‘I’m the luckiest bloke on the planet.’
—Murder target Ken Kelly
IN SOME parts of country Australia you are not considered a proper local until your family has been there for five generations. In western New South Wales there were some townsfolk who still did not consider the Lambells proper locals even though they had come to the area more than half a century ago. Since rolling in from the big smoke and, despite their status as the newish kids on the block, the Lambells had built a solid reputation in the area as good and reliable people.
It was at the height of World War II—the year the Japanese bombed Darwin—that the Lambells came to town. Arthur Lambell, a successful Sydney businessman, bought a sprawling farm in Gulargambone, ninety minutes’ drive straight up from Dubbo. It was a big stake: 5800 acres of red-and-black soil, and it grew bigger in the next generation. Under the direction of Arthur’s son Bill the property, Weenya, flourished. Neighbouring land was bought, which took the farm to 8500 acres—or substantially larger than the island nation of Nauru. Bill and his wife had four sons, and the born farmers of the brood—Keith and Ian—made Weenya their life’s work, running shorthorn cattle as well as sheep, and sowing crops of wheat and canola. Not all the men in the third generation of Gulargambone Lambells were interested in the hard graft of farming, though. One of the sons, Robert, preferred to get by on charm and bluster rather than sweaty toil. While his brothers were busy forming calluses on their hands doing intensive labour, the most overworked part of Robert’s anatomy was his silver tongue. But although Robert Lambell may not have been cut out for hard work, it didn’t mean that he was afraid to get his hands dirty.
STRIDING THE main streets of Gulargambone, Coonamble and Dubbo, in his finery Robert Lambell cut the gentlemanly figure of a country squire. But, beneath the tweed beat the cold heart of a short-fused and ruthless manipulator who would go to any extent to settle a grudge. Walking the same rural NSW streets in the first years of the new millennium was a much more moderate character named Ken Kelly. Ken, a Coonamble man, had for two decades helped run his wife Christine Burns’s family clothing business. Their joint venture ended in the late 1990s after Christine’s mother accused him, he said falsely, of having an affair with a member of staff. When they split, Christine kept the house and Ken kept the clothing shop.
Their divorce did not go entirely unnoticed by Robert Lambell—who had always admired Christine from afar—and before too long Christine had landed in the arms of the dapper country squire. Christine was still angry about the split from Ken. She set up a clothing business in Coonamble in competition with Ken Kelly’s, but it never really took off. Christine and Lambell never had any money, and they never seemed to stop spending the money that they didn’t have. Soon they were in dire financial straits. Christine told Lambell that her ex-husband Ken had mistreated her, ripped her off in the divorce settlement and stolen some of her things. Lambell, who had taken an acute interest in his new partner’s financial affairs, saw red. He adopted Christine’s grudge vicariously as his own and he determined to get square with her ex.
Pretty soon strange things started happening in Ken Kelly’s life. Someone changed the address on his superannuation and life insurance policies so that if Kelly died, all mail about those policies would go to Lambell’s address and not the one Kelly had nominated for the handling of his estate. Then a legal dispute over how the terms of Ken and Christine’s divorce affected financial arrangements existing between Ken’s shop and Christine’s house boiled over into distinctly less legal terrain. Five hired thugs—security guards from the local area—arrived at Ken’s shop to repossess goods. They then bashed Ken up and cleaned out his entire shop. Through somewhat more legal means, Kelly got some of the gear back—but ultimately thousands of dollars less than what was taken.
Country squire Lambell had collected a number of colourful acquaintances over the years. Propped up at the bar or working his mobile phone, he could talk a remarkably good game. He would promise the world, and persuade people to do risky and illegal things for him for promised fortunes that never seemed to materialise. His network of useful contacts extended to the brawny fields of security and sport and the traditionally less brawny field of fine arts. Renowned artist Stephen Franks was one of those always hanging around Lambell and seemed to be perpetually in his thrall. The 60-year-old aesthete once sold his art in Dubbo’s main mall but he had a reputation as an alcoholic and, when it came to his steady hand, the bottle was in a permanent fight with the brush. That Franks would do any odd job Lambell asked would come to be his downfall. One day Ken Kelly arrived at his clothes shop to find matchsticks broken off in his locks and ‘KEN KELLY PEDOPHILE’ in three-foot-high letters written across the front of the store. Across the road, Lambell and his crony—boozy artist Franks who had clearly been doing some sign-writing for Lambell’s rival clothing outlet—stood about leering. The same libel was graffitied on the grandstand at the local sportsground. On another occasion, Ken was with his daughter at the Coonamble rodeo when Lambell walked up to him and spat in his face. The pair came to blows, then went their separate ways. It was not a massive deal for Kelly—he could look after himself. What was disarming though was the mounting number of strange and hostile incidents and the feeling that things were starting to spin out of control. In the skies over country New South Wales there was a storm brewing.
Late one afternoon in June 2002, Kelly pulled into the driveway of his Coonamble home and a Toyota ute followed in behind him with its headlights on. Kelly assumed it must have been a friend visiting him and he approached the car. A man he recognised, but who was not a friend, hopped out of the ute. Stephen Franks opened his jacket and took out what Kelly thought was an iron bar. Not realising it was actually a sawn-off .22 calibre rifle, Kelly stepped towards Franks and squared up to give him a pre-emptive punch. A second, heavyset man then jumped out of the ute and ran towards Kelly. Outnumbered, Kelly legged it. He then fell trying to jump a gate and when he looked up he saw Franks standing above him—the gun just 2 feet away, pointed directly at his head. He watched Franks pull the trigger. The voice in his head said ‘Goodnight Nurse’.
THE trouble with deploying a boozy artist to do a professional hit man’s job is they aren’t necessarily across all the tools of the trade. And as an expert on firearms, Stephen Franks made a great sign-writer. Franks’s longarm had been cut down with a hacksaw. Whoever did it had unwittingly left a small metal bur on the bore inside the barrel that should have been filed off. The bullet flew down the barrel, hit the bur, came out crooked (on a 45-degree angle) and buried itself in the ground next to Ken Kelly’s head. Kelly didn’t need to have it explained to him that he’d just won an extraordinary second chance at survival. Within a fraction of a second Kelly was back on his feet and scrambling up a grapevine to get over his tall back fence. As he climbed for dear life, his phone fell to the ground, and there was another crack as a second bullet whizzed past, missing him. Kelly landed in the neighbour’s yard and ran out onto the street, warning groups of kids who were out playing to get inside their homes because there was a gunman on the loose firing off crooked shots with impunity. Kelly followed one group of kids in and asked to use the phone, but their phone was off. In the next house he called the cops and raised the alarm about the afternoon’s upsetting events. It seems Franks was meant to kidnap Kelly alive, not gun him down. But once Kelly had seen his attackers and resisted kidnap it was too late—he had to die. Only the ramshackle nature of the criminal enterprise and a lumpy barrel saved his life. Had Kelly been pursued by a professional, sober assassin instead of a reeling piss artist, it’s highly likely he would not have survived.
With one hand clutching the phone and the other still checking his body for holes, Kelly described to the authorities the Toyota ute that Franks and his accessories were travelling in. Police put the word out and set up a roadblock on the Castlereagh Highway. That night they pulled up a ute that matched the description and cautiously extracted three attempted murder suspects from the cabin. What they found was a long way from Murder Incorporated. Two of the men—William Stanley and Mervyn Stanley—were Aboriginal cousins from Wellington, both aged thirty-one, and both local rugby league stars. The third was Franks. Also in the ute, police found letters to various people, ostensibly drafted by Kelly. The letters admitted to all types of fraud and wrongdoing and instructed transfer of his estate to his ex-wife Christine Burns. The letters had not been signed—the intended signatory, it seemed, had escaped with his life. In the tray of the ute they found a block splitter, rope and two garbage bins.
Leaving the botched crime scene, the criminal trio had tossed the malfunctioning murder weapon from the car somewhere along the highway. Police put their suspects in three separate divvy vans to try and get at least one to take them directly to the gun. In the back of his wagon, Franks took his shoelaces out, attached them to the mesh on the van’s rear doors and, in a space too small to stand, hanged himself. Perhaps it was out of shame. But more likely, locals say, it was out of mortal fear of the more painful fate that awaited him at the hands of the kill-plot’s mastermind for failing in his mission. The ragtag outfit of the artist and the rugby cousins had clearly not been operating under their own steam. Police had already interviewed Lambell and Franks over the graffiti around town and Kelly’s jammed locks. Police had also interviewed Lambell over the rodeo assault. Robert Lambell was not among the three arrested men, but when officers asked themselves who would want Ken Kelly dead, his name was squarely in investigators’ minds.
Lambell’s minions had bungled his contract. But the plot’s mastermind was not necessarily in hot water. Franks was dead and the cousins weren’t talking, so Lambell may have figured he had dodged a bullet just like his target. A complacent crim who thinks he’s home free will rest on his laurels. A crim who knows he will be investigated, on the other hand, will cover his tracks, polish his story and destroy any evidence he can. Police quietly established Operation Wiltshire to investigate Lambell. But any advantage investigators had in making their target think he had not been connected to his minions was soon lost. At the public bail hearing for the Stanley cousins, detectives offered a much-too-detailed statement of facts revealing their suspicions about Lambell’s role. The bungle well and truly belled the cat. Lambell knew they were on to him and having lost the element of surprise, detectives feared they had missed their chance to catch the ruthlessly amoral Mr Lambell. Little did they know he would give them one more chance.
THE city of Tamworth is home to the annual country music festival that every January attracts tens of thousands of cowboys, cowgirls, crooners, bootscooters, twangers and hoodangers. In January 2003 Robert Lambell and Christine Burns attended the event to make some money selling moleskins, akubras and Driza-Bones to fashion-conscious festival-goers. While there, Lambell met a tough-seeming character who, when the two got talking, described himself enigmatically as a debt collector and euphemistically as a fixer of problems. Lambell liked what he heard and arranged another meeting with the capable-seeming stranger out of earshot of Christine.
At the next meeting, the two men got down to brass tacks. Lambell outlined that he wanted Ken Kelly killed. He said he also wanted the husband of Christine Burns’s sister, John Stuart, knocked off. Before killing the two men, Lambell wanted to torture them into giving him details that would enable him to fraudulently steal one million dollars from Kelly’s estate and five million dollars from Stuart’s. But it wasn’t just about the money. Lambell apparently took a little too much sadistic joy in the grisly detail and also wanted to bring some Old Testament punishment down on his potential cash cows. The stranger was a good listener. He indicated he might be able to help and Lambell kept talking. The stranger was an undercover NSW cop masquerading as a hit man. He was wearing a recording device and playing out an official con that is surprising in how often it works. Lambell told the undercover cop he wanted the targets to suffer a prolonged death after being kidnapped. Lambell specified he wanted the victims ‘restrained with a barbed-wire whip-and-cable instrument that would leave cuts in their skin … [that their] tongues should be removed with acid and they should be left to allow the flies and ants to devour the victims’ flesh’.
The police ruse successfully continued for a few weeks, all caught on tape. Then, one Sunday in February, Lambell suffered a very rude awakening. He was arrested while hanging out in Dubbo’s Macquarie Inn. Through his lawyers Lambell screamed police entrapment, but in his car officers found the tools for his murderous fantasies: a crude wire whip, acid, a shovel, a balaclava, rope and a crowbar. He remained in custody, still refusing to admit guilt despite the evidence on the covert tapes.
Some of the case’s most chilling details never became widely known because Lambell was stopped before he could realise his homicidal urges. He was prosecuted for his confessed plans to kill Ken Kelly and John Stuart, which were all recorded on tape. But police believed there were at least five targets on Lambell’s hit list that he had slated for the cemetery. They included a NSW truck driver and Ken Kelly’s lawyer. In some of the cases, mere trifles had given rise to Lambell’s murderous wrath. Police believe a neighbouring business owner of Lambell’s was marked for execution because he accidentally opened Lambell’s mail when it was delivered to him. Investigators also learnt that shortly before the bungled kidnapping Lambell had made a reconnaissance mission into the forest that lies between Gilgandra and Dubbo. Officers from Dubbo retraced Lambell’s bushwalk to see what he had been up to and were shocked by what they found. There, hidden among the dense foliage, was a metal cage large enough to hold a full-grown man captive. Dubbo Police emailed their pictures of the man-cage to the chief investigator. Once these photos were shown in court, Lambell dropped his assertions of innocence and promptly pleaded guilty to two counts of soliciting to murder.
IN 2004, Robert Lambell was sentenced to nine years’ jail, to be paroled in six if he behaved himself while inside. Despite Lambell’s best efforts, there was never a murder and because there was never a murder there was never a murder trial. On account of Lambell eventually admitting his guilt, there was never any kind of trial at all, so as a result all we have is jigsaw pieces of Lambell’s sick fantasy and some extremely close calls in relation to him executing his plan. In a parallel universe, Kelly could have come home on that fateful night a few minutes earlier, when the dusk light was a few watts brighter. With better light he might not have mistaken Franks’s sawn-off for an iron bar and, that being the case, Kelly might have gone quietly in the ute. Had he done so, he would have spent a last horrific hour on earth being bound in barbed wire in some sort of sick man-cage in a forest, looking at Franks’s and Lambell’s faces, and being forced to drink acid until he relented. And then, in a semi-human state, he would have been forced to sign the letters and documents that had been drafted in his name. The papers would then have been filed away and Kelly would have been instantly executed or tortured to death. He then would have been chopped in half or into smaller fractions with the block splitter, put in two bins and disposed of.
The local communities would have pondered for a while over the mystery of Ken Kelly moving on without telling anyone before shrugging their shoulders and then not worrying about it too much. Letters would then have started arriving signed in Ken Kelly’s hand, proving he was very much alive and just living somewhere else. Lambell and Christine Burns would have come into some money as a result of all this and maybe Lambell would have toasted his good fortune, quelled his murderous inner rages and relaxed a bit. Or at least until he needed more money, or he had crossed all the names off his list, or maybe just until the next time someone did something terminally provocative like accidentally opening his mail.
VERY few people, if any at all, stare down the barrel of a gun and remain unchanged by the experience. Ken Kelly had gone one better and stared down the barrel of a gun 2 feet away from his head—a gun which had then fired at him and, only through a quirk of physics, not killed him. Kelly lives with that vivid memory as well as the haunting image of a cage in the woods—a cage put there just for him. ‘I’ve had a lot of nightmares over the years I can tell you,’ Kelly said. But along with the bad dreams there is also an uplifting part of the legacy of the millimetre-long metal bur that saved Kelly’s life. ‘Oh mate I’m the luckiest bloke on the planet. To think that I dodged one from two foot,’ Kelly said.
Christine Burns moved on to another relationship. Ken Kelly and Christine’s mother—who had accused him of cheating—mended their fences and became best friends. Ken, who had known and liked Robert Lambell’s father, also remained friends with the good Lambell brothers. The Stanley cousins were never charged over their involvement in the attempted murder. Local wisdom has it they were largely unwitting members of the kill squad and were conscripted to the job as heavies under the premise they were repossessing Kelly’s car. They may have been called on to dispense a beating if necessary, this version goes, but had little idea Franks was on a mission to murder. Whatever the case, they never got paid. The five security guards who did Lambell’s brutal bidding and ‘repossessed’ Ken’s wares never saw a dollar either. ‘Everybody he ever dealt with, he dudded,’ a local said.
Lambell’s plight was regarded as a mighty fall from grace. His story ended very much in the vein of one of the numbers being crooned at the Tamworth Country Music Festival where part of his dastardly plot was hatched and another step in his downfall taken. Lambell’s desires for a woman, his greed and his lunge for power and money had done him wrong and taken him from being a member of one of the region’s most respected farming dynasties to a prisoner in a lonely cell in Grafton—a minimum security jail on the NSW mid-north coast, where the only respite was the odd hour tending the prison’s vegetable garden. The good Lambells, meanwhile, had to deal with the looks, scuttlebutt and embarrassment that came with having a jailbird and would-be killer in the family tree. Occasionally they had to deal with filling in the blanks for people who had heard nothing of the scandal. Good folk of the small communities of western New South Wales who had missed the whole kerfuffle sometimes politely inquired of Ian Lambell—the hard-working brother of the jailbird—what Robert was up to. Ian had formulated a simple reply for such occasions. Seemingly innocent, and technically all true, it avoided talking about his brother’s embarrassing current location or anything in the whole ugly chapter that had put him there. ‘Oh Robert?’ Ian Lambell would reply nonchalantly. ‘He’s growing veggies up in Grafton.’