The gun’s here in our yard.
The rotten mongrel has hidden it here.’
THEY stayed sealed in a police plastic evidence bag for more than twenty years. The sort of incidental material gathered at every murder scene – just in case.
Three damp cigarette butts found near some shrubs and trees at a mullock heap … where a sniper waited for his target to arrive around midnight on April 15, 1985.
The shot of 44 metres was an easy one for an experienced shooter – armed with the high-powered rifle steadied on the fork of a small tree just 250mm from the damp ground.
The killer lay on his stomach, making him virtually invisible. Not that the men on the other side of the deserted county road would have bothered to look.
They weren’t soldiers on patrol or gangsters in the middle of drug deal. They were four transport workers loading a truck for the nightly midnight run to Mildura.
The depot was floodlit with powerful fluorescent lights – meaning anyone could look in, while those inside could not focus on anything hidden in the darkness. But what had appeared an easy shot in planning became less straightforward in practice.
Firstly the driver of the truck backed into the depot at a slight angle, leaving the sniper’s view momentarily blocked.
Then when the truckie jumped out of the cab he quickly went inside, swinging open both rear doors of his truck, again blocking the view.
The gunman moved about three metres to the left for a clean shot and waited silently while the driver helped load the boxes from McPhee Transport Depot in Bellevue Road, Bendigo.
It took only minutes to load, but time was everything in this cut-throat business. The driver had already picked up mail two blocks away at the Australia Post depot and would head straight off to pick up freight from a late Ansett truck delivery before driving hours through the night to Mildura.
Kevin Pearce, a hardworking battler who tried many jobs before moving into the freelance courier world, shut the doors of his van and stood momentarily in the light as McPhee’s night manager Paul Thompson handed him an envelope with his payment.
It took only a few seconds but it was enough.
The sniper fired just one shot from his powerful .308 hunting rifle. It struck Pearce on the left side, leaving a gaping wound that his shocked mates tried to staunch with a toilet roll. A sliver of the bullet damaged his spinal cord so badly he would have been left a paraplegic. If he had lived.
Kevin Hugh Pearce, father of three daughters, lingered for three weeks before he died.
Within minutes of the shooting those close to the victim believed they knew who was behind the attack.
But two decades later, the only suspect remains free and apparently unaffected by the whispers that continue today. The case looked like remaining one of many in which police claim to know who did it but lack the solid evidence to convict. So when in 2006 detectives sent the three John Player Special Virginia 25s cigarette butts found at the scene for DNA examination they did so as a matter of routine rather than in hope of a late breakthrough.
The results, however, were anything but routine and were positive enough to breathe new life into an old case.
KEVIN Pearce, 45, was a hard worker determined to remain his own boss. He and his wife, Joan, ran milk bars and guesthouses before moving into the dog-eat-dog transport business.
The work was tough and margins slender for owner-drivers so in 1982 Pearce joined forces with two others, Bill Matthews and Barry Coates, to form CMP (Coates, Matthews, Pearce) Trucking Contractors to carry freight and mail to northern Victoria.
With eight large trucks and two vans they planned to become the major transport firm in Bendigo. At the heart of the business were the Australia Post mail runs that provided regular income and allowed the partners to load their trucks with private contract work to make a profit.
Pearce controlled the Mildura (valued at $61, 000) and Echuca ($49, 000) mail runs while Matthews kept the Robinvale contract. Matthews was a ruthless self-made man whose reputation for being keen on a dollar was matched by his reluctance to spend one.
Some of his associates claimed his paperwork was sloppy and when there was an error in accounts it would invariably fall in his favour. And the tough truckie rarely seemed bothered when those errors were revealed.
Some of those burnt by Matthews vowed to never again deal with him but working for a bad boss was better than not working at all so many returned.
But from the beginning the CMP partners argued and after a year Coates bailed out.
Pearce was uncomfortable when Matthews employed his mistress, Dianne Robertson, as the office manager – believing they were not making enough money to employ her.
According to Joan Pearce, Matthews did the books and was always short of money for accounts forcing the Pearces to use $5000 from their milk bar to top up the trucking firm.
Tired of excuses over shortfalls the Pearces left the partnership in February 1984 and commissioned a local solicitor to recover the money they claimed they were owed. Matthews was also committed for trial on a charge of stealing 10,000 litres of fuel from the company. And Pearce was to be a witness against him.
The one-time partners became ferocious competitors and Pearce began to win work from Matthews, who made it clear he would use any means to fight back.
‘After the partnership broke up Kevin used to give me the impression that he was frightened of what Matthews might do to him. I think Kevin was also scared for the whole family, not just for himself,’ Mrs Pearce said.
‘I know Kevin used to be petrified about going to pick the freight up but I did not know exactly why.’
The breaking point appeared to be when Pearce was awarded a contract from McPhee Transport to deliver freight to Mildura. Matthews was furious, as he had been confident he would win the tender.
Pearce’s oldest daughter told police, ‘In about January 1985 McPhee’s Transport contacted Dad and offered them their delivery run to Mildura, which Bill Matthews had previously had.
Dad accepted this offer and took the contract from Bill Matthews.
‘Dad told me after Christmas this year that he had been told by someone at the Bendigo Mail Centre that Bill Matthews said he was going to get him. Dad has been worried that Matthews would get him and Dad actually said he thought Matthews would shoot him.’
If the third partner Barry John Coates thought when he quit the company that he could walk away from the conflict he was soon to learn there was no way out.
Even when he was in the firm he found someone was holding a grudge. According to his wife, Dianne, Coates found the truck he drove was repeatedly vandalised, leaving brake lines and the radiator hose cut.
Like many who dealt with Matthews, Coates decided to quit while he was behind believing he had been ripped off for thousands of dollars.
But when Matthews later wanted his former partner to help out with the trucks Coates decided practicality outweighed principle.
‘Barry wanted to keep on the good side of him instead of the bad side of him,’ his wife explained.
Enraged by losing business Matthews escalated the commercial war. ‘Bill started to send his own truck to Mildura at a loss, just (to) be vindictive,’ Mrs Coates said.
‘I know Bill wanted the Mildura run desperately. I think Bill wanted to buy Kevin out but Kevin refused.’
According to Mrs Coates, Matthews believed if Pearce was out of the way he would inherit the Mildura run. ‘I heard from Barry that Bill was going to shoot Kevin to get him out of the road … Barry tried to talk him out of it and told him that he should not be a fool.’
It is clear that Barry Coates took Matthews’ threats seriously. So seriously he told his daughter, Sharon, while at their Sealake caravan, ‘Nobody wants to get in Billy Matthews’ way.’
‘Dad said someone was going to get hurt. He didn’t say who was going to get hurt, he just said Billy Matthews was going to do the hurting.’
It was April 13, 1985.
Two days later, an unknown sniper shot Kevin Pearce.
When local police and later homicide detectives began to investigate the shooting of Pearce it became clear that Matthews was the prime suspect.
He hated the victim, was in the vicinity, had made threats and believed he would profit from the death.
But when police began to interview potential witnesses they found some varied from vague to deliberately uncooperative.
Few wanted to stand up to Bill Matthews.
One had good reason to be worried. Just days after the shooting Matthews’ lover, Dianne Robertson, drove to the ‘Coates’ house in Adams Street, Bendigo to tell them a rifle was hidden in their backyard.
Coates looked around an old van body used for storage and found the rifle hidden under a wheel arch with a plastic bag containing a gun magazine and ammunition.
Coates went inside and told his wife, who was preparing dinner, ‘The gun’s here in our yard. The rotten mongrel has hidden it here.’
He told her he planned to dump the rifle, even though he thought the gun was used to shoot his former business partner.’ I just didn’t want to get involved. We got rid of the rifle and we just wanted to forget it,’ she said.
Dianne Coates told police they talked for hours about what to do with the gun, briefly entertaining the thought of going to the police before deciding to stay silent – for one overpowering reason – fear.
‘Barry was scared of Bill and getting shot.’
The couple drove to Lake Eppalock where he threw the gun into the spot known as the Metcalf Pool. If he suffered guilt pangs for his involvement in the cover-up he hid it well. He continued to drive for Matthews even though he was convinced his former partner shot Pearce.
The gun would have remained hidden if someone with a conscience had not come forward. A woman rang police and told them Matthews shot Pearce then hid the gun in Barry Coates’ backyard.
She claimed Matthews threatened the Coates family and Coates and his wife then dumped the gun near Lake Eppalock. The caller was Sharon Coates, Barry’s daughter.
When confronted by police Coates promised to co-operate, taking them to the lake where he waded in to recover the weapon.
But Coates remained a frightened man and initially refused to implicate the suspect further. While the truckie remained at best a reluctant witness his wife and daughter were more forthcoming.
Sharon told police that straight after the sniper attack ‘Billy Matthews told him (Coates) over the phone that he had shot Pearcey. Dad has told me that Billy Matthews has told him if he says anything about the shooting, about any of it, then Dad would be next. Dad is very scared of Billy Matthews.’
Coates’ version of the call was less colourful and he refused to directly implicate the red-hot suspect. If Coates had stood up and made a statement that Matthews had admitted the shooting it would have been enough to lay a murder charge. But he didn’t.
He remembered a call that night that woke him from a deep sleep. ‘I have a vague recollection of Bill Matthews ringing me at home … I seem to remember him telling me that Pearce had been shot.’
According to Mrs Coates a few days after the gun was dumped Matthews asked if they could recover the rifle, ‘because he might need it again. Barry was scared but he told him it was gone for good’.
Later, according to Mrs Coates, Matthews told her husband, ‘I know I can do it now mate’.
Sharon Coates went further, telling police Matthews had confessed to her father. She said her step-mother said Matthews told Coates, ‘I’m in the big league now, I’m a murderer … Billy Matthews laughed as he said it.’
She said her father told her, ‘Billy Matthews shot Pearcey because Pearcey’s trod on too many toes, mainly Matthews.’
After talking to Sharon Coates police decided to have another chat to Barry showing him the statements from his wife and daughter. At first Coates tried to blame a faulty memory for withholding vital evidence. ‘I’m not sure I said those things or’ not. I’m not saying that what they say is wrong. I just can’t remember saying these things.’
He opened the possibility Matthews paid a hitman to kill his commercial rival. ‘I am pretty sure that Bill Matthews spoke tome of hiring somebody to get rid of Pearce. I can’t remember when he said this before Pearce’s death. It would have been along time before.’
The gun recovered from the lake was a .308 Valmet Rifle, loaded with Musgrove K 6 ammunition with one in the breech. It was the same ammunition and the same calibre used to kill Pearce. Police were confident that having linked the recovered murder weapon to the suspect they had made their case against Matthews.
But firearm tests showed the gun from the lake was not the one used to kill Pearce.
Police traced the history of the rifle. It was stolen from a transport depot in Footscray from the same loading bay where Matthews picked up freight for his Bendigo run. Police now knew he was a thief but they still couldn’t prove he was a murderer.
WHY were people so quick to believe that Matthews would kill his partner? It would seem the hard-headed truckie revelled in a tough-guy image and gave the impression he could organise the shooting of anyone who stood in his way.
Pearce’s nephew Clement Pearce said that at a party his uncle told him Matthews was out to get him because he was a witness in the petrol theft case and was trying to recover $30, 000.
‘Kevin told me at a party that there was a bullet in the spout for him. He said Matthews would point the gun but wouldn’t pull the trigger … I know that Kevin was very scared of what Matthews would do to him.’
Clement Pearce knew his uncle had reasons to be wary. Four years earlier Matthews was running illegal gaming cards in Bendigo and wanted to scare off a rival. Clement Pearce told police Matthews tried to enlist him to recruit heavies from Melbourne to solve the problem.
The younger Pearce, who drank in a few rough Melbourne pubs, responded, ‘I’ll see if I can arrange someone’.
At first Pearce thought it was just beer bravado but a week later Matthews followed up with a call allegedly saying, ‘I just want them to give them a hiding. If that doesn’t work, if we have to shoot them we’ll shoot them’.
‘Matthews had said to me that he could get someone from Bendigo to do it, but it was too close to home.’
Clement waited a respectable time, then rang to say he couldn’t help.
Motor mechanic Emmanuel Schembri was another dragged into the increasingly bitter trucking conflict. He said Pearce told him Matthews owed him $32, 000 and he was worried he would never get it back.
‘Kevin was scared of Bill and would never drive past Bill’s depot which was around the corner from Kevin’s depot. Kevin also told me he didn’t trust Bill and thought that Bill would shoot him.’
Schembri told police, ‘Bill told me that if he wanted to get someone bad enough, he would ring up and send someone down and he would be shot. He also told me that he would alibi himself by being a couple of hundred miles away. I think Dianne, his secretary, was there at the time.’
Later in evidence at the Coroner’s Court Schembri’s memory began to play tricks and he was no longer ‘100 percent sure Matthews had used the word shot’.
‘I wish I never sort of said anything about that shooting because it could’ve just been a passing conversation, you know, between two blokes.’
While many of those close to the men seemed to suffer unexplained bouts of amnesia someone was trying to help police. They received an anonymous tip-off that a yellow car was seen leaving the scene of the crime. The same colour car as that owned by Dianne Robertson.
As a policeman, Roger Irwin was used to being an informal problem solver for friends and family. But when Kevin Pearce began to talk to him at a family party in Broadmeadows on January 12, 1985 the detective knew this was deadly serious.
‘He appeared very worried and said there was a person in Bendigo that was out to get him.’ He said his ex-business partner ‘had a bullet in the gun for him’.
He said Pearce confided, ‘He threatened to shoot me a couple of times.’
Irwin told him to notify Bendigo detectives about the threats and gave him his home number to ring if there were further problems.
Maxwell Yates was a truckie who had worked for both Matthews and Pearce. He was rung on the night of the shooting and drove straight to McPhee’s. Just before the victim was loaded into the ambulance he was still worried about the nightly run, telling Yates to ‘Take the truck and do Mildura.’
Yates told the dying man he would look after everything and then asked, ‘Who mate, Matthews?’
Kevin nodded his head as if to say yes.
BILL Matthews is a straight talker as well as allegedly a straight shooter. When interviewed by police he did not conceal his hatred of Pearce.
‘Personally I think he’s an arrogant fat c… and he doesn’t want to work. That’s my personal opinion of the bloke and … that’s not why we had the argument. The partnership broke up. The reason was I didn’t think he was working as hard as I was and I said, “Look, you go your way and I’ll go mine”.’
‘I haven’t had any contact with the guy for twelve months.’
‘I don’t really give a fuck about him as I said, I feel sorry for his missus and kids because none of them have screwed up.’
He said that on the night of the shooting he drove to Melbourne with his de facto wife, Keryn Strawhorn, to pick up and deliver freight, dropping her at their Bendigo home shortly after 11pm. He then took the truck to his shed in Adams Street where two men helped load goods until lam. Around 3.35am he left the shed to drive his Isuzu van to his brother-in-law’s house then walked the two blocks home.
His alibi witnesses were the two men who were in the shed with him until lam, meaning Matthews could not have slipped away around midnight to kill his enemy.
But the men did leave the shed to pick up mail freight just before midnight and did not return for more than 30 minutes – giving him the window of opportunity to get to the mullock heap and return without being seen.
His depot was just two minutes by car from the mullock heap. Police later tracked footprints from where the sniper fired the shot over two small hills to a reserve where the get away car must have been parked.
They noted the killer slipped several times clambering over one of the hills and used his rifle as a crutch to struggle over the sandy rise.
There was another person in the shed that night with Bill Matthews – his loyal and loving assistant, Dianne Robertson, who was prepared to work until nearly 4am alone with her boss.
Shortly after Pearce died Matthews asked a friend to enquire if he could buy the dead man’s trucks – ‘only to sort of help Joan out’.
In June 1986 Coroner Hal Hallenstein held an inquest into the death and under the law at the time it was a committal hearing to see if Matthews should stand trial for murder.
Matthews and Robertson did not give evidence on the grounds of self-incrimination, nor did Barry and Dianne Coates.
Hallenstein found, ‘One would have to conclude that … it (the murder) was carried out by a person who had some knowledge of Mr Pearce’s routine.
‘It was a well-planned and clearly calculated operation.’
‘My formal findings on this matter are that Kevin Hugh Pearce … was shot by or by the arrangement and organisation of William James Matthews.’
Matthews was committed for trial but the Director of Public Prosecutions reviewed the case and the charges were withdrawn.
As he was never acquitted before a jury the charges can be reissued if fresh evidence is uncovered.
He did stand trial for allegedly stealing fuel from the company. But with Pearce dead the theft charge against Matthews was terminally damaged and he was acquitted in the County Court.
Twenty-two years after the shooting Bill Matthews still runs a flourishing trucking firm in Bendigo. He works sixteen hours a day, has more than $300, 000 in the bank and his one social outlet is the Essendon Football Club.
Police still don’t know if Matthews fired the fatal shot or hired someone to kill his business rival.
These days he does not feel inclined to discuss the death of his former partner. ‘I don’t wish to say anything. I received legal advice not to make any comments and I don’t think I should go against that now. I hope you understand, thank you.’
Kevin Pearce’s daughter, Donna said, ‘Our Dad was a loving, caring person with strong, honest values.
‘He was a law-abiding man who always put his family first and taught us right from wrong. We are extremely proud to be the daughters of Kevin and Joan Pearce.
‘Our lives were shattered 22 years ago when Dad was callously shot and we watched him suffer and die over three long weeks. Our father was a hardworking man who was just too trusting.
‘We plead with anyone with information to please contact police.’
The head of the re-investigation, Acting Detective Sergeant Tim Argall, said ‘Kevin Pearce was a hardworking man who was just trying to earn an honest living.’
‘We have established there are several people who know what happened in the lead-up to the shooting, the events that happened that night and the immediate aftermath.’
‘I think there would be people whose consciences would still bother them even after more than twenty years. They know who did it and they have to live with it.’
He said the case was still open. ‘Murder never goes away.’
When detectives from the cold case unit received the DNA result from the three cigarette butts (found where the sniper waited) they were not expecting a breakthrough, as Matthews did not smoke.
But his lover and alibi witness did.
The butts were from Dianne Robertson.
One puzzle remains. If the killer smoked the cigarettes, why were three butts found at the scene and a packet with only one missing left neatly on a rock?
Were they planted to push the finger of suspicion away from the non-smoking Matthews? Only one man knows and he’s not talking.