by Gary Jubelin
Terry suffered a brain injury after being shot by rivals, but it didn’t stop him. He wound up making methamphetamine, the highly addictive drug known as ice, and was linked to two bikie gangs, the Gypsy Jokers and the Rebels. Terry used to drive ute-loads of meth down to Sydney from his property at Brewarrina, in the far north of New South Wales, and made a lot of money from these runs.
He married and later split from his wife. He got busted for drug production. Aged 53, he’d been due to be released from Silverwater Prison within weeks.
As part of that process, Terry was on day release, working at a smash-repair workshop run by one of his mates in Ingleburn, southwest Sydney. Ten days before his chopped-up body was discovered, three men dressed like cops arrived and showed Terry a police badge before one put on surgical gloves to search him. Witnesses said they put Terry in handcuffs and took him away in a blue Ford or possibly a Holden. Either way, the witnesses said it looked like a police car.
It wasn’t. Or at least, not a car belonging to the New South Wales police. Jaco checked more widely but none of the other, different law-enforcement bodies knew anything about what had taken place.
So had Terry faked his own arrest and gone on the run? Some in the cops believed it at first, but it didn’t make sense. Why run, says Jaco, when you’re about to be released?
That’s all we have. If it wasn’t the authorities who took Terry and he didn’t run, then he must have been abducted. It’s not much to go on, but it does tell us something: if Terry’s killers wanted him dead, they could have just walked up and shot him. It looks like they also wanted him alive first.
The fact there are at least three men involved in Terry’s disappearance also gives us a way in, if we can exploit it. Find one of those three and maybe he’ll roll over on the others. The third thing in our favour is the simple fact Terry’s body was discovered. ‘That’s a huge fuck-up by the offenders, buddy,’ says Jaco. Without that, the cops might have kept on thinking Terry staged his disappearance. Without a body, Homicide would not have been called.
I ask Jaco to pull up at an RSL, hoping to catch what is left of the fight, but when we arrive the place isn’t open. The radio says Ottke was landing body blows on Mundine in the seventh, but then the Australian came out with more aggression, advancing on the champion and getting in two right hands that put Ottke on the floor.
Jaco and I look at our potential suspects.
‘Buddy, there’s so much going on, we haven’t even got it all on [email protected] yet,’ says Jaco, referring to the new computer management system being introduced for major cases that I’d used for the first time a year before. It’s a more efficient way of managing the vast amounts of information, such as phone records, telephone intercept transcripts, photographs and witness statements that a big case collects and a big improvement on the systems that went before it. The difference from the old days, like in the beginning of the Bowraville investigation, when cops relied on card indexes, is vast.
Too often, back then, a suspect could fall between the gaps in these filing systems, such as when the list of names provided by a witness was not cross-referenced against a printout of vehicle registrations for example. The idea is that [email protected] will stop that happening, but even so Jaco says, ‘We’re just being overwhelmed with information.’
The list of potential suspects he’s drawn up so far looks like a Who’s Who of the worst people in New South Wales: bikies, murderers and organised-crime figures. Being a crook himself meant Terry mixed with plenty of other crooks, which is dangerous enough, and Jaco says he was also an informant for seven different law-enforcement agencies.
Seven! If any one of those connections had got out, it would have made Terry a target.
Our job will be to work through this long list of suspects, looking at which of them had the motive, opportunity and capability to carry out the killing. For starters, Jaco says, the Rebels bikie gang are said to have somehow got hold of a police document suggesting Terry was an informer.
Near Kendall, just south of Port Macquarie, I ask Jaco to pull off the road outside the Kew Hotel and run inside. At least they’re open, but not showing the boxing.
Jaco can’t stop smiling as I walk back to the car, shoulders slumped and finally resigned to missing the match’s conclusion. As we head back onto the Pacific Highway, he says Terry’s name also came up on [email protected] as a person of interest in another unsolved murder: the killing of a seemingly blameless old couple, Anthony and Frances Perish, shot dead in their backyard in Leppington, southwest Sydney, almost a decade earlier, in 1993.
It’s a strange case, he says. Both victims were shot outside the house then carried into their bedroom and left lying on their separate beds. It is a strange way to finish off a killing. Almost touching. No one knows who did it.
Jaco’s already spoken to one of the detectives who worked on the case, who told him one of the couple’s grandsons, Andrew Perish, believed that Terry was the killer, though if he was, any motive is uncertain. Perish is also a former president of the Campbelltown chapter of the Rebels.
The cops interviewed Terry about the killings when he was in prison earlier this year, after an anonymous caller to a local police station also claimed he was responsible. He denied any involvement, claiming his ex-wife was spreading rumours following their breakup. Terry said she was trying to get him knocked.
There was no evidence to back this up, says Jaco, but it widens the pool of potential suspects even further.
From Kendall, the road runs through thick, deserted forest before turning east towards the white beaches and blue ocean that run along New South Wales’ Mid North Coast. It’s a beautiful stretch of country and one I know well from the years spent driving up here to work on the Bowraville murders, which took place just over an hour away from where we are. I also have happy memories of holidays in Port Macquarie with Debbie and the kids. Days spent running in and out of the surf together, or just hanging out as a family in the garden. I know the place, it’s comfortable. It feels good to be returning.
That feeling ends when we arrive. By the time I find a pub to watch the fight, it’s over. Instead, on the car radio, I hear how Mundine looked to be one punch away from defeating the champion. In the tenth round, he was trading blows with Ottke when he caught a short right to the temple. The Man fell onto the canvas and could not get back up.
Disappointed, we drive to the town’s police station, which overlooks the harbour wall that marks the mouth of the Hastings River.
Here, in a long room on the first floor, Jaco’s been setting up a room for the strike force, which is what task forces are called now, after some decision by the police bureaucracy. I don’t mind the change, it makes us sound aggressive, which I welcome, but doesn’t make any difference to the work involved.
‘Welcome to Strike Force Tuno,’ Jaco says. ‘Sorry about the mess.’ There’s paper everywhere. The room is missing the computers, printers, in-trays and white boards that we’ll need to make sense of the investigation. Looking around, it’s obvious that Jaco has, rightly, been prioritising getting information in and our first job will be to make sense of it. The older I get, the more I understand how being a cop isn’t all about chasing crooks, kicking down doors, and sitting face to face with criminals – the way I imagined it when I joined up. The job is all those things, but only rarely. Most of the time, solving a murder is about making sure you control the tide of information flooding in, so that nothing gets lost.
There’s going to be weeks of dull office work just making sense of everything and I wonder what to use for motivation. Like Jaco, I usually think about the victim. It helps to get close to their family, so you can feel their emotion. This time, Terry was a crook, so maybe he’s not a big loss to society, but he still had people who loved him. And whoever killed him is still out there, laughing.
‘Mate, we should take this personally,’ I say to Jaco, breaking the silence between us. The worst thing is that whoever took Terry dressed themselves up as
cops. They used our badge. They made it look like we killed him. ‘You dress up as cops, kidnap someone and cut them up?’ It’s only a few years since the royal commission made crooks out of the cops. These people now are mocking us.
I feel a flame of anger rise inside me. I’m ready now. Whatever it takes. I’ll show everyone it wasn’t cops but crooks who were the killers.
* * *
Over the next week, I watch the strike force room fill up. All up, there will be about 30 of us working on it, including detectives from several different squads and local area commands, as well as the police analysts who do the vital work of going through witness statements, phone records, property documents and other sources of information, trying to find connections.
Privately, I compare the crowded rows of desks and growing piles of equipment with the resources put into the Bowraville investigation after the children went missing. Back then, the case was run by only three detectives, who drew up their own timelines in black Texta on butcher’s paper stuck on the wall of a spare room in the tiny local police station. Unlike me, the officer-in-charge had no experience in leading Homicide inquiries.
I think about how, only two years ago, senior police shut down the reinvestigation of those murders, after the Director of Public Prosecutions declined our request to put our main suspect on trial again over the killing of four-year-old Evelyn Greenup.
I argued for it to be re-established, saying we still had to take the children’s deaths to an inquest, and they agreed, but didn’t give us any resources to do it. It was still just Jason and me. Now, those same bosses have decided that the killing of one white man, a criminal, deserves a bigger strike force than I know what to do with. It’s offensive, I think, then put that thought behind me and get on with the job.
My first priority is setting up [email protected] to ensure that everything coming in about the roughly 70 potential suspects in Jaco’s Who’s Who of the New South Wales underworld is properly understood.
Jason, Nigel and I spend our first weeks inside the strike force room, collating evidence, ensuring everything is recorded and allocating tasks for the others. Watching the hours the pair of them put in, and the intensity of their concentration, I hope that everybody on the strike force – many of whom have never worked a murder – looks up to them as examples.
They’re smart, which you need to be in Homicide, both book-smart and street-smart. You’ve got to be able to talk to people at different levels, because you never know what type of killing you’ll be working. It could be a professor who gets murdered, or a street-corner junkie.
They’re confident, which is vital. You need an ego, even something close to arrogance, because it’s a massive thing to charge someone with murder, and it’s also a life-changing decision not to go after someone because you think that there are better suspects. You have to back yourself to make those calls, and deal with it if they are wrong.
Jason and Nigel can also handle the emotion. You need compassion to do this job properly, but having it means you will never forget what it feels like to sit down with a murder victim’s family. They won’t forget you either.
And, like the two of them, you’ve got to be prepared to put the hours in, even if that means day after day of information management. At first, our approach comes in for ridicule from some of those on the strike force, and other local cops who aren’t involved. A fortnight in, I start to hear people are bagging us, saying, ‘You’re not going to catch anyone sitting behind a computer’, or suggesting we don’t have the guts to go out and rattle the crooks involved.
I can’t stand that kind of lazy thinking, so I front some of those who are the source of this poison. I don’t care if it gets me a reputation as a hard man to work with. But unless you’ve worked Homicide yourself, you don’t get to criticise me, my team or the way we do our work.
The way I see it, you have to earn the right to walk around calling yourself a Homicide detective and the only way to do that is through the work itself. I know I ask a lot, in terms of hours, effort and constant attention, but it you’re prepared to do that, the way Nigel and Jason are, then I’m a real softie. On this case, as the first few weeks turn into months, I start to realise how much work it will involve.
U Love Me
29 August 2002: 17 years in
We’re almost nine slow months into the investigation when two Strike Force Tuno detectives, Glenn and Luke, walk up to the front door of a potential witness in one of the hardscrabble suburbs that are a part of Sydney’s western edge, a long, dull drive from the bright lights of the city centre.
This is only the latest of many similar, so far largely unsuccessful calls and the two detectives knock, half-expecting the bloke inside to ignore them, half-expecting him to tell them to get fucked. Rocco – which is what his mates call him – is a member of the Rebels, and that’s what bikies usually say to the police.
The door opens, although a locked security screen means they still have no real view into the house. All they can make out is a large figure standing in the shadows.
‘What do you want?’ he asks.
They say that they’re from Homicide and want to talk about Terry Falconer’s murder.
‘I know who’s done it, and why they’ve done it,’ Rocco tells them.
Glenn and Luke can hardly believe what they’re hearing.
Rocco tells them to come back tonight, alone. When they do, what he tells them is a revelation. It’s everything we’ve been hoping for, and more.
* * *
Since last December, our strike force of around 30 has been steadily cut back by the bosses, who also told us that the New South Wales Government was close to broke, so there was no more money for overtime or travel allowance payments.
To save on travel, a few months ago, the strike force was moved down from Port Macquarie to the Crime Agencies’ headquarters in central Sydney. It was probably a good thing; although the extra payments helped as I’m still short of cash following my separation from Debbie and the kids, I was sick of the travelling. Except, I found we didn’t have a room to work in.
Soon after the move, I walked into the office of Wayne, the acting Homicide Squad commander, and told him, ‘I need a room.’
‘We haven’t got one,’ Wayne told me. Wayne is a decent, honest bloke and I knew it was the truth, but I wasn’t going to accept it.
‘Well, I’m just going to follow you around all day until I get one.’
Wayne thought I was joking – until I started following him in and out of his office, up and down the corridors, repeating, ‘I need a strike force room, I can’t do this without a strike force room, you’ve got a fucking strike force here but no room for us to work in.’
Eventually, Wayne laughed. He got it. The way I deal with challenges like this might not always work, but he found us a room. We kept working. The next challenge was our lack of any real progress.
The pressure wasn’t only coming from our bosses. Sometimes, when I was on call, I’d stay over at my parents’ house in Dural to avoid the long drive to and from the Central Coast. My dad would watch me being interviewed about the murder on the TV news and ask me, ‘So, do they know who’s done it?’
‘Dad, who do you think “they” are?’ I’d reply.
‘The blokes working on this investigation.’
‘Dad, you’ve seen me, I’m on the TV, talking about it. Do you understand that I am “they”?’
He was the same when I did a short stint in close personal protection for dignitaries back in 2000, around the time of the Sydney Olympics. Working for the Prime Minister, John Howard, meant joining his early-morning walks, so I’d stay at my parents. Dad would ask me: ‘Who actually looks after him?’
‘Dad, I’m looking after him.’
‘Yeah, but who else is there?’
‘No, Dad, I’m looking after him. I’m his close personal protection.’
I’d laugh about it afterwards, but it made me feel like I was five years old again.
With Strike Force Tuno now short on resources, I told the team to make the most of what we had. So if they went to a country town to interview a witness, they were to drive around the streets and make sure people saw them. During media interviews, I tried to give the sense we were a big, remorseless investigation. I wanted to put pressure on anyone who knew about the killing, to make them think it would be better to come forward than wait for us to find them.
It hadn’t worked. For nine months we’d got little, and that upset me.
But that all changed once Rocco decided to talk.
* * *
Glenn and Luke go back to meet Rocco in a granny flat out the back of another property, a small place so crowded with junk they have to clear a space among it to sit down. They get on well enough to arrange another meeting, at which Glenn introduces me to Rocco, sitting inside an unmarked car parked near a servo in southwest Sydney. He’s big and physically imposing, somewhere in his thirties and with a menace about him – as well as a manslaughter conviction, over his part in a fatal brawl.
That’s good, I think. He’s the real deal. He’s only going to know about what happened if he is a genuine crook, not someone who’s pretending.
Rocco says little at first and I guess that he is also working out what to make of me. It will take a long time and many meetings to gain his trust and hear everything he has to tell us. After all, as he points out, the men who kidnapped Terry were dressed as cops. What’s to say they weren’t the real police? Both of us remember Roger Rogerson and the royal commission into police corruption. What if I’m another corrupt cop, who’s coming after him?
After every meeting, Glenn and I complete a formal investigator’s note and a contact advice form, documenting what Rocco told us, and entering the details into [email protected]. As his story emerges, what I like most about it is that it isn’t perfect. It doesn’t try to answer all our questions, which makes it more convincing. It won’t solve the case alone.