Chapter 4

The Vampire Slayer

Shane Chartres-Abbott

His baby face and clean-cut Aussie good looks made him one of the most in-demand prostitutes for a high-class Melbourne escort agency, where it was widely known he was up for any kind of kinky sex, provided the price was right. But it wasn’t his appetite for turning tricks after dark that saw 28-year-old Shane Maurice Chartres-Abbott step out of the shadows and onto the front pages of the national press in June 2003. Instead, it was the sickening accusations levelled at him in a grisly rape trial that would seal the gruesome fate of the supposed self-confessed vampire, whose alleged lust for human blood came at a fatal price.

The weird story quickly descended into the realms of the truly bizarre when the bloodthirsty saga of accused gigolo vampire rapist Chartres-Abbott took an unexpected twist on the fifth day of his widely publicised trial. For while the worst the defendant might have expected at the end of the salacious proceedings was a lengthy stint behind bars, his trial was instead brought to an abrupt halt by an unofficial death sentence. Incredibly, just twenty-four hours after his legal team made a successful application to Judge Bill White to suppress Chartres-Abbott’s address in Crown evidence, on the grounds that his personal security might be at risk, the alleged rapist – who supposedly told his victim he was a vampire who had lived on blood for over 200 years – was gunned down in cold blood outside his suburban home.

Chartres-Abbott was on his way to another day of grim and sleazy evidence at Melbourne’s County Court, when he was ambushed with his pregnant girlfriend and father-in-law outside his Reservoir home on the morning of 4 June 2004. While one of the two accomplices created a distraction by attacking Chartres-Abbott’s father-in-law, the other quickly opened fire on the gigolo, who had pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape and to two further counts of assault on one of his female clients.

Later that day, the jury who had been hearing evidence in his trial were discharged by the judge without a verdict. Judge Bill White offered each of the jurors counselling with a court-associated therapist before discharging them.

As they left the precincts of the County Court, speculation was already mounting that the alleged vampire’s slayer might be a professional hit man. This latest kink, in an already kinky saga, was poised to spark the biggest scandal in the history of the Victorian police force.

The police launched a major manhunt and issued descriptions of the killers, who had disappeared on foot into Bedford Street, vanishing behind the nearby Broadway Shopping Centre, as speedily as they had arrived in Howard Street, Reservoir at 8.45 a.m.

A theory began to circulate that the hit on Chartres-Abbott may have been ordered by underworld vice figureheads, who feared the alleged vampire might have cut a deal with authorities in exchange for information about the illegal production of snuff movies – macabre films where the deaths depicted are real. Others wondered if the man on trial might have held crucial information implicating supposedly corrupt members of the police force in illegal underworld activities. And while the speculation gathered momentum in the Melbourne media, the murder also prompted questions in high places about how the killers knew the gigolo’s whereabouts, and what the connections were that allegedly linked both a serving police officer and a former detective to the murder.

After days of unfolding salacious drama surrounding the trial – which included the discharge of a first jury after one of its members sought leave to be released for personal reasons; the empanelment of a new jury and the second judge being forced to reprimand one of the jurors for an impromptu ‘walkabout’ – the slaying of supposed self-confessed vampire Chartres-Abbott brought a sudden violent end to his sordid, secret double life, which he had allegedly concealed even from his own mother.

What his mother, Nancy Bowen, failed to reveal when pressed by media for a reaction to her son’s execution, was that Chartres-Abbott’s seedy links to the sex industry had first been sown by his father, who had run a Brisbane brothel while the impressionable youngster was growing up.

However, none of his bereaved relatives could recall any signs of the fascination with the dark subculture of vampirism, or any hints of the bloodthirsty traits he would later be accused of, ever surfacing during his early years. According to one of his sisters, the close-knit brood of several siblings had led an unremarkable and ordinary family life, sharing their time between their mother’s Lismore home in New South Wales and their father’s home in Brisbane.

Chartres-Abbott was an impressionable adolescent, but it was his growing religious interests that were best remembered by his sister Joanne, who later recalled that he had studied the Bible and joined the congregation of the local church, where he developed a passion for the Christian faith.

His attendance at church dwindled markedly after he met his wife Nadine, who gave birth to a baby son in the late 1990s. The young family moved to Melbourne, planning to make a new life for themselves. While the marriage broke up in 2000, Chartres-Abbot still kept in regular contact with his former wife and young son.

After discovering that one of his siblings was making a handsome living in the sex industry, it was just a matter of time before Chartres-Abbott decided to try his hand at it himself. Plying his trade on the seedy backstreets of Melbourne appealed to him as an easy way to supplement his modest income in the retail trade, and later in the world of telephone sales.

It was in telephone sales that he first met Kathleen Price, a young trainee nurse. They later moved in to the suburban house in Reservoir whose address would soon find its way onto a hitman’s radar. Apparently, Chartres-Abbott’s dramatic change of career was his fast track to owning a dream home in the country and funding a better life for his new love.

While he began his new career as a streetwalker, Chartres-Abbott quickly progressed from a rent boy and prostitute to a new position with a city escort agency. There his client bookings soon doubled, largely due to his growing reputation for kinky sadomasochistic sex, which made him popular with both male and female clients.

Kathleen Price would later tell the court she was well aware of the nature of her de facto’s line of work, which kept him out all night entertaining clients. She was familiar too, she had admitted, with the tools of his trade, which he stored in a black leather bag, complete with a record book for clients paying by credit card, in a cupboard at their home. These tools included an assortment of bondage gear (masks, whips and cuffs), sex toys and lubricants for the pleasure of both his agency clients and his growing list of private clients.

Bookings for the baby-faced gigolo came thick and fast, earning him $300 an hour or $2000 a night for his own special brand of S&M services. Meanwhile, Chartres-Abbott’s own fascination with the seedy world of kinky sex services soon began to border on obsession. For this highly sexually charged young gigolo with a mean streak and a taste for bondage and sadistic, on-the-edge sex, working long hours as an escort soon wasn’t enough. He was passionate about a career in which inflicting pain became an integral part of his sexual services, but he also enjoyed his own visits to brothels, where he would spend the money he’d earned on rougher, kinkier sex for his own gratification.

By August 2002, Chartres-Abbott had begun having regular sexual interludes with a Thai woman who had dabbled in the sex industry herself, and who soon became one of his regular clients. These steamy regular sex sessions would descend into a dangerous liaison for the pretty thirty-year-old, who quickly realised that the young Aussie gigolo liked his sex rough – but for Chartres-Abbott it would prove a fatal attraction.

It’s doubtful that Chartres-Abbott ever imagined the depths his desires would lead him to when the woman first contacted the Cloud Nine male-to-male agency in mid-July 2002, seeking a young blonde Aussie male for hot sex. She had found the agency’s telephone number in the Yellow Pages, she told the Melbourne County Court at his trial the following May. The woman’s first encounter with the handsome gigolo took place later that same day at the Richmond apartment she shared with a fellow Thai girlfriend.

Her English might have been broken, but her message was clear when she took the stand in court to explain her motivations for ringing the number in the ad.

‘I wanted sex,’ she told the jury, just days before her alleged rapist’s murder. ‘I felt horny!’

After emerging from a long-term relationship, the woman, who had been living in Melbourne for seven years, felt that ringing an escort agency for paid sex was a far safer bet than trawling the crowded bars and nightclubs of the city, where a date rapist was known to be preying on young single women.

The woman, who as the victim of a sex crime cannot be identified, recalled that Chartres-Abbott arrived with his driver-cum-minder, who he quickly dispatched in the car to pick up a bottle of red wine and some cigarettes. Meanwhile, it was down to business for the seasoned gigolo, who peeled off his trademark full-length charcoal-coloured overcoat and black leather boots, and headed into the bedroom with his black bag containing the tools of his trade.

He had introduced himself as Simon, and as they sipped red wine and she smoked, he stripped off and delved into his bag of tricks, where his bondage gear included a whip, handcuffs and ankle cuffs, a rope and a black leather mask. He also carried condoms, lubricants and gels, and a variety of sex toys such as dildos and vibrators, used for the purposes of spicing up the steamy sex that made him so popular with male and female clients. They spent the next four hours engaging in what the woman would later describe as ‘normal’ sex. The raunchy romp included vaginal and oral sex, and stimulation with a vibrator. She remembered him trying to kiss her, though she said she didn’t allow kissing because she kept that pleasure for her permanent intimate relationships.

But the woman would tell the jury how the session suddenly turned heavy when the gigolo took the lead and began performing an anal sex act on her, while holding a pillow over her face. She said both the smothering and the sex made her feel uncomfortable and she immediately instructed him to stop.

‘I don’t do things like that with people I don’t know,’ she said in sworn evidence.

After sex, she recalled them chatting, and explained that he had revealed his real name was Shane. He also told her that he had married young, owned dogs and had a six-year-old son, but that the marriage had ended and he was now in another relationship with a nineteen-year-old. The session cost the woman $880 for four hours, which she paid him on arrival, she said.

The woman then went on to detail how she had telephoned Chartres-Abbott on his mobile five days later, booking his services again. This time, she said, she had phoned him privately, and since he wouldn’t be paying a cut to the escort agency, she expected a discounted price too. He arrived later that day for sex, which again took place at the apartment in Richmond. This time she paid around $400.

She called to make a third booking shortly afterwards, again calling his mobile. She organised to meet him at the Saville Hotel in Commercial Road, South Yarra, this time, because her girlfriend had returned from holiday and there was little privacy at the flat. They met at 9 p.m., and on this occasion, she stated in evidence, Chartres-Abbott had suggested doing ‘something a bit different’. This had involved him tying her hands at the wrists, to the head of the bed, and then tying her spread-eagled legs by the ankles to the foot of the bed while she was stripped naked. He then had sex with her, but again put a pillow over her face for two minutes during intercourse. She complained about it again, saying she felt uncomfortable.

‘I feel scared because I didn’t know he was going to do that,’ she told the jury. ‘He later stopped, saying: “It’s good isn’t it, that you don’t know what’s going to happen?”’

Later, after the sex was over, the woman revealed in broken English how Chartres-Abbott went on to tell her that he was a vampire who lived on blood. She claimed he had shown her how to suck blood from an arm and invited her to join him as one of the ‘undead’.

‘He say he was a vampire and his girlfriend know he’s a vampire,’ she elaborated. ‘He said he had been living before in this city, in Melbourne, before it had been built…he say he live here before a long time more than anybody and he drank blood…to live.’

The woman recalled that in mid-August Chartres-Abbott telephoned her. This time during the conversation he chatted openly about his problems with his girlfriend and money. ‘He say he want to see me again…but his girlfriend not going to be happy,’ she said.

On this occasion, the woman explained she was happy to meet, but didn’t expect to have to pay for his services, since he was the one initiating the sexual liaison.

‘I say I can see you again, but I’m not going to pay the same money,’ she told him. ‘If you want to see me, I see you but not money.’

She agreed that she would cover the expenses of the hotel only.

‘He say don’t give up on me,’ she told the jury.

But things were about to take a dark turn after the woman booked into the Saville Hotel in South Yarra again, for a steamy midnight interlude on 17 August 2002. The victim’s allegations about what took place behind the closed doors of Room 307 during the early hours of the morning would soon be hotly contested by Chartres-Abbott, who she accused of the sustained vicious beating and sadistic repeated rape, during which half of her tongue was ripped out.

The unfolding seedy tale which Chartres-Abbott’s lawyer likened to ‘a story worthy of Bram Stoker and a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie’ was to prove every subeditor’s dream: a handsome young gigolo vampire rapist with a taste for kinky sex and bondage and an unquenchable thirst for human blood, on trial for a gruesome attack on a sex-hungry woman guaranteed days of sensational headlines – but it was about to get even better. For, in a wacky counteroffensive, the accused man’s defence lawyer guaranteed even more salacious reading when he claimed that the steamy sex had been part of a grooming exercise, as the woman had been enlisted to recruit him for a starring role in a sinister snuff movie: his on-screen death was intended to provide perverted titillation for a deviant black market audience with a taste for death.

Ironically, the burger-with-the-lot court case did culminate in the alleged vampire rapist’s death, and the grim details of the death were played out to a far wider audience, as headlines speculated on the motivation behind the murder. It would subsequently turn out to have been an organised underworld hit, orchestrated by the victim’s former boyfriend as revenge for the sadistic rape that put her in hospital for nearly three weeks. The vampire gigolo’s death would continue to make news for more than six years, culminating in more sensational revelations. It would be revealed that the man who had contracted the murder was now on the run, with a $1 million police bounty on his head; and worse, that the investigation had unearthed strong links between the underworld, the murder and corruption within the Victorian police force.

But both the gigolo and his client were unaware of the looming events on Friday 16 August 2002, as she booked the hotel then made her way to the Melbourne’s Southbank. Here she met her flatmate and a gay Thai businessman who was in Australia with a party of tourists from Bangkok on a gambling junket to Melbourne’s Crown Casino.

The woman was with the pair when Chartres-Abbott called to confirm their booking at the same hotel in South Yarra where they had had sex a few days earlier. She told the court that while she had agreed to cover the cost of the hotel, she had already told the gigolo that she had no intention of paying for his services that night, since he had been the one who had initiated the sex.

She recalled booking in at the hotel in the company of the gay male friend, and waiting there for Chartres-Abbott to arrive. The friend was still there, she said, when Chartres-Abbott strode in, his long hair tied back in a pony tail, clutching his bag of tricks. She also remembered introducing her friend to the gigolo, but said her friend refused her offer of a drink and left as soon as the escort arrived.

It would later be revealed that when Chartres-Abbott and his private driver–cum–minder, Alex Winters, had arrived at the hotel, the client had been running late, so they had sat outside in the car park waiting for her. Winters, who juggled escort driving in between working as a part-time pizza delivery man, had been Chartres-Abbott’s driver on and off for two years. He recalled picking up Chartres-Abbott, in his long overcoat, from his home earlier that night for the drive across town. He told the court in evidence that Chartres-Abbott was carrying the black bag of bondage gear and two bottles of red wine, which he had seen him pull from a cupboard at his home. Winters recalled sitting in the car and observing an Asian couple, a man and woman, chatting in the hotel’s reception. He said that Chartres-Abbot seemed unsure, as he looked out from the passenger seat, whether the woman with the male at the reception desk was his client or not. He was confused because it was unusual for clients to bring a third party along.

When the couple vanished upstairs in the lift, Chartres-Abbott called the woman’s mobile as she waited in the hotel room, asking who she was with. He appeared even more puzzled when she insisted the person with her, who had been tall, had short-hair and worn a suit, was a girlfriend. The gigolo cautiously climbed out of the car, asking Winters, ‘Did that look like a girl to you?’ They both agreed it was definitely a man, and Winters said that the escort appeared worried as he disappeared into the hotel.

Some moments later, Winters recalls Chartres-Abbott returning to the car, expressing his concern because he had overheard a man and a woman arguing in Thai in the hotel room.

‘It was definitely a guy because I could hear his voice from the other side of the door,’ he told his friend.

He telephoned the woman again, asking ‘Why did you say that it was your girlfriend not a guy?’ said Winters in evidence.

Winters said that from the conversation that followed the client appeared to have admitted that the person in the room with her was male. But she assured the gigolo he was a gay friend. Apparently she had lied because she hadn’t wanted to freak Chartres-Abbott out by admitting the friend was male. Anyway, he was about to leave, she had assured him. After the call, Chartres-Abbott went back into the hotel.

‘He told me before he got out of the car that if I hadn’t heard from him in ten or fifteen minutes, that I was to go up and pull him out of the room,’ said the driver.

When Chartres-Abbot called Winters a few minutes later, the driver asked if the third person in the room was male or female, and was told ‘No, it’s a guy but it’s alright, it’s under control,’ the driver told the jury.

In the phone call, he said the escort instructed him to leave, saying he would be at the hotel all night and would catch the train home the next morning. Winters explained that as an escort driver it was unusual for him to leave an escort alone while working. He usually hung around in the car until the job was over, for security reasons. Then he would drive the escort home from work again. The previous week, when Chartres-Abbott had met the same client at the same hotel, he had waited for several hours before driving him home before dawn. Winters revealed his role involved providing some counselling for the sex workers, who did a ‘pretty mind-intensive job’ and often needed someone to talk to. ‘I’m usually it,’ he told the court. But he said that on this occasion Chartres-Abbott had already told him in advance he wouldn’t be requiring a lift because it was looking like an all-night job. Winters explained that he knew the Thai woman was among Chartres-Abbott’s list of private clients, which meant the agency did not take a cut of his earnings.

In cross-examination, the Thai woman claimed to be unable to recall the volley of phone calls between herself and the escort about the presence of the Thai man in the room. She told the jury she had known her gay friend for a year, he was over in Melbourne on a junket from Thailand, and had accompanied her to the hotel as a favour.

What wasn’t contested was that once in the room Chartres-Abbott called reception and asked for a bottle opener to be brought to the room. The trainee duty manager recalled taking the bottle opener up from the bar and hanging around outside the door while the couple inside the room opened the bottle of wine, so he could return downstairs with it. It consisted of a corkscrew and a small knife with a half-inch blade on it, he recalled.

The manager also remembered a second request from Chartres-Abbott, asking again for the bottle opener to be brought upstairs. This time it was so late the manger left it with the long-haired young man, suspecting no other guests would be opening wine at this hour of the night. He remembered overhearing a woman’s voice inside the room commenting that next time they should choose a better hotel.

According to the Thai victim, she remembered Chartres-Abbott arriving in his long dark overcoat with his black bag, and then drinking red wine with him. She vaguely recalled some sort of argument afterwards, about money, but was sketchy on the details, except that she recalled him getting angry. She suspected the argument had most likely been caused by her ongoing refusal to pay him for his sexual services, as previously discussed.

‘I don’t have any money that night,’ she told the jury, explaining that she had always paid for the session as soon as he had taken his clothes off. ‘Every time he take his jacket off he say, he asked me for money.’

She recalled Chartres-Abbott going to take a shower, but could recall nothing after that except waking up at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital seventeen days later.

But staff working at the Saville Hotel remembered clearly the grisly sight that greeted them when they went to Room 307 at 11.30 a.m. on the Saturday morning. The general manager, who had telephoned the room a little earlier to remind the occupants that they had to check out by 10.30 a.m. but received no reply, went up to the room an hour later to find out what was going on. He unlocked the door, using the hotel’s master key, and let himself in, surprised by the apparent untidiness of the room. He noticed that the curtains had been pulled off the railing above the window, and that the bed had been stripped clean of all traces of bed linen. When he glimpsed black ladies boots and clothes on the chair, he called out, asking if someone was in the bathroom.

As he glanced around the room, he noticed the body of a naked woman lying in the shower cubicle on top of a pile of bloodied bed linen. The blood-covered woman appeared to be breathing, he later told police, so he raced downstairs to call emergency services, warning housekeeping staff to stay out of the room, which was now a crime scene.

‘She was very badly beaten up and there was blood around her face and also on the bedding,’ he later said in evidence.

The arrival of the police and paramedics shortly afterwards was a delicate situation, he recalled, because there was a ladies convention taking place on the hotel’s first floor which was about to break for lunch.

Paramedics attending the scene just after midday found the young victim lying in a foetal position in the shower, seriously injured and covered in blood. She bore signs of bite marks on her thigh, a serious haematoma on the side of her head, and a large amount of blood bubbling from her mouth. The medical team pulled the unconscious woman out of the shower on a blanket, lifting her onto the bedroom floor and off the wet bloodstained linen that had been piled into the shower cubicle with her. The patient’s eyes were badly swollen and there was a large amount of blood and mucus around her nose, mouth and lips. The paramedics attached her to a heart monitor and gave her oxygen before lifting her out of the room on spine boards and into the waiting ambulance. From there she was rushed to the nearby Alfred Hospital, where the emergency team was on standby.

On closer examination, the badly bruised young woman was found to have been raped and bitten, and bore a large haematoma-like swelling to the right side of her skull. More disturbingly, 5 centimetres of her tongue was missing, apparently bitten off by her attacker. Police officers called to the scene had described the patient making groaning noises, and observed blood bubbling from her mouth as she tried to speak.

Forensic experts found smudges of blood on the far wall near the bed, and blood on the door architrave leading into the bathroom. The room smelled heavily of cigarettes, a used condom was found in a bin in the bathroom, and a glass bottle lay on the shower floor. Cigarette stubs matching the variety smoked by the victim were found in an ashtray, along with another different cigarette stub.

While the badly injured woman insisted she had no recollection of what went on in Room 307 after drinking wine that night, Chartres-Abbott’s defence case hinged on the argument that her accusations were a fiction; that the defendant had not been responsible for the vicious attack on the woman, who had been brutalised by a third party, who must have entered the hotel room, raping and beating the victim, after the gigolo left.

According to Chartres-Abbott’s defence lawyer, Alan Hands, the escort left his client sleeping when he wandered out of the hotel’s front main entrance at 5 a.m., waving to the trainee manager as he went. But in cross-examination the manager had no recollection of the distinctive-looking Aussie, with his long dark overcoat and long blond pony tail, leaving. He explained that at that time in the morning he would have had to activate the front entrance door to allow Chartres-Abbott out, by pressing a button behind the reception desk, which he had no recollection of ever doing.

The Crown had claimed that when police searched the victim’s room the following morning, it was discovered that the victim’s underwear was missing, and that her handbag bearing her driver’s licence, credit cards and wallet had also disappeared, along with her Ericsson mobile phone.

The victim’s flatmate told the jury in evidence that she had spoken to her friend twice in the early hours of 17 August. She said she had returned home from shift work after 1 a.m. and had become worried when she realised her friend wasn’t yet home. The woman said she had called her friend on her mobile, only to be told she was at the hotel with the male escort and would be spending the night with him. The call took place at around 1.45 a.m., she said, recalling how her girlfriend called her again from the hotel about 15 minutes later, and had put Chartres-Abbott on the telephone to talk to her. She recalled the gigolo telling her he had visited her home in Richmond and commenting on a photo he had seen of her young son. He told her he had a son of a similar age, she said. The conversation ended with her girlfriend assuring her she would be home the following morning. She claimed her friend sounded perfectly happy and normal in that conversation, which took place around 2.15 a.m.

Chartres-Abbott was at home with his girlfriend when six officers from the Sexual Crimes Squad appeared on his doorstep on 20 August at 6.20 a.m., armed with a search warrant. Despite his protests that he had not raped his victim and was not responsible for the brutal attack, a subsequent search found the victim’s blood on his long overcoat, and when police rang her mobile number, the ringing phone was discovered inside Chartres-Abbott’s black bag.

He was arrested and taken to the headquarters of the Sexual Crimes Squad in St Kilda Road, where the suspect gave a ‘no comment’ interview. The interview was suspended while Chartres-Abbott called his father and his lawyer.

The evidence, maintained the Crown, strongly pointed to the man in the dock, now wearing a smart suit and sporting a short conservative haircut. He had been the only person in the room with the woman that night, and was known for his appetite for sadistic sexual practices. His clothing bore incriminating evidence in the form of the victim’s blood. More damning still, just days before the violent assault, he had told the client that he was a 200-year-old vampire with a thirst for blood – surely it was no coincidence that in the bloody attack that followed, part of the victim’s tongue had been ripped out. Also, how could he explain the victim’s missing phone being found in his black bag? The dark picture the Crown carefully painted was one in which a kinky game involving sadomasochistic sex had gone too far, deteriorating on the night in question into a violent, gruesome attack that had also left the unconscious victim with evidence of his bite marks on her thigh.

What the jury were never told was that an S&M video, seized from Chartres-Abbott’s home during the police raid, supported the Crown’s claims of a sadomasochistic tongue fetish. There was lengthy discussion in the jury’s absence, as the Crown sought to introduce the damning evidence of the front cover of the DVD, which showed a woman with a protruding tongue, clipped with a clothes peg, in a provocative pose. The Crown Prosecutor, George Slim, argued that this cover revealed an uncanny fascination with a very unusual fetish – more than a coincidence given the nature of the case. But the judge ruled the DVD cover inadmissible, accepting the defence’s argument that this material could be highly prejudicial to the defendant.

Chartres-Abbott’s girlfriend, Kathleen Price, told the court that she had known the defendant for two years. She said she and her sister, Frances, were living with him at the time the woman was brutalised. Price, who worked in a nursing home, said she was fully aware that Chartres-Abbott worked as a prostitute for Cloud Nine, as well as another brothel that specialised in corrections and disciplinary style sex. She had arrived home on the night of the attack at around 11.30 p.m. and saw Chartres-Abbott just before he and Winters left for the private booking. She said she knew the booking was a private client who had been known to book him all night, so she decided to ring him the following morning to see if he was OK. It was almost light when she called him on his mobile between 4 and 5 a.m. on the Saturday morning to ask when he would be home.

Ms Price recalled it being daylight by the time he returned home a few hours later, with his work bag. He seemed fine, she told the jury, describing him undressing and climbing into bed beside her. The only mark she observed on him that morning was a large round bruise on his arm that he had claimed he’d got when he knocked himself on the bathroom towel rack.

‘I said “are you going to see her again in a few days?”’ she told the court. ‘And he said “probably”.’

A very different, equally ghastly picture that explained the motivation of the grisly crime was painted by defence lawyer Alan Hands during his cross-examination of the Crown’s key witnesses. Mr Hands argued not only that the evidence against the gigolo was purely circumstantial, but also pointed to the possibility that another person had raped and beaten the woman. It was the defence’s case that the Thai woman, a former sex worker herself, had been involved in the snuff movie business and had been enlisted to recruit Chartres-Abbott to star in an illegal film that would record his real death.

Mr Hands suggested to the victim’s gay male Thai friend that his tourist business was not his only line of work, and that he was involved in the illegal underground production of snuff films, an allegation the witness strongly denied. The witness maintained he didn’t even know what a snuff movie was, and that he operated a legitimate business, which involved him taking Thai tourists to casinos around the world, including Melbourne’s Crown Casino.

He agreed he had met the Thai woman in Bangkok a year earlier, after she had travelled to her homeland from Melbourne. They had met at his home, but he denied ever asking her to recruit people for snuff movies.

It was further suggested to the witness that on the night of the rape and brutal assault on the victim, the man had gone to the Saville Hotel with her for the sole purpose of checking out the gigolo as potential talent for the proposed snuff movie. The witness denied this, insisting he had walked the woman into the hotel for her own safety, before going off to a nightclub. He denied that a third person, another Thai man, had been with him when he had walked into the hotel, and insisted he alone had walked the woman there.

Mr Hands suggested to the victim in cross-examination that the male the gigolo had overheard her arguing with in Thai was not a friend, but a business associate involved in snuff movies.

‘No,’ insisted the woman, who also denied an argument had taken place.

‘In the course of the evening you spoke to my client in Thai, not English, is that correct?’ asked Mr Hands. ‘And you called him Mark?’

‘I can’t remember,’ responded the victim.

‘You were upset this evening and my client asked you why you were upset?’

The victim said she couldn’t remember this.

‘And you said “don’t worry, it’s a personal matter”?’

‘No,’ insisted the victim.

Mr Hands went on to say that Chartres-Abbott persisted, asking her repeatedly why she had been arguing with her friend.

‘You told my client that he was being recruited to appear in a movie in which he was to be killed. You told him that didn’t you?’ pressed Mr Hands.

‘No,’ insisted the witness, who claimed she didn’t know what a snuff movie was. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You told him that you had developed an affection for him, that you liked him. Did you say that?’ asked Mr Hands.

‘Yes, I just say I like him,’ agreed the witness.

‘And that you didn’t want him to get hurt…you didn’t want him to be in the film where he would be killed?’

‘I never had that conversation anyway, sorry,’ replied the victim.

‘And that’s what the argument was about…you had gone cold on the idea of recruiting my client, hadn’t you?’

‘No,’ insisted the victim.

‘And besides, you wanted to get out of the business involving snuff movies anyway. That’s what you said, wasn’t it?’

‘No,’ said the woman.

She further denied that when her gay friend left he had indicated, in front of Chartres-Abbott, that he may come back later. And she denied that the escort had left some rope with her when he finally left, telling her she could use it for some bondage sex when her friend returned later.

‘No,’ she said.

The woman further rejected claims that she had invited Chartres-Abbott to go to Thailand with her and was upset when he had refused. She also denied that she was upset when he indicated he was leaving the hotel, after she had paid $400 for the session, or saying ‘go back to your girlfriend and your dogs’.

Under intense cross-examination, the woman further denied that during their previous kinky sex session at the hotel they had discussed a shared interest in the author Anne Rice’s works, in particular the book Interview with the Vampire. The victim maintained she had not only never heard of Anne Rice nor read any of her books, but she had also never seen the movie Interview with the Vampire.

When Mr Hands turned his attention to the sexual relationship between the client and the gigolo, she said that on every occasion, until the last sexual interlude, she had initiated the meeting. She had been the one who had booked the gigolo for sex. But she denied being the person who determined what sexual acts would take place between them. She further denied initiating rough sex or being agreeable to it, and hotly disputed allegations that she had been the one to initiate biting. She also denied she had allowed the escort to kiss her, insisting that this was something she reserved only for her serious intimate relationships.

‘What I am suggesting to you is that each session started with rough sex,’ argued, Mr Hands. ‘That there was biting, use of the dildo, there was some bondage, tying up and after you had had sex like that, you became more affectionate and you actually did kiss him and he kissed you, but this usually happened after the rough sex.’

‘No,’ insisted the victim.

She further denied suggestions that during a previous encounter in Richmond she had allowed the gigolo to tie her hands behind her back and place a pillow slip over her head, before having sex with him.

‘You see what I’m suggesting to you is that you were calling the shots, you were deciding what took place, you were saying “let’s do this. I’m paying the money, let’s do this” and he did what you asked him on each occasion.’

The victim denied this had happened.

Another story emerged during the defence’s cross-examination to bolster their case that a third party could have raped and attacked the woman. While the duty manager had no recollection of seeing the tall gigolo entering the hotel during the early part of his shift at midnight, or leaving the next morning at 5 a.m. as he claimed to have done, Donald Carrott, the Saville Hotel’s general manager, did recall seeing two Asian men with the victim, just before she checked in. He said in evidence that he remembered the victim entering the hotel with an Asian man shortly after midnight, but that there was another Asian man trailing a few metres behind them. After the couple checked in, the man had loitered for about ten minutes in the hotel driveway, before looking around and walking away. Mr Carrott said he didn’t feel too concerned, as it was common for people from the nearby supermarket to smoke and drink in that area.

When pressed about the attendance of a second Thai man walking her to the hotel that night, the victim insisted there was only one other person – her gay male friend. While the story the defence was suggesting to the jury implicated another rapist in the crime, the victim remained adamant that the only man present that night was Chartres-Abbott.

‘You know who assaulted and raped you, don’t you?’ asked Mr Hands, bluntly.

‘Him,’ responded the victim, gesturing towards Chartres-Abbott.

‘It is not him, but you are too frightened to say, aren’t you?’

‘No – I have to be frightened?’ replied the witness.

It was the defence’s case that the woman was upset because of her refusal to keep her bosses happy and pressure the gigolo into appearing in a snuff movie.

Mr Hands would not only maintain that Chartres-Abbott had left the hotel at 5 a.m., but also that witnesses could confirm they had seen him at a West Melbourne brothel specialising in S &M, by 6.10 a.m. Mr Hands said in order to get across the city and attend the brothel by this time in the morning, he would have had to leave the Saville Hotel at the time he claimed. This left ample opportunity between 5 and 11.30 a.m., when the victim was found unconscious, for another person to have committed the crime.

A prostitute from the West Melbourne brothel, who specialised in ‘correction’ and discipline, gave evidence that confirmed Chartres-Abbott was negotiating her services at 6.10 a.m. It turned out to be a prolonged affair, she said in evidence, because there were problems with his visa card payment and sex did not take place until that was sorted out.

Evidence from the trainee manager and the general manager of the Saville Hotel confirmed that there was a security video operating that night, but it only covered the reception and bar area. And while there was an alarm system attached to external doors of the hotel’s fire escape, it hadn’t been working on the night the victim was attacked. Just the same, while it was impossible for an intruder to enter the hotel from the outside, anyone in the hotel could possibly have left unseen by the fire escape.

In the Crown’s eyes, this was a kinky sadistic sex session that turned extremely violent. They argued that the defendant’s alibi that he had left before any attack took place simply crumbled in the face of the forensic evidence of the victim’s blood on his clothing, and her missing mobile phone in his bag. His explanation that attempted to cast the blame elsewhere stretched from the bizarre to beyond belief; the elaborate story about snuff movies was pure fiction, claimed the Crown. Chartres-Abbott was the only man in the room with the victim that night and he had been lying all along.

But the death of the supposed self-proclaimed vampire rendered the argument about whether the evidence would have been sufficient to convict him of the crimes, or flimsy enough to have seen him acquitted redundant by the time the County Court resumed for business on the morning of 4 June.

Ironically, the afternoon before his murder, the jury had been discharged early to allow legal argument relating to tape-recorded evidence of his interview, and other evidence, that was to have been played to the court the following morning.

Mr Hands, who only a week earlier had withdrawn a bid to have media coverage of the trial suppressed, had successfully argued that the material due to be presented into evidence detailed the defendant’s address and should be suppressed for his own protection. Judge Bill White had agreed to his application but it was already too late. The tape-recorded interview with the alleged vampire would never make it into court, because within twenty-four hours the vampire slayer had struck, sparking a massive manhunt. Chartres-Abbott’s death did not just set in motion a major murder investigation, but also an internal inquiry into how the killers knew where to find him.

The story was all over the internet and making its way on to radio news by the time Judge White took his seat on the bench on 4 June to hear Crown Prosecutor, George Slim, reveal in the jury’s absence that the accused man had been shot just before 9 a.m.

Judge White later told the jury cautiously: ‘What I have to announce is not confirmed one hundred per cent, so I’d ask that you keep that in mind. It appears highly probably that the accused man was killed this morning by being shot, as I understand it, on his way to court here, on his leaving his home address. Now that is not confirmed one hundred per cent at this stage but it seems that’s well up in the high nineties as far as percentages are concerned.’

Judge White then explained that the reason he had sent them home early the previous afternoon was to address legal argument requesting that the defendant’s home address should be removed from the tape-recorded material they had been due to hear as part of the Crown’s evidence.

‘So the tragedy of the situation is it appears that somebody did find out his address and there have been fairly dramatic consequences as a result,’ he said, discharging them without verdict.

‘Though it is a tragic thing that this sort of thing can occur in our state, it appears that it has in this case,’ he said. ‘I can only express the court’s sympathy to the family and friends of the accused, and no doubt it probably applies to everybody basically in the courtroom.’

It had been a ‘very unusual trial’ he said, offering each of the jurors professional counselling in the wake of the tragic events.

The Crown later pointed out in open court that it was speculative as to what the circumstances surrounding the killing might be. Mr Slim cautioned that it wouldn’t be correct to assume or infer that whoever was responsible had only just discovered the address in the past couple of days.

‘They could have known for ages,’ argued Mr Slim. ‘We don’t know who did it and what the circumstances are.’

Mr Slim added that it would be very ‘idle misguided speculation’ for anyone who had heard Judge White’s remarks to the jury to infer that the defendant’s address had only just recently been discovered, or that the crime had something to do with the attempts to suppress it over the past few days. The judge agreed, stating that the slaying of the alleged vampire in an ambush in broad daylight might be pure coincidence and have had nothing to do with the trial.

But the media were not so pragmatic. Their stories the following day speculated about the possible motivation for the defendant’s death midway through a particularly gruesome and sensational trial. ‘Hitmen Kill Male Prostitute’ screamed Melbourne’s Age, and the case made headlines as far afield as Sydney, where the Sydney Morning Herald declared more sensationally: ‘“Vampire” Keeper of City Sex Secrets Killed in Ambush’.

Victoria Police, already under pressure for answers, stepped up the manhunt, issuing sketchy descriptions of the two assassins wanted for the ambush and killing of Chartres-Abbott, who it was confirmed had died of a bullet wound to the neck. But while a police helicopter and members of the dog squad joined dozens of police to scour the area for clues, the trail was already cold.

The Homicide Squad’s Detective Senior Sergeant Clive Rust told Melbourne’s Herald Sun the suspects, believed to be in their twenties, appeared to have planned the hit and had been lying in wait before the ambush. Newspapers described the men police wanted to interview in connection with the crime: one had been wearing a beanie and scarf, the other had pulled his jumper over his face. It appeared to be a vicious, premeditated and callous attack, said Rust.

While the bereaved family set about planning a low-key funeral for the high-profile defendant, Chartres-Abbott’s 87-year-old father, William, told the Melbourne press his son had been confident of being acquitted and had not expressed any fears for his safety.

Meanwhile, neighbours remained shocked, maintaining that Chartres-Abbott had given no hint of his sordid secret double life.

‘He was a clean-cut young bloke. I just can’t believe he is dead. He was just like everyone else,’ his neighbour, Phil Lee, told journalists from the Herald Sun on 5 June 2003.

The local pizza shop owner described him as being polite but a bit ‘unusual’. He had worn his trademark long dark overcoat even in the heat of summer, he said. Meanwhile the woman who took bookings for the Cloud Nine agency confirmed that over the two-and-a-half years Chartres-Abbott had been with the agency, the bubbly intelligent young man had been a favourite among male clients. But he had also been a hit with the women, she said.

One month after his slaughter, his mother, Nancy, broke her silence, telling the Herald Sun, that she believed her son had been murdered to protect the identity of the victim’s real rapist.

‘I want them bastards caught,’ she said in her exclusive interview on 20 July 2003, which ran under the headline ‘He was innocent – that’s why he was gunned down…mum defends vampire son’.

‘How would you feel if it was your child?’ said Nancy Bowen sadly. ‘Wouldn’t you want the same thing?’

The heartbroken mother went on to insist that her son had been murdered to hide the truth, adding that the vampire story did not reflect his true nature.

‘He was a sweet, caring, loving person,’ she insisted. His seven-year-old son was distraught about his father’s death and was ‘suffering’.

‘I knew he was innocent of those crimes and I believe that’s why he was gunned down because I reckon they knew the truth was coming out, the truth about the whole thing, who really did this thing,’ she said.

It was the murdered man’s mother’s theory that her son’s killers were the same criminals who had raped the young Thai woman and cut her tongue out. And she stated that if her son had been guilty of the horrible crimes he had been accused of, it made no sense for him to have been killed.

‘There’s no way in the world he would have been killed, because they would have let him take the rap,’ she insisted. She claimed she didn’t believe her son ever knew who the real rapist was and said he had ignored the pleadings of his former wife, Nadine, to flee Melbourne.

‘He had said “No, I’m not going to take off. I’m innocent. If I take off they’re going to think I’m guilty,”’ said Ms Bowen, who protested that she had known nothing about his secret double life until a few months before his murder.

After learning of his work as a gigolo, she said she had warned him that ‘evil attracts evil’ and had predicted it would get him into serious trouble. ‘He agreed with me,’ she told the journalist.

Ms Bowen said her son had told her that once the trial was over he would get a ‘normal’ job, and just days before his murder had indicated an intention to enrol in a TAFE course.

The article ended with Ms Bowen urging the public to come forward with any information, so that the killers would be caught before they harmed anyone else.

But while the Crime Stoppers hotline remained eerily quiet, the million dollar question about how the escort’s killers had known where to find their target was creating noisy shockwaves around the upper echelons of the crisis-ridden Victorian police force.

As the scandal grew, so did the tough questions, and the case took another unexpected twist in July 2006 when a seasoned gangland killer stepped out of the shadows saying he was the vampire slayer. But despite his unexpected confession to the murder, it wasn’t until later that the professional hitman implicated five police officers in the crime, including a serving detective and former member of the force.

Armed with the confession, in April 2007 Victoria Police joined forces with the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) to establish a new taskforce, codenamed Operation Briars, to investigate the male prostitute’s murder and the possible involvement of corrupt police. The Briars probe involved the launch of a covert phone-tapping operation, bugging the phone lines of some extremely high-ranking police officers. The secretly recorded conversations the taskforce operatives listened to were later played to a public inquiry held by the OPI. They uncovered a sordid trail leading up the ranks. At the ugly epicentre of the unfolding scandal, a strong connection had emerged between the gigolo’s murder, leading players of Melbourne’s underworld and corrupt police, who were accused of leaking confidential information from the secret murder investigation, down the ranks.

The crisis caused major upheavals in the force and morale spiralled downwards as swiftly as the public’s plummeting confidence in its law enforcement authority. On top of an exposé on the armed robbery squad, whose unethical business practices had been caught on video camera, and the subsequent disbanding of a drug squad that had been revealed to include some corrupt officers dealing drugs, these new explosive developments only fuelled the mounting crisis.

With morale at an all-time low, even the leadership of Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon, came under fire. It meant the show of public support from Police Minister Bob Cameron, who told media on 17 November 2007 that he had the utmost confidence in his most senior law enforcement figure, came too late to stem the turning tide.

The shockwaves gathered momentum in November 2007 when the OPI’s private inquiry became public. The media heard how high-level leaks in the confidential murder investigation had begun in August and had filtered down the ranks from a senior police official to alert a serving detective that he was under investigation by the taskforce. The OPI inquiry was also told that the series of leaks indicated that a number of other police officers may have acted improperly in relation to the Chartres-Abbott murder. The investigation, which had been sparked by the professional hitman’s claims that the murdered man’s address had been passed on by a policeman, revealed that the officer under scrutiny was Detective Sergeant Peter Lalor. It was alleged he had been tipped off that he was under investigation, through an intermediary. The tip-off had been generated by Victoria Police’s Media Director, Stephen Linnell, who, phone taps showed, had passed on sensitive information on the Chartres-Abbott murder to Assistant Commissioner of Victoria Police Noel Ashby, who in turn leaked the confidential information to the then Police Association secretary, Paul Mullett. Through a colleague, Mullett alerted Lalor that he was on the radar of Operation Briars.

The explosive allegations were revealed in tapes of the bugged conversations between Ashby, Linnell and Sergeant Paul Mullett, who in September 2007 were all ordered to appear before the OPI inquiry, which had previously been closed to public scrutiny.

Ironically, Ashby and Linnell were uncovered in the secret intercept, discussing whether their phones had been tapped by the OPI. Ashby was intercepted telling Linnell: ‘I have got some pretty good information today.’ He went on to reveal that nine phone lines had been tapped, wrongly assuming their own lines weren’t bugged. The police high flyer was then heard conspiring with his media director, Linnell – coaching him to evade questioning at the next day’s corruption inquiry hearing. It was illegal for anyone due to appear before the public inquiry to discuss their appearance, let alone the nature of the matters, with a third party. In the bugged conversations between Linnell and Ashby in August, Linnell shared confidential information about the Chartres-Abbott case and alerted the Assistant Commissioner to the fact that Paul Mullett’s telephone line had been bugged.

On 9 November 2007, two days after lying to the OPI hearing, Ashby announced his retirement and resigned in disgrace. Two days later, Linnell resigned, and by the end of the month, Mullett was suspended from his position but continued working for the police union. He too resigned in March 2009.

Amid the storm generated by the tapes, which also highlighted petty power struggles and backstabbing within the police force, Christine Nixon told a packed press conference that she was personally wounded by the scandal. She said breaches of confidence in a criminal investigation were ‘unforgiveable’. In a statement, she said that the reputation of some members of the Victoria Police should not tarnish an entire organisation of 14,000 officers. Only a very small number of these dedicated officers had breached the public’s trust, she assured the press. The force would move on and recover.

But the saga for Ashby, Mullett and Linnell, a former journalist who had headed the 100-strong police media unit, was not yet over. All three faced criminal charges arising from the inquiry, including perjury for lying to the OPI, conspiring to pervert the course of justice, unlawfully releasing confidential information, and being in breach of the Telecommunications (Interception) (State Provisions) Act 1998. All of the charges carried possible jail sentences.

In February 2010, the case against Ashby collapsed and the eleven counts of perjury he had been charged with were dropped. His legal team had successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the OPI failed to comply with the law when it set up its public and private hearings, and therefore all evidence stemming from those hearings was rendered invalid. Four days later, Justice Robert Osbourn upheld their argument and charges were dropped.

The case followed the collapse of the case against Mullett, who had his two perjury charges withdrawn the previous July. On the same day, on the back of the Ashby case, Linnell’s lawyers lodged paperwork appealing his convictions for perjury. While he had pleaded guilty to three counts of perjury and three of disclosing confidential information in March 2009, for which he had received an eight-month prison sentence suspended for two years, the Ashby ruling meant the same legal precedent applied and his convictions should be overturned. In June 2010, the Supreme Court finally agreed.

The botched investigation into the death of the fresh-faced so-called vampire gigolo, with its high-level leaks, had unearthed a trail of incompetence and unprofessionalism. But it was then the gangland killer’s claims brought the entire house of cards tumbling down. The claims implicating Mr Lalor also implicated his friend, a former detective sergeant called David Waters. The killer claimed he had spoken to Waters in the hope of gaining a better address for his intended target. There were allegations that Waters may have in turn contacted his friend in the force, Lalor, who the hitman later claimed helped him fake an alibi for the Chartres-Abbott slaying. The OPI inquiry had heard that Lalor had allegedly told his old mate Waters to keep a low profile after his tip-off that he was under investigation by Operation Briars.

Detective Sergeant Lalor, the great-great-grandson of the famous Eureka Stockade hero of the same name, had been working at Prahran Police Station on the day of the gigolo’s murder. Lalor was just starting his shift at 3 p.m. when the veteran killer arrived to hand himself in for arrest warrants issued against him for outstanding driving offences. The killer would later claim this was just a ruse to deflect any suspicion for the murder away from himself. He had handed himself in to Detective Sergeant Lalor, who filled out the appropriate paperwork but left the time blank. The hitman told taskforce detectives that this was because the officer was helping him to fake an alibi, an allegation Peter Lalor strongly denied. Lalor argued it was nothing more than coincidence that he found himself on the desk that day, and that the paperwork omission was a simple administrative oversight. Mr Lalor told media he had become the target of a political vendetta by Operation Briars because of his outspoken criticism of OPI and his support of Sergeant Mullett.

He later said that while he admitted sending damaging emails as part of an internal campaign to discredit a former Police Association president, he rejected all allegations linking him to the gigolo’s murder. Mr Lalor, who later retired on grounds of ill health in September 2009, following a suspension of nearly two years, told journalists he had never been charged in connection with the Chartres-Abbott murder or sanctioned over the internal emails, sent using the pseudonym Kit Walker. He maintained the case against him was based on the confession of a gangland killer with a long history of lying to the police. In the article, he admitted meeting the killer on four occasions, but denied that he had ever provided him with the male prostitute’s address or an alibi. To those who knew the career policeman well, it was widely felt he had been made a scapegoat during the worst crisis in Victoria Police’s history.

Meanwhile, as Mr Lalor vowed to fight on to clear his good name, the furore surrounding the gigolo vampire’s death continued to reverberate in the national press. In October 2009, the story took a new twist when Victoria Police launched an international manhunt, issuing a $1 million bounty for the man they believed to be responsible for the organised hit on Chartres-Abbott. Police appealed for the public’s help to find former butcher and Melbourne bouncer Mark Adrian Perry, aged forty-two, who they alleged was behind the shooting six years earlier.

Mark Perry was a gym junkie and a ladies man, whose weakness for Asian women had seen him involved with several Thai women, including the victim, who had been his former girlfriend for eighteen months. When they had met in 2000 she had been involved in the sex industry, but their relationship had ended shortly before her rape, and he had begun a new relationship with another Thai woman, who bore him a child. It was widely speculated that Perry might have been the same Mark Perry that Chartres-Abbott’s Thai client had been referring to on the night of the attack.

In a sensational exclusive in the Herald Sun on 25 October 2009, under the dramatic headline ‘$1 million hunt for vampire killer’, it was revealed that the ‘cunning fugitive’ was a ‘master of disguise’ who had been on the run for two years, aware the police wanted to question him about the gigolo’s murder.

Sightings of the known Victorian drug importer, who had once escaped a jail sentence for selling ecstasy in a 1998 drug bust, were reported around the country. He had last been seen in a Broadbeach café on Queensland’s Gold Coast on 31 August 2007 with a man who had been subpoenaed to appear at an Australian Crime Commission hearing to give evidence in the Chartres-Abbott case. It is alleged that Perry had been tipped off by the man accused of facilitating the murder, and he fled. Perry, who coincidentally hailed from Reservoir, where his alleged contract killers gunned the gigolo down, had strong underworld connections from his ten years in the drugs trade.

It was also known that the wanted man was a regular at Jupiter’s Casino on the Gold Coast, had lived in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and had strong links with Thailand, where he had once owned a property. At the time that Chartres-Abbott stood trial for the sadistic rape of his former Thai girlfriend, Perry was living in Perth. His new relationship ended in 2005 in the wake of the rape and the gigolo’s murder.

‘Perry is elusive and skilled at avoiding police,’ a police source told the Herald Sun. ‘He is likely to be living under an assumed name and may have changed his appearance.’

The article went on to say that Perry was ‘extremely adept at staying below the radar’.

‘He is well connected and has the ability to travel in and out of Australia illegally. He is well aware that we want to talk to him about this murder.’

Police speculated that the missing man could have changed his looks and adopted a fake name and fake travel documents. It was known that he had travelled the world in the past decade, making a comfortable living off illegal drugs, and passing from Asia through South America to Europe, often using false passports. It had been further ascertained by police that although he was a heterosexual charmer, he was known among the gay community for using his links to supply them with drugs.

Since becoming a fugitive, police claimed he ceased all contact with his daughter and his five siblings. The police source added that it was likely Perry had been emotionally affected by the attack on his ex-girlfriend, because he had only ended the relationship shortly before she was hurt. It was revealed that while the police had been compiling evidence for Chartres-Abbott’s trial Perry had approached several underworld figures with the offer of drugs and money to kill his former girlfriend’s attacker. He was struggling to enlist a hired gun until he turned to an old family friend he had grown up with, who is the son of a major Melbourne criminal. Perry’s long-term friend, who had moved from Melbourne to the Gold Coast, came up with the name of a professional gangland hitman who had been a major player in Melbourne’s underworld for years. It was agreed that the veteran Victorian ‘hired gun’ would carry out the organised hit with a fellow assassin. But the address given to the gunman for the target was the wrong one. If he was to fulfil the contract, he would need an updated address for the alleged vampire.

The hitman would later allege he organised to get that address during a lunch with Waters and his friend Lalor, who would also provide the alibi for him. All allegations continue to be denied by the police.

This already wild tale took a further twist when the seasoned hitman was later charged by the Purana Taskforce, which had been set up to smash organised crime in Melbourne. He was charged with the high-profile gangland murders of underworld patriarch Lewis Moran and another gangland figure, Lewis Caine, the former lover of Melbourne lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, in killings unrelated to the Chartres-Abbott case. By then, the hitman had already informed on his accomplice in the gigolo’s murder, detailing in his confession his own involvement in Chartres-Abbott’s murder, and telling police where to find the murder weapon. Detectives finally uncovered it from a hiding place on a Geelong beach.

While Perry went to ground, other developments in the case have brought some closure to the family of the baby-faced sexual sadist, whose murder brought an entire police force undone. In March 2008, the gunman who fired the fatal shots was sentenced to life in jail by the Victorian Supreme Court for the male gigolo’s murder. His name was suppressed by court order, and he was referred to during the proceedings only as ‘JP’. At his earlier guilty plea to the crime the previous year, it was said he had agreed to give evidence against two policemen he alleged were involved in the crime. The court had been told that the hit on Chartres-Abbott was a ‘revenge murder’ carried out by JP at the request of a friend who wanted the alleged rapist dead.

‘You carried out the murder at the request of a close associate of yours,’ said Justice Simon Whelan. The murder, observed the judge, was carried out because JP’s mate had told him that Chartres-Abbott was ‘an animal and a danger to other females’.

The court had heard claims that JP alleged he had been helped by two police officers, both before and after the killing. Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles, head of Operation Briars, told the court that JP had put himself at great risk by coming forward in the inquiry and implicating himself in a murder in which he had never been a suspect. In his entire thirty-two years in the force, he had never known a crim­inal prepared to give evidence against a member of the police force, said Iddles. He added that it was ‘an extraordinary step’ that had been crucial to the investigation.

Justice Whelan, in sentencing, said he took into account the earlier guilty plea, and noted JP’s cooperation with the authorities. But the serious nature of the crime meant only a life sentence was fitting, and he ordered that the shooter not be eligible for parole before May 2023.

‘The murder to which you have pleaded guilty was a callous, planned, premeditated execution,’ said Justice Whelan in sentencing.

Prosecutor Geoff Horgan, SC, had earlier told the court: ‘The rooting out of corrupt police practices is one of the highest, the very highest importance…you would have thought, Your Honour, as a matter of principle there can be nothing more important in the criminal law than the exposing of corrupt criminal practices by police officers of a major sort. What is involved here is of the very highest sort, that is, in a murder.’

Justice Whelan agreed and the resulting sentence did not add a day to the sentence of the hitman who was already serving time for the murders of Moran and Caine, or any extension to his earliest release date of May 2023. But while he might have earned brownie points with the police, JP will now spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder in prison, where his confession will have marked him as ‘a dog’ – the lowest of the low, in prison speak.

But while JP prepares to see out the next decade behind bars, one of the two former police officers he implicated in the case continued to cast his own doubts on whether the high-profile murder really had been solved.

‘I have been told the killers have gone running off down side streets, to get away,’ said retired detective, David Waters, in an interview with the Australian on 21 June 2010. ‘[JP] couldn’t run 10 metres…seriously, he can’t run!!’

He said he doubted that the supergrass career-criminal who had taken the rap for killing Chartres-Abbott really was his killer at all.

Whether Chartres-Abbott would ever have been proved to be the vampire rapist he was believed to be remains just as open to speculation.

While question marks continue to hang over the case, the elusive Perry, who put the contract out on the vampire gigolo, continues to avoid detection. With his illegally amassed fortune but lack of assets on paper, he leaves no electronic footprints that might provide police with a trail via computerised bank accounts and plastic cards. Instead, the master of disguises with a morbid dread of jail remains invisible to the law – and as elusive as the truth in what is one of the most bizarre criminal cases in Australian crime history.