Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  The diaries, to my mind, could be logically grouped into a number of sets over his career. There were the early official police diaries, from January 1948. Bloomed with large, adolescent handwriting they charted in stupefyingly dry facts his progress from street cop to a young fledgling in the CIB. Then there’s a period of brief upheaval in the early 1960s, a momentary tenure in the Fraud Squad and other units, before Bischof appointed Lewis as head of the new Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB) on Monday 13 May 1963. For years the entries in these diaries went like this: ‘Typed list of persons interviewed by us. Typed draft of form considered suitable for us by J.A.Bureau. Typed reports re disposal of property in respect to R.M.McAllister; W.H.Woodcroft; and A. Coveney. Report re O.L.Powell. C.o.’s re B.Johns and R.McAllister and Supp C.O.’s re comp. L.P.Quinn. Returned car to depot. Off duty 5 p.m.’

  Further diaries covered Lewis’s years when he was posted to Charleville by then Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod in the early to mid-1970s. Then came the glorious years of his commissionership, from November 1976, when the diaries slowly but surely shifted from official record – Lewis was under no legal or professional obligation to keep diaries as Commissioner – to a record brimming with both data on his role as Commissioner blended with personal motivations and reflections. Added to the mix was a sketch of his social life as a leading society figure, flecked with snapshots of his private life.

  Lewis gave me copies of his diaries for the purposes of research – and suggested in no uncertain terms to me that handing over his Commissioner’s diaries to the Fitzgerald Inquiry had been a mistake. He had wanted to be seen to help Fitzgerald’s investigations, but in hindsight he believed the diaries had worked against him.

  During the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Douglas Drummond, QC, counsel assisting the Fitzgerald Inquiry, famously described Lewis’s daily scribblings as ‘the most extensive diaries since Samuel Pepys put pen to paper’.

  Indeed, at one point, Drummond asked Lewis why he had kept the diaries. When Lewis replied that it was because he had thought of writing his memoirs, the public gallery at the inquiry reportedly broke into uniform laughter.

  As Margaret Simons reported for the Age:

  Lewis was the coolest, most polite witness before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, and his diaries were, if nothing else, a record of how these qualities had helped him in his steady rise through Queensland society … Lewis had been invited everywhere, and had accepted most of the invitations. The diaries showed that he had known about and been involved in discussions over the appointment of judges, the state Governor, and political issues such as redistribution and the timing of elections.

  Studying the diaries decades later, they proved time and again to be a mixture of fact and illusion. Matters you would have thought to be at the forefront of the Police Commissioner’s thinking were not there. And petty matters involving young officers challenging the Lewis administration were densely notated with an air of crisis.

  Some entries were curious – noting a major event not head-on, but coming from the side, as if the author had notated a name or a place that would, in future, act as a cryptic reminder of the true gravity of the moment. During those early months together, Lewis was indeed a person of impeccable manners and thoughtfulness. He provided list after list of things he felt important for the book about his life and times, all the houses he’d ever lived in and an endless catalogue of his accomplishments as a police officer. He also provided a roll call of former police officers that it was imperative I speak to for the project.

  One of these was Alan Beattie ‘Abe’ Duncan, sworn-in on 27 October 1936, registered number 3496. Lewis directed me towards a retirement village in Bald Hills, north of the Brisbane CBD, described in its own literature as ‘a Low Care Aged Home with Mediterranean-style buildings set in beautiful landscaped grounds in Bald Hills’.

  I phoned ahead, and was put through to Abe’s room. He said he’d be happy to talk, depending on a medical assessment he was having on the following Monday. It would determine whether he was going to be moved into higher care. He didn’t know what was going to happen.

  The following week I was given the green light and arrived on an October Monday at about 8.50 a.m. A woman directed me to Abe’s unit – number 15 – and there I found him sitting quietly in a recliner chair.

  Even though he was sitting down I could tell he was a tall man. He was on this day thin, a little pale, and with little hair. He had several spots and fresh minor wounds on his face. He didn’t get up when I entered.

  The room was sparse and disorganised. There was a television on one wall. Two small pictures for decoration. Two walkers – one for inside the little unit, and one for outside. A grey pork pie hat. He had a side table with a few notebooks resting on it.

  Duncan then was 95. He had worked on one of the country’s oldest cold cases – the Betty Shanks murder in Brisbane in 1952. He had interviewed the prostitute Shirley Brifman at length through most of the latter half of 1971, and then viewed her body when she supposedly committed suicide by drug overdose in March the following year. He had been either at the centre, or on the fringe, of some of the biggest criminal cases in Queensland history.

  Abe spoke firmly and proved to have an excellent memory. He joked about Frank Bischof and Ray Whitrod as if he had seen his old colleagues only yesterday. To be on Lewis’s list of men ‘to see’ for the book, I presumed Duncan was at the very least an ally of the former commissioner, yet I found the old detective frank and straight down the line.

  Abe had fond memories of Lewis. ‘He was one of the five most successful detectives in the CIB,’ Abe recalled. ‘We had many jobs together, Terry and I. We used to work the old patrol cars. I was the senior man and Terry was what we’d call a rear gunner. He came to the CIB as a junior man, probably in his early twenties. I had a few years in the mounted police, then out west before I came to the [Brisbane] CIB in 1939.

  ‘We used to have to do patrols at night time. I remember Terry being very alert. One night we were concerned, we were driving down Wickham Terrace, and we saw a fellow walking along normally. The driver pulled over to the kerb and Terry said, “Come over here, mate.” [The man] came to the side of the car. Terry grabbed him by the shirt. He had a shirt full of clothes he’d pulled off a clothesline. [Lewis had] managed to observe his shirt was a bit bulgy. He [Lewis] was very keen. A great worker. And a very, very tidy man. If you went into his locker it was conspicuously clean.’

  Commissioner Whitrod had promoted Duncan to Assistant Commissioner in 1971, and he was in the mix for the top job in the future. In that same year, Duncan was asked to interview at length the prostitute and whistleblower, Shirley Brifman.

  ‘I had no knowledge of her,’ Abe remembered, sitting back in his chair, his notebooks and pens at the ready by his side. ‘I never met her when she was associated with the National Hotel or Killarney [brothel in South Brisbane].

  ‘She fell afoul of the New South Wales police in that she was determined to nominate many of those who had personal associations with her, big shots, and she was coming back to Queensland. Whitrod put me on the job of contacting her and keeping in touch with her. On coming back to Queensland she made a complaint against police from the olden days and the National Hotel. She did mention Tony Murphy and she mentioned Bischof and Hallahan and a few more of them. I took various statements from her in the event of her giving evidence if she was wanted.

  ‘I came to the conclusion you couldn’t believe to a great extent what she said. There’d be a certain amount of truth in what she said regarding the National. You have to distinguish the truth and lies.’

  Abe said that after several months of taking statements from Brifman, Whitrod became frustrated at what he perceived was a lack of progress. ‘Eventually it got to the stage where Whitrod thought, or got the wrong impression, that we weren’t doing sufficient for her in Queensland,’ Abe said. ‘I said, “Look, we’ve got to let New S
outh Wales have first go before we start in Queensland.” He agreed with me.

  ‘He told me to hand over all those statements to the Crime Intelligence Unit and Norm Gulbransen … I gladly handed it all over. Within a month they’d raided Tony Murphy’s rooms, took possession of a diary, and went back years to try and get evidence against Murphy and charge him [with perjury].’

  ‘What about Murphy?’ I asked.

  ‘He was another of one of the other best detectives that ever went through the CIB,’ Abe said. ‘Tremendous hard worker, a dedicated detective. Very tough operator. Excellent in murder cases and difficult cases. Of course, Whitrod sent him out to Longreach.

  ‘Let me put it this way. Lingering in the back of my mind, there may be some truth in Brifman’s allegations in the early stages. I’m not totally confident in everything Murphy did. I wouldn’t be totally confident.’

  He said Whitrod had it in for Murphy. ‘He wanted to prove there was substance in what Brifman said about the old National Hotel days,’ said Abe. ‘Gulbransen moved heaven and earth to get something on Murphy.’

  ‘Did Whitrod have an agenda against Murphy?’

  ‘I think so,’ Abe said, staring straight ahead.

  We started talking about the Betty Shanks killing, and it still irked him, played with his mind, that they’d never found the killer. Her body had been discovered in a yard at the corner of Thomas and Carberry streets, The Grange, just metres from where she lived with her parents at 54 Montpelier Street. She’d been brutally bashed to death.

  On the day the body was discovered, in the early hours of

  20 September 1952, Duncan was one of the first on the scene. Not long afterwards the reporters arrived, including veteran Ken ‘Digger’ Blanch.

  Abe had fond memories of Blanch, now an old man living across the city by the bay. Abe said he’d been thinking a lot lately about Betty Shanks. In particular a neighbour at The Grange, Jim Coates, who was interviewed at the time of the brutal suburban killing.

  ‘Tell Ken,’ he said, ‘I don’t think Jim Coates was ever satisfactorily cleared.’

  Abe Duncan passed away in late 2012.

  Lewis has asked me to return two ring-binder folders. I arrive at his home on a cold and drizzly morning. It is the first time I have seen him since the death of Tony Murphy in late 2010.

  The return of material he gives me has become a pattern – not for his wish to hide or obfuscate, but for his own research purposes. His idea is to begin tackling the full 22,000-page transcript of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, and to mark with Post-it stickers what he considers the most interesting and where he is mentioned. Each folder, he says, contains 500 to 700 pages.

  He is wearing a grey tracksuit and black slippers. He has two further layers beneath his top – a white T-shirt and a navy collared shirt. When I suggest we may as well sit down and talk now that I’m here, he takes to the idea instantly.

  Today, I ask him how he felt about the death of Murphy. ‘I didn’t feel sad,’ he says.

  I query this as it had always been his story that they were friends as well as colleagues. That Lewis had attended the weddings of some of Murphy’s children, and been there for christenings and other major events. That Murphy had visited him in prison on several occasions. That they had stayed in touch until fairly recently.

  He expresses his affection and admiration for Murphy’s wife, Maureen Murphy, and says she was one of ‘the good wives’. But he seems to have soured on Murphy himself, in death. I ask him if it was true that Murphy sat in the courtroom every day of Lewis’s trial. He says he can’t recall seeing Murphy there.

  I press him further, and ask him directly if he thought Murphy was corrupt. He says he knew he was a ‘pants man’ and chased the girls, and that he ‘supposed’ he and Herbert were corrupt. ‘Why would he have stayed in the Licensing Branch for four years?’

  He agrees that with Murphy and Herbert in the Licensing Branch, a system of corruption could have been organised, streamlined and expanded.

  We resume our discussion about the Fitzgerald Inquiry. He tells me how he went into the court most days by bus from his and Hazel’s humble flat in Kelvin Grove. It was terrible, he says. People would stare at him. He mentions again how intimidating it felt to be in the same room as the line of QCs, particularly during his cross-examination later in the inquiry, and his attempts at defending himself and questioning witnesses.

  He recounts how Hazel went ‘from being somebody, if you like’, to nothing. He appears to get emotional when he talks about his family and the impact the inquiry had on them. He mentions how it might have been easier if he’d ‘never been born’.

  It is a statement that jolts me. It stands out from his other reflections on how the inquiry made a scapegoat of him. It strikes at the reason for his existence in light of what happened, and implies that if he hadn’t been born, people close to him wouldn’t have suffered. Is he saying the calamity occurred because of who he was, or the type of person he became, from birth? Was he blaming his own nature for bringing down everybody around him? And what aspect of his nature might he be referring to?

  We talk for 90 minutes and Prince remains silent and asleep on the chair beside him. The old dog with a grey muzzle is feeling the cold.

  ‘I don’t want to go into the characters of Murphy or Hallahan but I have found these for you,’ he says wrapping up our session for the day. ‘Maybe I should wait and give them to you on the way out.’

  There is a list of officers that Lewis wrote up when he became Commissioner. The list examines various policemen and their friendships, and who might be considered loyal or disloyal to Lewis. More importantly, Lewis hands me Norm Gulbransen’s report on the Shirley Brifman interviews dated November 1971. It summarises many of the important allegations Brifman levelled against Murphy, Hallahan and even Lewis. The report also makes some character judgements of Brifman, and the importance of thoroughly investigating her allegations.

  Lewis says it took a lot of hard work to find the reports. He says he will soon begin making notes on his prison diaries, but has found the prospect of the job ‘too depressing’. He rubs his eyes with his hand. Today, every year seems to show on his face.

  As I leave, Prince finally awakes and does his usual barking complaint. ‘Well, he was here for ages and you didn’t even talk to him,’ Lewis says in that slightly high, childish voice he reserves for the dog.

  As I get in the car and drive off, Lewis waits to wave goodbye on the front steps. A gentle old man through the grey drizzle.

  Fallout

  In 2013 Three Crooked Kings was finally published. I had accumulated such a wealth of material during my research that halfway through writing the manuscript it became clear that it would be impossible to contain the chronology to one volume.

  I didn’t know, prior to publication, if there was any sort of appetite out there for a book that covered events that were, at the very earliest, almost 40 years old, and in some cases stretching back almost 70 years. After the book was launched, I attended a number of public events around Brisbane to promote it. Sometimes these were in-conversations at libraries or speaking engagements in bookshops. I was often held for prolonged periods afterwards by people who wanted to share their stories of the era, or pass on contacts that they felt might be useful to me. (Indeed, it was this outpouring of information from the ordinary readers in Brisbane that meant that the second book, Jacks and Jokers, would again exceed its intended word count and necessitate a third and final volume to complete the trilogy.)

  It astonished me how many people’s lives were touched by this corruption story, how broad its reach and how deep its roots. It seemed as if half the people of Queensland had their own unique connection to the saga and they were now willing to share what they knew. It was as if a fissure had opened between the present and the past.

  I got an email from a man who had vague recollections
of his days at the Ithaca Creek State School not long after the death of Shirley Brifman in 1972. When Shirley died, the family split up, with some of the children staying with Shirley’s sister in Paddington.

  I do remember being impacted by a younger kid who always struck me as sad – Sydney Brifman, I believe his name was. He lived in Brindle Street. I was incredibly innocent and sheltered and [had] no idea about his family circumstances but Sydney still remains imprinted on my brain as someone I wish I had done more for to be his friend. I regularly wonder how Sydney (sure that was his name) dealt with the cards life handed him.

  Another email came in from Ken Crooke, former press secretary to Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He made a valid point concerning Commissioner Ray Whitrod transferring Terry Lewis to Charleville in 1974. Crooke wrote:

  I am no apologist for Lewis but there is a consistent error in some of your material in relation to Whitrod’s attitude to him. The Cabinet records will show that Lewis was promoted by Whitrod to go to Inspector in Charge of the Charleville Police District – not sent there as a ‘disgraced’ officer.

  In those days transfers and promotions at Commissioned Officer level all went to Cabinet for approval and the Cabinet minutes will show that Whitrod recommended Lewis for promotion three times – including the big initial promotion from uniformed sergeant to a commissioned officer above more than 50 more senior police at the time. He made a glowing reference to the work of Lewis in making the recommendation at a time when he subsequently claimed (years later) he knew Lewis to be corrupt.

  My point is (and it always remains a puzzle to me) promoting an officer he thought might be corrupt was just not in Whitrod’s DNA. Whitrod only started talking about his doubts after Lewis became Assistant Commissioner. Why?

  Anonymous letters were posted in. One came from someone who identified themselves only as a ‘Brisbane solicitor’. They wrote: