Executed for the murder on 29 January 1907 of May Jewson, who ran a rooming house in White Cliffs, NSW. Sadeek, who had been drinking, was jealous of her relationship with a younger man, Peter Marriott. He also claimed Jewson had given him VD. In his defence he said she had picked up a knife and had been accidentally killed. On 11 June 1907 Sadeek became the only man to be legally hanged at Broken Hill. (Stephen Lasscock, ‘Seventeen Steps’ in Australian Police Journal, December 2007)
Victorian drugs squad officer who in 2007 received 10 years with a minimum of six to be served for drug trafficking. Sadler, along with Ian Norman Ferguson, who received twelve with a minimum of eight, and Stephen Alan Cox, who received seven with a minimum of four, had been dealing with an informer, ‘Vinh’ Duy Le, returning confiscated drugs back onto the street. The prosecution alleged that between 1999 and 2002 $1.5 million of heroin was recirculated. (R v Cox, Sadler [2006] VSC 443; DPP v Ferguson [2006] VSC 484; Ian Munro, ‘They Were Rotten to the Core’ in The Age, 19 October 2006)
At his September 2006 funeral service in Woollahra, the rabbis spoke of club owner and pimp Saffron, one of the last of the so-called East Coast Milieu who dominated organised crime in Sydney from the 1940s to the 1980s, as ‘acknowledged as a man of goodwill’ and ‘a true Australian icon’.
When in 1940 he was convicted for possession of stolen car radios Saffron had identifiable assets of £10. Despite this he was able to open a number of clubs. His most celebrated, the Roosevelt, in Orwell Street, Kings Cross, which catered for resting American troops, was temporarily closed in 1944 when it was described by Mr Justice Maxwell as ‘the most notorious and disreputable nightclub in the city’. Saffron then took up bookmaking in Newcastle, acquiring the licence of the Newcastle Hotel. He was by the end of the war one of the biggest of Sydney’s illegal liquor dealers owning a string of clubs and hotels and often using his relations as front men. By the early 1950s he owned public house and hotel licences worth in excess of £84 000.
In addition to the clubs his interests included brothels, arson—he was suspected of being behind the Luna Park fire—bribery, blackmail and extortion. He was also heavily involved in illegal baccarat games. He always denied involvement in drugs but the comments of his employees seem to give the lie to this. In 1974 he was dubbed Mr Sin at the Moffitt Royal Commission. To his great annoyance it stuck.
The next year the renegade and crusading heiress Juanita Nielsen, who was trying to prevent re-development of part of Sydney’s King Cross, disappeared after a mid-morning appointment at Saffron’s transvestite nightclub, Les Girls. Her body was never found.
In the early 1980s Saffron had free access to high-ranking police and in particular to the office of Bill Allen, the NSW Assistant Commissioner, something which contributed to the officer’s speedy dismissal. Saffron was also named by senator Don Chipp in Federal Parliament as ‘one of the most notorious, despicable human beings—if one can use that term loosely—living in this country’.
In 1988, Saffron fell out with James Anderson, his former partner in his nightclubs who gave evidence against him about the bookkeeping. Now, Caponelike, Saffron went to prison for three years for tax fraud and served 17 months. It cannot have been a hard sentence because he organised the cabaret from Les Girls to give a performance for his fellow prisoners. Another prisoner had food brought in for the concert from a Chinese restaurant he owned.
In November 1947 he married Doreen Kratz but much of his life was spent with his mistress, one time Tivoli showgirl Biruta Hagenfelds, by whom he had a daughter, Melissa.
He remained spiky to the end, suing the Gold Coast Bulletin over a crossword clue ‘Mr Sin (3.7)’ and, rather less successfully, John Silvester and Andrew Rule over his entry in their Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters. He settled the action on part payment of his lawyers’ costs and the sales of the book increased enormously.
Saffron died on 15 September 2006. Karl Bonnette, another East Coast Milieu survivor, thought, ‘He was always a gentleman and I don’t believe any of the things that were written about him being a criminal’. One of his former employees thought differently, saying, ‘He made sure his girls had enough heroin to work and make him a dollar. He always took 60/40. He was a hoon.’ (Tony Reeves, Mr Sin [The Abe Saffron Dossier]; John Silvester and Andrew Rule, Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters; Kate McClymont, ‘Mr Sin of Sydney Dead at 86’ in SMH, 16 September 2006)
After the death of Norman Bruhn, his friend Saidler continued to stand over bars and clubs in Glebe and Elizabeth Street near the Central Railway, Sydney. On 13 September 1930, he demanded five shillings’ protection from Ernie Good who ran a wine bar. Good refused; Saidler threw a glass of wine in his face and, taking out his razor, threatened to carve him up. According to one witness he said, ‘I’ll slice off your smeller with this little beauty’. Good took out a pistol and shot him where he stood. Charged with manslaughter, Good was acquitted when the coroner ruled self-defence saying it was, ‘One of the strongest cases of justifiable homicide’. Saidler’s widow Lallie, who thought her husband, whom she had married at 15, was ‘wonderful’, told reporters how he kept cats and pulled the noses of Chinese children until they squealed with delight. She took a penny and scratched, ‘I’ll kill you for killing Sailor’ in the woodwork of Good’s front door. That, however, was the full extent of any reprisal. (Larry Writer, Razor)
Sydney heroin dealer distributing drugs to prostitutes in the Kings Cross area, Salvietti was thought to have ordered the killing by Emil Rusnak of Brett Hanslow, shot at Neutral Bay in February 1983 and Kevin Arthur Browne who was shot in March the same year. Around 10 p.m. on 19 March 1985 Salvietti was found in a Commodore that had smashed into a parked car on Edward Street, Concord. He had been executed with a single .32 shot to the back of the head. Earlier Salvietti had been a major witness for the prosecution in the Enmore conspiracy case. Steven Alan Smith, from Narrabri, NSW, was convicted of Salvietti’s murder, sentenced to life imprisonment, and released in 1998.
May 2002 NZ robber murderer with Ese Junior Falealii of Marcus Doig and John Vaughan.
Known as the ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’, after being transported for seven years the former Londoner was convicted of the 26 August 1803 murder of Constable Joseph Luker who was investigating the robbery of the considerable sum of 24 guineas from Sydney prostitute Mary Breeze in Back Row East (now Phillip Street), Sydney. His cutlass was left embedded in his head. Another constable, Isaac Simmons, was strongly suspected of involvement but never charged. Samuels admitted the robbery but denied killing the officer. Sentenced to death, his hanging was a gruesome spectacle. First, the rope snapped, then a second unravelled and finally the third broke. Suspecting divine intervention the authorities called it a day and he was granted a reprieve. On 24 September 1803 the Sydney Gazette thought, ‘A Reprieve was announced … and if Mercy be a fault, it is the dearest attribute of God and surely in Heaven it may find extenuation!’ Samuels did not really benefit. A short while after, he and companions stole a boat and drowned in an escape attempt.
The body of Milad Sande, the nephew of a man of the same name said to be one of Melbourne’s biggest heroin dealers, was found in Sydney on 23 November 2005. He had been shot in the head and his body dumped beside a waterfront park in Malabar. His uncle was said to have had direct links with Chinese heroin importers. (SMH, 24 November 2005)
37-year-old drug dealer Sandery from South Australia went missing in April 1988 when he was last seen in the Zetland Hotel, Sydney. Residents in Hansard Street reported hearing a series of shots on 12 April and seeing three men lifting a man from the road before bundling him into a white van. His body was found some months later in a shallow sand grave near Botany. Neddy Smith was charged with Sandery’s murder but the charge was dismissed at the committal stage in 1996.
In November 1991 in what the court described as the ‘worst example of this type of offence’ seven members of the Wellington chapter received prison sentences for bombing the clubhouse of the Mongrel Mob. In 1995 the club’s one time president Mark Albon was sentenced for what was then the largest illegal importation of amphetamines. (R v Wright (1991) 7 CRNZ 624)
Drug dealer and one time Marrickville Council member. In 1985 a doctor who had charged Savvas with fraud had his surgery firebombed and his chauffeur was killed. Two years later the fraud charges were dismissed. Savvas then went into drug distribution with Barry McCann. On 28 December 1987 McCann’s body was found face down on a bench. He had been shot 20 times in his back and head. In 1988 Savvas was arrested and charged with McCann’s murder. At the trial it was suggested there had been a fall out between the pair not only over price undercutting but also the apparent disappearance of two suitcases and their valuable contents. The immediate reason for McCann’s death, alleged the prosecution, was that Savvas knew his partner was out to kill him and he needed to get in first. After a 10-week trial, Savvas was acquitted on the direction of the judge but was later sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for heroin trafficking.
In 1992 Savvas was charged with the importation of heroin while in prison and convicted in June 1994. On 6 July 1996 he put on a false wig, beard and moustache and, passing through six apparently locked gates, walked out of the prison visiting area in civilian clothes. It was not until May the next year that he was dobbed in by a caller telling the police he was in the Suntory Restaurant behind the Hoyt cinema complex in Kent Street, Sydney. When officers arrived they found him drinking red wine and eating beef fillets with two women companions who were left to settle the bill. He lasted in prison a bare two months. Two days after the discovery of an escape plan devised by him and Ivan Milat, Savvas was found hanging from a bedsheet in his cell. One prisoner told the inquest, ‘I just heard that he was strung up’ but on 18 April 1998 a coroner ruled that he had hanged himself while distressed. (Janet Fife-Yeomans, ‘No More Mr Bigs’ in The Australian, 22 October 1998; Neddy Smith, Catch and Kill Your Own)
Drug dealer and prison escaper. One of the more ingenious excuses offered by a jailbreaker was that of Saxon, who vanished from the Metropolitan Remand Centre at Long Bay on 2 March 1993 while he was on remand on charges relating to $77 million worth of cannabis and associated money laundering. He claimed that masked men wearing overalls and black boots entered his cell and kidnapped him. They must have released him unharmed because he was on the run for the next two years, using Belgian and British passports, until he was recaptured by officers from the National Crime Authority in California on 21 April 1995. He was given a sentence of two years to go with the 24 years with a minimum of 16 to be served for masterminding the importation of 10 tonnes of hashish. (Regina v Ian Hall Saxon [2000] NSWCCA 268; Sunday Telegraph, 6 August 2000)
Suspected of being the deviser of the Fine Cotton Ring-In. Originally from Melbourne and then a Sydney-based SP bookmaker, Sayers was also a drug supplier to the Kings Cross clientele. Sayers, a great gambler and now sampling his own product, had also ripped Barry McCann off in a drug deal. On 16 February 1985 Sayers was on his way home to his house in Hewlett Street, Bronte when he was shot with a .22 rifle. A second man then shot him with a .357 Magnum. At the time of his death he was on bail on charges of supplying cocaine and Indian hemp. In 1988 Tom Domican, Vic Camilleri and Kevin Theobald were all found not guilty of his murder.
Vietnamese-born drug dealer from South Yarra, who in 1999 shot three people, including a police constable, during a six-day rampage. Born Khuong Pham, he took the surname of an ex-girlfriend. On 23 February 1999, Scarborough attacked a man in a road-rage incident and then shot another drug dealer who owed him money. When the police tried to arrest him he shot a police constable. He received a 20-year sentence with a 15-year minimum period. (R v Scarborough [2000] VSC 276)
Possible victim of Black Hand activity. On 8 June 1935 he received a demand for £250, with the money to be put under a tramline bridge on his property at Stone River, Queensland. He apparently declined to pay and was shot and killed as he went to let out his horses. His brother Vincent who lived in Ingham had previously served a 16-year sentence in Italy for a shooting. However, in 1933 Scarcella had been involved in an abduction case outside Ingham, when he was one of three men involved in snatching a 13-year-old girl and taking her to Townsville, where one of the men was found in bed with her. (John Harvey, Black Hand Vengeance)
Mafioso who went missing from his Sydney home in 1987. He had been arrested over a $4 million crop of marijuana in a seizure near Townsville in 1986. He had earlier given evidence for the prosecution in another drugs case.
Convicted with Sarah Fotini Bird following a vicious attack on Dulcie Brook in Noosa in June 1998.
Convicted of fraud, the Lithuanian-born Schneidas first entered the prison system as a non-violent offender but found his way to Katingal from the Grafton intractables unit. On 11 August 1979, now a robber and prison escaper and a member of the Grim Reapers prison gang, Schneidas bludgeoned prison officer John Mewburn to death at Long Bay jail. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Schneidas spent most of the next 20 years in solitary confinement but was finally paroled in 1998. He died shortly afterwards following a heroin overdose.
Convicted of August 2000 NSW murder of Jack Valera, see Belinda Jean Valera.
Convicted in December 1930 of the murder of his 14-year-old daughter Doris May, whom he first seduced and then poisoned. Her body was found on Little Redhead Beach, Newcastle. He claimed she told him she had been attacked on the Manning Road and had bought the poison herself. At one time Doris May’s body was thought to have been that of Kitty Reidy, who had disappeared in the neighbourhood three years earlier. (Truth (NSW), 14 December 1930)
The so-called Kimberley Killer, German tourist Schwab first shot the former deputy mayor of Fremantle, 70-year-old Marcus Bullen and his son, Lance, who were found dead at Victoria River in the Northern Territory on 9 June 1987. Five days later he killed Julie Anne Warren, her fiancé Phillip Walkemeyer and his workman Terry Bolt at the Pentecost River in Western Australia. All had been stripped naked and shot with the same high-powered rifle. Their vehicles had been burned and the bodies of the last three had been thrown in the river. Schwab was shot dead on 19 June when he opened fire on a police helicopter, which was searching for him in the Kimberley region. His motive for the killings remains unknown.
Irish-born Scott, a one-time lay preacher at Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, was transferred to Mt Egerton, where he befriended 18-year-old Ludwig Julius Bruun, the manager of the London Chartered Bank, which he duly robbed on 8 May 1869 leaving behind a note that Bruun had done everything he could to stop the robbery. Bruun was acquitted at a subsequent trial but lost his job while Scott went to Sydney where for a time he cut a swathe through society, entertaining actresses and buying himself a yacht. He was jailed over a dud cheque and on his release in March 1872 he was re-arrested for the Egerton robbery. This time he appeared before Redmond Barry who sentenced him to eleven years. Released in seven, he began his career as a bushranger leading the so-called Moonlite gang of young admirers. When he offered his services to Ned Kelly he was rebuffed, with Kelly replying that he would shoot the increasingly mentally unstable Scott on sight. Captured at Wantabadgery Station in November 1879, he was hanged on 20 January the next year.
The first woman hanged in Victoria. Englishwoman Scott at the age of 18 married a man much older than herself. By the time she was 23 her husband, with whom she ran a hotel near Devil’s Rise, was an alcoholic. She recruited a local farmer David Dredge and Eurasian Julian Cross, both of whom were besotted with her, to kill him. Her husband was shot in the head on 13 April 1863 but the attempt to make it appear a suicide was botched. The evidence against her was strong. She had watched them make the preparations and had given them some shots of brandy as Dutch courage. She counted on the fact that the authorities would not hang a woman and secondly they would not hang a woman as pretty as she. Scott was wrong and she was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1863. Dredge and Cross were hanged with her.
Lawyer grandson of Michele Scriva, over the years Scriva acted for major criminals including Victor Peirce, for whom he laundered the proceeds of the ANZ bank robbery in Ringwood, Melbourne in January 1988. A friend of the Benvenuto family, he was struck off after claiming to witness signatures on statutory declarations and fraudulently completing a certificate of identity. He would have been able to apply for reinstatement in 2009 but in the months before his death—following a heart attack on 13 July 2000—he had allegedly been acting as a loan shark and had embarked on a very successful campaign to raise $6 million. The bait was interest of 18 per cent and Scriva took a cut of the lending margin as well as a fee from each duped investor. One source said, ‘I think he honestly believed he was still a lawyer’. Most of the money he raised was never traced. Nor was the remainder of the money he was holding for his underworld clients. (Herald Sun, 14 August 2000)
Acquitted of the Melbourne murder of ‘Fat Joe’ Versace in 1945. In 1950 Scriva was charged with another murder, this time of a former Sixth Division veteran, Frederick John Duffy, who was stabbed to death on 23 September after he tried to help Keith Dibb whom Scriva was attacking. Scriva’s daughter had been hit by Dibb’s car in Peel Street, North Melbourne. Scriva was condemned to death, but was reprieved and served 10 years of the commuted life sentence. His friend Antonio Romeo, who was with him, received a 12-year sentence for attempted murder.
The first man in Victoria since Samuel Peacock to be charged with murder where no body was found, Scully was accused of killing his wife Caroline, who disappeared on 8 May 1950 from her home in Frankston. No money in her bank account was touched, she did not collect her clothes from work, she did not tell her son she was going away and she did not wait a few days to collect £1500 that would have been her share of the sale of the family home. A converted cutter was used to drag parts of the beach without success. In May 1952 Scully was found not guilty of murder when the Crown withdrew the charge and he pleaded guilty to disposing of the body and thereby preventing burial. He claimed his wife had fallen and hit her head during an argument. He was sentenced to three years. (Truth (M), 2 June 1952)
Safebreaker and blackmailer. An expert at the ginger game, Sellers gave evidence to the Beach Inquiry into the Victorian police. He was killed in 1988 when he drove off the Sydney to Melbourne Road hitting a tree. Earlier he had been accidentally pushed out of a third floor unit window by police officers. In 1979 he had been shot in a South Yarra massage motel but had survived. (Mark Read, Chopper 2: Hits and Memories)
Brother of Craig Anthony, Adrian Semyraha was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1999 for shooting and killing his cousin Michael on 7 March 1998 at Browns Plain, Queensland over a $1500 debt. In 2004 he was sentenced to a further 18 months for supplying a small amount of heroin while in prison. (R v Semyraha [2000] QCA 303; [2004] QCA 373)
Robber and drug dealer who committed suicide on 18 July 2007 after shooting Queensland Constable Brett Irwin in the chest when the officer was serving a warrant alleging breach of bail conditions. Irwin did not know that Semyraha had been involved in a robbery at a motel earlier in the day. Irwin’s last act before dying was to warn his colleague that Semyraha had a gun.
Charged first with conspiracy to murder and then the Sydney murder of his 21-year-old former girlfriend, Frances Tizzone, who broke up their relationship. In early March 1995 Serratore first approached a friend saying he wanted her punished, kidnapped and made to write a suicide note before being forced to take an overdose. When the friend declined, on 29 March Serratore strangled her, leaving her body some seven metres from Wakehurst Parkway in Frenchs Forest. He was convicted on 6 November 1998 and sentenced to a minimum of 13 years. (R v Serratore [2000] NSWCC 696)
Sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1982 after being convicted of the Melbourne murder of rival drug dealer Gary Wayne Jennings. Faced with competition and falling profits from his business dealing mainly in amphetamines in the northern suburbs, Sewell, from Glenroy, arranged for Jennings and Thomas Wayne Kite to be abducted as an example and warning to others. Jennings and Kite were taken to a bridge at Keilor where both were shot. Kite survived.
Talented conman with convictions going back to 1981, who has posed as a president of an OMCG, as a wealthy businessman and as a member of the SAS during which time he claimed he had shot Osama bin Laden in the foot. His was the only effective evidence on which Gary Nye and John Harlum was prosecuted for the murder of Roy Thurgar. At the subsequent civil action brought by Nye for malicious prosecution, the judge said of Shakespeare’s role in the murder trial that ‘the principal consistency is the number of lies told by Shakespeare’. He served a sentence in New South Wales for perjury at the Chris Flannery inquest when he said he had been present on the day of that hitman’s death. In March 2005 he was arrested at a Coorparoo club in Queensland and charged with swindling businesswomen. In 2008 he was convicted and sentenced to five years partly suspended, with three years four months to be served.
22-year-old beaten and kicked to death but not sexually assaulted on 19 September 1952 as she left the tramstop in Thomas Street, The Grove, Brisbane. Her death brought an end to an era when windows and doors were left unlocked at night. Although at least eight men made confessions, her killer was never caught. It is possible she was killed in mistake for a doctor’s receptionist who would have been carrying keys to the drug cabinet. (Ken Blanch, Who Killed Betty Shanks?)
In 1970 Shannon was appointed caretaker secretary of the Painters and Dockers in Melbourne after the death of James Donegan. Shannon wanted to be reelected secretary and on 10 December 1971, the morning of the elections, the ballot boxes at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard, the car of Shannon’s driver and the Port Melbourne union offices were all machine-gunned. His opponent Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley had his men outside the Williamstown docks helping their men inside. He thought he had won the vote but later discovered that early in the morning Shannon’s men had arrived and stuffed one of the ballot boxes holding observers at gunpoint. When a rival group appeared a gun battle followed with over 50 shots being fired into one car. The returning officer, Paul Cullen, resigned—at pistol point, it was said. There followed a long series of shootings between supporters of the rival factions.
In May 1972 Shannon had issued a statement reminiscent of those ‘we only kill our own’ made over the years by many of the world’s criminals: ‘Remember, no stray bullet or bomb has harmed a non-unionist’. However, on 21 April 1973 11-year-old Nicholas Kolovrat was killed with a stray bullet in the Mooney Valley Hotel when he was with his father and brother. In fact Shannon did not see out that year. On 17 October shortly before 10 p.m. he was drinking along with another unionist, John Patrick Loughnan, in the Druids Hotel—now the Water Rat—in South Melbourne when, moments after Gary Harding had checked to see he was there, Kevin James Taylor shot him with a sawn-off .22 rifle with a silencer added. Loughnan told the inquest in May 1974, ‘I was facing the Moray Street door. We drank to about 10 p.m. and then I heard crackers go off. All of a sudden Pat said, “You cunt” and fell off his seat. Then I saw blood flow from his mouth. I could not work out what was happening.’
The week after Shannon was shot, Gary Harding was arrested and confessed, implicating Taylor and also Longley who he said had offered him $6000 to shoot the secretary. Longley, who has consistently denied his involvement in the killing of his rival, was arrested. In his interviews with the police Taylor named Longley but when The Texan went on trial in 1975 Taylor said that the contract had been taken out by a man he knew only as Puttynose, who must have been Jack Nicholls. However, it was Longley’s .22 rifle that had been used by Taylor, who had borrowed it saying he wanted to go rabbiting. (James Morton and Susanna Lobez, Gangland Australia)
One smuggler of the 1920s was Reginald William Lloyd Holmes, a man with appar ently impeccable social and business connections who owned land at McMahon’s Point across the harbour from central Sydney. For no apparent reason he gave a former boxer, Jim Smith, a contract to erect a block of flats on the land. This was all the more peculiar because whatever talents Smith may have had as a fighter or billiard marker he had no experience whatsoever in the building trade. The likelihood is that Smith was standing over Holmes. Smith went bankrupt and creditors were defrauded. Nevertheless Holmes continued to finance Smith and set him up with the grandly named Rozelle Athletic Club—in fact a billiard hall. He also gave Smith a more or less free hand as skipper of his speedboat.
House building apart, Holmes’s other great activity was smuggling. It was a time when smugglers often simply took the contraband off the ships in the docks but Holmes used his boat Pathfinder to outrun Customs officials as they picked up packages dumped overboard in Sydney Harbour or on the coast. Much of the contraband was cocaine, then as now the drug of choice among the bright young things of Sydney and elsewhere. It was a lucrative but highly competitive game with fights between rival gangs.
It all began to unwind when Smith’s arm, identified by tattoos, was regurgitated by a captured shark in Coogee Baths on Anzac Day 1935. A Patrick Brady was arrested for Smith’s murder and it was hoped that Holmes would give evidence but, in the midst of police investigations, Holmes was shot dead on 11 June that year in his car. His body was found in Hickson Road at Dawes Point, a known courting spot. Without the evidence of Holmes, the case against Brady withered and died and on 10 September he was acquitted on the direction of the Chief Justice. Nor was the prosecution any more suc cessful in the cases of two men, John Patrick Strong and Albert Stannard, who were accused of the murder of Holmes. The evidence was again weak—a flimsy identification and fingerprints found on the dashboard of Holmes’s car—and the pair were acquitted shortly before Christmas. In his analysis of the case, author Alex Castles suggests that Smith was not only a blackmailer but was also a police informer, and had been shot and killed by another criminal, Edward Frederick ‘Eddie’ Weyman, whom he was threatening. Castles also suggests that Holmes, who was heavily insured, hired men to kill him—suicide would have voided his life policies. Holmes’s wife Inie died when she set fire to her bed at her home on 30 October 1952. (Alex Castles, The Shark Arm Murders)
Australian World War I deserter who teamed up with a fellow Australian Thomas Maguire and Englishman Frederick Jones, who had been invalided out of the army in 1917. The trio began taking soldiers in London on leave to clubs and brothels and then robbing them. On 8 November 1917 they took two Canadian soldiers to a club in Waterloo, South London, and after they left set on them with coshes. One escaped but the other died from the beating. The trio were soon arrested and all blamed each other. Eventually Sharp turned King’s Evidence. He received seven years for robbery and Maguire 10, while Jones, tried for murder, was hanged on 21 February 1918.
On 23 March 2004 Sharpe killed his wife Anna, shooting her with a speargun while his daughter Gracie slept in another room at their home in Mornington. The next day he buried her in the back yard. Four days later he fired the speargun into Gracie’s head, injuring her but not killing her. He then took the two spears with which he had shot his wife and this time killed his daughter, dismembering the body before putting it in garbage bags and taking it to a landfill site on Mornington Peninsula. Later he exhumed his wife’s body, dismembered it with a chainsaw and took it to the same landfill. In 2005 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 33 years to be served. He had seemingly been having difficulty in coping with life’s stresses when he killed his family. (R v Sharpe [2005] VSC 276; Russell Robinson, ‘Mind Games’ in Herald Sun, 1 October 2005)
Police killer, robber and child molester. During the afternoon of Sunday 12 October 1902 a neighbour complained to off-duty St Kilda police officer Richard Johnson that his eight-year-old daughter had been molested. Johnson bicycled to investigate and when he approached Shaw, the man shot him. Johnson pedalled on but collapsed and died in Brighton Road. When two other officers cornered Shaw in Rosamond Street he stabbed and then shot himself. For some time his identity was unknown—no fingerprint system then operated—and Shaw’s body was placed in a formalin bath before it was finally identified by the deputy governor of Darlinghurst jail. Shaw, who was also thought to have shot and killed Constable Denis Guilfoyle in Sydney in the July, had earlier dobbed in his colleagues from a £11 000 robbery in 1885 in Collingwood. Guilfoyle had tried to arrest Shaw and his off-sider who were passing counterfeit coins in Shepherd Street, Redfern. Constable Maher was also shot but survived.
Ex-boxer Shaw, when charged with killing his de facto, Melbourne prostitute Sylvia Holmes on 3 May 1950, said he had been drinking with brothel keeper and his former mistress Ada Cartledge aka Maddocks, during the afternoon in the Standard Hotel, Melbourne. He had returned home at 5 p.m. to find Holmes had left a note for him and when he went back again at 6 p.m. he found her dead on the bed. An inquest in June 1950 returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown but when, in August, Ada Cartledge reappeared to say he had told her he had hit and killed Holmes, Shaw was charged with murder. He still claimed he had found her dead but after a retirement of only 35 minutes he was convicted and sentenced to death. His conviction was quashed on appeal, during which he ran away in handcuffs. After a retrial he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. (Truth (NSW), 16 June, 11 August 1951; The Age, 28, 29 May 1952)
Geelong sly-grog dealer and June 1946 murder victim, see Horatio Morris.
Breaker and enterer and escaper who stole a hacksaw and rope to break into Pentridge on Boxing Day 1951 to deliver tobacco to the inmates. He found he could not get out and, discovered eight hours later hiding under floorboards, was sentenced to six months along with 30 months’ recall. He had previously escaped twice. (Truth (M), 9 January 1952)
In 1960 Melbourne identities Jack Twist, Harold Nugent and Joey Turner were defied by Sheehan. Collecting a debt he owed, they shot up his St Kilda flat only to find this did not faze him in the least. In return Sheehan and a friend allegedly shot up Nugent’s flat on no less than three occasions. The last time it was sprayed with some 20 bullets. Surprisingly, they actually gave evidence at Sheehan’s trial when he was acquitted of conspiracy to demand money with menaces—he had allegedly asked Nugent for £200 to go to Sydney—but was found guilty of discharging a firearm in a public place. (Truth (M), 6 August 1960)
New Zealander born in 1961, career criminal Shepherd crammed 29 offences, including driving and drug offences and burglary, into 23 years before, on the evening of 3 October 2004, he kidnapped, robbed and murdered his landlady, Thai-born Darunee Aphiromlerk in Manurewa. He drove and carried her to the Whangamarino swamp area some hours later. Tying her tightly inside a doona cover, he then threw her alive into the Waikato River, where her decomposed body was found by an eel fisherman on 21 October. Shepherd made a late guilty plea and was sentenced to life with a 17 and a half year minimum. (R v Shepherd [2006] NZHC 1347)
Lieutenant to Terrence Clark in the Mr Asia syndicate, the diminutive Shepherd ran the operation after Clark was arrested in London. He later served over 15 years.
Convicted of the September 1997 murder of James Godden with Richard Leatch.
Drug dealer allegedly shot and buried by Neddy Smith in the Royal National Park in Waterfall, NSW, in 1983. In 2001 it was decided not to continue with the prosecution of Smith. Shu’s family was not interested and it was thought sufficient money had already been spent prosecuting Smith who had been jailed for life. At the time of his death Shu was facing drug charges with James Frederick Murray, whose de facto, Jennifer Anne Lewis, was also charged with murdering Shu and had been with him on the day of his death. (Sun-Herald, 23 February 2003)
Convicted of the murder of his estranged wife Dianna on 10 April 1980, shooting her in the head eight times after breaking into her home near Newcastle, Sievers ran the unsuccessful defence that he was a battered husband and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992 he convinced the court he was a born-again Christian and rehabilitated. Under the new Truth in Sentencing legislation Sievers had his sentence reduced to 12 years and was released later that year. On 4 July 2000 he repeatedly stabbed his girlfriend, mother-of-three Michelle Campbell, to death, again claiming he was a battered husband. This time he drove the body around for three days talking to it and taking money from Michelle’s account. In 1967 Sievers had also stabbed his brother. On 18 December 2002 he was sentenced to life without parole. (R v Sievers, [2002] NSWCCA 1257; [2004] NSWCCA 463)
August 1998 police sergeant murder victim along with senior constable Rodney Miller of Bandali Michael Debs and Jason Roberts. Both Silk and Miller were devotees of AFL clubs Hawthorn and St Kilda and an annual match, the Blue Ribbon Cup, is played in memory of officers killed on duty. Medals are awarded in their names to the best players on the respective sides.
Career criminal serving 15 years in Long Bay for robbery, Simmonds along with Leslie Alan Newcombe escaped from the inner section of the jail on 9 October 1959. The next day they battered warder Cecil Mills to death at Emu Plains prison farm and took his gun. Newcombe was recaptured two weeks later in Sydney but Simmonds kept a manhunt at bay until he was caught by Detective Ray Kelly at Mulbring on 15 November. Mills had apparently been forgotten as a crowd applauded Simmonds as he arrived at Kurri Kurri police station. Tried for murder in March 1960, Simmonds and Newcombe were perhaps fortunate to be found guilty only of manslaughter. The judge, not in sympathy with the verdict, sentenced them both to life imprisonment. For the next six years Simmonds spent his time among intractables at Grafton jail. He became a self-mutilant and eventually was found hanged in his cell on 4 November 1966. Newcombe was released from Parramatta after serving 10 out of his 15-year sentence. He had been transferred there following the suicide of Simmonds. (Leslie Newcombe, Inside Out; Jan Simmonds with Anne Gollan, For Simmo; SMH, 16 December 1969)
Arrested on 10 March 1924 on suspicion of the theft of two guns at Appin, NSW, Simpson was not searched and on the way in a car to the police station shot Guy Chalmers Clift and Constable James Flynn who were in the car with him. Flynn managed to drive the car to the local police station. At his trial Simpson claimed he had been trying to commit suicide when they were shot in the struggle to get the gun from him. Convicted on 3 September, he was hanged on 10 December.
Melbourne Two-up operator and a friend of Siddy Kelly, Sinclair was brought to Sydney at the end of the war by Harry Stokes to run baccarat games. Sinclair also employed the young gambler Perce Galea. After Stokes’s death his widow claimed Sinclair had not paid her an agreed share of the profits.
Corrupt financier who began his career as a financial journalist working for the Melbourne Sun and the Australian Financial Review. In 1977 he took over Qintex and moved to Brisbane where he became a friend of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His downfall came when in 1987 he bought the television network Seven and later tried to buy the American studio MGM. When he failed to pay, his pyramid of companies collapsed and it was found he had been siphoning money for his own account. He declared himself bankrupt to the tune of $170 million and, facing fraud charges, fled to Spain from where, armed with a passport from the Commonwealth of Domenica, he fought off attempts to extradite him until his death in Majorca on 6 August 2001. (Tom Prior, The Sinners’ Club)
Petty criminal but talented multi-escaper, in 1951 Skinner escaped when he had learned that he would not be released at the end of a 15-month sentence for car theft and escaping. While on the run he wrote to the newspapers to say that he was a reformed character but no one would believe him. Recaptured, he took part in the ill-fated escape by Kevin Albert Joiner on 14 April 1952.
Convicted with James Hamilton of the September 2002 NZ murder of Richard Harcombe.
Gypsy Joker acquitted of the 2001 murder of former police officer Don Hancock.
Thief and standover man first convicted in 1910 for larceny from the person, for which he received 18 months. Slater then went to America where, under the name of Henning Campbell, he beat a vagrancy charge before being convicted of burglary and deported. After his run-in with Henry Stokes during the Fitzroy Vendetta Slater became something of a peripatetic villain gravitating between Sydney and Adelaide, living by theft and the standover of SP bookmakers. He had his share of fortune, however. After three trials, in May 1922 he was acquitted of the murder of Thomas Peter Monaghan, killed in the back room of a sly-grog shop in Surry Hills in June 1921. In November 1940 in an apparently prosaic end, Slater was shot at La Perouse near the Yarra Bay shanty town after he left his home to catch a tram. The killer pumped two bullets into him and then rode away on a bicycle. At the inquest into his death the coroner was told Slater had been shot by a poulterer, Christopher Ransome, who had said, as he stood by the body, ‘You won’t worry me or anyone else again’. Apparently Ransome had shot him because, over the years, Slater had been saying he was a pervert. By the time of the inquest Ransome had been committed to an insane asylum. Appearances can be deceptive and not everyone was convinced by the official account. (Truth (M), 7 December 1940)
In Sydney on 12 October 2003 Slwea was shot four times, bound, gagged and, after being doused with petrol, was set on fire and put in the boot of a car. Amazingly he survived. He had been charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder of Dimitri Debaz but the proceedings were dropped.
Goldfields standover man shot and killed in Kalgoorlie in January 1903, see Charles Kennedy.
Western Australian identity whose body was found on 3 April 1965 on the beach near St Kilda’s yacht club. His skull had been fractured with a blow behind the left ear. He had been seen with another man around 4.15 at Fitzroy and Acland streets. The police believed he had been killed elsewhere in a grudge attack. They later reported that suspects had been whittled down to two men but no charges were brought.
Black singer at Phil Jeffs’s 400 Club in Sydney who in 1936 claimed she was not being paid her agreed wages. Jeffs’s defence was that since she was there to sell sly grog, her contract was illegal. She (or possibly he, since that was another line of defence) abandoned the action. (Truth (NSW), 13, 20 December 1936)
Sydney doctor who in 1981 was prosecuted after performing a partially successful abortion on a 17-year-old girl then seven months pregnant. He had not asked her about the state of her mental/physical health in accordance with the ruling in the Heathbrae Abortion Clinic case and was convicted. He appealed but, in poor health, died before the case could be heard. He remains the only New South Wales medical practitioner convicted of carrying out an abortion.
Uncle of contract killer Lindsay Robert Rose, Smeal disappeared from his Burwood home in July 1990.
Sydney gunman, razor and standover man Smiley was just as regularly a victim. In 1936 when he was shot in the thigh in Elizabeth Street, he had refused to help the police, saying, ‘If I had the Town Hall clock in my pocket, I wouldn’t tell you the time’. Earlier in 1928, at the height of the Razor Wars, he had received five years for slashing. In 1935 he slashed a man at a party given by Kate Leigh and was shot through both feet a few days later. On 13 July 1940 Smiley was shot in a shop run by Mrs Sadie Pinn in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills and his body carried to a nearby lane. He had been standing over George Dempsey and had come into the shop and fired at him. Dempsey and John McIvor were charged with his murder and acquitted. (Truth (NSW), 20 July, 23 August 1940)
Bank robber and escaper whose attempted escape from Yatala, SA, in March 2007 was foiled when guards found a mobile phone, iPod, screwdrivers and superglue in the ceiling of his cell. He had tried to escape in 2003 when five mobile phones and six hacksaw blades were smuggled into the prison. Smith, serving a 30-year sentence for bank robberies, escaped in 1999 and again in 2000, this time after he eluded his guards while visiting his father in hospital. He then shot two people while escaping from a bank robbery in Myrtle. While on the run he stayed in a luxury hotel, photographing himself lying on a bed surrounded with the proceeds. (R v Smith [2003] SASC 263; Smith v The Queen [2004] HCA 129)
Standover man, rapist and drug dealer. Although he has been behind bars since 1990 Smith is probably the best known of Sydney criminals of the last 30 years. One of the most prominent of Sydney criminals in the 1980s he was given a sentence of life imprisonment in Sydney’s first documented road-rage killing. Glen Flavell, a passenger in a tow-truck whose driver became involved in a fight with Smith and another man, was stabbed him to death in a Coogee street in 1990. Smith had been drinking all day, part of the time with Roger Rogerson. Three years later Smith went into segregated confinement as he became a principal witness at the Independent Commission Against Corruption conducted by Ian Temby.
Smith not only had friends in the police such as Rogerson but also in the legal profession for whom he could do odd jobs. In 1984 he was used by his then solicitor, Val Bellamy, to orchestrate a fake bag snatch.
In 1995, following alleged conversations secretly recorded by a cellmate, Smith was charged with the murders of Harvey Jones, Lewton Shu, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, Danny Chubb, Barry McCann, Barry Croft and Bruce Sandery. He was convicted of the murder of Jones and found not guilty of that of Huckstepp. In July 2001 Nicholas Cowdery, the New South Wales DPP, decided not to proceed with the Lewton Shu case. The remaining charges were dismissed at the committal stage in 1996. Since the mid 1990s Smith, now in his early 60s, has suffered from Parkinson’s disease and much of his time has been spent in protective custody. In December 2008 he was reportedly making an application for special release. A spokesperson for the Attorney-General said, ‘While we haven’t received an application for release on compassionate grounds, we intend to keep Mr Smith behind bars for the rest of his life’. (James Morton and Susanna Lobez, Gangland Australia, Neddy Smith, Neddy; Catch and Kill Your Own; Daily Telegraph, 13 July 2001; The Age, 12 December 2008)
Staunch wife of Neddy Smith, who married him when he was in Long Bay prison in 1981. They had three children. In an interview with a journalist she commented, ‘As funny as it may seem, Ned has always been as honest as he can’. (Candace Sutton, ‘20 Years’ Hard Labour Over for Neddy’s Wife’ in Sun-Herald, 23 February 2003)
Sydney gunman Smith, so called because he wore a lead-lined leather glove, was killed in 1970 in a fight with James Anderson in the Venus Room, Orwell Street, Kings Cross. The previous year Smith had been running an unlicensed nightclub Interlude at Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. He had had a quarrel with ‘Ratty Jack’ Clarke and police officer Fred Krahe had arranged with the Queensland police officer Glen Hallahan that Smith and his wife Linda should go to Brisbane. The Interlude, frequented by prostitutes, was the hangout of some of the best Brisbane criminals of the time. The club was later reopened as Pinocchio’s by Geraldo Bellino, who had once been an adagio dancer, and his brother, Antonio.
Privately educated karate black belt and heroin addict Smith received 23 years reduced to 16 for a series of robberies on building societies to finance his habit. The robberies only netted a total of $38 000. He escaped from Pentridge in 1980 and was not arrested until 1990 when he was found in Frankfurt, Germany carrying a small quantity of heroin and was returned to Australia. He later wrote his highly successful faction memoir Shantaram. (Mark Read, Chopper 2: Hits and Memories)
Convicted with Matilda Ann Edwards of the December 1938 killing of her husband in New South Wales.
Smith, brought up in the Colac district of Victoria, was known as The Jockey because he was apprenticed to a trainer as a teenager. Early in his criminal career Smith, regarded as a bank robber’s bank robber, teamed up with Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Australia. On this occasion it was Smith who tried to shoot a police officer when the pair were caught burgling a shop; however, the gun jammed. In 1973 the situation was repeated when a PC Russell Cook was searching a car. Smith again tried to shoot and once more the gun jammed. Charged with a string of robberies in Sydney, despite his escape attempts Smith was given bail. He skipped and was found in Melbourne. Sent to Pentridge, he was there only a matter of weeks before he obtained a visitor’s pass and walked out. One thing he was good at was dealing with horses and now he combined the names of two of the country’s top trainers, Tommy Smith and Bart Cummings, and set up as trainer Tom Cummings. He did well at country tracks but the life of a small trainer has never been an overflowing cup and in 1976 he shot and injured Jerry Ambrose in a robbery in Sydney and the following year killed bookmaker and crime associate Lloyd Tidmarsh in another robbery.
This time he was arrested in Nowra and tried to shoot Detective Bob Godden who saved himself by putting his thumb between the breech and the trigger of the gun. In December 1977 he was charged with Western Australia’s biggest hold up when the Taxation Department’s $176 000 payroll was snatched in Perth on 1 May 1975. Smith was given life, of which he served 14 years, for the attempted murder of Godden and was acquitted on appeal of the other charges including Tidmarsh’s murder, after allegations that his confession had been fabricated.
He was released on 12 February 1992 and a day later was shot in the chest and left for dead outside his home in Curlewiss Street, Bondi. He declined to help the police who said that he was another with so many enemies it would be difficult to say who might have shot him. Now, for a time, he made good money dealing in amphetamines and it was said he was so mean he would ‘bite the head off a shilling’.
In the November he tried to steal an iron and kitchen equipment from Grace Brothers at a shopping mall in Erina. Stopped by the store detective he yet again produced a gun and hijacked a couple to drive him away. Hiding in the bush, he then teamed up with Christopher Dean Binse—another escapee from Pentridge—plotting a series of armed robberies.
Smith died on 5 December 1992. About 8 p.m. he was seen speeding by Senior Constable Ian Harris who followed him to the Farmers Arms Hotel in Creswick, Victoria. When asked for his identification Smith pulled a gun on the officer and when a man Darren Neil, who had seen the incident, approached, he fired a shot into the ground. Neil retreated, drove his car a short way and dropped off his children. He then drove the car at Smith, distracting him. The constable pulled his own revolver and shot Smith three times in the chest. After his death an associate commented that ‘like so many of us he was getting too old to go back to jail’. (John Silvester and Andrew Rule, Leadbelly; SMH, 13 February, 13 June, 7, 8, 20 December 1992, 26 July 1994, 30 May 1998; The Age, 17 December 1977)
Ex-boxer, blackmailer and standover man, murder victim in the 1935 Shark Arm Case.
Convicted of the November 1946 murder in London of John McBain Mudie with Thomas John Ley.
The first foreigner facing drug charges to be given bail in Thailand, in 1996 Melbourne-born Lisa Smith, accused of smuggling 4 kg of cannabis and 500 amphetamine tablets, failed to appear in Bangkok after her father paid $75 000 to have her bailed. She then obtained British and Australian passports in Greece and disappeared. In 1997 after arrest warrants were issued a Thai police spokesman said, ‘I am sure we will get her’. She was still at large in 2006 when the British authorities said they were convinced she was not in the country. At the end of November that year Australian Federal Police said they did not think she was in Australia either. By July 2008 she was one of the world’s most wanted fugitives. In July 2014 she was found in Dublin, where she had been running a cafe since 2010. (The Australian, 27 November 2006).
Victorian robber convicted and jailed for a minimum of 13 years for the murder of a man on a Craigieburn building site in 1987. On his release, in 1999 he was convicted of a burglary at a computer factory with Peter Michael Reed and received two years with a minimum of 10 months to be served. In February 2000 Smith was again convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 30 months for robbing pensioners while disguised as a police officer. On 28 December 2002 he was shot in the neck after declining to carry out a contract on Jason Moran. He survived and went interstate.
Together with his stepfather Colin Frederick Turner, small-time criminal Smith was convicted of the murder of Warlord biker Cosimo Castelluzzo. On New Year’s Eve 1992 the pair kidnapped Castelluzzo in Hindley Street, Adelaide and drowned him after throwing him still alive attached to two metal wheels into the sea off Edithburgh on the York Peninsula. Despite a search covering 2.5 million square metres, the body was never discovered. Lora, sister of Bora Altintas, who drove Smith and Turner away from the dock, was convicted of assisting their escape. (R v Smith (1994) 75 A Crim R 327; Police Journal Online, April 2000, September 2002)
Career criminal Smith, claimed he had driven Jason Moran to the home of Alphonse Gangitano and was told to wait outside on 16 January 1998, the night the ‘Prince of Lygon Street’ was killed. He said that he believed Moran threw a heavy McDonald’s paper bag into the Yarra on the way back. Although the river was searched no gun was found. On 16 September 1998 he killed himself while in police custody. In a written statement Smith had said he was very scared for his own safety as he knew what Jason Moran was capable of doing.
Member of the East Coast Milieu, Smith was born in Balmain in 1936 and has a police record dating back to 1954. In 1965 he travelled with George Freeman as his minder to Las Vegas. A witness at the Moffitt Royal Commission, Smith was recorded being coached in his evidence. At a meeting at the popular Taiping restaurant in Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills on 22 June 1976 he was again recorded, this time explaining how it was essential ‘to get the game sewn up’. He was referring to the likelihood of licensed gambling and was, naturally, keen to ensure that the licences would be granted to existing, if illegal, operators and not to newcomers.
Convicted with Noel Ernest Masters of the August 1947 murder of jockey Neil Joseph McKenna.
Helper in the Barry Quinn escape in June 1979, Smith became a murder victim of Paul Steven Haigh.
Convicted along with Wayne Carstairs of the killing of businessman Robert Cancian, bashed to death at his home in Waterloo Road, Wellington on 25 February 1983 when jewellery and money was also stolen. Robbery, however, was not the prime motive. In the first use of the witness protection scheme in New Zealand, two informers told the court the killing had been a contracted one. Three years earlier, on 1 September 1980 Sneller, the then de facto of Marion Granville, was due to appear in court with her on charges of possessing cannabis with intent to supply. On 30 August she was seen being dragged into a white Holden that was returned to her home two hours later without her. She was never seen again. (William Minchin, Wellington: The Dark Side)
During her August 2008 trial for the January 2006 NSW murders of stud farm owners Gregory Hosa and his wife Kathryn McKay, Snibson changed her plea to guilty. The court had been told by co-accused Stacey Lea-Caton that Snibson had told him and Andrew Wayne Flentjar that Hosa and McKay had filmed themselves performing a sex act on her and she wanted them belted up. The claim was totally false but the pair were lured to a spot near their farm, hogtied, strangled and then their bodies put in drums and burned in the Tomerong State Forest outside Nowra. Within hours Lea-Caton went to the police to tell them what had happened. ‘I couldn’t live with my conscience’, he told the court. He received a maximum of 22 years and gave evidence at the trial of Flentjar and Snibson. Flentjar, who told the jury he had left before the pair were actually killed, was convicted only of kidnapping and received 10 years with seven to be served. On 5 September 2008 Snibson was sentenced to 32 years’ imprisonment with a nonparole period of 24. (R v Snibson [2008] NSWSC 905)
In 1841 Snodgrass, a member of the Melbourne Club, challenged Redmond Barry to a duel over a letter written to a mutual friend. Snodgrass fired prematurely hitting himself in the foot. Barry fired into the air.
Short-lived 1960s Melbourne gang that surfaced to control prostitutes in St Kilda after the death of Norman Bradshaw.
Stealing clothing from washing lines. The offence was prevalent in the 1930s when the items could be pawned or sold. It took its name because underwear of the time was almost exclusively white.
Also known as the Bodies in the Barrels murders, on 20 May 1999 the remains of eight bodies were found in plastic barrels in a vault in the old State Bank of South Australia building at 25 Railway Terrace, Snowtown, SA. Two more bodies were found at 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Salisbury North. One skeleton was found in a nearby paddock and a case of a suicide by hanging was reinvestigated and dealt with as a murder. Some of the deceased were apparently victims of hate crimes, others had been robbed of their pensions. Both male and female victims, forced to call their captors ‘Master’ and ‘Lord’, had been tied with ropes and tape and tortured with electric instruments, knives, saws, pincers, pliers and clamps, before being suffocated or strangled. Some were hacked up and parts of the bodies cooked and eaten. Their bank accounts had been subsequently raided. John Justin Bunting, a one-time abattoir worker, described as a psychopath with a God complex, together with three other men, the bisexual Robert Wagner, Mark Haydon and James Spyridon Vlassakis, were charged. Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four murders and gave evidence against his co-accused. In September 2003 Bunting and Wagner were convicted of killing eleven and ten people respectively and received life sentences without parole. Haydon, whose wife was one of the victims, was later convicted as an accessory and sentenced to 18 years’ non-parole. Vlassakis was given a non-parole period of 26 years. (R v Bunting & Wagner [2005] SASC 45; Mass and Serial Murders in Australia, A Study of Homicide in Australia 1989–1999, Research and Public Policy Series (no. 28))
30-year-old migrant and sly-grog dealer shot and killed in Melbourne in May 1951 by Horatio Morris.
Hanged at Pentridge in 1936 for the rape and murder of four girls over a five-year period from 1930. As a result of his confession, charges against three other men were dropped.
On 16 December 1939 the popular broadcaster Solomons tried to cut off three rival radio stations in an effort to carry out a rort on the Tote that would have produced over $1.5 million in today’s money. He intended to make a phantom broadcast after the race had been run and the winner announced, but the wires were cut too late. Solomons fled to Fiji but was retrieved and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment on 10 August 1940. (Jack ‘Ace’ Ayling, Nothing But The Truth)
Said to be the model for Dickens’s Fagin, Solomons, born in 1787 in Gravel Lane, Houndsditch, began his career at the age of nine. His colleagues regarded him as a coward but he turned out to be an expert planner. On 25 April 1827 then aged 40 he appeared at the Old Bailey. On his way back from court he stopped with his escorting officers for a drink, drugged them and promptly disappeared, going first to America and then Hobart to where his wife had been transported. He was dobbed in and, in an early example of extradition, was sent back to England where he was acquitted of all the capital charges on 9 July 1830, but sentenced to 14 years’ transportation for receiving. Mrs Solomons continued her career as a receiver in Hobart. Solomons later rejoined his family but it was not a happy reunion. He died in early September 1850. (Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2; [Anon], The Life and Adventures of Isaac Solomons; The Times, 10 July 1830)
Career criminal who by 2008 had had some 15 convictions comprising 58 offences. One of the prisoners who bashed Gregory Brazel in the Acacia Unit at Port Phillip jail in 2007, Sonnet was convicted of conspiracy to murder Mario Condello and was arrested outside Brighton Cemetery in June 2004 waiting for the former lawyer to walk his dogs. The jury rejected the defence that he was in debt to Carl Williams, who was leaning on him, and that he would have been killed if he had not obeyed Williams. The court was told that Sonnet, who was to have been the actual hitman, had expected to receive between $125 000 and $145 000 for the contract. He recruited first of all his drug-addicted cousin Maurice Thorneycroft as the getaway driver but when he proved unreliable he brought in Gregg Hildebrandt. Thorneycroft received a suspended sentence and became a police informer, dying in 2007. Hildebrandt pleaded guilty and received nine years. On 28 May 2008 Justice Betty King sentenced Sonnet to 20 years with a minimum of 16 to be served. (R v Sonnet [2008] VSC 221)
Killed at Pentridge on 5 November 1976 while playing chess in his cell with Romano Martin, who had left him while Sopulak was pondering a move. Initially, a short-term prisoner, Colin Raymond Corrigan, was implicated by another prisoner who later changed his mind and claimed self-defence. In July 1977 Corrigan was acquitted and the man convicted of manslaughter. The case led to lawyers campaigning for better conditions at Pentridge. (Frank Galbally, Galbally for the Defence)
Auckland-born Sorby, a former merchant navy officer, was known as Mr Midnight because he sold heroin late at night. He was arrested when a bulldozer he was operating became stuck in the mud at Brisbane international airport. He was the first member of the Mr Asia syndicate to be prosecuted successfully in Australia. His trial ran from 10 April to 13 July 1984, when he was sentenced to 23 years, then the second longest sentence for a drug-related offence. He was released and deported in 1995. In June 2003 he was sentenced to home detention in New Zealand following an assault in 1996 of a man in a hotel brawl and trying to launder $350 000. He had paid $50 000 compensation to his victim. It was claimed he had been traumatised by his 12 years in Pentridge. (Richard Hall, Greed: The Mr Asia Connection; David Wilson, Big Shots II)
Convicted of the April 1994 Sydney robbery murder of Toula Soravia, see Steve Anas.
Marijuana farmer in the Yarrowitch, Northern Tablelands area who disappeared on 2 March 1994 and whose remains were found in the middle of August that year. His uncle, rodeo rider Brian Leslie Smith, was charged with his murder. Smith produced an alibi that he was drinking with Lindsay Robert Rose and Michael Simon in the Burwood Hotel in Sydney. They were seen by a police officer, Michael Thomas. Smith also produced a statement from Alan Robert Thomas, then the Chief of Detectives at Earlwood, who liked to be called ‘Chop’ or ‘Chopper’ as tribute to ‘Chopper’ Read. He also claimed that Spadborrow’s stepfather Victor John Bridge had more reason to kill him because Spadborrow was thinking of evicting him. Smith was acquitted but during an investigation by Taskforce Yandee in 1995 Smith’s wife Pauline Landrigan said she had paid Michael Simon $45 000 to devise the alibi.
In May 1996 Smith, Landgrigan, Rose, Simon, Michael Thomas and Alan Thomas were all charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Thomas could not supply a satisfactory answer to an allegation that he had been paid around $35 000 by Errol James Wright to escape a charge of cultivating cannabis. Now he told Yandee officers of a double murder committed by Rose. Rose made a later statement ‘under inducement’, which meant it could not be used in evidence and he refused to appear as a prosecution witness against the Spadborrow conspirators. In the end only Landrigan, who pleaded guilty and received 250 hours’ community service, was convicted over the conspiracy. Alan Thomas received seven years for other offences. (R v Thomas [1999] NSWCCA 34)
Acquitted of the Victorian October 1843 murder of Aboriginal Jim Crow, see James Daplin.
Police Constable Frederick William Wolgast was shot and killed while on duty in Centennial Park, Sydney on 19 January 1921, clearing out voyeurs whom Truth described as ‘dirty degraded pestiferous parasites known as park touts’. In this case he was chasing a man who had stolen a courting woman’s handbag when the man turned round and shot him. Speechley, a man with a long list of convictions for theft and receiving, was charged and convicted on identification evidence. In a statement from the dock he claimed he had been with his wife at the cinema and then had a fish supper with her. But there was a time gap; she had gone home earlier. Speechley was reprieved and released in 1941 but, after he was charged with a sex offence in Brisbane the next year, he disappeared. There was a single sighting of him by a kangaroo hunter five years later.
Wanted for attempted murder and a number of robberies, in July 1977 Spence was shot and killed by Senior Constable Wright at a roadblock near Moruya, NSW. The coronial inquest was told that Spence had pointed his rifle at the officer and yelled, ‘You’re not taking me, copper’. A witness at the inquest, Colin George Gates took the opportunity to try to dig his way through the court cell wall and out of custody with a spoon. He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for damage to the lock-up. (SMH, 7 August 1977)
Leader of the Bandidos OMCG when they broke away from the Comancheros. After his conviction in the Milperra Massacre, Spencer committed suicide in prison. (Daily Telegraph, 3 September 1984)
On 4 April 1979 Speranza became the first man to hijack a commercial jet in Australia when he took a woman hostage at Sydney airport and threatened to blow up a Pan-Am airliner if his demands to go to Moscow via Rome to visit the Pope were not met. After a four-and-a-half-hour stand-off he was shot dead by SWOS officer Brian Harding.
65-year-old gardener hanged on 26 May 1938 for the rape–murder of 6-yearold Marcia Hayes at Windsor, NSW the previous Christmas Eve. Her body was tracked and traced by police dog Tess to a sack in a stream. The case created considerable controversy when the chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform in Sydney said he would not support a petition for Spicer’s reprieve. In the death cell Spicer claimed he heard an angel singing the hymn ‘Saved by Grace’.
Perth street gang composed mainly of Asiatic members who in the early 21st century fought with rivals M’Boys and Enclos, but in recent years appear to have joined them in an alliance dealing in drugs with the Big Circle Boys.
One-time member of the Kangaroo Gang, Spink was jailed in 1996 for a minimum of six and a half years over the importation of 15 tonnes of cannabis. Spink as ‘Mr C’ was also involved in the so-called Jockey Tapes turf scandal. In 2008 he successfully reclaimed US$500 000 from a bank in Switzerland lodged under a false name. He maintained that the money had come from gambling and not from drugs.
Convicted wholly on forensic evidence of the 3 December 1977 murder of Rosa Amelia Simper, Splatt continued to maintain his innocence claiming that the fibres and blood specks on his clothes had no relation to the murder of the widow who lived 200 yards from him in Adelaide. There was no evidence to show the two had ever met. After a two-year campaign by journalist Stewart Cockburn, in January 1983 a Royal Commission under Judge Carl Shannon re-examined the evidence and the following year Splatt’s conviction was quashed. He was awarded $200 000 compensation. (Malcolm Brown, ‘Pardoned but He Is Almost a Non-person’ in SMH, 10 March 1990)
Supporter of Pat Shannon in the 1970s war for the control of the Melbourne branch of the Painters and Dockers Union. The day after the union elections the car of Sproule, who had a conviction for the attempted murder of a police officer, was found burned out. He suggested it might have self-combusted.
Convicted of the rape–murder of Leanne Holland, his girlfriend’s younger sister, at the township of Goodna, west of Brisbane, in 1991. Since then Stafford and his supporters have waged a campaign, so far unsuccessfully, to have the conviction overturned. They point out that there was a known convicted rapist in the area at the time of the killing. He was released in 2006 and on 19 April 2008 Stafford won the right to re-apply to the Court of Appeal for a pardon based on new evidence. (R v Stafford ex p. A-G [1997] QCA 333; Graeme Crowley and Paul Wilson, Who Killed Leanne Holland )
Womaniser and gambler born in England on 20 April 1824, there had been no more popular man on a racecourse until in 1852 he sold his mortgaged properties to pay his gaming debts and set sail for the Colonies. He was appointed assistant commissioner of the Goldfields, and in September 1858 was appointed Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria at a salary of £1200. In 1853 he had already been rejected for the appointment when he applied under an assumed name. He was not a good choice. Standish certainly undertook some reforms, including the use of the telegraph and the railway for communication and transport, but his control was lax and he did not believe in any formal training for officers. There was preferment for Irish Catholics (82 per cent of the force) and from 1860 to 1863 three select committees looked into his administration; the third suggested he be replaced. Standish, however, survived until the Ned Kelly outbreak. Legend has it that that the hunt for Kelly was suspended while the weights for the Melbourne Cup were declared. After his resignation he continued his rackety ways. In 1882 he was nearly thrown through the window of the Melbourne Club by Colonel Craigie Helkett whom he had called by a ‘provocative name’. He died in the Melbourne Club on 19 March 1883 of cirrhosis of the liver. His appropriate legacy is the Standish Handicap run at Flemington on New Year’s Day.
Associate of Dennis Allen, shot and killed by him on 11 August 1984 in a drugged and drunken fit at 37 Stephenson Street, Melbourne. Stanhope’s van was dumped 70 km out of the city where it was found the next afternoon. Of the body there was no trace, although clothing identified as his was found in a national park. It may well have been eaten by wild pigs. At the time of his own death Allen, who thought Stanhope might have been a police informer and who had annoyed him by interfering with his stereo unit, had been charged with his murder. (Adrian Tame, The Matriarch)
Wife of Sir Arthur Stanley, Governor-General of Victoria, who had the mistaken idea she could reform Squizzy Taylor. They met at the Menzies Hotel in a meeting arranged by a social worker. He promised to mend his ways and later presented her with a silver jewel box inscribed, ‘To one who understands, from one misunderstood’. (Truth (M), 5 November 1927)
On 18 December 2006 21-year-old Stasinowsky, together with her 20-year-old lesbian lover Valerie Paige Parashumti, who claimed to have drunk blood since she was 10 years old, killed 16-year-old Stacey Mitchell in Lathlain, WA, bashing her over the head with a concrete block, strangling her with a dog chain and filming the scene on a mobile phone before stuffing her body in a wheelie-bin. On 25 January 2008 they pleaded guilty, saying the killing was to ‘prove their love for each other’. They were sentenced to life with a minimum of 24 years. An appeal by Stasinowsky claiming the judge had not taken sufficient account of her age, was dismissed in January 2009. (Stasinowsky v State of WA [2009] WASCA 20;Christian Jones, ‘Bubbly Teen’s Fatal Move’ in West Australian, 8 March 2008)
Kings Cross 1990s identity who ran the Love Machine strip club, Stavrou told the Wood Royal Commission he allowed clients to pay for prostitutes on credit cards, which he kindly put through as payments to Idemeno Clothing.
Robber and kidnapper who on 17 February 1983 escaped from Darlinghurst court and went to Perth where he committed four robberies. He returned to Melbourne where in 1984 he was shot in the head and shoulder by police detective Jimmy Venn while driving in Swanston Street after he had fired a sawn-off shotgun at him and fellow officer Paul ‘Fish’ Mullett. Steele survived because the windscreen took the initial impact. He was sentenced to 17 years with a 13-year minimum. On 17 January 1986 he escaped from Long Bay. After shaving his beard and hiding in the prison workshop, he walked out wearing a prison officer’s hat. He went to London where he met New Zealand-born Carol Messenbird, who was on a round-the-world trip working as a barmaid. Steele began another string of robberies and when they were staying in a guest house in Highgate, during a quarrel she said she would dob him in. He strangled her and he told the police he had ‘finished the deed with a shirt’. Her body was found in woodland in Bedfordshire in May 1988. Steele was arrested shortly after he robbed the Leeds Permanent Building Society in Regent Street. He calmly walked to a bus but he was followed. On the second day of his murder trial he changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Old Bailey on 14 June 1990. He received 21 years for 15 robberies that he also admitted.
On 26 November 1965 Steele, highly respected in the Sydney underworld and who had served a seven-year sentence for armed robbery and a five for safebreaking, was shot near his home in Woollahra. He was not a difficult target. He tended to walk most nights of the week, about 8 p.m. for a drink at the Lord Nelson. On his way back he was followed by a car with the false plates CIB 1 whose passengers were wearing hats of a style favoured by the detective branch. Steele thought they were police after him for money but, in fact, it was a shooting on behalf of Lennie McPherson. Pinned in the headlights, he received up to fifty pellets and bullets. He staggered the 300 yards to his home and climbed two flights of stairs to his flat before he collapsed. More than 20 bullets were extracted but some not removed because of their position. His wife and daughter went into hiding. When questioned by the police Steele said he had no idea who was responsible: ‘I didn’t think I had an enemy in the world’. He had. McPherson was annoyed that Steele was claiming the No. 1 position in the Sydney underworld. He was also furious with an article in Oz that labelled him as a gig. Steele had bought up a number of copies and was circulating them.
Steele was not known as the Iron Man for nothing because he then survived a second attack when he and two others were badly beaten by a nine-man gang in Potts Point on 13 October the next year. One of the most talented workers with explosives of his generation, Steele died from his earlier injuries while awaiting trial for his part in the murder of Joe ‘The Writer’ Borg. ( SMH, 29 November 1965)
OMCG member involved in the attack by members of the Coffin Cheaters on the Resurrected in Morwell, Victoria on 5 November 1976. The problem arose six months earlier at a meeting at a bayside hotel in Hampton when the Coffin Cheaters attempted to stand over the Resurrected, first by demanding a $10 a head levy per member and secondly that they should change their name. Neither suggestion appealed to the representatives of the Resurrected and as they set off on their return journey Stephens, the Vice President of the Coffin Cheaters, appeared to try to force some of the bikers off the road. In fact all he succeeded in doing was to kill his passenger, the club’s president ‘Shades’ Marshall. Stephens now became president and, in a curious and twisted way, blamed the Resurrected members for Marshall’s death.
On 5 November that year Stephens and a number of other Coffin Cheaters rode for revenge. They attacked Glenn ‘Pig’ Harrison at his home where he was with his girlfriend Mandy (a pseudonym). When he answered a knock on the door he was knocked down and his clothes cut off him. Cigarettes were stubbed out on him, his eyes put in his mouth and the steel pickelhauber of a German World War I helmet was rammed into his anus. One biker defecated on him. Mandy was raped both as a punishment and to make her divulge the address of other members of Resurrected. She behaved with the utmost courage. When the Coffin Cheaters left her, she telephoned other Resurrected members to tell them they were on their way. By the time the Cheaters arrived at the home of Terrence ‘Dactyl’ Coady they had barricaded themselves in. They were still savagely beaten but one of the girls managed to shoot ‘Gorilla Snot’ Stevenson and the bullet passed through him into the side of Stephens. When the police arrived they handcuffed him to a lamp post while they tried to sort things out and an hour later he told them he had been shot, showing them a gaping wound in his side.
In March 1977 Judge Leo Lazarus sentenced Stephens to a minimum of 10 years, and five others to lesser terms. Two were acquitted.
Born in 1900 Sterling, a conman generally dealing in ‘shoddy’ goods and rival of Squizzy Taylor, moved into a different league and was convicted of a Sydney home invasion in August 1924. He and William McDonald robbed Veronica Cleary and Isabel Roshen of their earrings and other jewellery at gunpoint. He was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. Before that in 1919 he had received three months for obtaining money by false pretences. He had duped a man into believing that he could settle income tax penalties on payment of £100. (‘Conman and Gunman’ in Truth (NSW), 21 September 1924)
The commission into drug trafficking headed by Justice Donald Stewart that followed the Woodward Royal Commission.
A witness in the John Kerr murder case, Stewart, said to have an unrequited love for the victim Beth Williams, committed suicide by taking poison. His was one of the deaths that caused comment after Kerr, on his conviction, had cursed those involved in the trial. (Truth (NSW), 3 March 1951)
Contract killer sentenced to death in 1956 for the stabbing murder of Archangelo Macri in Russell Square, Perth on 28 January that year, using a triangular dagger. Macri had been on the run for betraying a Sicilian girl in Queensland. The previous year Stillitano had been found not guilty of an attempted murder. Reprieved, he served nearly 20 years before disappearing on his release.
Seven-year-old abducted from St Kilda beach on 10 August 1968. Her body has never been found and her killing is often attributed to Derek Ernest Percy, who admitted being in the area drinking that day and allegedly told a police officer that he might have killed her but remembered nothing of the incident. In April 2007 a Melbourne court ruled that the child had been abducted and murdered so allowing a claim by her family under the Victims of Crime Assistance Act 1996.
Convicted in February 1945 of the attempted murder in January 1942 of Frederick Davey by mutilating his genitalia, Stitt was sentenced to natural life imprisonment. He had offered the soldier a room for the night before he attacked him on the Torras Embankment in Adelaide. Before his conviction for the assault on Davey, Stitt had been found not guilty of the murder of another soldier, Phillip John Beattie, on 23 January 1943. (Truth (NSW), 25 February 1945)
Bulldog-faced and short with iron-grey hair, the one-time horse dealer began life as a store clerk before becoming a clerk in a Two-up school. By World War I he had progressed to running the biggest of those in Melbourne, eventually taking the game from backyard gambling sheds to somewhere society would go when out slumming. Stokes and Squizzy Taylor were certainly long-time loose associates if not formal partners, with Taylor providing protection for Stokes’s gambling in return for an investment in his own sly-grog shops. In July 1929 Stokes was charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice over the bombing of the Greek Club in Lonsdale Street. It was alleged he had conspired with prostitute Madge Vaughan to produce perjured evidence in the appeals of the three convicted men. Stokes was put on trial with Norman McIver and Squizzy’s brother Thomas Taylor. Vaughan gave evidence that Stokes had met her in Lonsdale Street and later she had gone to a flat in East Melbourne. Stokes had let her in and she had had a discussion with Taylor and McIver that would have cleared the men. She was not believed. In January 1932 Stokes was shot but, declining police assistance, said he would take care of matters himself.
In 1935 he put together an audacious robbery from the Commonwealth Bank at Ballarat. Stokes approached Constable Rex Byrne with the proposition that he would receive £10 000, 10 per cent of the estimated take, if he arranged that neither he nor any other officer was near the bank on the night when Stokes and his partners broke in. Byrne reported the matter to his superiors and Stokes and his crew were almost caught red-handed. They escaped, dumping the oxyacetylene cutters near Melton and high-tailed it back to Melbourne, where they were arrested. Stokes was charged with conspiracy and received four years.
The great turnaround in his fortunes came after he completed his sentence. In 1938, he promoted Australia’s first illegal floating casino, the Alvina—which had originally been a gift from the Prince of Wales to Lily Langtry—sailing nightly around Port Phillip Bay. The next year he opened his first baccarat club, the Ace of Clubs in Elizabeth Street. There was naturally competition but once again Stokes showed his business acumen. Instead of waging war, Stokes engineered an amalgamation with his rivals. From then on the profits were enormous. Other clubs followed including one in Goodwood Street, Richmond. He died following a heart attack sitting in a chair in his club in June 1945 leaving an estate of around £15 000. It is not clear what had become of his undoubted fortune.
Queensland editor of Port News convicted and jailed for life on 25 August 1978 for the murder of boxer Ian Hamilton, alleged to have been the driver in the Whiskey Au Go Go fire bombing. Hamilton’s body was never found. The evidence was that Hamilton had been a friend of Stokes’s but they had fallen out when he would not stand bail for Hamilton, who had been arrested on drugs charges. Hamilton and his friends began making abusive telephone calls to Stokes. On 10 January 1975 Hamilton was abducted from his home at gunpoint by a masked man and was never seen again. The evidence against Stokes was thin. There was no body, no admissions, no eye witnesses and no forensic evidence. What evidence there was came from a travel agent who said Stokes had told her he had killed Hamilton. There was also damage to a car, hired by Stokes in his own name. The prosecution claimed that Hamilton had fouled the back seat, which had required extensive cleaning. Stokes, who defended himself, neither gave evidence nor called witnesses and made a speech to the jury lasting only a few minutes. There were many who thought he had been set up because of his investigations into the Clockwork Orange Gang. In prison he wrote an account of the celebrated racehorse Bernborough.
The NSW Strathfield Massacre on 17 August 1971 and the Port Arthur massacre almost twenty-five years later, have been described by experts as ‘spree murders’—the killing of three or more victims in one event. See Wade Frankum.
Realisation of the full disaster of the 1990s drugs policy of the Victorian police came on 18 October 2006 when, after three years on remand, the very experienced and high-flying officer Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Strawhorn was convicted of trafficking 2 kg of pseudoephedrine to the late Mark Moran. He was acquitted on three of four other charges, including trafficking the chemical to members of the Bandidos. Sentenced to a minimum of four years’ imprisonment, his appeals against conviction and sentence were dismissed in June 2008. (R v Strawhorn [2008] VSCA 101)
In late 1993 40-year-old Street suffocated his diminutive wife Dawn, leaving her body in a large shopping bag in Berry’s Island Reserve, North Sydney. Two months later, he stabbed his new de facto, the equally diminutive Linda. Her body was discovered when the police were questioning him over the death of his wife. When the police called at an Enmore boarding house in February 1994 where Street was staying, wanting to take away some clothing they asked to borrow his suitcase. In it was Linda. He claimed his wife had suffocated herself and Linda had died in a row when she stabbed herself seven times. Street was a man with a history of violence towards women and in 1989 had received a sentence of four and a half years for an attack on a woman who rejected his sexual overtures. In June 1995 he became the seventh man to be given a life sentence with no minimum term in New South Wales. As he was led away he remarked, ‘Such is life’. He died in March 2007 after suffering from bowel cancer.
Drifter who set fire to Tjandamurra O’Shane, pouring petrol over the six-year-old in the playground of his school at Cairns during the lunch break. Streeton was jailed for life on 6 March 1997 with a 12-year minimum. Tjandamurra recovered after suffering 70 per cent burns and undergoing 12 operations. He was awarded $75 000 compensation and boxer Lionel Rose gave him his world title belt. The incident highlighted attacks that were taking place on Aboriginals at the time. (R v Streeton, CA No 99 of 1997)
Armed robber sentenced to five years for a Kellow Transport hold-up in September 1938 at whose trial the police disclosed he was an informer. Strong hanged himself at Pentridge on 16 December 1938. (Truth (M), 7 January 1939)
Acquitted of the murder of Reginald Holmes in the Shark Arm Case.
Hanged in Sydney in October 1841 with Robert Hudson.
Serving his sentence for the Whiskey Au Go Go fire bombing, Stuart died in prison following a heart attack on 1 January 1979. He was found to have illegal drugs in his organs but the coroner ruled that these had not contributed to his death.
Arrente carnival worker accused of the rape–murder of nine-year-old Mary Olive Hattam on 20 December 1958. Her body was found shortly before midnight in a cave on a beach at Ceduna, SA. Stuart had been working in the town on the day of the killing but had been sacked for absenteeism and drunkenness. He stayed on there working as a labourer for the Wheat Board. Two days later when questioned by the police he was evasive. Later he said that he had seen the killing, done by a white man who had forced him to carry the girl’s body. Finally, he admitted that after a day’s drinking he had lured her into the cave under the pretext of showing her some birds and had raped and killed her with a stone. Stuart had two previous convictions for assaults on women.
At the time the state had no proper forensic science facilities that would have provided evidence for or against him. At his trial no effort was made by his Law Society appointed defence lawyer to exclude the confession on the grounds that it had been obtained by force. Stuart did not give evidence but made a short statement from the dock saying, ‘I cannot read or write. Never been to school. I did not see the little girl. I didn’t kill her. Police hit me. Choke me. That’s what I wanted to say.’ His lawyer had wanted a much longer statement to be read out detailing the alleged police brutality and for Stuart to say that it was correct. The court declined to allow this to be done and Stuart was sentenced to death. In a series of attempts to quash his conviction, Stuart endeavoured to call a partial alibi that he had been with another girl around the time of the killing. His execution was repeatedly postponed and following a Royal Commission into the conduct of the police and an appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Stuart’s conviction was upheld but the sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. The Royal Commission found that there had been no brutality and that the alibi did not affect the case. Finally paroled in 1976, Stuart married and, given a local government job, settled near Alice Springs. (Sir Roderic Chamberlain, Stuart Affair; KS Inglis, The Stuart Case)
Born in London as plain Jones, Stuart-Jones arrived in Australia with his parents at the age of nine. A fine sportsman, he played for Sydney University at cricket, football, tennis, athletics and rifle shooting. Once he graduated as a doctor he returned to England where he married his first wife Sheena, heiress to a chain of cinemas. He then returned to Sydney, where he set up practice in Macquarie Street as a gynaecologist.
There appears to have been a louche streak in him for his constant companions were criminals. He carried a revolver that he would fire into the ceilings of bars in Surry Hills and in 1939 he was arrested for drunken driving. For a time he held interests in several nightclubs of varying degrees of quality. At the one end was the Lido in Bondi Beach and at the better end, certainly financially, was the 400 Club. An interest in a nightclub or two can provide an endless stream of patients for an abortionist and in this aspect of his career he went into partnership with Richard Gabriel Reilly. With the proceeds Stuart-Jones became a great racing man, owning, quite successfully, thoroughbreds, trotters and greyhounds. At one time he was president of the NSW Coursing Association.
He appeared before the courts and was acquitted of ‘unlawfully using an instrument for a certain purpose’ in 1944 and that year married his second wife, Mary Kathleen. It was not a happy marriage. He found her in a room in Leichhardt wearing the pyjamas of the preliminaries welterweight Cliffie Thompson, who boxed as Thomas. He sued for divorce but before the decree was made absolute they were back together again.
Just before midnight on 31 October 1944 he was kidnapped from outside his house, Casa Grande, in Bellevue Hill. He was asked by his old sparring partner Thompson, along with Alexander ‘Scotty’ Jowett, to look at a man in a car and was promptly kidnapped by them. He was taken at gunpoint to Maroubra and told he would be shot and his body thrown over the cliffs. Indeed just after midnight Jowett shot Stuart-Jones in the chest, hitting him in the lung. The doctor then, amazingly, seems to have talked his captors into dropping him off at the Vassilia private hospital in Randwick from where he was transferred to St Vincent’s, which over the years has seen the life and death struggles of so many of Sydney’s underworld. He survived.
Nor was 1945 a good year for the doctor. When the notorious drug dealer Donny ‘The Duck’ Day was shot and killed, Stuart-Jones’s wife told the press in some detail just what a close friends they had been and just what they had got up to together.
In 1949 Stuart-Jones and Mary Kathleen were divorced and he married again, this time an Adelaide beauty queen, Adeline Morick. Life was, however, becoming increasingly difficult for him. After losing a tax case, in which he had run the usual and almost invariably unsuccessful defence that his wealth had been acquired through gambling, he was obliged to sell Casa Grande.
In 1958 he was disqualified by the Queensland Turf Club after his horse, Kingperion, had run oddly at Bundama racecourse. For some time he had been suspected of being involved in horse-doping and race fixing. He turned to managing a middle-of-the-road boxer, Norman Valentine Gobert, whom he also employed as a driver. After Gobert went to work for Sammy Lee’s 417 Club, in theory he employed Richard Reilly of whom he was clearly in some awe. In practice it was the other way around and there were suggestions that Reilly simply relieved Stuart-Jones of the substantial sums of money he carried with him and the doctor could or would do nothing about it. In December 1960 Stuart-Jones received another tax bill, this time for £186 000 and again he claimed his wealth was from betting. Six months later, in June 1961, he died suddenly after a heart attack. (David Hickie, The Prince and the Premier; James Morton and Susanna Lobez, Gangland Australia)
In 1986 Desmond Sturgess QC conducted a limited inquiry into police corruption in Queensland in connection with male brothels. A preliminary report was said to contain harrowing details but they were not released. His report was the precursor of the far wider-reaching Fitzgerald Inquiry. He later became Queensland’s Director of Public Prosecutions. (Desmond Sturgess, A Tangled Web)
Convicted at the age of 60 in July 1996 of the murder and subsequent mutilation of 21-year-old St Kilda prostitute Jodie Larcombe shortly after Christmas 1987. Suckling, a man with a record of over 130 offences including assaults on women, was arrested in 1990 but a no-bill was preferred against him. While in prison for other offences he boasted of the killing to his cellmate who, on his release, went to the police and agreed to wear a wire to tape further conversations. Suckling was sentenced to life imprisonment. An appeal against both conviction and sentence was dismissed. (R v Suckling [1999] NSWCCA 36; Janet Fyfe-Yeomans, Killing Jodie: How Australia’s Most Elusive Murderer Was Brought to Justice; Chris Murphy, ‘In Defence of the Prosecution’ in Sun-Herald, 1 March 1992)
Celebrated Adelaide brothel keeper who ran the Fantasy House for 10 years at a time when such establishments were illegal. In her salad days she stood as a candidate for the One Nation party in local and national elections. By 2006 her fortunes had fallen and she was evicted from her Waymouth Street brothel after failing to pay $230 000 rent. She was also alleged to owe $43 000 in back taxes. By winter 2007 she was, however, on her way back as Dr Stormy after she acquired an Honorary Doctorate from London’s Psyche-soma Guilds. In 2003 a painting of her by Lauren Jade Ryan was entered for the Archibald Prize.
Victorian drug dealer arrested in 1991 at his Avon Heights home for driving a stolen car while on bail. In his garage police found amphetamine chemicals that were confiscated and, after testing, sent to Attwood near Melbourne airport for storage and later destruction. Sumner was however advised to ask for the drugs to be re-tested and it was found that red phosphorus was now red tile grout and methylamphetamine was Coca-Cola. The drugs had been stolen and substituted by a criminal gang with the help of corrupt officer Kevin Hicks. In court the original analysis was, however, sufficient to convict Sumner.
South Australian 1958 triple murder, see Raymond John Bailey.
Led by Carl Williams and his principal henchman Benji Veniamin, the Sunshine Crew, from that area of Melbourne, was named after the Sunshine Harvester Works, who were the suburb’s main employers. Many crew members had been friends since their schooldays and together they set themselves in opposition to members of the older, more established, Carlton Crew in an increasingly brutal drug war, running from the first years of the 21st century. (John Silvester and Andrew Rule, Underbelly; Leadbelly)
On 5 May 1942 5 ft, 15 stone Surridge, who worked as a prostitute under the unfortunate name of Stella Croke, was involved in the death of Ernest Hofmann, variously described as a sporting man and a chef at the Royal Sydney Golf Club. She took him to a ginger joint in Langley Street, Darlinghurst and while he was there he saw another woman going through his pockets. When he struggled with the women two men rushed in and beat him unconscious before dumping him in an allotment in his shirt and singlet. He died in St Vincent’s Hospital ten days later after identifying Surridge. She, together with her husband William and the other man James Harris, known as Skinny Jones, were all charged with murder. They pleaded not guilty but the jury retired less than an hour before convicting them. The trio were sentenced to death but were reprieved and given life sentences. For a time Phyllis Surridge was in the next door prison to her husband and they were allowed to meet once a year in the men’s chapel. After her release from prison in 1956 she was given a coming out party by Tilly Devine. It was not the happiest of events because she was shot through the buttocks by another guest. The wound healed, she returned to prostitution and the ginger game. She died a year later following the infection of a cut on her finger.
Taxi driver sentenced to a flogging and 14 years’ hard labour for his attack on Mary Jane Hicks immediately prior to the Mount Rennie rape case.
Nazi sympathiser given life imprisonment after he killed David Noble on 19 December 1991 with an axe at a birthday party for Adolf Hitler in Melbourne’s Pascoe Vale. He then cut off Noble’s legs and left the remainder of the body at Kew Boulevard the next day. At the time he was on bail for bashing a child molester, for which he received an additional year to be served. In 1993 he reputedly asked fellow inmate Paul Steven Haigh to stab him so he might claim compensation. Despite a series of protests he was released on parole in October 2005.
Perth-based street gang, members of which wear miniature scimitars and some of whom are alleged to have distributed drugs for the Coffin Cheaters.
In early June 1979 18-year-old Szach allegedly shot his 44-year-old homosexual lover, criminal lawyer Derrance Redford Stevenson, and put the body in a freezer in Stevenson’s Adelaide home, glueing the lid down. There has been some evidence that Stevenson was in the habit of entertaining young male hitchhikers and might have been connected to the pedophile group involved in the Family Murders. At the time of the murder Szach took Stevenson’s prized car and drove to Coober Pedy some 850 km north of Adelaide instead of taking the train as he had originally intended. If the prosecution’s view of the time of death is correct then Szach would have been alone at Stevenson’s house at around the time. It was, however, bitterly challenged. Szach claimed the scientific evidence over the time of Stevenson’s death was wrong and that, because Stevenson had been receiving threatening calls, he told him to take the car and go away. Found guilty at his trial on 14 November 1979 Szach refused to apply for parole. He was released in 1993 and, supported by some notable forensic pathologists, has continued to maintain his innocence. In June 2013, the South Australian Legal Services Commission concluded that as Szach had served the sentence imposed by the court and had been released, ‘it appears that the only purpose for an appeal would be to have the conviction quashed’ adding, ‘with no other practical benefit to be claimed’. In 2014 he was said to be dying from motor neurone disease.