Chapter 14

Please, Go Home

By August 1996, Clinton Moller had been on the run for seven months. He’d also known about a ‘whale in the bay’ off Bondi since late the previous year and quit the force. But the royal commission’s investigators had come knocking anyway. On Sunday, 28 January, they’d contacted him near his parents’ northern NSW home at Coffs Harbour and delivered a summons to appear before Justice Wood in Sydney the following day. Moller, however, had other ideas.

When he failed to show, Wood took evidence from several of his colleagues, who alleged the 27-year-old constable regularly supplied ecstasy and sold amphetamines at popular inner-city nightclubs, naming several of them as Axis, DCM, Byblos and Blackmarket. It was then customary for him to begin his police shift the next morning by checking the station computer to see if any of his clients had been arrested.1 He’d kept a set of scales in the glove box of his car to weigh transactions and a secret money stash under the oven in his kitchen.2

Wood was told significant numbers of police officers, particu­larly younger ones, were themselves using drugs too. At least seven from Bondi had been linked to cocaine and illegal steroids, and indications were that it was Moller dealing it to them. Five would resign and the other two were eventually sacked.

One of the group, BD4, a constable, admitted he’d also bought ecstasy from Moller as far back as 1993. Another, BD1, claimed he’d scored the so-called designer drug from Moller over a period of about 18 months. He said Moller often took to selling ‘eckies’ at gay and lesbian dance parties too, including the annual Sydney Sleaze Ball at Moore Park.3

BD5, Moller’s former girlfriend, told the commission he’d started out selling steroids to friends to help pay for his own use of them as a body builder but graduated to supplying other drugs obtained further up the criminal ladder. She said the reason he’d fled rather than testify about it was that he feared for his life. ‘Other people he would have had to nominate would have absolutely killed him,’ she sobbed in the witness box.4

For Moller’s mum, Shirley, enough was enough. She branded the story ridiculous and BD5 persona non grata. But the following day, 31 January, there were more disturbing allegations.

Although later vehemently denied by the club, BD1 claimed Moller had told him one of the venues he’d sold ecstasy at, the Blackmarket in Chippendale, had paid City of Sydney licensing detectives $40 000 to ‘look after things’.5 It was an assertion that resonated with earlier evidence that Moller had at one stage carried at least $40 000 around in his gym bag.6

In March 1996, Moller absconded to New Zealand. Using an assumed name, he worked as a nightclub bouncer and barman in Wellington until his capture on 10 August. Extradited to Sydney to face contempt of court charges, he applied for but was denied bail and left to await his fate in Long Bay .

His arrival there coincided with Guider’s. Both classified as high risk, the two men also found themselves segregated from the rest of the jail’s population and placed together among some 60 inmates doing time in strict protection.

They were indeed strange circumstances. Few around them would have grasped that the fugitive cop with the athlete’s physique and the bookish ‘killer’ who’d just landed from Junee had anything in common at all. Yet their fates seemed curiously to overlap. Bondi had extracted the very worst from both men.

***

According to Guider, the notion of protective custody at Long Bay fell well short of living up to its name. Even before the near-fatal bashing at the hands of his psychotic cell mate on 23 September, he’d complained to Denise of being spat on and threatened by inmates and staff alike. After the attack, of course, he was a man on edge.

‘Now I’ve survived my first attempted murder and hopefully the last but as long as I’m in gaol I can never let my guard down and will always be looking over my shoulder,’ he wrote from his hospital bed, having just watched the Bart Cummings-trained Saintly win the Melbourne Cup on 5 November. ‘Forgive me for my apparent paranoia but I think it is well justified.’7

Moller, for one, would soon be in a unique position to sympa­thise with him.

Guider laid blame for his treatment at the feet of those who’d cast him into the spotlight: the media and in particular the Daily Telegraph.

‘My case got maximum publicity, including trying to connect me to someone’s disappearance,’ he continued, not able to bring himself to use Samantha’s name. ‘By giving me publicity to the extent they did and publicly vilifying me, they guaranteed I’d get a harsh sentence.’8

His response to the circumstances he found himself in was to affirm that he would serve his penance quietly without getting involved in appeals or bringing charges against those willing to inflict physical harm. To do otherwise would mean ‘I would not be allowed to survive,’ he warned. ‘At least this way I still have a chance of leaving gaol alive.’9 It was a philosophy shared almost universally by those forced to occupy the lowest rungs on the inmate ladder and would similarly take hold with Moller over the coming weeks.

Equally typical was the fact Guider began contextualising his predicament in terms of conspiracy. The human loss elicited by the royal commission, for example, was a matter that clearly came to weigh on his mind, especially the November 4 death of Judge Yeldham.

‘He is the 6th person to have committed suicide over allegations of paedophilia,’ he wrote to Denise the following day. ‘It does make you wonder what is really going on.

‘Undoubtedly many high-standing social identities are involved and the police, who were always involved in corruption, be it sex, drugs or criminal activities have, in the main, got [sic] away with it. Unfortunately it’s a very corrupt society we live in and anyone who speaks out gets murdered, disappears or suicides.’10 There was more than a touch of prophesy in his remarks.

***

On 16 November 1996, Moller was sentenced to eight months’ jail for failing to comply with Commissioner Wood’s summons. Supreme Court Justice John Dunford ordered that he continue to serve the time under protection. Specifically, he noted that Moller had finally appeared and given testimony at the royal commission the previous month and was, of course, a former police officer. Being both a dobber and a copper was no doubt an unhealthy descriptor to carry on one’s inmate resume.

Little was known about the circumstances of Moller having actually attended the St James hearing rooms. In a precaution afforded to few, Wood had taken his evidence behind closed doors. It was generally accepted, however, that he must have had something to say or he would again have found himself cited for contempt.

Under the circumstances, Dunford suggested Moller might complete his sentence removed from the dog-eat-dog environ­ment of Long Bay and in the relative tranquillity of Berrima, a smaller, lower security jail in the NSW Southern Highlands.

Much to the young copper’s initial relief, a Department of Corrective Services classification committee supported the recommendation on 21 November. But, in what would become a turning point in Clinton Moller’s life, the decision to move him was then overruled higher up the chain. The reasons given were that he’d already been the subject of an extensive international search while on the run and was still facing serious charges of supplying commercial quantities of amphetamines and ecstasy.11

There was another explanation for why Moller was staying put. Three days after Donohue and Gordon’s jail cell chat about Guider with Roberts, on 5 October Moller had received a visit at the Bay from a certain female friend. Unfortunately, she was stopped on the way in and found to be carrying two resealable plastic sleeves in her handbag. Combined, they contained 1.7 grams of speed.12

Nonetheless, Moller’s solicitor Ken Madden felt his client had been hard done by and wrote to the minister concerned, Bob Debus, seeking a review of the entire classification process. He also took the step, like Denise, of filing a complaint with Irene Moss.

No doubt appreciating the sensitivities involved, Moss opted not just to accept the grievance but also to examine Moller’s circum­stances herself. This included personally interviewing him about the reasons for his unease.

Her decision to become involved in the affair heralded a compelling dynamic. Should she find in Moller’s favour that he be transferred, it would be interpreted as acknowledging that there were indeed dark forces at work inside the jail system, forces that could get to someone despite the security measures in place, forces willing to do whatever it took to silence further revelations about the drug trade and the corruption that had allowed it to flourish.

Should Moss agree with corrective services that Moller stay put, though, it would undoubtedly dampen his willingness to further assist the royal commission in any shape or form. Other similarly compromised witnesses would likely follow suit. There was a lot at stake.

At a political level, the notion that the state’s top jail was incapable of protecting a high-profile prisoner with potentially valuable information to impart about Sydney’s criminal milieu wasn’t a good look.

The scenario had the capacity to reflect badly on the cops as well. After the sorry deluge dumped upon it at the Wood com­mission, the last thing the force needed was for the ombudsman to start prodding about again in relation to what had been going on at Bondi. Yet here she was, floating the possibility of a second inquiry intimately connected to one of its most troubled patrols before the Mathes-Donohue complaint had even been finalised.

It would therefore come as a serious relief for those in high places that Moss would soon report that she was satisfied the decision to refuse the Berrima request had not been unreasonable. For now at least, Clinton Moller would stay at the Bay.

***

While all this was going on, Moss’s Investigations Officer, Fiona McMullen, was continuing to spin her wheels trying to get the force to delegate Bob Waites or another senior officer to address some of Denise’s unanswered questions.

Paperwork requesting the meeting had rather pointlessly been sent back and forth several times between admin staff, and phone messages on the subject had apparently missed their mark in both directions.13 From Denise’s point of view, there was certainly no indication from the ombudsman’s people that the police were about to step forward with an offer to re-examine Guider’s status as a suspect. In fact, it was increasingly obvious to her that they just wanted the whole thing done with and forgotten, and to be rid of her.

Still, it appeared she wasn’t the only person about town who had reason to be dissatisfied with the police. In her soon to be released annual report to the NSW parliament, Moss would announce a whopping 17 per cent increase in complaints about the force over the previous 12 months. During the period, more than 60 officers would be charged with criminal offences, at least 230 formally disciplined and almost 400 forced to apologise for their actions.

The ombudsman would be particularly worried by the inappropriate handling of internal inquiries and a tendency for police investigators to find in favour of their workmates. She would also say there had been a ‘disturbing’ level of unauthorised access to personal police computer files. There was even a special investigation underway into whether or not files on herself and her staff had been viewed by certain officers.

Elsewhere, a number of case studies would be used in the report to illustrate some of its more serious findings. None of them would actually name the police involved, but limited imagination was required to work out who Moss was talking about. One would describe an officer taking anabolic steroids and another selling amphetamines in Sydney nightclubs.14

***

As Christmas and New Year came and went, the turmoil afflicting the thin blue line abated but only momentarily.

In late January, Commissioner Peter Ryan controversially launched a rationalisation offensive aimed at flattening his management team. Amid the criticism from both Wood and Moss regarding the force’s inability to effectively police itself, Geoff Schuberg lost his post as internal affairs boss and resigned after 34 years in the uniform. Also among the dozen or so senior police either shown the door or squeezed out were Assistant Commissioner, South Region, Alf Peate and his second-in-charge, Chief Superintendent Darcy Cluff. Both had coincidentally helped oversee Ted Ellis’s handling of the Mathes-Donohue affair on behalf of the ombudsman.

At the local level, Ryan announced that he was drastically pruning the state’s 164 patrols to 80. Bondi commander Chief Inspector Dick Baker wasn’t one of those being moved on just yet. That would take place in July, when he’d be appointed boss at Mt Druitt, in the city’s outer west. Yet he would come to wish that it had happened sooner.

Baker had proved himself a sturdy and capable character but he’d had a lot to deal with. From the outside, he was perceived by many as the bloke in charge of the station where the ‘druggie’ coppers worked. Within, he was presiding over what he himself described as a crew divided and ‘in disarray to a high level’. Morale, he conceded, was ‘very low’.15

To add to his woes, of course, Baker was still sweating on the final outcome of Denise’s complaint. He’d already had to parade three of his senior detectives because of it and then inform them the stuff up would leave a permanent stain on their records. Worse, though, if the matter did somehow find its way to Justice Wood or into the hands of the media, as he’d been led to believe it may, all and sundry would know about it. Unfortunately for Baker, however, there was another far more devastating calamity brewing.

In the early morning of 28 June 1997, two of his patrolmen would shoot dead an emotionally distressed man on Bondi Beach, just a short walk from the scene of Samantha’s abduction.

In front of dozens of horrified onlookers, the pair, Constable Rodney Podesta and Senior Constable Anthony Dilorenzo, fired four fatal shots. Still clasping the long-bladed kitchen knife he’d been brandishing for the previous hour, French national Roni Levi crashed to the sand. Dramatically heightening the impact of the tragedy would be its frame-by-frame capture by a freelance photographer and subsequent broadcast across the globe.

The awful event had both nothing and everything to do with the angst Baker and some of his more senior colleagues were already struggling to deal with that February, months before the shots had even rung out. Privy to Baker and his colleagues alone at the time was the suspicion that despite all the humiliation and bitterness generated by the Wood inquiry, Podesta and Dilorenzo had been leading double lives: working as cops by day and binging on cocaine and pills, consorting with dealers and possibly supplying drugs themselves at night.

To be sure, both officers were targets of top-secret internal affairs investigations: Podesta since January, on Baker’s recom­mendation, and Dilorenzo for almost a year before that.

Known by their Bondi colleagues as the ‘Awesome Twosome’ the pair were said to be the founding members of the ‘Living Dangerously Club’, a sort of inhouse Bondi fraternity into staging all-night benders at Byblos, Black Market and other of the city’s more sleazy watering holes and pole-dancing bars.16 Although under watch, they’d continued to carry on with the same recklessness Moller and others at the shambolic patrol had already been routed for, much to Baker’s personal chagrin. Ultimately, it was feared Podesta and Dilorenzo had even still been under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs at the time of the shooting.

***

Removed from the maelstrom, early 1997 found Guider happily relocated to maximum security at Lithgow. He con­sidered the Blue Mountains facility far more civilised and friendly than his last abode and found it delightfully surrounded by bushland.

However, his inclusion in a controversial national paedophile register published by New Zealand-born journalist and activist Deborah Coddington in February got his back up, big time. On 12 March, Guider fired off a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, complaining of vilification:

I am a self-confessed paedophile serving 16 years for my crimes. In regard to Deborah Coddington’s book listing paedophiles and sex offenders, I am concerned with two issues. First, the civil liberties aspect – how long before other books appear listing convicted drug addicts, thieves, bankrupts or homosexuals or any other section of society you wish to vilify.

Second, I feel Ms Coddington’s book does not present an honest picture of the full extent of this type of crime. The names of hundreds of fathers and mothers who have sexually abused their own children will not be listed because they are protected by law in closed courts. The names of hundreds of school teachers who have abused children are protected by members of the Education Department. The names of paedophile witnesses are protected with code names like T9 by the royal commission. Many other highly prominent people like judges, lawyers, businessmen and police who are involved in pedophile activities are protected by position, power or wealth.

Ms Coddington’s book reveals only the tip of the iceberg.

As a child, I was sexually abused many times, resulting in deep psychological and behavioural problems which finally contributed to my becoming an abuser. This does not excuse my actions for which I am fully responsible and deeply regret. However, it does help show how damaging and far-reaching the effects of child abuse can be.

He signed the correspondence, Michael Guider – Lithgow Correctional Centre, 4 March.17

Moller, meanwhile, hunkered down in Long Bay, determined to get some of his time squared away.

‘I’ve done it hard but I’ll be out of here pretty soon,’ he’d told one of his Bondi police mates during a recent visit. ‘After what I’ve had to put up with in here, nothing in my whole life will ever frighten me again.’ Asked if he planned leaving Sydney once he’d seen off his troubles, he’d said: ‘No way. I’m going to stay…to show I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m going to get out and start my life again …’18

Yet by early April, Moller’s tune had changed. He made a second application to be moved to Berrima, citing renewed concerns about his safety. He apparently felt increasingly threatened knowing that others close by might be planning to balance the ledger for what he may or may not have told Wood in-camera the previous October. Whether or not he was being physically intimidated was unknown but he was said to have been worried.

On the 11th, the department agreed to move him. However, this was to Parklea prison, in Sydney’s west, rather than to Berrima, because it was said to offer a stronger level of protective custody.

The following afternoon he was found hanging from the door frame of his cell.

***

Moller was counted the 11th person linked to the royal commission to commit suicide. However, not everyone believed he’d died by his own hand. Questions were raised about how he obtained a skipping rope, why he also had a woollen jumper tied around his neck and why he would want to kill himself when he’d reportedly been in good spirits.

Shirley Moller called immediately for an inquiry, while Ken Madden told Sydney radio station 2BL that ‘a lot of pressure had come from somewhere very high up’ to keep his client at Long Bay.19

In state parliament, Bob Debus described the allegation as grave. He pointed to the fact that a coronial inquest would be held. Still, though, the speculation continued.

‘Clinton was serving only a short sentence for contempt,’ family minister Tom Wills told mourners at Moller’s funeral. ‘His trial on the drug charges was not due to start until September and he was engaged to be married.’

Reverend Wills said he simply found it difficult to see Moller as the type to take his own life. ‘I think it was just that he knew too much.’20

A former colleague, Bondi constable Craig Raymond, told the Sydney Morning Herald the only way his former work partner would have tied his own knot was if someone had threatened his girlfriend or mother.

‘If someone had got to him and given him the ultimatum that night and said, “Listen Moller, they’re dead or you’re dead, one or the other,” then that would make sense to me.’21

***

Fourteen months after nervously confiding in Bob Sawyer, Denise Hofman had been granted her long-awaited audience with someone in a position of police authority on 9 April, three days before Moller’s demise. Wanting to get the little things right, Chief Superintendent Bob Waites drove out to meet her where the drawn out saga had begun, Castle Hill police station.

Lanky, bespectacled and balding, Waites wasn’t quite your typical-looking old-school cop. Nevertheless, he’d joined the force on his 16th birthday as a cadet in 1966 and spent most of his time in general duties and the rescue squad. More recently, he’d advanced quickly through the ranks, partly as a result of the years of part-time university study he’d undertaken.

When he arrived, Waites walked Denise to a small room behind the front counter, separated from the main detectives’ office by a glass partition. She’d again asked Rob Allen along to provide a little moral support but couldn’t help feeling somewhat intimidated by the fact that many in the station had an open view of them.

Judging by the cobalt blue of his eyes, Denise surmised that instead of his glasses, Waites was wearing coloured contact lenses. He explained to them that he was a church-going man, and took the liberty of asking for their trust. The disclosure of their names, Waites assured them, had been an accident.

Furthermore, neither of them should hold any further concerns about Guider or the information they’d provided about him, he said, because he was no longer a suspect in Samantha’s disappearance. There was no need to visit the man again in jail or keep writing him letters. ‘Please,’ Waites implored, ‘go on home, put the matter behind you and move on with things.’

Her nature being what it is, Denise’s immediate reaction to what she was being told was one of scepticism. No matter how firm the assurance, she couldn’t reconcile the fact that after everything that had happened in the past year, she’d not once been offered a single, factual reason for ruling Guider out. She decided to throw up a final prompt.

Telling Waites she’d thought of one more piece of evidence possibly implicating Guider, Denise asked that she be able to pass it on exclusively to a representative of the commissioner, Peter Ryan.

Waites agreed to make the request on her behalf but for whatever reason she never heard from anyone at police head­quarters again.