You need a reason to go to Reservoir’s Summerhill estate, a sad, lost pocket of once-public housing deposited among the unfashionable sweep of Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Newly arrived migrants have it. So does anyone on social services or in need of cheap housing. People with choices do not.
Joel Russell thought he had it. But it cost him his life.
Like nearby West Heidelberg, Summerhill has a rep, a ‘name’, but during the late spring twilight it settles into a benign quiet. Daylight saving is kind to this place. Residents tend neat little gardens or sit out on the front steps with VB longnecks. It’s a reflective time. The sounds of kids playing hang in the still, evening air. Families of the newest arrivals, East African refugees, play soccer on their front lawns.
Down by what passes for the local shopping centre, the quiet creates a different mood, of loss and resignation. Most of the businesses have fled, hiding their failure behind heavy metal shutters now scarred with under-done graffiti. The car park is deserted.
Up the hill and along Nisbett Street it used to be different.
Business boomed there. Lance Franklin’s business: dealing ‘smoke’. Thirty, 40 cars a day, maybe 50 on pension day.
Joel Russell was 14 and a regular client of Lance Edward Franklin’s drug business – mainly marijuana but occasionally speed.
Lance is a little man, sharp featured, with a body as hard and lean as a wild hare and a record of burglary, theft, drug and firearms offences. Franklin dealt dope, the currency of the Age of Aquarius, but he was no blissed-out flower child. Cross him, and you’re a dog, a fucking lying dog.
What was the Franklin house is pre-fabricated concrete, 1950s Housing Commission stock, part of an estate that is being progressively privatised. It is on the low side of the street, so the property falls away to the south creating a kind of enclosed basement under floor level. It was down here that Lance Franklin and five other men took Joel Russell and beat him to death.
Who said so? Well mostly Joel’s 17-year-old brother, Wade Russell. Wade was down there too, having been forced to crawl through the house on his knees and led down into the sub-floor area where he was flogged with a baseball bat and made to eat dog shit by Lance’s son, Alan. Lance in miniature, Alan has the same high cheekbones, hollow sculpted cheeks and tight frame as his dad, and he is working on his mean streak.
Joel and Wade knew the house well. They had lived there before the Franklins and had taken to making regular visits to buy marijuana. Their mum, Lorraine, knew Lance Franklin, and was able to put names to the descriptions of his associates that Wade would offer up but could not himself identify.
Joel and Wade began their ordeal about 2 pm on Tuesday, 14 January 1997, but Joel set out on that path about 14 hours earlier when, with a friend, Chris Hexter, he paid a late-night visit to Nisbett Street to buy a small quantity of marijuana for $25.
Alan Franklin was supposed to be relaxing with friends, all grouped around the glass tank in the lounge room that served as a coffee table, but which also housed Lance’s pet snake. Trouble was, someone had brought along a mouse in a box. It had eaten its way to freedom so they were running around looking for it.
Lance was in and out during the evening, and was visiting his girlfriend when Joel arrived, so Alan sold him the dope. Within minutes of Joel leaving there was a knock on the door answered by Alan’s mate, Luke Bird.
‘We’re running through,’ he was told when he opened the door to two men, one wearing a balaclava.
‘No you’re fucking not,’ he shouted back, slamming the door.
Seconds later the raiders broke through the back door. There were four of them. Four men. Two whites and two Aboriginals.
Alan, his girlfriend Kristy Edwards and Luke fled. Their mate Robert Carpenter was unable to get away, and was held by the burglars until they left. They made off with an impressive haul: gold jewellery, 14 pairs of runners, $250 cash, 135 grams of marijuana, most of Lance Franklin’s clothes and a video player. They left behind three of Lance’s T-shirts.
When Lance got home and the others had returned to the house, Robert Carpenter’s brother brought over some dope. They had a smoke and started canvassing who might have done the run-through.
Suspicion soon fell on Joel Russell because he had left just minutes before it happened, Luke Bird told police. ‘They didn’t go on about Joel, it was more that his name was mentioned, along with a lot of others,’ Luke said. One other thing he could say: the white guys he saw during the run-through did not include Joel Russell.
At about 10 am, Lance went to Neville Honeysett’s house in Preston. Shane Kelly and his girlfriend Dallas Sweetman were also there. Lance was badly shaken, Sweetman recalled later.
Later, after she had obtained her methadone dosage and Shane had reported to police as he was required, the couple went to Lance’s home. By now, the conversation had turned to ‘how they thought that it was Joel and Wade’.
Joel and Wade were in the frame, but they didn’t see it coming.
About 2 pm on 14 January, Lance Franklin drove up to the Russells’ house down near the Yarra flood plain in Alphington. The first Wade saw of him, he was pulling up in Alan’s two-tone green Holden Calais. Through the driver’s window Lance asked if Wade had seen a bloke, Andrew Werner, who was supposed to owe Lance $2500.
Wade agreed to help Lance look for him, but Lance insisted Joel come too.
‘I said that I would know all the places Andrew might be. Lance said just to get him to come anyway in case we forget a place,’ Wade said later.
They drove to a series of addresses without finding the man, and then, Wade made it easy for Lance. He asked to buy a couple of grams of dope. Lance said: ‘Yeah sweet, it’s at home, you’ll just have to come home with us.’ It all seemed so ordinary.
At Nisbett Street Wade and Joel and Lance went straight into Lance’s bedroom because that is where he always stored the smoke.
As he led the way into the bedroom, Wade noticed Alan and a cluster of others in the lounge room but he ignored them. Alan’s girlfriend Kristy was lying on Lance’s bed, but she left immediately: ‘Sorry. I’ll leave,’ was all she said. Lance headed to the right side of the bed, Wade figuring he was going to get the smoke.
Time moved too slowly once Wade saw Lance pick up a silver baseball bat, walk behind Wade and up to Joel, carrying the bat alongside his right leg.
Dallas Maree Sweetman had known Lance most of her life, from when she was 11 or 12 living in the high-rise public housing flats in Collingwood and when her older sister Kylie was dating him. Dallas was an aunt to Lance’s youngest kids Trent and Samantha, born during the 10 years Kylie shared with him.
Although the relationship with Kylie had hit the rocks five years earlier, Dallas still saw Lance, practically every day, to buy smack. This day she was visiting with her boyfriend Shane Kelly who was just out of jail.
In the lounge room, Dallas heard a sudden, distinctive sound from the direction of the bedroom. Like a bat hitting a baseball, she said later.
Alan Franklin was facing the bedroom, watching through the open door like he knew something was coming: ‘Fucking beautiful,’ Dallas heard him say. ‘Straight across the head.’
The bedroom door closed. Then she heard shouting. Lance mostly.
In the bedroom, Lance backed up with a verbal barrage: ‘Where’s me gold chains? The clothes, the shoes? I want the smoking dope as well … you little cunt, you set it up last night … two minutes after you walked out four guys ran through the place with knives.’
Wade later told police: ‘When we said we didn’t know, that’s when the second blow to Joel’s head came.’
Lance turned on Wade next. ‘And you little cunt, I’m gunna shiv you four or five times for knowing about it and not trying to stop him.’
Shortly after, the three of them emerged from the bedroom, Wade and Joel crawling on their knees, and Franklin announced, ‘I’ve got me culprit.’
Franklin ordered the boys down into the sub-floor area. ‘Get the fuck in there, you little cunts.’
Alan Franklin, Shane Kelly, Robert Carpenter and Paul Cassar – the boyfriend of Alan’s sister Tracey ‘Sissa’ Franklin – followed like very interested spectators. Carpenter had lost some gold chains when he was held captive during the run-through and Sissa had lost all her runners and gold as well.
It was too low under there for an adult to stand upright, but Lance lifted the bat as high as possible to hit Joel several times to the legs and body. The low roof cramped his style but Lance did the best he could. Then he ordered Alan to take hold of Joel’s arm and hold it to the ground.
‘Right, I am gunna ask you one more time and then I am gunna break your wrist,’ Lance told Joel who screamed that the gold was in the roof, and that Chris Hexter, his friend who was with him when he bought the dope at Nisbett Street, had everything else and was going to sell it. Lance brought the bat down anyway, just like he said, on Joel’s wrist.
‘I could hear the sound that an aluminium bat makes,’ Wade recalled. ‘It is very hard to describe the sound.’
Alan Franklin laid into Joel next, kicking him in the ribs as he writhed in pain from the blow to his wrist. Lance told him not to dirty himself by getting in too close: ‘Use the bat.’ Alan told Joel to lift his arms above his head so he could take a clear swing at his ribs. ‘Shut the fuck up, you little dog. My girlfriend was shittin’ herself pretty bad. Shut the fuck up and cop it sweet.’
There was more of this. Paul Cassar rushed under the house and punched Joel. Kelly kicked him as well. Alan laid into Wade with the metal poles of a dismantled trampoline, and when he went down, Cassar kicked him in the head, maybe three times. Wade covered up so Cassar shifted target, kicking him in the chest, and stomping on his groin.
‘These cunts aren’t talking. Go up and get me a couple of shivs. I’m gunna shiv these bastards until they start talking.’
Cassar disappeared, returning soon with a couple of Staysharp knives. Lance Franklin stabbed Wade in the buttock and sliced Joel across his collarbone.
This time Joel said the gold jewellery was in the roof of his home, but the bashing did not stop immediately.
Alan joined Lance in bashing Joel while Shane Kelly straddled Wade, forcing a curved section of trampoline framing into his neck. Shane was working hard, his sweat dripping onto Wade. A few metres away Alan was holding Joel’s arms and Lance was flailing at him with the bat.
Lance finally ordered that Joel be tied up, and Neville Honeysett, who had just arrived, helped out by showing Alan how to hogtie the teenager, leaving him suspended from one of the floor bearers, slung sway-backed with his stomach touching the ground.
Before he left, Lance belted Wade with the baseball bat half a dozen times. Joel was frantic. If the gold jewellery was not in the roof, then Wade must have moved it, Joel told Lance. If the stolen goods were in the roof, Lance said he would let them go: if not, ‘I will fuckin’ kick the living fuck out of you.’
Carpenter re-appeared suddenly, demanding Joel return his mobile phone that was pinched in the run-through. He kicked Joel and stomped on his head.
There was a surprise waiting for Lorraine Russell when she returned home from shopping. Lance Franklin was in her roof.
‘He came out with a telephone in his hand,’ the boys’ mother said. ‘He said he was looking for gold.’ The boys were in Broadmeadows, he claimed, ‘with some nasty men’. Then he was gone.
He had already made his phone call. Alan took it back at Nisbett Street. ‘Hang on, Dad. I’m having trouble hearing what he is saying,’ Alan told the others under the house. He picked up the bat and twice swung it into Joel’s shoulder blades. Joel said to tell him to look near the veranda at the front door.
Alan put the phone away and nothing much happened for half an hour. Upstairs they were blowing a few bongs, and Alan kept the business going as Lance’s regular customers turned up to buy dope. There was a steady flow of visitors to the house and Alan took many of them into the backyard to have a look. Twenty-eight deals were done that afternoon. In total, about 50 people were said to have come and gone during the day.
In this lull, Wade could see some of them standing around the backyard.
Alan Franklin’s sister, ‘Sissa’, came home during the afternoon and was told to turn up her music. Loud. The television was tuned to cartoons on pay TV to amuse Lance Franklin’s five-year-old niece, Karen. The cartoons didn’t hold her though, or maybe those under-floor noises caught her curiosity, and she ran out to the driveway and over to the side of the house. Her dad, Lance’s brother Shane, called her back in each time.
Returning from the futile search, Lance took up the bat. ‘I could see the expression on Lance’s face. He was pretty much trying to give it everything he had,’ Wade said.
Lance was furious. ‘I hate climbing up into roofs because of spiders and shit like that,’ he said.
Alan had Sissa bring down a sock and a shoelace to tie a gag into Joel’s mouth. Joel’s T-shirt was stripped off him to mop up the blood streaming down his face. His shoulders and legs were marked red and purple.
The thumps could be heard from inside the house, coming it seemed from directly below the lounge room. Six or seven at a time, then a pause of maybe 20 or 30 minutes, Dallas Sweetman said.
Lance was gone again when Alan ordered Wade to eat a piece of dog shit that was under the house, where Lance had tied up his pit bull. It was dry and crumbled in his mouth and Alan refused him a drink of water. Wade said he had started to choke on the dog shit when Dallas Sweetman appeared with some water.
During this time Lance was back at the Russells’ home, with Robert Carpenter waiting by the door with a baseball bat for the return of Chris Hexter who was living at the Russells’ unit.
Lorraine Russell asked him what he was going to do with the bat. Lance said that depended on the answers he got. But when Hexter arrived he said he did not know anything about any gold. Carpenter had a good look at him and said, ‘That’s not the bloke.’ Lance pulled down the neck of the kid’s T-shirt and then the pair took off again.
At Nisbett Street the torturers became a little more inventive. Shane Kelly hit Wade with a second baseball bat to coax him into hitting his brother.
‘I then hit Joel twice around the top of his right shoulder area. I didn’t do it hard and I told Shane I was sorry it wasn’t hard. I had to hit with my left hand because I couldn’t move the right one that well. The next thing I recall was feeling a kick to my right side around my ribs. Alan said something like “don’t say sorry to your brother” so I thought that it was him who kicked me.’
Lance returned home, still convinced Joel knew more than he should about the run-through, but this time when Joel offered up Chris Hexter’s name Lance said he ripped down Hexter’s T-shirt and ‘he had no gold at all’.
But it was slowly dawning on Lance that Wade had no part in it. He decided to take the older Russell home.
When Wade was led away, Joel’s shoulders were black – ‘not purple, literally black’ – his legs dark purple, his body suspended and motionless, his breathing a rattle and he had blood streaming from his nose and mouth and the back of his head.
Wade’s return was Lorraine Russell’s worst fears realised. She burst into tears at the sight Lance Franklin and Robert Carpenter brought with them.
To Lorraine, it seemed her son’s head was swollen like a discoloured pumpkin. His face was misshapen. Unrecognisable. He could not walk unaided. He was dirty and bloodstained. Lance Franklin told Lorraine Russell: ‘This is nothing, the other one is worse.’
He said he should take the family’s TV, fridge and freezer as compensation for what the boys had organised. The boys’ little sister, Leah, 11, called Lance an ‘arsehole’ for what he had done to her brother. ‘Get upstairs, you little slut,’ he told her.
He left, but came back yet again, with Wade’s wallet. He said that he had dropped Joel off with a bottle of coke and $10 for a taxi. An ambulance was called for Wade and Lorraine went off to Faye Street, where Joel was supposed to have been dropped, but he did not turn up for three days.
Joel may still have been alive, according to medical evidence, when Wade was dropped at home. He probably died about eight hours after his ordeal began, from either asphyxiation or blood loss, or a combination of both. He had five broken ribs, a ruptured kidney, a broken collar bone, a broken vertebra, internal bleeding and massive bruising.
About the time of his dying, Wade was being picked up by an ambulance. The police were about to arrive at the Russell home.
When the police went on to Nisbett Street, a little after midnight on Wednesday 15 January, and two hours after they spoke to Lorraine Russell, Joel was gone and so was Franklin’s car.
Questioned at the local police station, Alan Franklin said he had been home all day but had not been involved in any assaults on Joel or Wade.
Lance arrived home, saw the police heat and drove on to stay at his sister’s. He was picked up 30 hours later, walking along High Street, Preston, early on 16 January. Interviewed at the homicide squad that day, Lance denied having anything to do with either of the Russells being bashed. ‘As for getting rid of his body, or both their bodies or whatever, well, you’ve gone a couple of miles past me, chief,’ he said.
‘You know the mentality of them two kids. Are you trying to say I’m stupider than them? You’re trying to get me for some bloody, double fuckin’ murder or something. And I’m not gonna cop that.’
Lance did make certain admissions to an undercover cop who was in the cells with him, however, including the revelation that, ‘Every time I go to jail, some cunt fuckin’ dies’. This was believed to be a reference to the death years before of his father.
In court even Lance’s lawyer would marvel at the obscenities that poured from his mouth: ‘Some of it is not English, it’s simply saying profanities,’ he observed.
Justice Frank Vincent responded: ‘It’s certainly English. Very old English – some version of Anglo-Saxon.’
Joel’s body was found floating in the Yarra River at Hawthorn, the opposite bank to Alphington, two days after he disappeared.
When they went to trial in July 1998, Alan Franklin, then 20, Shane Kelly, 40, and Robert Carpenter, 20, pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Joel Russell, and to unlawfully imprisoning and causing serious injury to Wade Russell.
Paul Cassar, 19, pleaded guilty to causing serious injury to Wade and to Joel Russell. Neville Honeysett, 32, pleaded guilty to assisting Lance Franklin to avoid arrest.
Lance Franklin, then 40, pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to false imprisonment and to intentionally causing serious injury.
He had been charged with murder because he was different to the manslaughter defendants, argued prosecutor Jeremy Rapke, QC. He had suffered the personal loss of the run-through; he lured the boys from their home; he struck the first blow; he directed the others; he was the only one to use a knife on either victim; and he had the obvious power to put a stop to the attacks. After all, said Rapke, ‘he extricated Wade Russell and restored him to his mother’.
The jury agreed and Lance Franklin was sentenced to 22 years.
But for Lorraine Russell that could never be enough. She retreated from the inner suburbs to a small unit in country Victoria where she is unknown and might construct something of her life.
There, at the far end of the narrow lounge room, where the curtains are drawn against the spring sunshine, is a small table with a formal arrangement of photographs and candle holders. Its backdrop of rich burgundy curtains gives it the look of a shrine, and so it is. A shrine to a family history of violent loss.
There is a little girl, maybe 12 months old, with plump red cheeks, turned towards the camera as if someone just called her name. Next to this is a larger portrait, a teenage girl, bright, attractive and confident.
These are unremarkable images, typical of any family album, not intended for strangers. But the next portrait many have seen, in newspapers and on television: an adolescent boy stares evenly out of the frame. Joel Russell, tortured and bashed to death under a house in Reservoir, aged 14.
The little girl, Michelle, would have been Joel’s eldest sister had she not died in a Thomastown house fire 24 years earlier, shortly after the photograph was taken. The teenage girl is Joel’s twin, Ruth, who died of a deliberate drug overdose eight months after he was murdered, deeply troubled and unable to cope with her brother’s death and the manner of his dying.
Sometimes Lorraine lights a candle for each of them. She is a religious woman despite the layers of horror her God seems intent on visiting upon her. But she is not forgiving. She speaks heatedly, angry and bitter. She had hoped to put some of the pain of Joel’s dying behind her. Now she says she cannot, because the sentences of those who killed her lovely and loving boy, her best friend, seem to hold his life in contempt.
Two walked free from court. Lance Franklin, the ringleader, got his 22 years with a minimum of 17, and Shane Kelly received a minimum of eight years. Two others, Franklin’s son, Alan, and Robert Carpenter, received seven years with four-and-a-half-year minimum sentences.
Lorraine Russell’s emotion threatens to overwhelm her. Her hands tremble constantly, her voice occasionally breaks and she fights off her tears. These men did not just kill her son, she insists, they destroyed a family and mocked the boy’s memory. They mocked him when they tied a blue shoelace like a bow tie around his neck before they threw his trussed body into the Yarra River. And they mocked him when they exchanged smiles and thumbs up signs with their friends at their sentencing.
‘I am absolutely so angry about this,’ she says. ‘Fair enough for what they did to Wade, they’ve been sentenced for bashing Wade, but where’s Joel’s justice?
‘I was told they were going to come out old men: the older two would die in jail; the younger ones would come out old men.
‘They have tortured him with iron bars, bats … and Paul Cassar used an iron bar and walks with a two-year suspended sentence. Honeysett walks away. Nothing whatsoever. He tied up my boy by the feet and hands upside down, and he walked free.
‘There was no justice done. And the horrific way he died, tortured for five hours and dumped in the river. Even after I saw him, I still couldn’t believe it because there was no resemblance.’
While Lorraine and the remnant of her family have been moved from Melbourne for their safety, there is talk of another move, interstate, with new identities. She does not want it. She wants to retain some semblance of normality for her youngest daughter, Leah.
She knows better than most that you cannot run or hide. One of her brothers, Patrick, was murdered while hitch-hiking in 1985. Another brother, just 13, was killed in a hit-and-run accident. And her first husband, the father of Michelle, was killed by Cyclone Tracey a few weeks after Michelle died.
It was while she was in a psychiatric hospital being treated for depression after Michelle’s death that she discovered marijuana was more effective for her than conventional medication. It is an awful quirk that marijuana introduced her and her boys to Lance Franklin, who was running a thriving drug business out of that Housing Commission house in Reservoir.
Now Lorraine Russell is consumed with bitterness. ‘You can’t see the inside of me. I’m tough,’ she says.
So what is the inside like?
‘It’s indescribable, it’s agonising, it’s black, bitter. It really disturbs me how I feel and think about these people that did this to my family. It’s eating me away. I know when I get the strength I have to hand it over to God … he’ll take my pain, but I have to feel good and ready to hand it over. At this stage I can’t, because they got away with killing my son. And the way they killed him.’
While Wade Russell provided the account of what happened under the house, in sentencing the men Justice Vincent said that Wade’s ‘observations were made during a period when he himself was being beaten, terrified and humiliated’. This could have resulted in an ‘understandable error’ in his recall. The judge said he must be careful in attributing particular acts to specific people.
Court observers said this doubt about exactly who did what probably influenced the sentencing of Cassar in particular, who was regarded only as aiding and abetting the assaults and who received a suspended sentence.
Although Neville Honeysett was alleged to have advised Alan Franklin on the tying of Joel to the sub-floor of the house, he was sentenced on the grounds that he had attempted to hinder police after the event by planting false leads to protect Lance Franklin. He had, however, served a ‘substantial period’ on remand, Mr Vincent said.
None of this can console a mother for whom the unthinkable has become reality: ‘I want to see them properly punished so I can get on with what’s supposed to be a life. I could deal with my pain a bit better.’
Lance Franklin appealed against his conviction and his sentence. On 28 May 2001 the Court of Appeal unanimously rejected his appeal. It still wasn’t much comfort for Lorraine.