Police were standing around, wondering what to do, so Deborah spoke to the man. He told her he hated women. It was a recent development: he’d formed the opinion they were ‘all sluts’ because he had woken up to find his best man screwing his bride-to-be at a roadside stop while they were travelling to Sydney to get married. The scene had upset him. But before he jumped, he fancied a cigarette. Deborah offered to take it to him and the would-be jumper agreed that she was the one he wanted to bring it to him.
She was heaved over the barrier onto the platform with the ‘jumper’, with nothing but a borrowed packet of cigarettes and a breezy line of chat to protect her – a fact that later led to trouble.
‘We smoked several more cigarettes, which I felt was more likely to kill me than being pushed from the bridge. I gained his confidence, I think, because we spoke the same language and both came from a farming background.’
To the shock of the other police, whose plan had been to wait for the bloke either to jump or get sick of it, she talked him back over the safety rail. So far, so good. But the story wasn’t over.
Back at North Sydney station, the broken-hearted bridegroom was stuck in a cell while they wondered what to do with him. Half an hour later, Deborah peered through the flap on the cell door … and saw him hanging by the neck by his belt.
By the time they got the door open and cut him down, he looked dead. But he was only unconscious and came around. The grumpy senior constable gave him coffee and a sympathetic ear. He felt sorry for him.
‘Perhaps,’ noted Deborah deadpan, ‘this was why he wasn’t charged with trespass on the Harbour Bridge. Or perhaps it’s because he was a suicidal male placed in a cell, unsupervised and with his belt and shoelaces.’
So the jumper lived to love another day. And probationary constable Deborah Webb was the heroine of the moment. Or should have been…
A few weeks later, an inspector broke the news that she wouldn’t be officially acknowledged for her actions on the bridge. Why? Because they didn’t want to get the Cliff Rescue unit into trouble for allowing her over the rail without a safety harness on. The logic was twisted but unassailable: for her bravery to be recognised, it would be for risking her life by going onto the platform without safety harness, which in turn was a clear breach of correct procedure. Catch 22.
There was no way around it. If she had been shoved off the edge and died, everyone would have been in huge trouble. The way it had turned out, it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. When bravery meets bureaucracy, bravery loses.
Apart from the break-up of her first police romance – with a handsome cop who decided he was a woman trapped in a man’s body – there was another reason to remember her time at North Sydney. It was the early morning prison van run.
She and a senior constable would regularly go to Long Bay prison to pick up prisoners for court appearances. Deborah would have to search each prisoner for hidden weapons before they got in the van. Then she would have to sit in a separate locked section at the back of the van to guard the prisoners in transit, an ordeal as they dragged to courts all over Sydney.
On one particular day, she was feeling carsick after dropping off prisoners at three courts when the van suddenly stopped in the street. She opened the door and saw two detectives and four uniforms, guns drawn and looking worried. They hurried her out of the way and then one of the detectives jumped into the van and dragged out a prisoner by the hair and belted him.
She asked the driver what it was all about. She would recall his answer in Watching The Detectives.
‘“It’s your lucky day,” he told me. “The bloke we dropped off last ratted on that piece of shit. He was charged with killing his wife and two other people. You were going to be next. He’s got a replica gun down his pants. You mustn’t have found it. He had pulled it out back at the District Court and was going to use it on you when we stopped again.”’
Deborah didn’t catch on. Then the old cop explained that the killer had planned to menace her with the replica pistol to force her to hand over her service revolver. And then, he told the other prisoners, he was going to shoot her in the head. Anyone who has shot three people has nothing to lose by shooting another one.
What saved her was that one of the other prisoners had taken pity on her and decided to break the criminal code by dobbing in the would-be killer as soon as he was unloaded back at the previous court, which had prompted the posse to come to the rescue before the van got to the next court.
Deb knew that having a gun pulled on her would have worked. She would have handed over her revolver. It was a lesson – but a confusing one. On one hand she’d learned how dangerous and unpredictable prisoners could be. On the other, she’d learned that treating them like human beings, not garbage, had made one of them take pity on her – and save her life.
She also learned to search people properly. Not that she was ever rostered back on prison van security. She was going to the Cross.
THE Kings Cross Drug Squad office in the mid-1980s was a rat’s nest in the station basement. ‘It was a small, underground concrete bunker with no natural light and the musty smell of damp carpet,’ was the way Locke put it later, writing about her first experience of plain clothes work.
In the mornings she walked to work early along Darlinghurst Road, the hardened artery leading to the heart of Kings Cross. The last few hookers still on the street would say ‘I’ve already paid sergeant (name) today’. Sure enough, as she later wrote, ‘the roster confirmed every time that the bloke they had mentioned had started at seven that morning.’
The old hands at the station had a word for young officers on rotation, gaining experience: ‘woodchucks’. Like many others, Deborah Webb went there because it would look good on her service register. The first thing she noticed was that the older detectives did a lot of whispering and treated the youngsters like rubbish.
The young policewoman found the Cross exciting at night, when it blazed with neon and noise. But the cold light of each new day fell harshly on the Cross. Young girls high on drugs or shaking and shivering as they came down, leaned on walls as the sun rose, waiting for one more ‘mug’ to score a few more dollars to buy more drugs: a pitiless and pitiful cycle that all too often ended in premature death.
Most street prostitutes were junkies in 1985 but there were still some old-school professionals … pro pros. Deborah got to know and like two of them, who called themselves Betty and Chantal. Unusually, they didn’t touch drugs, which was why they were still functioning – and still fit – in their late 30s. They both wore big, teased-up hair, lots of make up and tight, bright clothes in slinky material. They looked more like actors playing 1960s prostitutes as they stood in their usual pitches outside the Pink Pussy Cat or Porky’s. And they would always be pleased to have a rest from propositioning the passing punters to have a chat with the friendly young policewoman with the reassuring down-home twang of rural Australia in her voice. Deborah’s slant on it was that they took a shine to her because she didn’t treat them like garbage.
Chantal told her she had three kids in boarding school in Melbourne, and showed her photographs of them. One thing that Chantal told her stuck in her mind – and would figure on the back cover of her book. ‘You’re too nice to be a cop, Deb. You speak to us like we’re humans, not like the other bastards. When you’ve been in this job as long as I have you see a lot of pigs come and go. Be careful of the blokes you are working with, they are not nice.’
The Kings Cross detectives took her to a strip club run by a Greek who called himself Stevie Stardust and who looked the part of the shady nightclub owner: shaven head, hairy chest, gold chains and sunglasses. He warned her about a particular detective and then said something that she later recalled as: ‘Get out of here while the going is good, Deb. This is no place for a young girl like you.’
In the mornings, the young cops would walk around stamping on syringes in the gutters to break them so passing schoolchildren would be less inclined to pick
them up or re-use them. AIDS was starting to take hold. One morning a teenage hooker told Deb she had the disease. ‘The fear and hopelessness were in her eyes.’
On evening shifts the woodchucks would walk around in small groups. Deb was better at spotting trouble – and offenders – than most of the others, because she was more street smart. She had been a barmaid, her parents were alcoholics, and some of her cousins were bikies and had been in trouble with the law, so she had a fair idea of what low life was.
One day, a sergeant chipped her for having a long conversation in the street with a bikie parked outside one of the local tattoo parlours. What the sergeant didn’t know was that the bikie was her cousin, ‘Hairy Mick’.
Towards the end of her three months at the Cross, she was in the office finishing paperwork while most of the shift were up at the (famous bar) Bourbon and Beefsteak, where the management put on free seafood and drinks for the cops. The phone went. It was the inquiry counter upstairs: there was a young woman there wanting to see a detective.
‘When I walked upstairs I saw the young woman, blonde hair hanging straight down, wearing blue jeans and T-shirt, and with a big gap between her front teeth. Having briefly spoken to her a few times on street patrols, I knew who she was.’
Debbie asked if she could help but the blonde woman dismissed her as ‘just a woodchuck.’ She was agitated and distressed and hurried out.
Next day she was found face down in a pond in Centennial Park. Her name was Sallie-Anne Huckstepp and her tragic story – of the well-educated, beautiful and doomed girl – would become part of Sydney crime folklore. Her death was blamed on notoriously violent criminal Neddy Smith and his bent police connections, namely Roger Rogerson, the central figures in the memorable Blue Murder television series.
Debbie later heard that she had been given ‘a speedball that would have killed a horse’ but that her tolerance to drugs was so high the killers had to hold her under water to kill her. The consensus is that it was all to silence her over her willingness to speak out over what she called a police conspiracy to cover up the details of the death of her boyfriend Warren Lanfranchi, shot dead by Rogerson four years earlier.
Huckstepp had blown the whistle by going to media, insisting Lanfranchi had been deliberately murdered by corrupt police. In the end, all it got her was the early grave she’d enlisted for by turning her back on her middle-class life in favour of drugs and prostitution. Her looks and her intelligence meant that her story gained traction where others wouldn’t. Her monument is a fine book written by an admirer, John Dale. He called it Huckstepp: A dangerous life.
BE careful what you wish for, goes the saying. Deborah Locke wanted to be a detective.
It was the appeal of working in plain clothes that led her to the Gaming Squad. It wasn’t much of a reason, looking back on it, but she was young and still relatively innocent about the secret ways of the New South Wales police. Besides, she had worked with the son of the Gamers’ commanding officer at the Cross, and he put in a good word for her.
During the interview for the job, a senior officer suggested she try the Highway Patrol on the grounds that, ‘They’re starting to let women in there.’ It might have been good advice from someone with her best interests at heart, but how could she know that? She was only 21 and she wanted to be a detective.
The senior officer urged her to think about the environment she would be going into with the Gaming Squad, and suggested it was no place for a woman. She would recall and record, with uncanny precision, his exact words: ‘You would be the odd female in a squad of hardworking, hard-playing blokes. The language around here gets pretty rough.’
But if she wanted to follow her ambition, that’s the way it was. Already, she had tried to do something about the treatment women received in the force. Inspired by a talk by the head of the Equal Employment Opportunities branch towards the end of her stint at North Sydney, she had spoken up. She approached the officer to complain about sexual harassment and discrimination but was ‘basically told to shut up and that was just the way it was and that I should consider myself lucky to be there.’
Despite her growing disenchantment, she was still keen for the excitement of detective work that had led to doing the undercover work at Kings Cross.
‘There’s the police force and then there’s the rest of society. Being a cop is exciting. The other day I saw a car go past doing a high-speed chase with lights and sirens and I was so envious,’ she would tell Maree Curtis, long after leaving the force.
‘It’s the adrenaline rush. I was a detective. It’s like a secret club that you had to be invited into and I had broken through the glass ceiling.’
The Gaming Squad branch of ‘the club’ had 60 members. Locke was the only woman, as the one before her had left days before after receiving a hard time. She was an Italian girl called Claudia, and Deborah heard she was ‘too much of a nice girl’ to handle the brutally sexist behaviour. ‘The guys made disgusting comments about her being Italian and what they would like to do with her. No wonder she ran. I began to wonder what I had walked into.’
The sexual harassment started as soon as she walked in the door. That did not surprise her – but she would soon become uncomfortable about the more secretive goings on.
‘Very little police work was done,’ she would say later. ‘There would be days when some officers wouldn’t turn up at all and other days when we might only work for two hours. It was not very productive.’
It was at the Gamers that she would win two Commissioner’s Commendations for police work. But it came at a cost. The job inevitably involved drinking in bars and clubs and it took its toll. On race days, Wednesdays and Saturday, detectives would visit pubs and drink, supposedly looking for SP bookies. Her social drinking would turn into a drinking problem in the two years she was there.
‘It was a great job if you were an alcoholic,’ she writes. They were given tax-free cash from a slush fund to pay for drinks and then do the round of the pubs, driving unmarked cars. Race days were better than a day off for the drinkers in the crew. The funny thing was, she notes, not many SP bookies were being arrested as a result of the supposed surveillance. And although the ‘gamers’ constantly drank and drove, it was never an issue. They were above the law but didn’t enforce much of it.
She gradually realised that each ethnic community that ran illicit gaming had a police ‘protector’ in the squad. Her crew looked after Chinatown, another seemed to have an understanding with the Lebanese and another with the Greeks. One day a sergeant angrily remonstrated with her boss, saying he was sick of approaching Chinese involved in illegal gaming and having them yell, ‘You can’t touch us!’ But after her sergeant took the other one away and talked to him he calmed down. It didn’t stop the regular meals in Chinatown – almost always at restaurants that ran big games upstairs. And it was nothing but the best – usually the biggest live lobster in the tank was sacrificed to keep the detectives well fed.
But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Her sergeant, a big sporting man almost old enough to be her father, took her under his wing. One night after another Chinatown dinner he drove her to his home on the pretext of picking up something he needed. In the driveway, she would write later, was a silver Mercedes with deep circular scratches on the bonnet and roof. He said the vandalism had been caused by ‘a woman scorned’.
Inside, he offered her a gin and tonic. She liked a drink and accepted, despite the fact she did not feel comfortable looking at family photographs – including adult children older than she was herself. He told her his children had left home and he had no one to share the house with. As she looked politely through a picture album, he sat beside her.
She jumped up, making excuses for not being interested in his advances. She told him about having to look after her alcoholic parents. She hoped that would be the end of it, but she would find out it wouldn’t be quite so easy to fight off unwanted attention.
About a week later, she got to work
to find two strange detectives waiting for her. They were from Internal Affairs – as opposed to the sort the sergeant had tried to embark on. This pair was investigating everyone in the office who’d helped raid a Greek card game at Marrickville a few days earlier. She had to go with them and answer a few questions.
A complaint had been laid that police had stolen money, gold rings, and a bracelet from the Greek card players. The investigators were not interested in her version of events. One typed her statement while the other dictated it. It said she had seen nothing untoward while searching the premises and that no one had complained to her there, and that she had mostly been out in the car. This was basically true, but she was unhappy about being told what to say and what to sign. It was, of course, the same feeling that countless offenders had complained of after being interviewed.
Meanwhile, it was back to the hard-living, hard-drinking life of the squad. One night, described in Watching the Detectives, her amorous sergeant got drunk, produced a bundle of fireworks from his locker and got Deborah to drive to each of the venues where they knew there were card games in progress. At each one, he would light a big bunger and toss it through the door, where terrified patrons would hit the floor when it exploded.
But ‘Sarge’ had more than fireworks in mind. He made another pitch for her to live with him, arguing that the age difference wouldn’t matter and that he had plenty of money to keep her ‘happy’. When she resisted, she writes, ‘He pushed me up against the wall of an elevator, trying to kiss me as we were coming up from the basement to the office.’
Fighting him off, she bolted from the lift to the women’s room. Inside was a policewoman she names as Mandy Price, from the Surveillance Unit, who asked what was wrong.
Deborah would recall replying she was ‘sick of fighting these bastards off’. To which Mandy Price had answered: ‘They’re all dumb pricks’ and offered to talk to a senior officer about moving to the Surveillance Unit. ‘I had to go there because the same shit was happening to me.’ She said the gaming squad office was a ‘zoo … full of animals’.
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