In the kitchen, a tap can be heard running hard into an empty sink. There is the clatter of dinner dishes gathered up, the brittle chatter of television voices, later the hum of what might be a dishwasher, and there is conversation, much of it whispered, yet all of it clearly audible.
In the courtroom, 15 jurors follow this on their headphones and on transcript, turning pages in unison as the recording advances.
Amid the mundane, household routines of cooking, eating and cleaning, extraordinary things are said. A father is calmly discussing with his daughter the prospect of killing two policemen.
Not all the recordings are as clear as this one. Those from the garage at the front of the house compete with passing traffic as cars labour through their gears rounding the corner of Springfield Avenue, and those from one of the bugged cars are punctuated with the metronome-like ticking of what may be a dashboard clock.
At other times the incessant yapping of a little dog called Pebbles threatens to obliterate conversations from the house.
During the four-month trial of the two men accused of killing police officers Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rod Miller during a robbery stake-out at Moorabbin, south of Melbourne’s CBD, on 16 August 1998, the jury hears from 161 witnesses. But the prosecution has no smoking gun and no confessions – the case is built around the secretly recorded words of the suspects.
In the courtroom, the red-cloaked Justice Philip Cummins leans towards the jury and stresses that the transcripts are not evidence. It is the recordings that count as evidence; the transcripts are merely an aid to understanding them.
In the kitchen, it is shortly before midnight on 11 February 2000. The Narre Warren home of one of the two accused men, Bandali (Ben) Debs, has been bugged for nearly three months, but police investigating the killings have recently begun a strategy of encouraging conversation among their suspects – the middle-aged Debs and Jason Joseph Roberts, the 18-year-old boyfriend of his daughter, Nicole. Since the case is 18 months old, police believe the two men may need some prompting.
So earlier on that day, detectives visited the New South Wales home of Debs’ brother, Robert Rutherford. Rutherford then rang Debs from a public phone to alert him of the police visit.
The eavesdroppers heard that conversation, picked up by a telephone intercept, and they have heard Debs and his family attempting to discern its meaning, since Rutherford spoke guardedly.
Debs reckons it must be about the matter where ‘two CPs’ – police – have gone down. Rutherford would not ring otherwise. Debs adds, however, that the ‘things’ that were used have gone – one was destroyed, the other was thrown into a lake. After the water gets at it, it will give a different reading if it’s ever fired again.
Now Debs and his eldest daughter, Joanne, hold a hushed conversation in the kitchen, but their words are so clear they could be whispering into a microphone.
‘I don’t want you to worry or anything, but I’m telling you straight. Within the next six months we’re going to have to get rid of another two CPs, listen,’ Debs tells her.
It will confuse the investigation, he says, but Joanne seems to suggest that he is already in the clear.
‘Yeah, but what for?’ she says. ‘They’ve already been here … They’ve questioned, taken the car. If they found anything on that car don’t you think that they would have been fuckin’ pullin’ youse both into the police station by now?’
At the time, her logic may have seemed impeccable. In December 1998, police scientists cleared sister Nicole Debs’ Hyundai Excel – an 18th birthday present from her father – of involvement in the police shootings. But events had moved on.
Everything had begun to change the previous winter, when police had no breakthroughs, no clear leads, and the first anniversary of the killings was approaching.
At the time of the shootings the lack of evidence and clear suspects suggested police faced a protracted investigation. The then head of the homicide squad, Rod Collins, told relatives of Gary Silk that if there was not a breakthrough in the first two weeks it could take two years.
Paul Sheridan was heading the murder investigation. Sheridan, then a detective inspector in the homicide squad and a graduate of the prestigious FBI National Academy, agreed the case would be a marathon.
When senior police want results they usually turn to their most experienced detectives. Sheridan defied convention when he created the investigating taskforce called Lorimer. He turned away from the comfort of veterans and drafted young detectives, reasoning that energy and stamina would be more valuable than experience.
By mid-1999, almost a year after the shootings, they had gathered enough intelligence against five suspects to persuade courts to allow them to bug telephones and plant listening devices. But each lead ended in disappointment.
They were running out of time. There had been too many false leads, too many dead ends. Some senior police were losing confidence and patience. There was talk of scaling down the taskforce or changing tack to introduce a ‘harder edge’ – a tougher, kick-down-doors approach.
Instead, Sheridan ordered a review of all material held by the taskforce. He was prepared to start over.
Among the thousands of tips, interviews and false starts, they found a glimmer.
It was not a eureka moment. Just one small thing that reignited interest in Bandali Michael Debs, hard-working tiler and middle-aged family man.
Debs had been under notice within days of the shootings. Shattered automotive glass at the scene had told police the killers fled in a small Hyundai with a broken rear window.
Police asked parts suppliers to alert them to anyone seeking a Hyundai rear window. Which is why, when a young couple arrived in a Mazda mid-morning on 26 August 1998 – 10 days after the shootings – to pick up a Hyundai Excel replacement rear window, the sales assistant at Grant Walker Parts in the Melbourne suburb of Bayswater noted the registration number of the car.
The Mazda was registered to Joanne Debs. Questioned, Bandali Debs said he had broken the Hyundai’s window, claiming he closed it on metal strips used for tiling.
He said the accident happened at a work site on 19 August – three days after the shootings. Police took his mobile phone records to check his movements over the time of the shootings, but when glass from Nicole Debs’ Hyundai was tested in December 1999, and failed to match crime scene samples, he was not pursued further.
A police surveillance crew was set on Debs and trailed him when he left for work and when he returned home. Nothing untoward showed up. Debs appeared to be an early riser and hard worker at his tiling trade. Nothing in his background or his behaviour suggested a double life. If anything he was too busy on work sites to have the energy for armed robbery.
On the night of the shootings, Silk and Miller had been taking part in Operation Hamada, an investigation into a series of ‘soft target’ robberies – raids on isolated restaurants, take-away stores and shops.
It was not the first such operation. During the review, an officer noticed from phone records that in the days after the shootings, Debs had made a series of calls to a man suspected of involvement in a series of armed robberies strikingly similar to the Hamada raids.
This earlier sequence of robberies, investigated by police under Operation Pig-Out, hit 28 targets between 1991 and 1994. There were two bandits, a heavy-set man with a younger assistant, and the robberies occurred in Melbourne’s outer east. In most cases the victims were tied up. But on their last job, on 9 October 1994, at the Palm Beach Restaurant at Patterson Lakes, they had too many victims -17 diners and three staff – to bind them all.
As usual, both bandits were dressed in dark pants and jumpers and balaclavas, and were carrying handguns. The robbery went badly when one of the patrons started abusing the robbers and would not shut up. Panicked, they bailed out of there.
But one of the diners trailed their getaway car, a white Ford Meteor, closing in sufficiently to take down the registration number, although he lost interest when one of the robbers pointed a gun at him.
About three-and-a-half hours later, the owner of the Ford Meteor walked into Dandenong Police Station. It was 4.05 am, 9 October 1994, and 18-year-old Jason Manuel Ghiller had come in to report his car stolen.
He had been at a local nightclub earlier, he said, while his car was nicked. In fact Ghiller had spent the previous two hours running through the Nu Hotel in Scott Street bailing up his mates to tell them he had been there all night and where the fuck had they been? He was almost certain someone at the Palm Beach holdup had sighted his car’s registration so he was building an alibi.
Ghiller’s Ford was later found burnt out in nearby Lysterfield and he lodged an insurance claim. The Pig-Out robberies stopped after that and Ghiller sweated through hours of interviews with Pig-Out investigators.
There had been an earlier close call, although it was not then seen as a Pig-Out incident. Two cops on uniform patrol pulled over a Nissan Bluebird at Hallam, in Melbourne’s south-east on 19 September 1994. But when one of them started to approach the Nissan he saw a man pointing a gun at him.
Three shots were fired at the police car before the Nissan sped off as the cops fired back. They lost the Nissan which later was found burnt out behind the Fountain Gate Shopping Centre. It proved to have been stolen from a car yard three months earlier. Its number plates were stolen too. Since it was untraceable, the robbers felt confident enough to go out again the next month.
They ended up with their bungled job at the Palm Beach. This time their getaway car was traceable and Jason Ghiller was scared out of the business.
It would be four years before the Pig-Out-style robbers struck again.
When, in 1998, two bandits launched a similar series of raids there was a difference. While the older gunman seemed the same, his partner was colder and more aggressive.
They thought, rightly, that the original, younger robber had been scared off by the near-capture after the Palm Beach Restaurant raid, and the older man had recruited a new apprentice.
Hamada was launched, and police identified 60 possible targets for the pair, with 10 restaurants highlighted as the most likely. The Silky Emperor, a licensed Chinese restaurant on Warrigal Road, Moorabbin, was in the top 10.
Now, during the review of information by the Lorimer Taskforce, police found that Debs had been in phone contact with the young suspect from Pig-Out. Jason Manuel Ghiller was Debs’ nephew.
The link was strong enough to demand another look at the hard-working tiler.
Further phone record checks showed that Debs had, on 16 August 1998, rung a man near Bendigo who advertised Hyundai parts for sale in The Age and The Trading Post. This was just hours after the murders, and three days before he claimed to have broken the window.
Olivia Coffman almost had to laugh. A sales assistant at Sportsmart in Noble Park, she had left the store to move her car, only to walk blithely into an armed robbery when she returned. She came through the front door, and was met by the barrel of a revolver.
Herded with the other staff and customers into an upstairs storeroom, she was, like the others, bound with her hands behind her back and her ankles together.
It was terrifying, and gut-wrenching. A female customer who was there with her little girl was told they wouldn’t be hurt if they didn’t do anything stupid.
But the bigger robber, the one whose revolver greeted Coffman when she returned to the store, whose gaze she avoided because he was clearly more dangerous, had also warned the store manager: ‘I’ll kill you if I have to.’
Lying there on the concrete storeroom floor, Coffman – an attractive, elfin, 20-something – could still see the joke: she knew the second younger robber. He had been walking into the store undisguised as she went out to her car.
Maybe he had been a customer before, because she had recognised the long face and the dark, heavy eyebrows. As for that stocking he had since pulled over his face, it was a pathetic attempt at disguise. Amateur hour. Almost comical.
‘I very clearly remember almost having not to laugh at the fact that I could still see and recognise the face through the stocking,’ Coffman said.
The next day she went to police headquarters and worked with an artist on a face likeness of the smaller robber who she reckoned was aged about 19.
Coffman was not happy with the likeness, but insisted she would always recognise him if she saw him again. In the flesh or a photograph.
The Noble Park robbery, in March 1998, was the second of 10 committed in a spree over five months at small businesses in Melbourne’s eastern and south-eastern suburbs.
The crimes occurred at ‘sitting duck’ targets with poor security, which were cashed-up at the end of a week’s trading and were robbed late at night or on weekend afternoons when other nearby outlets were closed.
Two robbers carried out the offences. Almost always, both carried handguns. They herded their victims together and taped their hands and feet.
One offender, taller – about 182 centimetres (six feet) – heavier, seemingly older, was in control, making demands and taking money, while the other, the short, lightly framed one, used the tape.
Two weeks before Coffman had a clear look at the smaller offender, Tracey Chadwick was able to observe his older, heavier accomplice at close quarters.
Chadwick was working at a car parts suppliers at Carrum Downs and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun. A big one. A. 44 Smith & Wesson. A hand-held cannon.
For a time it was held to her head, but despite his black cap and sunglasses and her terror, she formed a view of a sculptured face, drawn and angular.
Just as the Pig-Out robberies had ended suddenly in 1994, after the robbers were pursued by a victim, so too did the Hamada robberies, in August 1998, after Silk and Miller were shot.
The way they died has tied Gary Silk and Rodney Miller together inextricably. Yet their pairing on the night, and even their appearance at The Silky Emperor, was almost accidental.
Silk was based at St Kilda and Miller at Prahran. Both had been seconded to the Elwood Regional Support Group, which was seen as a bridge for young police to gain investigative experience before becoming detectives.
Silk, 34, was picked for the job as a supervisor because he was a trained detective, Miller because he had shown a flair for investigation. Silk was the senior man, with 13 years’ experience. Miller, who was a year older, had joined later after serving in the army.
They were assigned to watch over a Korean restaurant, but after it closed they were reassigned to The Silky Emperor.
It was a routine job. So routine that both men kept their bulky bullet-proof vests in the boot of their unmarked car.
Two other police, senior constables Frank Bendeich and Darren Sherrin, were already there, but unable to watch the rear car park, which was located down a narrow access way. Silk and Miller took up a surveillance position in the car park.
About 12.15 am on 16 August 1998, a small Asian-built coupe drove into the car park, and drove out again almost immediately, followed by Silk and Miller in their unmarked police vehicle. The two vehicles turned out of Warrigal Road into Cochranes Road, an industrial estate that shuts down at night.
Bendeich and Sherrin followed, and drove past Silk and Miller, who had pulled up about 90 metres along Cochranes Road. As they rode by they could see that Silk was out of the car speaking to a male driver in front of the Asian-made car.
It did not look suspicious and Bendeich and Sherrin continued along Cochranes Road until they could turn right in the median strip into Capella Court. From there, they were about 200 metres from the scene. Their car’s headlights were switched off, so neither Silk and Miller, nor their killers, knew of their presence.
Bendeich and Sherrin heard the volley of gunfire. They saw the muzzle flashes. They saw a Hyundai drive off slowly along Cochranes Road and they went to the aid of their colleagues.
They found Silk, clearly dead, on the roadside’s grassy verge. Miller was missing, but finally he was found in front of The Silky Emperor, having struggled back to the main road, fatally wounded.
‘Silky’s dead. Silky’s dead,’ Miller told Senior Constable Glenn Pullin who found him. He was in pain and afraid. ‘Help me, help me. Don’t let me die.’
Asked how many offenders there were, he said, ‘Two. One on foot … dark Hyundai … I’m fucked, I’m fucked … I’m having trouble breathing.’
Three hours later, he died.
Once Debs’ telephone records linked him with one of the suspected Pig-Out robbers, police scientists re-checked the glass from Nicole Debs’ Hyundai.
There was a complication. The windscreen bought at Grant Walker Parts had not lasted long. Debs fitted it himself to save money, but it blew out when the car was being driven and a second replacement was professionally fitted about a month after the first.
Investigators queried the original glass examination by scientist Edward Kennedy-Ripon. He had taken two pieces of glass from the car and one from Cochranes Road. When he examined them in December 1998, he found small differences in the way they refracted, or bent, light.
He took the variation to be significant, and concluded that the vehicle was unlikely to be the source of the Cochranes Road glass. Was it possible he inadvertently tested glass from the first replacement window installed by Debs?
In September 1999, overseen by Peter Ross – a team leader at the Victoria Forensic Science Centre – Kennedy-Ripon conducted another analysis, this time using a much larger sample of glass fragments: 46 fragments from the car were tested. This time, a significant match between the Cochranes Road and Debs’ Hyundai fragments was found. The Debs car was back in the frame.
Almost by chance, Jason Roberts, the boyfriend of Nicole Debs, entered the picture.
Mark Butterworth fixed on the young man’s face. The picture jumped at him. An armed robbery squad detective sergeant seconded to the taskforce, Butterworth had seen Olivia Coffman’s impression of the younger Hamada robber, and this man looked right for it.
Once Debs was elevated from a person of interest to a suspect, a police analyst compiled a profile of him and his associates.
Among pictures of Debs and his family was a photograph of Roberts, who qualified for inclusion by way of his relationship with Nicole Debs.
As it happened, he had been with her to pick up the rear window from Grant Walker Parts. While Debs claimed to have broken the window at work, Roberts told the salesman a thief had smashed it ‘and stole the sub-woofer’ from the car’s sound system.
The day after his discovery, Butterworth went to see Coffman with a photo board of 12 faces. Coffman identified Roberts from his driver’s licence as the younger robber with the heavy-set eyebrows.
Miller’s dying declaration was that there were two offenders. That was confirmed in police thinking by Miller’s shooting pattern as he returned fire in the brief gunfight: two of his bullets, fired presumably in the direction of Silk’s killer, hit the roller door of a nearby panel shop, while another, which hit the rear of the Hyundai, was fired towards the killer with the Magnum.
Two weapons, two targets for returned fire, and the fact that the Hamada robberies were committed by two offenders, led to the conclusion that both had been present and both were involved in the gunfight.
Now, with Coffman’s identification of Roberts, there were two clear suspects.
Bandali Michael Debs had an unconventional upbringing. He was born Edmund Plancis on 18 July 1953, the son of Helga Anna Frank and Silvester Weipnikowski.
Helga Frank had married Olgerts Plancis in Germany and the couple migrated to Australia in the late 1940s. They had one son, whom Olgerts took with him to Adelaide after the marriage broke up.
Helga Frank then had a series of partners – Silvester Weipnikowski, Dennis Reynolds and Albert Rutherford, whom she married in 1977. She had two further children by Weipnikowski – Robert Rutherford, who adopted his surname as a young adult, and Christine Weipnikowski.
Edmund Plancis proved to be a difficult adolescent. Unable to get along at home, he befriended a father figure in a man who ran a nearby boarding house, Bandali Michael ‘Malik’ Debs. When he was aged 17, the older man formally adopted Plancis, who in turn took Debs’ name and shrugged off his family name.
Debs met his wife, Dorothy, in Melbourne. They married when he was about 26 and had five children – Joanne, Nicole, Kylie, Michael and Joseph.
Jason Joseph Roberts met Nicole Debs in a karate class. A couple of years later, when he was 17 and she 18, they met again at a party and soon after began dating.
Roberts lived at home in Cranbourne in south-east Melbourne with his mother. His father had died of a heart attack when he was 10. By the time he began dating Nicole Debs, he had left school and drifted into the building industry as an apprentice glazier and builder.
When Lorimer investigators looked closely, they were surprised at Debs’ close relationship with his daughter’s boyfriend. Just as Debs in his youth had gravitated towards an older man, he now became a father figure to Roberts.
In the space of a few months, the investigation had gone from a series of dead ends to one promising lead: the re-examination of Debs’ phone records linked him to an armed robber; the review of the glass placed one of the Debs family’s cars at the scene, and a witness had placed Roberts in the Hamada robberies.
In most of the Hamada robberies the victims were tied up with a type of tape commonly used in the glazing industry, with which Roberts was familiar.
It was promising, but it wasn’t a case. For example, placing Nicole Debs’ Hyundai at the scene was one thing, proving who was in it was something else. Police remained cautious.
‘We weren’t too excited,’ Sheridan said. ‘We had seen strong leads before that had gone nowhere.’
During October 1999, police began to monitor their suspects’ bugged telephones – including Nicole and Joanne Debs’ mobile phones; a public phone box in New South Wales used by Robert Rutherford; Rutherford’s home telephone; and his partner’s mobile phone.
In November, two bugs were placed inside the Debs’ house. Bandali Debs’ Commodore station wagon was bugged on 9 December, and Nicole Debs’ Hyundai sedan was wired up on 13 December.
A further listening device was installed at the Cranbourne house under construction for Jason Roberts and Nicole Debs, as well as another at Roberts’ mother’s house.
Almost from the beginning, the police monitoring the listening devices – a crew headed by Detective Sergeant Dean Thomas – knew they were on to something. Criminality was evident in a conversation picked up in December 1999 between Bandali Debs and his young son Joseph, then 15, who was working at a local Hungry Jack’s store.
It began with Debs asking if any money was counted that day. The teenager told him: ‘I swear that joint is so easy to fucking rob … All you got to do is fucking knock out their guard … fucking walk in … they leave the safe open when they count the money.’
Debs responded: ‘Is there only one guard now, or two?’
Moments later, Joseph suggested his father rob the joint when ‘the black cunt’s working. Beat the fuck out of him.’
Debs asked: ‘Would it be all right if I, um, cut his fingers off?’
Joseph replied: ‘Fuckin’ oath. I hate the cunt.’
Weeks later the pair returned to the subject, with Jose – as his father called him – asking how long the raid would take. Told it would be 40 minutes, he told Debs: ‘I want an apprenticeship off you.’
Debs answered: ‘Well, I can tell you, after the first 12 months you’ll be making big money.’
It was this series of conversations that convinced police Debs was the older gunman. They had connected him with younger suspects for the Pig-Out and Hamada robberies. Now they knew he was planning jobs.
Throughout the investigation, Sheridan briefed the Silk and Miller families every two weeks, even when there was no news. Now he could tell them there had been a breakthrough.
Gary Silk’s father, Morrie, was dying of cancer. Sheridan knelt beside Morrie Silk’s bed to comfort him with the news they had identified his son’s killers. Within two weeks, Morrie Silk was dead.
Over time, the investigators would become familiar with the group’s vernacular: police were ‘CPs’, detectives were ‘Ds’, firearms were ‘articles’, the Silk-Miller shootings were ‘that other matter’ and their victims were ‘our friends’.
The surveillance revealed crimes being planned, and carried out, such as when Debs and Roberts carried out late-night burglaries, unaware that Debs’ station wagon was bugged.
Other conversations, unheard by the jury for legal reasons, were boastful recountings of past glories: of Roberts using his car to run a motorcyclist off the road; of terrifying victims during robberies; of people soiling themselves in fear; of a man threatened with emasculation and something about smashing a woman’s face; and how when Debs screamed at them ‘people just dropped like fucking spaghetti’.
Some of the stories clearly came from the Pig-Out series of robberies. Their ruthlessness and appetite for criminality seemed insatiable. According to another tape played to the court, while riding in Debs’ Commodore in June 2000, Roberts tells Debs that someone called Rodney ‘wants to know how far we go’.
They are discussing becoming hitmen, of killing Rodney’s estranged wife, a mother of three. They agree it will have to be an overdose: ‘Take it out of the packet, wipe up all the gear, double check, take the syringe out, have it already filled. Boom, boom, boom,’ says Roberts.
Debs confirms it – one good hit. ‘Remember, that particular person’s been taking a lot of drugs and they need a massive hit … The person’s out of it, and just make sure they’re holding it in their hand and that’s it. When CP comes they say, ah, had too much.’
Roberts says their client ‘will pay good’. Debs replies: ‘Oh yeah, I reckon five big ones.’
And it seemed any reference to police shootings sparked conversation. Sheridan decided to exploit this, using press statements as a prompt as well as specific police action, which in one case included having two officers pull over the suspect Hyundai, with Roberts and Nicole Debs aboard, for a roadside check.
In February 2000, three months after the electronic surveillance began, and after police nudged him with their visit to Robert Rutherford in Sydney, Debs had his incriminating conversation with daughter Joanne in which he talked about another two police having to be shot, and in which she talked about it being done out of their area.
Getting to and from the shooting would mean taking back roads to avoid City Link’s e-tags, he said, but Joanne urged him to wait to see what Rutherford knew. For at least a moment Bandali Debs also considered killing Miller’s widow, Carmel, and her son, then almost 20 months.
‘Seriously. Do you think I should get rid of the kid and the mother? … So they try and get the investigation to think that it’s drug-related or anything like that?’ This was also a comment the Supreme Court jury did not hear. Justice Cummins ruled it inadmissible on the grounds that it could be prejudicial to a fair trial.
From all of this it emerged that Debs made confidants of his young daughters, but mostly not his wife, Dorothy. After discussing killing police with Joanne, for example, he cautions her not to talk to her mother, who he said was ‘fuckin’ very nosey’.
Talk of shooting police and Carmel Miller had immediate repercussions. Sheridan knew he did not have enough evidence to make an arrest, but would be forced to move if Debs went ahead with his threats.
A unit of the Special Operations Group was moved to the Police Academy in Glen Waverley. Debs and Roberts were under constant surveillance and would not be allowed to leave the region to conduct an ambush.
More difficult listening than the conversation with Joanne, but still audible when it was played in court, was Debs’ conversation with his adoptive father, ‘Malik’, a few days later at home on 15 February. While his lawyer, Chris Dane, QC, argued that many of the details of the shooting had featured in media reports and knowledge of them did not imply he was present, Debs appeared to describe the shooting in detail. His was an account that the prosecutor Jeremy Rapke, QC, described as ‘unnervingly accurate’.
According to the prosecution, Silk, who approached the gunmen’s car, was shot first – in the chest by Roberts – with a. 38 calibre revolver. And from less than two metres, he was shot in the hip and head, effectively executed, with a. 357 Magnum, while lying helpless. Silk’s pistol remained in its holster.
Miller was shot once in the chest with the Magnum fired by Debs from within the car, but he fired several shots from his police revolver before crawling several hundred metres to Warrigal Road where he was found.
‘He was on the ground – laying on the ground, firing in the air … he just shot up in the air and things went everywhere … and you know where they found the other one, a long way away,’ Debs told Malik.
‘They don’t know. But the other one never got to pull his, it was still in the pouch.’
Debs also appeared to describe what went before, the police staking out The Silky Emperor restaurant and the robbers’ car trailed out of the car park.
In words clearer than those that preceded them, Debs was recorded as saying: ‘No, no those were the ones that were sittin’ there, when we drove in just to quick look, they seen us so they drove behind us, and drove down the street to stop us. They stopped us. Then it’s not good.’
This was followed by an account of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, including a reference to police messages picked up on a scanner: ‘A few shots, it’s no worries, a little thing … as soon as that happened we went. But then they came, after everything happened they come in one minute … oh yeah, we heard it on this … they said, “Oh one is gone, we can’t find the other one”.
‘After we left, they come in 30 or 40 seconds they were there, that means they had a few cars in the area.’
Justice Cummins told the jury this account could be used only against Debs, but not Roberts, since he was absent when Debs used the words ‘we’ and ‘us’.
‘Roberts wasn’t there for this conversation between Mr Debs and his father, so Roberts can’t put his hand up and say “That’s wrong. I don’t know what you’re talking about” … you can’t use it against Mr Roberts,’ Justice Cummins said.
Roberts, however, provided his own moments of self-incrimination, among them the expression ‘I kill Ds’ in a conversation taped at his Cranbourne house on 19 February 2000.
And after reading from a newspaper article, which quoted Sheridan as saying the younger of the two suspects may be in danger, Roberts remarked: ‘I didn’t know that. I had so much fun. Fuckin’ hell.’
Seeing police attending a road accident on the Eastern Freeway, Roberts also seemed to offer an insight into an intense hatred of police. As he passed the scene, Roberts yelled ‘Bang! Bang! Suck on that cunts,’ before breaking into a laugh, his taunt clearly caught on the Commodore’s bugging device. But to some investigators this shout was more than a statement of hatred – some reckoned it was a re-enactment of what had gone before.
That Debs and Roberts were insular – in effect, an independent crime cell – made the investigation difficult. They did not talk to outsiders and had no contacts among wider criminal networks.
But once identified, their clannish culture helped police. While they trusted no-one outside their group, privately, at home and in their cars, they spoke with a brutal honesty. Even the youngest daughter, Kylie, was able to speculate about where this was heading. Shortly after he told her that another two police would have to be shot to distract the investigation she asked him: ‘What about when they shoot you – do you have a plan?’
The tapes revealed Debs rehearsing what he would say to police if they tried to re-interview him – he had made a formal statement to police to explain the broken rear window in his daughter’s Hyundai.
He would also be heard talking about stuff hidden under the stumps of his mother’s house – where a gun and stolen jewellery from one of the Hamada robberies would later be found, and another eight guns besides – and he would be heard paying an inordinate amount of attention to police shootings anywhere in the country. When a gunman shot three police in Queensland, Debs hoped that he might be blamed for the Silk–Miller shootings.
On 29 May 2000, six months after the electronic surveillance began, Sheridan announced a breakthrough in the investigation, claiming that an anonymous caller had declared they may be able to help identify the killers, especially the younger and smaller one.
On 31 May, at Roberts’ house, Debs was overheard saying: ‘I don’t reckon they were talkin’ to somebody … no-one was there but us.’
The conversation continued for minutes, with Nicole and Joanne Debs joining in. Joanne said: ‘The police have an idea, they think they know how it happened of course.’
Jason: ‘Yeah and I’ve seen two of their ways that they think it happened and it’s fuckin’ backwards.’
Nicole Debs tried to calm herself. ‘It’s someone fuckin’ shittin’. Why would they … ?’
Police prepared a face image of the younger suspect – suggesting they wanted to know the person’s identity. The image was taken from Roberts’ driver’s licence. Sheridan released the image on 16 July – a quiet Sunday. He wanted headlines and had cancelled two news conferences because of competing news stories, including a coup in Fiji and the introduction of the GST.
He was looking for maximum coverage to unsettle his targets.
Sheridan said: ‘Somebody must know this person … this man is not a recluse. He cannot hide forever. This is the best lead we have received. I feel fairly confident that this will lead to the solution of this case.’
It prompted extensive conversations over several days among Debs, his daughters, Roberts and other associates. Nicole said repeatedly that she felt sick.
Debs said, accurately, that the police were trying to build up the pressure. ‘They’re trying to make something out of nothing … If people show ‘em they’re scared they get caught.’
Within days Roberts had contacted the taskforce. ‘That’s my picture, mate …’ he told Detective Sergeant Andrew Burgess. ‘It looks exactly like me.’
During the trial, Ian Hill, QC, representing Roberts, called an expert witness who challenged Sergeant Thomas’ interpretation of the expression ‘I kill Ds’.
Speech pathology expert Professor Andrew Butcher said he heard the words ‘I’ll’ and ‘kill’, but could not make out ‘Ds’.
In cross-examining, Rapke produced compact disc recordings of the phrase. One was enhanced to remove background noise, the other left unenhanced.
Rapke was able to emphasise the expression, playing it 20 times to the jury, and he had Butcher agree that familiarity with a voice made it easier to accurately interpret sounds on a tape.
And the person most familiar with the voices on the tapes was the police witness, Sergeant Dean Thomas, who had spent thousands of hours listening.
In terms of voice recognition, Thomas had the advantage of having met Debs in person. The first time was when the Hyundai was examined in 1998. Then, they met by chance in an outer-eastern suburbs supermarket.
Thomas was there to buy milk. Debs was shoplifting that night’s dinner, and had secreted a $15 tray of chicken in his jumper at the time.
He later bragged to his wife that he walked up to Thomas and said: ‘How ya goin’, mate? … Have you caught those pricks who … um … killed those cops?’
Debs was annoyed that he could not continue shoplifting and speculated that Thomas lived nearby: ‘I’ll have to get rid of him … find out where he lives and kill him.’
Roberts, meanwhile, had done his predecessor as Debs’ sidekick a big favour. When he was first linked to Debs by telephone records, Ghiller had been a suspect for the police shootings, but Roberts had clearly taken over Ghiller’s subordinate role.
It would emerge much later that this was not because Ghiller was scared out of the business, but that Debs knew the kid’s cover was blown by the car registration link to the Palm Beach restaurant. It was Debs who had decided not to go out any more with Ghiller.
While Sheridan was making statements to the media, and using police operations to spark conversation between Debs and Roberts, an entirely different operation was aimed at Ghiller in the first half of 2000.
After keeping his secret for almost six years, Ghiller found himself with a new mate with whom he felt he could share everything. He would not realise, until far too late, that his mate was an undercover cop and that their conversations were recorded.
On 30 April, he related the story of that bungled last robbery fouled by an angry customer. ‘But he came up to attack us … we were just rounding all the people up to move them aside … and he’s goin’, oh he’s fuckin’ he’s going shit and I looked at me partner … and he sort of lunged for us and he just, he just knocked him out and then we fucked off.
‘And all of a sudden there was a car behind us with its high beam on, and that’s it, got away and that’s it … I ended up going to a nightclub … I had a good alibi. Like I said, I went and got clothes, went to a club and all me mates were pissed.’
He showed the same lack of compassion for his victims as Debs and Roberts. One of the jobs he did with his ‘Uncle Ben’ was an early-morning raid on a newsagency in Clayton, near Moorabbin, on 29 November 1992.
A middle-aged couple, Shawki Yacoub and his wife, were opening up for the newsagent.
About 4.20 am, Mrs Yacoub saw two men wearing balaclavas and armed with handguns in the rear work area. Aiming the guns at her, they told her they wanted money. Mr Yacoub walked back into the work area, and, seeing his wife threatened, pushed her to the ground as he called to the robbers not to hurt her.
As he lay on top of his wife to shield her, Debs took aim and shot him in the back, severing his spine and crippling him. Years later, when the undercover cop asked Ghiller if he lost any sleep over that episode, Ghiller answered: ‘Nah. Are you talking about the wheelchair cunt?’
Springfield Drive in Narre Warren marks out the furthermost boundary of a metropolitan fringe housing estate south of the Princes Highway. It mixes established homes with well-tended gardens with a few vacant lots.
From the Debs’ house the view is of suburban rooftops and open paddocks to the Pakenham rail line a few hundred metres away.
Residents must have wondered what was happening to their quiet little neighbourhood in July 2000, when, within two weeks, a Springfield Drive man was shot while walking to his car early one morning, followed by a bomb scare in the street a fortnight later.
At least one family, however, knew the bomb scare was ‘sus’, as one of them put it.
‘Anne’ was stopped by police in Springfield Drive and held up for more than an hour on 11 July as a police robot examined a suspicious package. At least, that is what people were told since the roadblock prevented the dozen or so locals stranded by the operation from seeing much.
The plainclothes detective who stopped ‘Anne’ wore a name tag distinctive enough to stay in her mind: Sol Solomon. When she related the story to a family friend who is in the force, he remarked that it was odd that a senior, St Kilda Road-based detective like Sol Solomon – a member of the Lorimer Taskforce – would be on an operation so far out of town.
Her family decided the whole thing was suspicious. They felt vindicated in their judgement when Debs was arrested. They did not know him personally, but he was known to them as ‘Fucking Michael’, since those two words, a reference to one of his sons, often emanated in an exasperated shout from the Debs backyard.
The bomb scare was a cover to enable police to replace a failing battery in one of the listening devices inside the Debs home. By the time of the bomb scare, the devices had done their work in terms of gathering evidence, but police still needed to know what their suspects were thinking.
The shooting was unrelated to the Lorimer investigation, but it offered plausible cover for the bomb scare. Two weeks later, on 25 July 2000, Debs and Roberts were arrested by the Special Operations Group in co-ordinated raids. Debs stuck to his original story and was vague on any other questions.
Jason Ghiller was arrested six days later. He was planning a visit to the Lonely Planet brothel in Elsternwick when his mate, the undercover cop, and another bloke made a surprise diversion and delivered him up to the St Kilda Road police complex.
‘I’ve got some bad news for you, buddy,’ his mate said. ‘It’s a set-up, and we’re from the government.
‘Co-operate with these blokes. They are from the Lorimer Taskforce. It’s your last hope. We’re just doing our job, and that’s it, all right? If you give them what [they] want, everything will be fine.’
Faced with armed robbery rather than murder charges, Ghiller would plead guilty.
Roberts was released and then finally charged on 15 August. Sheridan had considered delaying the final act for a day, to coincide with the second anniversary of the shootings, but felt that would be too contrived.
In the courtroom, the families of the victims and the accused sit a few metres from each other.
Opposite the nine women and six men of the jury, Gary Silk’s mother and brothers, and Rod Miller’s widow sit along one wall. The Lorimer investigators occupy the row in front of them.
At a right angle to this, a single form has been placed in front of the dock for the families of the two accused. Nicole and Joanne Debs, often joined by Kylie, sit here in conservative dark suits.
Once, they were rebuked by the judge for rolling their eyes and exchanging glances during Olivia Coffman’s testimony, which placed Roberts as one of the Hamada robbers. But apart from that indiscretion, the Debs daughters remain impassive.
Meanwhile, Debs is placed at the scene of one of the robberies by Tracey Chadwick, who identified him from a videotape line-up after observing the older robber at gunpoint during the first of the Hamada raids.
Chadwick said that she looked three times at a police videotape recording of 12 men in September 2000, to see if she could identify either robber.
Number eight on the video flipped her stomach. ‘When I saw [the video] a second time, I said: “Number eight gave me that hair-on-the-back-of-the-head, stomach-doing-somersaults kind of feeling”,’ she said. ‘After seeing it a third time, I said it was definitely number eight.’
Number eight in the video parade was Debs, recorded during an interview after his arrest for the Silk–Miller murders.
Debs’ sons join the daughters – a family united – when Chris Dane makes his closing argument to the jury. Behind them, Debs cuts a studious figure, taking notes throughout. Debs and Roberts show no emotion as the tapes of their conversations are played to the court, but by now there are no surprises. Just as there were none for the police who interviewed Debs.
They had, after all, listened to him outline his interview strategy with his father, Malik.
‘They don’t like it when you talk tough to them,’ a laughing Debs had told Malik on 23 July 2000, two days before his arrest.
‘And when you say I dunno, I dunno – that one, they hate it. You know that one? I dunno. I’m not sure … Happened so long ago. I didn’t take much notice.’
Debs and Roberts do not testify in the trial. They stand by their right to remain silent, but have, in a sense, already testified.
Less than a week before his arrest, Debs had asked his family: ‘Listen, do you think our phone’s tapped?’
On 24 February 2003, Bandali Debs was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment for the murders of Gary Silk and Rod Miller. He was refused a minimum term. This one-man crime wave, who with his youthful apprentices raged through Melbourne’s south-east in two rampages, killing two police and shooting at two more, is never to be released.
Jason Roberts was also sentenced to life, but was given a 35-year minimum term which will see him released a few years before he could claim an old age pension.
Nine months after his mentor in crime, his Uncle Ben, was jailed, Jason Ghiller arrived at Melbourne’s Supreme Court carrying an overnight bag. He was packed and ready for prison. Ghiller pleaded guilty to 22 offences including 13 counts of armed robbery, one of intentionally causing serious injury and two of reckless conduct endangering life. He was jailed for 10 years, with a six-year minimum term.
Joseph Debs never did win that apprenticeship, as an armed robber with his father, or in any other trade. In December 2003, not quite 12 months after Debs and Roberts were convicted of the police killings, the body of a young man was found in a house in Greensborough, north-east of Melbourne. It was Joseph Debs, dead of a drug overdose.
Nor was the justice system finished with Bandali Debs. In April 2007 he was back in court charged with the murder of troubled 18-year-old and occasional prostitute Kristy Harty.
Harty was shot once in the back of the head overnight on 18 June 1997 near a bush track in outer-suburban Upper Beaconsfield. An unused condom was found near her body. She was known to offer sex to motorists in the area and she was desperate for $90 in the hours before her killing.
The guns found under Debs’ mother’s home in Sydney included a. 357 Magnum, the type of weapon used to kill Harty, although damage to the lethal bullet prevented conclusive identification of his gun as the murder weapon. While digging in the backyard the new owner of the house had uncovered two glass containers containing ammunition. Included among the bullets were 69 Winchester. 357 Magnum cartridges of the type used to murder Harty. Semen at the scene further linked Debs to the killing. Forensic scientists found there was only a one in 370 billion chance the semen came from anyone other than Debs. The police case was that Debs killed her before, during or immediately after having sex with her.
On 11 May 2007 a Supreme Court jury convicted Debs of Harty’s murder. Despite speculation that Debs’ daughters could be legally viewed as accomplices in his second crime spree, they were not charged. The Debs family, however, was forced to surrender the Hyundai Excel used the night of the police killings.
Finally, in April 2005, the Court of Appeal refused Debs and Roberts objections to their convictions, and confirmed their sentences.
With John Silvester and Peter Gregory