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Who Murdered Sallie-Anne?

Just after dawn on the morning of 7 February 1986, a jogger noticed what he thought was a body floating face down in the lake known as Busby’s Bore, situated on the westernmost corner of Sydney’s Centennial Park. He notified the park rangers, who used a row boat to recover the corpse of a woman wearing blue jeans and a pink skivvy top, which had been rolled up to rest on the top of her breasts.

Police recognised the body immediately. It was one of the best-known underworld characters of the time, 32-year-old Sallie-Anne Huckstepp – heroin addict, prostitute, gangsters’ moll and police informer. Huckstepp had a long criminal history for petty crimes and drug use, and was always in the company of one heavy criminal or another. It was said that she had also had affairs with police officers.

So no one was really surprised that Sallie-Anne had wound up dead, floating among the lilies. Over the years she had been an outspoken police informer on her criminal associates and, according to the underworld scuttlebutt, she was just marking time on the one spot waiting for any one of a long list of villains to see to it that she would never tell on them again. Sallie-Anne was known as a ‘dead woman walking’.

Born Sallie-Anne Krivoshow into a respectable Jewish family in Sydney’s up-market Bellevue Hill in 1954, she was educated at exclusive Moriah College, a private Jewish school. Sallie-Anne married young and had a daughter. After the marriage broke up she retained her married name and began hanging around Kings Cross, using heroin and selling herself to pay for it.

It wasn’t long before Sallie-Anne’s good looks and charismatic personality found her in the constant companionship of the notorious Sydney standover man, armed robber and heroin dealer, Warren Lanfranchi.

When Lanfranchi was gunned down and killed, allegedly in self-defence, in Woods Lane in the inner Sydney suburb of Chippendale in June 1981 by detective Roger Rogerson, Sallie-Anne made the fatal mistake of publicly condemning Rogerson and his criminal associate, underworld crime boss Neddy Smith.

Sallie-Anne told 60 Minutes and the Willesee current affairs programs that when her lover had left home that day to meet Rogerson it was to give him (Rogerson) a $10,000, bribe which she saw him stuff down the front of his pants in $50 notes before he left home. No money was found on Lanfranchi’s body.

At the inquest into Lanfranchi’s killing Sallie-Anne was even more verbal and told the court about dealings that her dead lover had with Neddy Smith and the police. She told the court that Lanfranchi feared for his life after he had attempted to murder a police officer but the gun had failed to go off.

She said that Neddy Smith had arranged the meeting with Lanfranchi and detective Roger Rogerson, and Lanfranchi was to pay a $10,000 bribe and the matter would be forgotten. She said that Neddy Smith had driven Lanfranchi to the meeting with Rogerson at the secluded lane in Chippendale, where Rogerson had murdered Lanfranchi in cold blood and taken the money.

But despite Sallie-Anne’s evidence and open outrage to anyone who would listen, Roger Rogerson was exonerated and she became a criminal pariah. For her own protection Sallie-Anne became the partner of another of Sydney’s most feared and notorious drug traffickers, David Kelleher, whom she referred to as her ‘Blond God’ due to his muscular physique and bleached blond hair.

Together they became quite an item among the criminal milieu of Sydney’s eastern suburbs and Sallie-Anne became what is known in criminal jargon as a ‘koala’ – a protected species. But that was only as long as she was with her Blond God. Without his protection, she was fair game.

So when Dave Kelleher was arrested, thrown in jail and ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment for trafficking huge amounts of heroin, Sallie-Anne was out in the cold. She went back to hooking for a living, only this time with more up-market clients. And being a celebrity of sorts herself, she liked to cater for the celebrities.

But that didn’t dampen her newly acquired media profile as a walking authority on the underworld who wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. She often appeared on current affairs programs and even had a regular column in Australian Penthouse Magazine. Blind Freddy could tell you that Sallie-Anne was long past her use-by date.

Around 11pm on the night of 6 February 1986, Sallie-Anne received a phone call at the apartment she shared with a girlfriend in Edgecliff Road, Woollahra. She left immediately, telling her flatmate she would only be a few minutes. The flatmate suspected that the call was from a drug dealer and that Sallie-Anne was going to collect some heroin.

Dimly lit Centennial Park at night is not the best of places to be on your own, especially if you are an attractive woman, but the lure of the heroin was strong enough for Sallie-Anne to park her car at the unlit Martin Street entrance, which allows pedestrian access, and she entered into the dark. It was also raining heavily. She never came out.

An inquest into Sallie-Anne Huckstepp’s death concluded that she had been strangled by a person unknown. While police had their suspicions, no charges were laid.

Many years later while serving a life sentence for murder, Sallie-Anne’s old adversary, Neddy Smith, began gobbing off to his cellmate that he had murdered her. The cellmate went to police and they wired him up and he recorded the conversations. Everything added up. Smith even said that he hated Sallie-Anne so much that, as he strangled her in the pond, he made sure that she looked into his eyes as she drew her last breath, so that his would be the last face she would ever see.

Smith was charged with Sallie-Anne’s murder and sent to trial in 1995. So convinced were police that he had done it that they had Sallie-Anne’s coffin exhumed in the hope that some of Neddy Smith’s skin would be under her fingernails, which would give them the conclusive DNA proof that would wrap the case up. No such luck.

With only what he had said to his cellmate as evidence, Smith was found not guilty of murder. Neddy Smith has since been found guilty of the 1983 murder of brothel keeper Harvey Jones, and will never be released from prison.

The murder of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp remains open to this day, though police aren’t looking too hard for the killer. They believe that the person who did it is safely behind bars as it is.