – and Angela trusted her. It was all organised. In seconds, the situation had changed from the girls going with three people Donna had already met to being in a car full of strangers.
The first thing she realised was that the four men belonged to one ethnic group. They were dark-haired and spoke with the same accent. She thought they were Greek or maybe Italian. In itself, that didn’t matter to her. Donna and some of her five siblings were born overseas – to a Canadian father and Northern Irish mother – and the family had been all over the world before immigrating only a few years before, so she knew what it was like to be an outsider.
What made her uneasy was that these strangers knew things about her: which concerts she had been to; that she liked dancing; where she came from and which school she went to.
‘They were kind of laughing but in a sly way,’ is how she put it later. ‘We were being “interviewed” but I didn’t know it. They were looking for someone who fitted their criteria: who came from a different area and had no idea who they were or where they were taking us.’ The men avoided using each other’s names. They called each other ‘mate’, although she heard the name ‘Joe’ and one mentioned working in a garage.
What the men knew about her was harmless enough, but the fact they knew it unsettled her. Donna glanced in the rear-vision mirror and caught the eye of one of the men in the back seat. She didn’t like his stare. He was sizing her up.
The longer they drove, the stranger the situation seemed. For the second time in three days, she was driven into the western suburbs. When both cars pulled up at a service station she was uneasy. The one she called the ‘big guy’ got out and spoke to Wayne secretively.
It was as if they were discussing a drug deal.
It was a deal. But not drugs.
THE big guy was boss. He was broad-shouldered, thick-set and had a strong accent. Donna noticed the distinctive crease across the bridge of his nose.
By the time they left the service station, Donna was spooked but didn’t know what to do. Even if she got away, Angela was trapped in the back.
Soon, they left the houses behind and passed open country – the rifle range at Williamstown – then turned off on to a rough dirt track that led into wasteland between the Altona beachfront and a row of huge fuel or chemical storage tanks. In the distance she saw the orange-tiled roofs of a new housing development, but the wasteland was deserted. Thunder rumbled as the cars stopped near a patch of stunted scrub.
Everything was wrong. Donna jumped out of the Torana and ran to Wayne’s car, checking over her shoulder that Angela was behind her. ‘What’s going on?’ she yelled at Wayne.
‘What’s the problem?’ he answered, and one of the two with him said something odd: ‘We’re doing a deal.’ An admission.
She heard a thud, a sudden exhalation of air and a scream. She jerked around to see that the big guy had knocked Angela to the ground and was dragging her, like a hunter with an animal carcass. Angela’s face was contorted with fear. (Years later, when Donna saw Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, it reminded her of the way her friend looked at that moment.)
Donna turned back to Wayne and the two Johns and begged them to do something. One mumbled something about going for help. They got back in their car and drove off.
She never saw them again. It was a set-up.
The big man threw Angela into the Torana. Donna ran at him and jumped on his back, clawing at his neck. He grabbed her and tossed her into the back seat with Angela, who was sobbing. The other two men were still outside, leaving the driver and the leader in the front.
The other two walked off, as if they had rehearsed their movements. The driver sped off, bouncing over the rough ground, then stopped the car.
Donna was terrified, but she was still thinking. ‘You don’t want to do this,’ she said, but the big guy interrupted.
‘Why don’t you just fucking shut up,’ he said quietly, cold eyes staring into hers. Then she saw the glint of the knife in his hand, held low between the bucket seats.
That’s when she knew there was no way out. But she couldn’t imagine what was going to happen. How could she? She was 15.
IT wasn’t until Donna was twice that age, an apparently successful and sophisticated woman living a long way from Melbourne, that she found the words to tell what happened that day.
She had worked hard and lived fast, a party girl running on adrenaline and deadlines, pushing herself to exhaustion so that she could sleep it off and do it all again, night after night. She left school and Melbourne soon after the rapes, started as a window dresser, moved to working in nightclubs and then theatre – steadily more frenetic jobs that kept body and mind busy. It was the mask she held up to the world, a way to keep nightmares at bay.
It didn’t always work.
Once, in 1983, drunk in an empty club at 5am, she told a friend she’d been raped, but then fell silent. He did not hear the full story until years later.
After one failed relationship and a few false starts, she stayed single for years. Her family knew what had happened in Melbourne but it was taboo. Her parents had opposed going to the police, moved interstate soon after the ordeal and ‘left it behind’. Donna was implicitly encouraged to go along with an unspoken conspiracy to keep it buried for the same reasons many rape victims did and still do: shame, blame and fear. Not only fear of blame and fear of reprisals, but fear of being cross-examined in court and judged outside it.
In any case, for years she could not force herself to talk about it. Until one day in early 1992, when the past finally caught up and her mask cracked.
It happened with a chance sighting at a mailing house where she was approving theatre subscription brochures. A supervisor asked where she went to school, explaining that one of the men working there thought he remembered her face from a high school in Melbourne.
It was a harmless query, but Donna was rattled. Being recognised triggered a rush of submerged memories – and fears. From that day, friends noticed that her behaviour changed.
One of those friends was Tom McDonald, an Australian business lawyer then practising mostly in the United States but who often visited the city where Donna lived. He first met her in 1991 at the club she then managed. They became friends and he helped her with a legal problem. She repaid him by cooking him dinner when he was in town. To McDonald, Donna was ‘sparkling company and a damned good cook’, but their friendship was platonic. After one such meal in early 1992, they were listening to music and having a drink when Donna’s breezy charm fell apart. She said she trusted him because he had never made a pass at her. Then she said she’d been having ‘strange feelings’. Then she broke down.
The savvy club manager turned into a frightened girl. Crying and disjointed, she poured out a stream of raw recollections. ‘It was so traumatic it made her physically ill,’ McDonald recalls.
Afterwards, he felt ‘ashamed to be a man for about five minutes’. Then he decided to help. He suggested psychological treatment – and legal remedies. One avenue was crimes compensation. The other was justice – searching for the attackers and seeing them punished. McDonald helped her launch a crimes compensation case that she eventually won. But mere compensation – about six months’ wages for a dozen rapes and a ruined life – was never going to be enough to put her back together again.
In 1992, Donna’s friends saw what one calls ‘that sparky, mischievous, bossy girl’ unravel. The workaholic could no longer work. Her stylish Art Deco inner-suburban house was a mess. She stayed indoors for days, curled in a ball, crying. On her first visit to a psychologist she handed over a tape recording of an interview she had recently had with a sexual assault counsellor. It was, the psychologist said later, ‘a harrowing account of a harrowing crime’.
Another friend heard the story first-hand, with detail that shook him – ‘all the filthy parts she needed to have said,’ he says.
She finally went to the police on March 17, 1992, while in Melbourne for a conference. She went to Nunawading Community Policing Squad and started talking. It took 10 hours to finish the statement. A kind policewoman took it all down and shared a piece of boiled fruitcake with her, the only thing either of them ate from midday until 10pm.
She recalled every detail as if it were frozen in time. ‘I have these snapshots in my brain,’ she explained later. ‘It unfolds like a film. A noir film.’
IT wasn’t just the knife but the look in the eyes of the man who held it that terrified Donna. He dragged her out of the car, then got in the back seat and started to rape Angela.
Donna was in shock. The driver stayed in the car, watching. The other two men walked up. They pushed and abused her, working themselves up. They called her ‘fucking slut’ and ‘stupid bitch’ and ‘hopeless c…’ and grabbed at her breasts. They called her ‘boutana’ or ‘puttana’ – Greek and Italian variations of whore.
She refused to undress. ‘Smart bitch’, one snarled, and they shoved her face down on the bonnet of the car and pulled her jeans and underclothes down, one holding her by the hair. What followed was obscene, violent and degrading.
She was numb with pain, fear – and concern for Angela, who was a virgin. And who, Donna thought guiltily, wouldn’t be there except for her. She could hear her friend whimpering in the car. It rained again. She tried to block out what was happening by concentrating on the sky, the refinery tanks and the raindrops on the windscreen. Forever after, a wet windscreen has jolted her into remembering these unspeakable acts.
The rapists laughed and taunted Donna as they zipped up their flies. She dressed herself and got in the car with Angela, thinking it was over. It wasn’t. The Torana went a few hundred metres and stopped. Waiting was another station wagon, a metallic, mocha-brown Ford with curtains in the back. There were two men in it – a tag team. The big guy dragged Angela out and ordered both girls into the Ford. He got in, too, as if he owned them. They drove off. Donna didn’t see the Torana again, except in bad dreams.
She had no idea where they were until she saw a Footscray Institute of Technology sign as the car turned down a sloping entrance to parkland beside the river opposite Flemington racecourse, still crowded after the races. It was quiet on the Footscray bank, but a family was nearby trying to have a picnic, despite the weather. The girls were raped again. Donna could see the picnickers through the fogged-up windows. She willed them to realise what was happening and rescue them.
They drove off again. The gang leader put his arm around Angela in a grotesque parody of affection, as if she was his girlfriend. When the car stopped at traffic lights, he whispered in Donna’s ear, ‘I know you’d like to run’. They drove under a bluestone bridge where water was lying across the road, almost knee-deep. They turned into cobbled lanes among warehouses and factories, somewhere in North Melbourne or Kensington, went up a steep lane and stopped in a car park underneath a building. It was dark and deserted but suddenly the space was filled with the rumble of a V8 engine and male voices. More men.
Donna whispered to Angela to cling to the pack leader, ‘Just stay with him – he won’t let anyone else touch you.’ She was not sure this was true, or even if they would survive. She feared their ordeal was heading for some sinister climax: ‘I was frightened we were going to be annihilated.’ One by one, the newcomers raped Donna. Except the last one, the twelfth man to straddle her that day.
She saw his face. She thought one of the others called him ‘Steve’. He was smaller and fairer than the rest and less sure of himself. She whispered to him, ‘Help me get out of here.’
He quietly helped her get dressed, then called to the leader, ‘Mate, it’s getting late. Why don’t we get rid of them?’
They drove. It was getting dark. Minutes later, the car pulled into a lane beside North Melbourne railway station. The girls were shoved out, like pieces of rubbish. They had avoided death but their life sentences were just beginning.
DONNA’S police statement trickled through the system and across the city from Nunawading to Footscray CIB, a crowded office with stained carpet and strained resources in one of the busiest police stations in Australia.
The file was handed to a detective who was transferred soon after, then to another, who was too busy on recent offences to waste time on something that happened so long ago. And so, in mid-1993, the file passed to Detective Sergeant Richard Parsons, the constable at the 1976 Melbourne Cup.
Parsons had lived and worked in the western suburbs all his life and none knew ‘the patch’ better. He had seen a lot of bad endings but, unusual in his calling, that had not stopped him being calm and courteous. Only a fool would mistake this for weakness or lack of purpose. No policeman who has worked the Melbourne waterfront is a soft target – but it didn’t stop him having a soft heart.
When Parsons read Donna’s statement, it touched a nerve. He remembered gang rapes in the district in the 1970s and it bothered him that some went unsolved. Besides, he had a daughter of his own. And when he spoke to Donna, they struck a rapport.
Without new leads, there wasn’t a lot Parsons could do, but he did what he could. The starting point was the man Donna knew as Wayne Thompson and his friend John. Although Wayne had lied that John was his brother, Donna knew his real surname. What she didn’t know was that Wayne had also lied about his own surname: it wasn’t Thompson.
The day after the rapes, Wayne had called her at home and told her his telephone had been disconnected and she would not be hearing from him. She had no idea where he worked, except that he was probably a labourer or apprentice tradesman. He had vanished.
Sergeant Parsons soon found John, who still lived locally. He had a string of convictions – assaults, thefts and drink driving – and had served time for armed robbery in the 1980s. The detective wasn’t surprised when John denied having anything to do with Donna or the rapes.
On John’s criminal record, Parsons noticed that one of his associates was called Wayne, though his surname was not Thompson. This Wayne (Wayne X) was the right age – 18 in 1976 – and had a record for assault, theft and burglary in the 1970s. He had served time in Turana youth training centre.
When Donna visited Melbourne in January, 1996, the detective showed her a series of mug shots of possible suspects, including a poor-quality photocopy of Wayne X. She paused over the picture and said the eyes reminded her of ‘Wayne Thompson’ but she wasn’t sure.
Meanwhile, Parsons had traced Angela. Whereas Donna had left Melbourne soon after the rapes and had lived interstate ever since, Angela had stayed. They’d written to each other briefly but the friendship had petered out. They had little in common except their ordeal, which each had tried to bury in her own way.
Angela had married, had children and moved to an outer suburb. Parsons arranged to meet her discreetly. Angela confirmed Donna’s statement but refused to be involved in any possible prosecution.
Her husband and children did not know about the rapes and she wanted it to stay that way.
It looked like a dead end.
IN June 1996, Donna was going through things she had stuffed into a suitcase when leaving Melbourne 20 years before. She opened a satchel full of school English notes. As she put it down, something orange fell out.
It was a ticket to the 1976 Rocktober concert at Festival Hall. On the back was written ‘Wayne’ and a telephone number. She stared at it, then sat down and typed a fax to Parsons. ‘You’ll never guess what!’ it began. ‘I’m still shaking with excitement and amazement.’ She was sure the old telephone number would lead to Wayne and unravel the rapists’ identities. Eventually, it would, but for a long time the orange ticket was a red herring.
In the rush to computer databases in the 1980s and ’90s, old telephone records and manual systems had not only been superseded, but destroyed. In 1976, a disconnected telephone number might have been used to trace someone who didn’t want to be found. But in 1996, the same number seemed useless because it couldn’t be crosschecked using modern data systems.
Months after finding the ticket, Donna saw an article about old telephone directories for sale. It gave her an idea. She asked the State Library of Victoria to look up Wayne X’s surname in the 1976 Melbourne directory to see if any subscriber of that name matched the number she had. None did.
Donna either had to give up or look for a needle in a haystack. She decided to look. In June, 1997, she asked Telstra to let her search an archival copy of the 1976 directory. She spent hours every week at her state’s Telstra headquarters, poring over it. She took four months and 655,000 names to find the number.
Again, it seemed like a breakthrough.
The name listed for the number was T. Fennell, at 175 Millers Road, Altona. Perhaps Fennell was a friend or relative of Wayne’s family? It had the allure of the unknown and it seemed to Donna and the detective that T. Fennell was the missing clue.
But when Sergeant Parsons went to 175 Millers Road, his heart sank. It was a block of flats that had been rented out to dozens of tenants over the years. No one knew of a T. Fennell. Parsons and Donna set up stories in local newspapers, appealing for help. None came.
The problem was that the 1976 telephone directory had been out-of-date. (In fact, respectable tenants called Tony and Doris Fennell had moved out of the Millers Road flat in December, 1974, but Fennell’s name and outdated address and number had mistakenly stayed in the 1976 directory. Meanwhile, the number had been allocated to new subscribers: Wayne X’s parents. There was no way of knowing this until the author finally traced Tony Fennell to a country district in eastern Victoria.)
For five years, however, it threw the investigation off course. Without Fennell, it seemed they couldn’t prove a connection between the telephone number and Wayne X. As it turned out, when Fennell was found, he couldn’t directly make that connection – but he provided valuable information by pointing out that Donna had searched the wrong telephone directory. There was still hope.
In 2003, on a rare visit to Melbourne, Donna went to see Richard Parsons. Once more they revisited the crime scenes, from Festival Hall to Altona to the Maribyrnong riverbank to North Melbourne. This time the detective had unearthed a good-quality photograph of Wayne X in the 1970s. Donna said it looked like the Wayne she had known – but she needed to be sure. Later, she went to the State Library and asked for the 1977 telephone directory. She eventually found the telephone number she had written on her concert ticket 26 years before.
Proof that ‘Wayne Thompson’ was really Wayne X.
Proof that the past can reach out.
THE last chapter of Donna’s story has not been written because it has not happened yet. The ending she hopes for is that the net will tighten around the men who planned and committed the pack rape of two terrified teenage girls all those years ago.
She knows they are out there. Time has disguises – thinning hair and thickening waists – but it cannot alter some things. If he’s alive, the leader of the pack will still be tall and broad-shouldered and have a southern European accent and a domineering personality … and that distinctive crease across the bridge of his nose. Time cannot alter the fact he used to go around with his mates in a spotless red two-door Torana and that he knew someone with a dark-brown Ford station wagon with vinyl bench seats and a column shift.
The Torana was the sort of car young men prized. Somewhere, photographs of it will be in an album. Somewhere, people will remember the car and who owned it in 1976. The rapists are not the only ones with secrets. Richard Parsons is sure Donna and Angela were not the only girls set up and raped who didn’t go to the police because they felt compromised by the unspoken suggestion that they had somehow ‘asked for it.’
Those frightened girls will be women in their early 40s now. Old enough not to be scared any more and to help each other fight back. Each will know something that counts. Some might even know who their attackers are or where they live.
Meanwhile, time is running out for the gang. The day will come when the patient Sergeant Parsons will knock on the door of a pale brick-veneer house in a suburb on Melbourne’s western fringe. It’s the house where Wayne X lives with a new woman.
The detective will pick his time – Wayne is a truck driver these days, and isn’t always home.
What happens next is up to Wayne. He can help police. Or he can try to protect the members of the gang.
Wayne X knows what jail is like: he once did time for assault. He was young and reckless then. Now he has family reasons not to go back inside. Wayne’s wife died recently and he has a young daughter to worry about. It won’t be long before she’s at high school and wanting to go out with boys.
AT the time of going to press, two women had come forward to tell police they were victims of the same gang. They identified several suspects as members of the gang, and police established that two of the wanted men had died. Inquiries are proceeding.
Victims’ names have been changed in this story.