17

The Persecution of Harry ‘the Hat’ Blackburn

It was no secret among detectives at Kogarah police station in the early 1970s that Detective Sergeant Harry ‘the Hat’ Blackburn was a dead ringer for the Georges Hall rapist, a disgusting fiend who had been raping women at knifepoint in Sydney’s southern suburbs since 1969.

An identikit likeness of the rapist resembled Harry Blackburn because they both had similar, distinctive teeth. Blackburn heard that because of the alleged likeness, he was a suspect. Blackburn, a decent and straight cop, was aware of these rumours but as far as he could see there was no resemblance at all.

Other alleged evidence linking him to the assaults was a knife scabbard that was found in bush near where one of the rapes had taken place. On the scabbard were initials that matched two of Harry Blackburn’s initials; a third letter was indecipherable.

At work, Harry Blackburn wasn’t one of the boys. Rather than stay at the pub after work, he was a loner who kept fit by jogging or playing squash. A dedicated family man, he had no time for fools and chose his friends carefully. He was a tenacious investigator with a strong work ethic and a dedication to justice, and would not tolerate inefficiency. It was no secret that due to his forthright manner and being a stickler for the rules, Harry Blackburn had trodden on many toes within the police force over the years.

While the rumours persisted that Harry Blackburn was the Georges Hall rapist, it wasn’t until almost 20 years later that anything was done about it. On 24 July 1988, outside the War Crimes Commission building in the city where the now retired 57-year-old Inspector Harry Blackburn worked as an investigator, seven police officers arrested him and took him away. Acting on a tip-off that ‘someone big’ had been arrested, there was a huge contingent of media waiting back at police headquarters to get their first glimpse of the multiple rapist who had eluded police for so many years.

Once there, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of the New South Wales police force, Harry Blackburn was paraded before the TV cameras before he was taken inside and formally charged with 25 offences, including rape, armed robbery, kidnapping and assault. Although he vehemently protested his innocence, for weeks on end Harry Blackburn was headline news. He lost his job and his pregnant wife miscarried as a direct result of the stress.

It seemed that a month earlier, in June 1988, Detective Sergeant Phil Minkley was investigating the latest attack by a new offender in the district, known as the Sutherland shire rapist. At that stage the new Sutherland rapes and the old Georges Hall rapes had not been linked. Minkley’s task force comprised Minkley, Detective Kevin Paull, and other detectives under the supervision of DCI Jim Thornthwaite, the commander of the Tactical Intelligence Unit (TIU). Inspector Thornthwaite and Harry Blackburn had had a close association both personally and in the police force for several decades but they hadn’t seen each other in recent years.

The Georges Hall rapes had occurred from 1969 to 1972. Then for 13 years there were no rapes of a similar nature until they began again in Sutherland, from 1985 to 1988. The rapist’s disguises included dark clothes and a red balaclava, beret or a kilt. He threatened his victims with a knife, pistol or sawn-off shotgun, and would usually lock the man in the boot and rape the woman in the car. He usually preyed on couples in lover’s lanes and spoke with an authoritative Australian accent that led detectives to believe that he was either a policeman or an army officer.

The TIU gave Detective Minkley a photo of Harry Blackburn and told him that Blackburn was a suspect in the Georges Hall rapes. Relying solely on the photo, Minkley made what he regarded as a ‘positive identification’ of Blackburn from a witness to a Sutherland rapist attack that happened on 25 June 1988. By now the Georges Hall rapist and the Sutherland rapist were deemed to be one and the same, and the suspect photo ID had linked Harry Blackburn to both cases. He was arrested.

But as it would turn out, a twist of fate saw to it that Sergeant Minkley wouldn’t see the drama unfold. In the early hours of the morning after Harry Blackburn’s arrest, Phil Minkley was involved in a serious car accident and he wound up in hospital with brain damage, from which he would never fully recover.

With the alleged rapist in jail, once the Director of Public Prosecutions began to put together the Crown’s case against Harry Blackburn, he was horrified to find on what flimsy evidence Harry Blackburn had been arrested and charged.

• • There were two very dubious photo identifications, one from 19 years earlier and the other from the recent ‘Sutherland Rapist’ rape at Mascot. Several other victims had been shown photographs of Blackburn, but no one else identified him.
• • The only DNA sample was not linked to Blackburn.
• • The rapist’s blood sample was found not to be of the same type as Blackburn’s.
• • Of the eight Sutherland attacks, Blackburn had watertight alibis for at least four of them and was able to prove that he was in Katoomba at the time of the most recent rape.

It was all so ridiculous.

In October 1988, three months after his nightmare began, the charges against Harry Blackburn were dismissed due to lack of evidence. But terrible damage had been done to him and his family. In a subsequent royal commission into the botched investigation, the brain-damaged Sergeant Minkley was described as:

…the person principally responsible for most of the problems that have arisen in this case. He is responsible for the lack of records. The suppression of records, we suggest, was done at his direction. There is no question that Sergeant Minkley behaved like an unprincipled scoundrel and almost all the list of deficiencies are his responsibility directly or under his direction.

But in view of the severe brain damage Sergeant Minkley incurred in the car crash, the Commission did not recommend charges.

On 8 May 1990, at the same royal commission, Harry Blackburn wept when the 11 police officers who had investigated him apologised for falsely accusing him. Blackburn sued the NSW Government for defamation and was awarded an undisclosed amount, believed to be in excess of $2 million. Soon after, Harry Blackburn moved his family to Robina, on the Gold Coast, where he set up a private inquiry agency.

While the truth will never be known, there is more than one person who believes that Sergeant Minkley’s accident and subsequent brain damage were a blessing in disguise. Had it not happened then, Phil Minkley may have been able to tell the truth as to who in the police force was really pulling the strings, and the real reasons behind the persecution of Harry Blackburn.

Police now believe that the Sutherland Rapist was in fact Ashley Mervyn Coulston, who was also known as the Gold Coast Balaclava Rapist when he terrorised that area in 1979–80. Coulston is currently serving multiple life sentences for the murders of three young people in Victoria in 1992.