BONNIE Doon is a pair of road signs sandwiching a motel, store, service station and a few houses scattered beside the Maroondah Highway where it crosses the northern tip of Lake Eildon in Victoria’s high country.
It would flatter this humdrum collection of buildings, imply some non-existent charm, to call it a hamlet. To all but a few locals who get their beer, bread and mail there, it’s an irritating slow spot on the main road to the Mount Buller snowfields beyond Mansfield, twenty minutes drive further east.
In summer, the place hums with activity and outboard motors as visitors swarm in from the highway to fish and water-ski on the vast man-made lake, a tangle of drowned river valleys sprawled among the brooding mountains that stretch to the horizon. The rest of the year, the district drifts back to sleep.
Holiday houses and retirement retreats have crept into the valley, perching on blocks carved from properties whose titles date to the gold rushes.
But the bleak, granite-scarred ridges rising like battlements each side of the valley are as lonely today as they were when the diggers left five generations ago. Gold reefs run along hilltops, so the shafts the miners left behind are on the crest of the ridge.
Up here, where the only sound is wind whimpering through stunted gums that cling to the shale slopes, a wandering farmer or hunter might occasionally disturb kangaroos and rabbits.
But few know exactly where the old shafts are.
It’s almost the perfect place to get rid of a body …
That would mean going the long way, around a winding back track from Lake Eildon. Or taking a shortcut through farmland, which would mean getting a horse, tractor or four-wheel-drive to carry the bleeding burden uphill through steep back paddocks to its deep and lonesome grave.
In 1978, someone did. And, for nearly two decades, the mine kept its secret.
SIX years later, in 1984, there was another violent death in Bonnie Doon. A young wife and mother was found, shot dead, with her husband’s rifle placed between her knees.
At first, the district wondered why one of its own would commit suicide. More than a decade later, some still talk about it, though mostly behind closed doors, and rarely to strangers.
But, later, the talk was not so much why she would commit suicide, but how the case could ever have been considered anything but murder. Many suspect they know who really pulled the trigger, and it frightens them.
It happened late in the spring, on a property called Springfield, which runs south from the highway towards the same ridge where there is an old mine known as the Jack of Clubs.
Around 7.30 pm on 14 November, a Wednesday night, Laurie Tanner drove out the front gate of the property, where he and his younger brothers had grown up, and which his family had farmed for generations. The 39-year-old shearer and fencing contractor, known more as a hard worker than a deep thinker, was going to Mansfield to clean a shop, a part-time job he shared with his second wife, Jennifer, known to her family as Jenny.
He left just after Sale of the Century ended on television, first kissing his 21-month-old son. As he was going, Jennifer asked him to buy bread, milk, the local paper and ‘a surprise’, meaning a chocolate bar. In the following months and years, this cheerful last-minute request might have struck investigators as unlikely to have been made by a woman supposedly about to kill herself.
After finishing the cleaning job, Tanner had other chores to do. As president of the Mansfield Show Society, he had to prepare for the annual show the following Saturday. He drove around the showgrounds to check a new arena fence.
Soon after 9 pm, he dropped in on friends, ‘Curly’ and Angie McCormack, to discuss other arrangements for the big day. When he arrived, Angie mentioned she had just been chatting to Jenny on the telephone. ‘About babies,’ she would later testify.
Laurie Tanner left just after 10 pm, he testified later. At home, he found his own little bit of hell.
He would later give police his stilted recollection of what happened: ‘I … walked in the back door, put the milk, bread, Courier (newspaper) and Cherry Ripes on the kitchen table.
‘The TV was going, and I noticed through the loungeroom door, which was open, Jenny on the couch, covered in blood and the rifle between her legs.
‘I didn’t think there was anything I could do for her. I believed, from the way she looked, she was dead. I’m not sure exactly what I did, but I’m pretty sure I checked the baby and found that he was asleep in bed.
‘I rang the ambulance and said there had been a death in the house … I then rang Hughie Almond, my neighbor. I didn’t say what was wrong. I just said that I needed help and could he come straight down.
‘I met him at the back door and told him to prepare himself for a shock. I ushered him in, and he nearly collapsed when he saw her. He sat me down at the table and went into the lounge.
‘When he came out he said he didn’t think there was anything we could do. He asked who I’d called, and I said the ambulance.
Hughie then rang the Mansfield police.’
WHEN Senior Constables Bill Kerr and Don Frazer reached the farmhouse, a shaken Laurie Tanner and his neighbor were drinking whisky from a bottle the latter had fetched from his house across the highway.
The ambulance had arrived a little earlier, at 10.40 pm, but apart from ensuring the woman was dead, there was nothing the driver, Gerard O’Donnell, could do until the policemen had finished their grim routine in the loungeroom.
At first glance it looked like a classic suicide, although Kerr was surprised the victim had chosen to use a rifle: he knew women almost invariably choose gentler exits, such as drug overdoses.
He was surprised, too, at the amount of blood, as if she had moved violently before dying. And he did not know why, given nothing had been touched, there was a blood-soaked towel to the left of the body – and, further away, a blood-stained cushion, looking as if something had been wiped on it.
The victim’s left hand was wrapped around the rifle barrel, according to Kerr and Frazer’s subsequent statements. This was puzzling, because she had bullet wounds to both hands, which seemed to indicate they had been in front of her forehead when the gun was fired.
There were other things that, in hindsight, didn’t jell to Kerr. On the floor near the body was a half-drunk cup of coffee, and a plate with three biscuits on it. Nearby, a wet disposable nappy and a tin of nappy powder. There was no suicide note.
Kerr picked up the rifle. Underneath the trigger guard was a spent bullet case. He worked the bolt to open the breech; the ejector spat out another shell.
Two empty shells. Did that mean two shots? Laurie Tanner later said he often stored the rifle with an empty shell in the breech. An unusual habit that might explain the presence of two empty shells in the room … that is, if only one shot had been fired by the victim. Or at her. In the magazine were two live hollow-point bullets, making it almost certain that the empty shells had also been hollow-points.
A hollow point gives a .22 cartridge extra hitting power because the slug spreads on impact. The odds against surviving one through the forehead at close range are long.
Even if she had survived, a pathologist surmised afterwards, the likelihood of being knocked senseless by the impact made it unlikely she could work the bolt with four separate movements to eject the spent shell and re-load a live round, let alone reverse the rifle and neatly shoot herself again. All these thoughts were to niggle Kerr during the next twelve years. But that was later. That night, as the minutes ticked towards midnight, there was work to be done.
He’d already done one job soon after arriving. That was to call the nearest Criminal Investigation Branch, at Alexandra, far enough away for the detective sergeant on the line to decide not to go to what he later said sounded like a simple suicide. Kerr described the scene, and asked if photographs should be taken before anything was disturbed.
The detective sergeant made a decision over the telephone that helped skew the investigation of Jenny Tanner’s death from that moment. No photographs. No forensic tests. No fingerprinting. And no order to preserve the scene.
According to evidence Kerr was to give many years later, at a second inquest into Jenny Tanner’s death in October, 1997, he telephoned the detective sergeant again that night, when he found the second empty shell.
He did this, he told a packed coroner’s court, because he found it hard to believe that anyone could shoot themselves twice with a bolt-action rifle. He was surprised when the detective sergeant had again said there was no need to order photographs or forensic tests, or to preserve the scene. The detective sergeant said he still thought – based on Kerr’s original description of the scene – that it was a suicide.
The word ‘suicide’ – repeated to each new person introduced to the case – settled over the tragedy like a shroud, obscuring the body of evidence. So when Dr Ross Gilham, called from Mansfield, arrived just after midnight formally to pronounce life extinct, he did exactly that, and no more. Some later wondered if the doctor took more than a cursory glance at the scene. He was known by locals more for his erratic behavior than his medical skill, and was later charged with injecting himself with drugs.
Judging from Dr Gilham’s brief statement, he did not notice anything odd about the body – in fact, there was so much blood and matter covering the victim’s head that he totally missed the forehead wound, and assumed she had placed the barrel in her mouth.
A reason for this might be that a policeman, the doctor claimed in his later statement, told him ‘the rifle had been placed between the woman’s legs with both hands holding the barrel … in her mouth.’ By the time the doctor inspected the body, the weapon had been placed to one side. Curiously, the neighbor, Hugh Almond, did not recall seeing the rifle barrel in the woman’s mouth.
When Kerr and Frazer drove off into the dark to face the worst job of the policeman’s unhappy lot – the ‘death knock’ to break the news every parent dreads – they kept any twinges of doubt to themselves.
In two hours, a fatal shooting had become just another sad domestic incident, to be settled as discreetly as possible, for the benefit of all concerned. Almost all.
‘JEN had never given us a moment’s worry,’ Kath Blake was to say often of the eldest of her four daughters. The one who, had she lived, would have turned 40 in 1997.
Les and Kath Blake lost more than their first-born the night the police brought the news; they lost peace of mind. Hardly a day goes past that they don’t think about their ‘Jen’ … and wonder how she really died.
The Blakes are a close family. The girls grew up in the spotless white weatherboard house hidden behind huge elms in a picture postcard spot on the Delatite River flats, exactly twelve kilometres south of Mansfield. They moved the house from Dingley in the 1960s, after Les started managing the Mansfield sawmill.
After 30 years, they’re ‘nearly locals’, they joke. They have been robbed of happiness, but not their sense of humor, nor a sense of proportion. This calm absence of bitterness makes them powerful witnesses.
Les Blake is tall, fit for his age, and still has some of the physical toughness of a man used to hard work. His wife is small, with inquiring eyes, a sharp mind and a strong character.
Of the two, Les seems more philosophical about their daughter’s death. Nothing, he says gently, will fix things up. Not revenge, not even seeing the case reinvestigated, could lighten the loss.
‘We have never rocked the boat much because of Jen’s little boy,’ he says carefully of the child, who lives with his father in Mansfield. ‘We don’t point the finger at anyone.’
His wife agrees. But she craves the truth about her girl’s death. Les leans forward in his chair and says: ‘Whatever you write, we’ve got that grandson there.’ It’s half warning, half plea.
Suddenly, he adds: ‘But one day he’s going to want to know what really happened to his mother.’
A snapshot of the boy and his dog is stuck to their refrigerator door. Above it a fridge magnet bears the words: ‘A friend is someone who has the same enemies as you.’
Les and Kath Blake sit at the same timber table – underneath the same picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall – as the grim-faced policemen did the night they brought the news all those years ago, and relive it the thousandth time.
‘They said,’ Les recalls softly, they said, ‘Jennifer’s shot herself’.’
The Blakes didn’t believe it then, and still don’t. It would make their lives easier to accept suicide as an explanation, and let it rest, but time has hardened the belief they rarely put into words.
Their girl was murdered.
NOTHING the Blakes were told about Jennifer’s death rang true to them. She had no reason to commit suicide, they insist.
Even if she had wanted to kill herself, she wouldn’t use a gun. And if she did use a gun, she would not shoot herself twice in the head … through the hands. Apart from everything else, it seemed almost a physical impossibility.
‘Jen hated guns,’ says her mother. ‘We always had a hatred of firearms, and instilled it in our children. When she was first married and Laurie used his rifle to kill a snake, instead of a shovel or something, she was so surprised she rang and told us. She didn’t like the way he’d go to the back door and fire off shots to stop his dogs barking.
‘She wasn’t dexterous. She was very left-handed, and would have had great trouble trying to use a bolt-action rifle. And she didn’t like blood. She nearly passed out once when she cut herself shaving her legs in the bathroom. Why would she shoot herself through the hands?’
Nothing in Jennifer’s behavior indicated to her parents, sisters or friends that she was dangerously depressed. Later, a coroner would accept some vague evidence from her husband and from her doctor, Dr Geoffrey Patience, about her emotional state and her supposed difficulties with her child.
But Dr Patience readily conceded, both under cross-examination and privately afterwards, that his comments would have been different had he had any reason to question the apparently firm police assumption that it was a suicide. At no point did police tell him that there were two bullets found in her skull, something he hadn’t known until twelve years later, when a ‘Sunday Age’ reporter told him. Had he known that, he said, he would have rejected outright any suggestion her death was suicide.
Some facts. The Saturday before her death, Jennifer Tanner went to a clearing sale with her mother and was delighted to buy an antique jug for herself, and two small tables for her son’s room.
The following Monday, she went to Melbourne with her mother and sister, Clare, to do Christmas shopping. She wanted to buy a plug-in car ‘fridge’ for Laurie to use for his lunch when he was shearing.
She ordered furniture for her son’s bedroom and bought him a pair of sandals. She called on her grandmother and asked her to come to Springfield for Christmas dinner.
She promised her grandmother she’d be back soon to finish her shopping, and that she ‘couldn’t wait’ for her Christmas Club cheque to arrive. She was delighted to have saved $100 on the furniture, and said she’d put it towards a Christmas holiday at Cowes.
To the Blakes, all this was evidence of her commitment to family and future – as was an earlier visit to a Melbourne specialist to discuss if she could become pregnant again. It contrasted starkly with Laurie’s recollections of his wife before her death.
He claimed that she had suffered from ‘post-natal depression’, but that her parents, sisters and friends didn’t know about it because ‘she covered it up pretty well’.
On the day she died, Jennifer hosted a playgroup of children and their mothers at home, and seemed normal and happy. The last person known to talk to her was Angela McCormack, whose husband had dialled the Tanners’ number around 9 pm, looking for his friend Laurie, then handed over to his wife a few minutes later. Angela McCormack spoke to her for about 20 minutes, and later said she had sounded cheerful. Jenny Tanner had at least two other telephone calls that day. One, about 3.30 pm, had been to a close friend in Queensland, Rosslyn Smith, to tell her about the antique jug she’d bought.
Rosslyn was relieved that Jennifer was much happier than she had been when she had called three weeks earlier.
The second call came around 5 pm, according to evidence given later. It was Laurie’s brother, Denis, then a police sergeant stationed in Melbourne. Sergeant Tanner spoke briefly to Jennifer, then to his brother. In his later statement to the inquest, he said he talked to Laurie about getting a horse broken in.
SOMEBODY knew Laurie Tanner’s movements, and what vehicle he drove, judging by strange events in the weeks before his wife’s death. One night Laurie and Jennifer arrived home after dinner at her parents’ house to find Laurie’s valuable kelpie working dog shot dead. The Blakes noted later that a detective came from Alexandra to make a report on the dog’s death – but didn’t turn up the night their daughter was killed.
The detective’s line of inquiry about the dog was whether Laurie had ‘an enemy’. Laurie could not think of any. There were two possible explanations: either he did have an unknown enemy, or someone wanted to make it look that way. Either way, it’s easier to sneak up on farmhouses without barking dogs.
There was another night-time incident, one that prompted Jennifer to telephone her mother the morning after it happened.
The previous night, when Laurie would normally have been at an Apex meeting, a car had come up the drive. The Tanners were in bed. Laurie went to a window, and saw the car reversing quickly, with someone running behind it.
Jennifer told her mother it seemed the intruders had fled when they recognised Laurie’s car and realised he was home.
THREE weeks before her best friend was killed, Rosslyn Smith took a call that she still recalls clearly thirteen years later.
About 11 am on 23 October, 1984, the telephone rang at her home at Sorrento Waters, on Queensland’s Gold Coast. It was Jenny Tanner. They had known each other since going to the convent together in Mansfield, they had taken holidays together before they married, and stayed in touch since.
Long-distance charges did not stop Jenny from calling often.
But, according to Rosslyn Smith’s sworn statement later tendered to the inquest, this time it was no idle chat.
The previous night, when her husband was at one of his meetings, Jenny had gone out the back door to get firewood when she was surprised to find her brother-in-law, Denis, standing on the step. She hadn’t heard a car arrive.
She invited him in, and asked what he was doing in Bonnie Doon. He said he’d had a fight with his wife, and had told her (his wife) he was going to the races, but that he wanted to ‘go shooting’. He then asked for Laurie’s rifle, according to Rosslyn Smith’s statement.
‘Jennifer said she went to the bedroom and obtained the rifle with bullets and gave it to Denis.’
He declined her offer of coffee, and went with her into the bedroom when she put the baby to bed, according to the statement.
‘Once (the child) was in bed, Jennifer and Denis returned to the loungeroom where Denis asked Jennifer if she was leaving Laurie. She stated that she wasn’t. She asked him where she had heard this, and he said, ‘a friend’.’
Before he left, Jennifer told Rosslyn, Denis had asked her not to tell Laurie about the visit or the conversation. But she had immediately reported both to her husband when he got home.
When Laurie was asked at the first inquest a year later about the conversation with his wife, he said that Denis had walked across for a friendly chat and cup of coffee after delivering some building materials. (Denis had testified: ‘I did not mention to the deceased that I had gone there to go shooting … I did not look at any of Laurie’s guns … I didn’t inquire into the deceased’s private life.’) Not in the witness box, nor in his original statement to police, did Laurie Tanner say Jennifer had told him about Denis handling the rifle and talking of marriage splits.
Laurie Tanner was not cross-examined about the puzzling difference between his story and Rosslyn Smith’s. Despite the subsequent open finding, Rosslyn was relieved her ordeal had ended. She had been nervous about giving evidence. ‘I had nightmares … for the whole eleven months until the inquest,’ she was to confide years later.
THE oldest and youngest of the four Tanner brothers were opposites in temperament, and to look at. Laurie was thin, gangly and quiet. Denis wasn’t. In the police force he earned the nickname ‘Lard’ and a reputation as a knockabout cop.
People who knew both regarded Denis as the dominant brother. In an inversion of most sibling relationships, it was the younger brother who acted as a protector for the less worldly Laurie.
Laurie had been married before, and it had ended in divorce.
When he remarried the much younger Jennifer, according to evidence Denis was to give at the inquest, he borrowed money to buy out his parents and brothers so that he and Jennifer owned Springfield outright.
Denis used his part of the proceeds to take a third share of the neighboring property, Stanleys, with his parents. He regularly came up from Melbourne, and the two brothers and their father worked the properties together.
For all their outward stability, and Jennifer’s determination to have another child, there was probably friction in the marriage, as in many others. But not enough friction, say her parents and close friends, that she would seriously contemplate leaving her husband. Let alone commit suicide.
WHEN Senior Constable Kerr typed what police cryptically call an ‘83’, the formal notice of death to the coroner, he stopped at the space where the familiar words ‘no suspicious circumstances’ are usually inserted. He left it blank.
Two days later, in his opinion, his instinct was proved right. But some of his superiors disagreed.
The post-mortem examination was done on Friday morning at Shepparton, a 24-hour delay later criticised by the coroner.
Part-way through it, the pathologist, Dr Peter Dyte, stopped to call Mansfield police with what he obviously thought was interesting information. He was put through to a telephone to which Kerr had attached a tape recorder. He greeted Dr Dyte, then handed the handpiece to a Sergeant Neil Phipps, a big, bluff man who had once worked in the Homicide Squad.
Kerr kept the tape, along with several others he made in what became one man’s attempt to investigate a death other police ignored.
The taped conversation reveals how key officers enthusiastically embraced the assumption of suicide, and dismissed more likely possibilities.
Dr Dyte, described by his colleagues as a shy and obliging man, opens hesitantly: ‘I was just ringing up to confirm that you had no suspicions about this death.’
Sergeant Phipps, confidently: ‘No, we haven’t … What, ah, seems to be the trouble?’
Dyte: ‘I thought I’d just talk to you before we complete the post mortem, just to check, really. There’s certainly two definite wounds in the forehead.’
When Phipps doesn’t answer, he adds quickly: ‘Which would be quite possible. She could still be alive after the first one.’
Phipps: ‘You are satisfied she would have lived after the first one.’
Dyte, nervously: ‘Well, I am saying it’s possible.’
After finishing the autopsy, Dr Dyte immediately calls again to say he had found two bullets in the brain. Despite this, he nervously assents to Phipps’s suggestion that ‘there’s a strong possibility she would be alive after the first bullet’.
The sergeant, trying to explain the hand wounds, theorises that the victim had pushed the trigger with her toe. There is no discussion of the possibility of foul play – or of tests to check for gun residue on either hands or feet. Decisions against that had already been made by Alexandra CIB, an attitude supported by other senior officers.
Instead, the sergeant asks if the body will be ready soon because ‘the family’ (meaning the Tanners) was anxious to make funeral arrangements.
Jennifer was buried next day, just 60 hours after her death. Her mother, a devout Catholic, resented the fact that Denis Tanner made all the arrangements and that her daughter was to have a Protestant service.
After the funeral, the mourners drove to the Blakes’ house for a brief wake. Jennifer’s sister Christine approached Laurie Tanner sympathetically to tell him the family had been to the undertaker’s to view the body and ‘say goodbye’.
Mrs Blake recalls that before Laurie could answer, Denis snapped: ‘Laurie doesn’t want to hear any of that,’ and shepherded his older brother away. She also recalls that one of the four Tanner brothers shepherded their father, Fred Tanner, away from the Blakes. Mr Tanner senior had been a daily visitor to Springfield, often had lunch with Jennifer, and had been very close to her.
Meanwhile, the investigation proceeded entirely on the basis of what Dr Dyte called the ‘possibility’ of suicide. Five months later, on 30 April, 1985, Detective Sergeant Ian Welch took the trouble to drive from Alexandra to Shepparton to get Dr Dyte to ‘clarify’ his opinion that suicide was possible, and to make some additions to his report to reflect that.
Dr Dyte, who was suffering a terminal illness that ultimately prevented him attending the inquest, was characteristically helpful. But he later seemed to have misgivings about the way his report was being interpreted.
When Jennifer’s sister, Miriam Blake, spoke to him just before the inquest opened in October, he told her the family had ‘a good case’ to argue that she had been murdered.
It seemed that the pleasant Dr Dyte had either changed his mind, or tended to agree with whoever he was talking to.
Dr Terry Schultz, a pathologist called at the first inquest, was not so flexible. He said, after reviewing Dr Dyte’s post mortem findings, ‘it’s virtually impossible that it’s suicide.’
When Dr Kevin Lee, one of the world’s leading gunshot wound experts, was to study details of Jennifer Tanner’s death years later. His conclusion was even blunter: ‘It’s a homicide until proven otherwise.’
BILL KERR was as surprised as almost everyone else when the pathologist found two bullets. He had been uneasy. Now, like a few other local police, he was suspicious. He ran through the ‘suicide’ scenario.
Jennifer Tanner had asked her husband to bring home milk, bread and chocolates, chatted on the telephone, changed her baby’s nappy, made a cup of coffee and got some biscuits to settle down in front of the television … then suddenly decided to shoot herself in the head. Twice. With a bolt-action rifle that had to be manually operated for each shot. Without leaving a note.
It sounded outrageously unlikely. But trying to prove otherwise was not easy. Already, the best chance of gathering evidence had gone, with the scene cleaned up, no photographs, no tests, the body buried.
One thing Kerr had was the rifle. But each time he requested forensic tests in the following weeks, it was ignored by his superiors. ‘They kept saying it wasn’t warranted.’
Bill Kerr remembers asking for certain people to be interviewed in Melbourne – and to have particular questions put to them.
But when they were interviewed, key questions were not asked, he claimed. Instead, they were allowed to make simple statements that avoided vital points.
He tried as much as a prudent country copper can in a big bureaucracy riddled with the usual bureaucratic ills: jealousies, inefficiency, apathy and maddeningly slow procedure. There are ‘proper channels’, but they are easily blocked.
Frustrated, he contacted Rosslyn Smith in Queensland on his own initiative – and discreetly arranged for Queensland police to interview her about what Jennifer had revealed to her. He got her statement in record time – then was ‘rapped over the knuckles’ for sending the request direct to Queensland instead of through the chain of command.
It was, Kerr later mused, ‘like one bloke against the system’.
He started to keep his doubts to himself. A police station, like a schoolyard, can be hard on those at the bottom of the pecking order. He did not want to stir up more trouble than he already had.
Which is one reason, when he visited Les and Kath Blake a week after the funeral, that he did not tell them their daughter had been shot twice.
They didn’t find that out for ten months, and then only because a friend was married to a policeman who persuaded Kerr to tell the Blakes all the facts.
Facts that should have turned her death into a homicide investigation. But, by then, it was far too late to unravel.
Even for the coroner at the first inquest.
THE day after the funeral, Laurie Tanner came to the Mansfield police station to make a formal statement. Denis came with him.
Kerr asked the Tanners into the mess room. He used a tape recorder to record the conversation. The recording was muffled, but Kerr remembered nonchalantly asking Denis Tanner where he’d been on the night Jennifer died.
Tanner, Kerr later testified on oath, said he had been at ‘the trots’, an answer at least one other policeman then stationed at Mansfield also heard about that week.
Kerr did not attach any great significance to Denis Tanner’s alibi – until ten months later, just before the inquest was to start, when he read a deposition made by a Melbourne bookmaker, John Francis O’Hanlon, which appeared to give Tanner a different alibi.
O’Hanlon’s deposition stated in vague terms that Tanner had spent the evening ‘minding’ a bingo night at the Carmelite Hall in Richardson Street, Middle Park, a job he sometimes did on the side. This technically breached police regulations.
The deposition was made on 16 October 1985, eleven months after the shooting and just two days before the inquest was to open.
It was witnessed by Senior Sergeant Peter Fleming, the police prosecutor who appeared at the inquest to assist the coroner.
O’Hanlon’s deposition was vague about days, dates and times.
It read, in part: ‘I have been asked to recall a bingo night at the Carmelite Hall in Richardson Street, Middle Park, in approximately the months of November or December last year (1984).
‘In particular, I have been asked to recall the bingo evening that I said farewell to Mr and Mrs Keith Brown. I can’t remember the date exactly, but it was after the Melbourne Cup … I can’t remember whether it was a Wednesday or a Friday night, but I can vaguely remember Denis Tanner standing at the back of the Browns …
‘We had been held up by a gunman previously, and Denis was there to assist the committee. I can’t recall any conversation I had with Denis that night …’
Then, half way through making the statement, O’Hanlon apparently became more certain of dates, faces and names. If Sergeant Fleming noticed this sudden improvement, he did not comment on it.
‘After thinking about it (continued O’Hanlon’s statement) I am pretty sure it would have been a Wednesday night, and it would have been the Wednesday week after the Melbourne Cup … I can’t remember whether Denis went to the bank with the committee or not, but he has on occasions escorted us with the takings to the bank.’
John ‘Jack’ Francis O’Hanlon is now dead. But his son, John, also a bookmaker, remembers Denis Tanner well from when the policeman was stationed at South Melbourne in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
‘Denis did quite a lot of work with my father,’ he told a journalist years later. ‘Dad used to run functions and Denis used to help out on the door. He and other police often used to come around.’
THE legal firm of Mal Ryan, Jackson and Glen has been in Mansfield since last century, and in that time has acted in the routine legal affairs of generations of the Tanner family and their relatives. So when a date was finally announced for Jennifer Tanner’s inquest, the firm naturally gave first offer of its services to Laurie Tanner.
The Tanners, however, had already made a decision. Mal Ryan, Jackson and Glen was told that Denis Tanner had already hired a well-known Melbourne barrister, Joe Gullaci, often instructed by the Police Association on behalf of its members.
Instead, the Blakes engaged Mal Ryan, Jackson and Glen. They instructed a solicitor, Rodney Ryan, that they wanted an open finding. They said they did not know who killed their daughter, only that she did not do it herself.
The fact the Blakes engaged a solicitor at all seemed to anger the Tanners. And when, in October 1985, the coroner, Hugh Adams, made an open finding, Laurie was ‘furious’, Kath Blake was to recall.
‘I went to speak to him and say “That’s good that we got an open finding,” but he flounced out of the courtroom. My daughter Clare was outside the court and he walked straight past her.
‘From then on he hardly had anything to do with us. He said later we’d ‘shamed him’ in the court, and that he didn’t want our grandson to have anything to do with us again.’
It seemed, to the Blakes, a peculiar reaction by a grieving husband to the family of his dead wife.
‘What we can’t understand is why people don’t think it was just someone off the road, a rabbit shooter or something,’ Les Blake was to say later. ‘All we are saying is that it wasn’t suicide. Someone shot Jen. The Blakes are law-abiding, God-fearing people. For them, the open finding was enough. It left the way clear for a day of reckoning. Some time, they believed, the truth would come out.
IT WAS almost eleven years after Jennifer Tanner’s death that Bonnie Doon was jerked awake by what some called ‘another’ murder mystery. After seventeen years, the mineshaft in the hills behind Tanners’ old place gave up its grisly secret.
On the afternoon of Thursday, 20 July 1995, two young men out shooting decided to tie a rope to a tree and climb down to explore the old Jack of Clubs mine.
Ten metres down, David Twomey and his mate Mick Bowen hit the mine’s drive, running horizontally. They shone a torch – and saw something red half-hidden in debris. They looked closer. It was a red jumper. Inside it were bones. They took one, climbed out and rang the police.
The homicide detectives arrived next day. Under the debris they found a skeleton and faded feminine things: aqua panties, cream woollen socks, high-heeled ankle boots, vanity mirror, Timex watch, cheap jewellery. And a pair of silicone breast implants.
Within two days, pathologists were able to tell that the remains, judging from the masculine heaviness of the bones, were probably those of a transsexual.
From then, officially at least, the hunt was on. But it was not until an Auckland family read about the case two months later in a Melbourne gay and lesbian newspaper, ‘The Star-Observer’, that one part of the mystery was solved.
They feared it might be their transsexual prostitute ‘sister’, Adele, a Pitcairn Islander born Paul David Bailey in Auckland in 1955, and missing from St Kilda’s streets since 1978. Dental records proved them right, but the mystery lingers. Despite thousands of pages of fresh statements gathered from dozens of witnesses by the police task force, leading to a new inquest being ordered in late 1997, two tantalising questions remain.
Who put Adele Bailey’s body in the mineshaft? And did the same person kill Jennifer Tanner?
IN his summing up, the Coroner who presided at the first inquest, Hugh Adams, bluntly criticised the investigation of Jennifer Tanner’s death, describing it as ‘slanted’ towards an assumption of suicide when the evidence could suggest otherwise. In making an open finding into the death, he said there was no evidence to show either Denis or Laurie Tanner were responsible. Unlike the Coroner, Sergeant Denis Tanner had no qualms about the investigations. ‘As far as I am concerned it was a thorough investigation,’ he told ‘The Sunday Age’.
Below is an edited text of the Coroner’s summing up of the first inquest into Jennifer Tanner’s death, which was quashed in 1996 in readiness for a second inquest by Graeme Johnstone.
‘MY INITIAL first comment would be (to ask) why the brief took so long, some seven months, to be completed …?
This inquest has highlighted … the lack of initial proper investigation. In my opinion, this brief should not have been passed in its initial state by the District Superintendent’s Office, nor indeed accepted by the local coroner, because the investigations were all slanted towards a situation of self-inflicted injuries, and it was only when further investigations were conducted through this office, some eleven months unfortunately after the event, and what appeared on the surface to be a non-suspicious matter … indeed may not have been so.
The initial investigating officer should have been alerted to the situation of possible non-self-inflicted injuries because of some unusual features … evident at the scene.
The fact that there were two expended cartridge cases (and the) lack of any correspondence from the deceased to indicate an intention to take her own life.
But on this initial assessment… the scene was allowed to be cleared and no autopsy performed until the 16th. Yet when the autopsy revealed two entry wounds, neither forensic nor ballistic tests were sought.
Now I am at a loss – having regard to the two injuries to the forehead and the fact the weapon was a manually loaded rifle … (why) the Homicide Squad was not asked to assist from at least the day of the autopsy onwards. Simple tests by the Forensic Science Laboratory officers would have shown whether the rifle was discharged by either the hands or the foot …
Neither were ballistic tests done to determine if the recovered bullets were in fact fired from the rifle in question. The scene was not photographed with the body in situ and an incomplete set of photographs (was) taken at the autopsy.
A lot of unanswered questions could have been resolved and suspicion removed from certain persons if proper initial investigations and tests (had) been instituted by the police officers and the pathologist.
Now what evidence have we in support of self-infliction? The entry position of the two head wounds certainly is a common sight in respect to persons who take their own lives by the use of firearms.
The deceased was left-handed, the rifle was found at the scene on her left side. Her emotional state – now the evidence of Dr Patience shows the deceased had suffered depression after the birth of her son and this was combined with a shy and not very outgoing nature.
Now the evidence to be considered against self-inflicted injury … There was no written correspondence found that would show a motive for the deceased taking her own life … the question arises, who other than the deceased may have been responsible? The evidence indicates that Mr Laurie Tanner could not have been responsible for his wife’s death …
And likewise the same situation in respect to Mr Denis Tanner.
His movements on the night of the 14th have been investigated. His answers substantiated. I am satisfied that he was in no way responsible.
There is another possibility that certainly an unknown person inflicted the wounds.
However, there were no signs of a struggle … And this person would have had to have known the location of the weapon and the magazine.
… Before a coroner can return a finding that a person has the intention to die by their own hand, and in fact did so, there must be clear and conclusive evidence to that fact.
And here in my opinion that is not so.
… Jennifer Ruth Tanner died … from the effects of gunshot wounds to the head … And on the evidence adduced I am unable to determine if the wounds were self-inflicted or otherwise.’
IF the body of Adele Bailey had not been found by a fluke the Tanner case would still have remained dormant, but when homicide detectives started to ask questions about the dead transsexual the answers made them look back at events long relegated to police history. Nearly twelve years after the original unsatisfactory inquiry into the death of the young mother a new generation of detectives called for the old files.
Late in 1996 the Attorney General moved to quash the original coronial open finding and order a new inquest. The court was told, more than ten years too late, that the Tanner case was murder.
In the hearing, the head of the task force, Detective Inspector Paul Newman, said there was ‘significant evidence disproving an alibi offered by Denis Tanner.’
He said fresh forensic evidence gathered after Mrs Tanner’s body was exhumed in July 1996 indicated she ‘could not have caused her own death and the only likely cause of death was murder.’
Here was a senior investigator pointing the finger squarely at a fellow policeman. Ugly accusations until then alluded to only behind closed doors were now being made in open court.
In an earlier hearing in the Supreme Court, designed to stop ‘The Sunday Age’ newspaper publishing results of its own inquiry into the Tanner death, police were even more specific.
In a sworn affidavit, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins said that Detective Sergeant Denis Tanner was a suspect in the alleged murders of Jennifer Tanner, and a transsexual, Paul David Bailey, known as Adele Bailey.
Mr Colons swore that the death of Adele Bailey was being treated as a murder. ‘Bailey’s body was found in a mine shaft in Crown land adjacent to a rural property known as Springfield. At all times Springfield has been owned by the parents of a serving police officer (Detective Sergeant Denis Tanner) and Laurence Tanner.
‘In 1984 the wife of Laurence Tanner (Jennifer Ruth Tanner) was found deceased in Springfield with two bullet wounds to the forehead.
‘Following the discovery of Bailey’s body in a mine shaft adjacent to Springfield in July 1995, the death of Jennifer Ruth Tanner is being investigated as a homicide. Detective Sergeant Tanner is a suspect in our investigations into the death of Jennifer Ruth Tanner and Bailey.
‘Detective Sergeant Tanner was the second last person to arrest Bailey in 1978.’
Bailey went missing from St Kilda, where she worked as a prostitute in 1978. Sergeant Tanner worked in the St Kilda area in the 1970s.
Collins said in the affidavit: ‘Detective Sergeant Tanner inquired of Jennifer Ruth Tanner where her husband (Laurie Tanner) kept the guns in the Springfield residence shortly before she died; the deceased (Jennifer Ruth Tanner) had informed an acquaintance that her brother-in-law (Detective Sergeant Tanner) had made sexual advances to her; the part of the Crown land where Bailey’s body was discovered is unknown to even local residents and is virtually only accessible by four-wheel-drive through the Springfield property.’
The Tanner family later sold Springfield. The empty farmhouse was burnt to the ground shortly after police began investigating the Bailey murder in 1995.
The fire, which started in the house late at night, ended any chance of forensic experts examining the room where Jenny Tanner was shot. The fire was regarded as highly suspicious, as the house was empty at the time, which meant there was no use of cooking, heating or electrical appliances, most often the cause of accidental house fires.
The then Chief Commissioner, Mick Miller, a respected and forthright senior officer, was stunned to learn, twelve years later, of the original Tanner investigation. He said he should have been told of the Coroner’s criticism of the slanted inquiry but that it appeared to have been kept from him. ‘There are two options, either someone neglected to pass the information on, or it was deliberately suppressed,’ he said.