Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  Rogerson recalled Stuart’s relatives being heavily involved in the case. ‘I can remember these relatives coming along and giving evidence about them being up in the middle of Queensland deliberately lighting fires to work out best accelerants to use,’ Rogerson said. ‘It wasn’t a matter of a few coppers getting together and putting a few verbals together. His own family was giving evidence to fit him.

  ‘We knew that Stuart hadn’t lit the fire because he had an alibi. We then came across Jimmy Finch, a Dr Barnardo’s boy. He was the key to it. I don’t think they believed they were going to kill anyone. The nightclub was upstairs. Fire roars up a hill, not down a hill. It sucked all the oxygen out of the nightclub area and they [the victims] were asphyxiated.

  ‘John Andrew Stuart. He was insane … [he] would have definitely come to grief in Sydney. I reckon he would have been killed by his own blokes.

  ‘Len McPherson said to me once: “Roger, you can control a bad man, but you can’t control a mad man.” These blokes are more dangerous to the criminal milieu sometimes than the public. They can kill your missus and kids in a fit of rage.’

  In the days after the arrest of Stuart and Finch the story emerged fairly quickly that they had been bashed by police in the interview rooms. ‘We got Finch and he alleged we bashed him and flogged him and got an unsigned record of interview with him,’ Rogerson said. Yet, despite the rumours and protestations from both Stuart and Finch, no concrete evidence ever emerged that they were bashed by police.

  But then, years into my research I inadvertently stumbled upon another twist in the story, coming from an entirely different quarter. At one point I had communicated with Sydney novelist and true crime writer Tom Gilling, who had actually sat down for some days with Jack Herbert and interviewed him for Herbert’s memoir, The Bagman. Initially I had wanted to get a sense of how Herbert sounded. What were his mannerisms? Was he a funny man, as everyone said he was? Was he charming?

  Gilling happily shared his recollections, and also generously offered me his original interview cassettes with Herbert. I had duly filed them away. One day I would listen to them but first I had to find a machine that actually played the cassettes, given the world had moved almost exclusively into a digital universe.

  By chance, one overcast Saturday I was travelling from Brisbane to Byron Bay to meet my family. I was driving in an older car that had a cassette deck. I popped in one of Tom’s interview tapes and when I pressed play the dark cabin of the car was suddenly filled with the mesmerising voice of Jack Herbert. It was like listening to a ghost.

  Between the horseplay and idle chatter of Gilling’s interview one part of the conversation immediately caught my attention. It was Jack Herbert, talking about the night Stuart and Finch were questioned by police – at the time of the Whiskey fire Herbert was working in the Licensing Branch. Years later, in the interview with his biographer, Herbert was retracing some of the evidence he gave as an indemnified witness at the Fitzgerald Inquiry. Had he told the royal commission all he knew?

  GILLING:

  But one thing I was going to [ask] … he [a lawyer for Finch] then went on to ask you about Whiskey Au Go Go on the night that Finch and Stuart were brought in. And you were in the station on that night and you were in the wash room with Atkinson and Hayes and he asked you directly, ‘Did you see them washing blood off their hands?’ Didn’t he?

  HERBERT:

  Yeah. And I said, ‘no’.

  GILLING:

  You did say, ‘no’, yeah is that true?

  HERBERT:

  You’re the only one I’ve told this to and I can’t do anything about it I’m afraid …

  GILLING:

  Don’t lower your voice.

  HERBERT:

  No, well, I don’t want to actually say this because I’ve already said, ‘No’. I’ve got to be careful. Let me tell you … the day the Sydney police came up there … Noel Morey I think it was. I could hear …

  GILLING:

  You could hear some biffo going on in the cell?

  HERBERT:

  Yeah, dragged them down …

  GILLING:

  Sorry, they?

  HERBERT:

  Dragged the two of them down, gave them a wash up and that’s all dead-set what I know. But I’ve never told another soul. I’ll tell you why. At the time everybody was incensed at these bastards doing what they did. I wasn’t going to get them out and lose all the bloody sympathy of the public. I remember that was my feeling at the time. That I couldn’t afford to [intervene], so I thought about it a lot and I can’t do anything about it. Because what’s it going to do? It’s going to … bloody Finch and Stuart are dead …

  GILLING:

  Is Finch dead now?

  HERBERT:

  No, no, I’m sorry.

  GILLING:

  Stuart is dead.

  HERBERT:

  I guess I can’t see a way out to tell the truth, and I’d have to deny I even told you. Because I’ve given oath through indemnity that I didn’t see what …

  GILLING:

  Did you actually see them come out … did you see them drag them out of the washroom?

  HERBERT:

  Oh, yeah.

  GILLING:

  They’d taken them in for a wash?

  HERBERT:

  Yeah.

  To Lewis’s house at Keperra for a discussion about my impending visit to police headquarters in Brisbane to talk to the Queensland Police Service about crime and corruption. Lewis is clearly agitated about this appointment.

  ‘This is important to my family,’ he says. ‘When you are asked, “Is Lewis one of the Three Crooked Kings?” you say, “Absolutely not”. Tell them it is Murphy, Hallahan and Herbert.

  ‘I had a phone call from someone just yesterday discussing how most of the graft and improper sexual activities involved the Licensing Branch,’ he adds.

  Lewis hands me a list of retired police officers he knows will be attending the talk at 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday. He then hands me a sheet of paper with notes he has typed to keep me on track. Lewis wants me to read to the headquarters gathering something he has prepared: ‘Have interviewed large number of persons and not one has implicated Mr. Lewis in any unlawful activities.’

  At 85, why is it so important for Lewis that I stress his innocence to a room full of serving policemen he wouldn’t even know? Why is it that a group of retired detectives are turning up for the talk and that Lewis feels it necessary to inform me of their names and previous ranks?

  Not for the first time, Lewis suggests that perhaps he could earn some money for his family by appearing on television and being interviewed.

  I suggest he might want to wait until around the publication of the second volume.

  I notice at one point that his breathing is a little laboured as we go through the issues he wants to discuss for the day. He seems relieved by the progress of my visit and again, as I head out the door, stresses the importance of knowing what to say on Wednesday.

  ‘If you do the truthful thing on Wednesday, please, then I think I’ll feel a lot better.’

  I leave trying to understand why this event with the police means so much to him. Forget the inquiry, his sacking, the evidence at the inquiry, Herbert’s evidence
, Lewis’s charges and his trial, Lewis being found guilty, going to prison and his failed appeal. Forget all that. Just tell them all at headquarters that ‘I am innocent’.

  The Monster of Eyre Street

  A Brisbane house I often visited during the writing of the trilogy was 54 Eyre Street in Mount Gravatt East, 12 kilometres south-east of the CBD.

  I would park my car on the street outside and reflect on this little brick and weatherboard house and how ordinary it looked, how innocent. Built in the early 1950s the house and yard were exposed on two fronts – Eyre Street and half the length of Orb Lane – but there was something about the property that suggested it had – what? – turned its back on the street fronts, that it was hunched, that the human activity associated with it had all occurred away from exposure behind a high metal green fence.

  Or was this just my imagination running over, given what I had come to learn about the house and its sole occupier – about its history in the landscape of the Brisbane underworld? If a house could hold secrets, this one did.

  Looking at it from the car on dozens of occasions, 54 Eyre Street puzzled me, left me perplexed. I could not reconcile what I was looking at with what had gone on at this small nondescript parcel of earth. This was the house of Clarence Henry Howard-Osborne, a character I had stumbled across in researching Jacks and Jokers. Initially, I paid Howard-Osborne scant attention. He was just another bit player in this saga with its colossal cast. And to be honest, as the father of three children, I was not impelled to go near him and his story if the facts of his pitiful life were true – that he had abused thousands of boys, photographed them naked, made extensive notes of their physical measurements, filmed them and sexually assaulted many. And that all this depravity ended with his suicide in late 1979 after he had finally come to the attention of police.

  His was a case of monstrous, virtually incomprehensible historic paedophilia, and I initially incorrectly isolated Howard-Osborne and his life story. He was just a sick individual who had indulged in his fetishes and had ended his life when he got caught.

  I briefly asked Lewis about Howard-Osborne. He had little to offer about the man. I had read an online version of criminologist Paul Wilson’s book on Howard-Osborne – The Man They Called A Monster – and while I disputed many of Wilson’s conclusions, including that Howard-Osborne was not a paedophile but a man who had instead provided emotional solace to troubled boys, I did not initially connect Howard-Osborne with any broader picture.

  What did not sit right with me however, was the failure of police, under Lewis’s commissionership, to fully investigate Howard-Osborne’s extensive personal files and photographs. Even by today’s standards, Howard-Osborne’s crimes would make world news. This was a recidivist paedophile of global proportions. Yet somehow, Howard-Osborne’s case had all but been forgotten.

  According to Wilson, in the spring of 1979, a suburban Brisbane mother accidentally overheard her young son talking about being photographed in the nude by a man. When she later pressed him for details, he volunteered that a person named Clarrie Osborne had taken pictures of him and other boys. Some weeks later, the mother supposedly mentioned the incident involving her son to a friend at a social function. As it turned out, the friend was married to a Queensland police officer. That officer – not a member of the force’s Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB), the unit that might be expected to handle such situations – decided to have Howard-Osborne put under surveillance. Howard-Osborne was duly caught photographing boys.

  Howard-Osborne was taken by police to his house in Eyre Street. There, they discovered thousands of pictures of naked children, hundreds of hours of tape-recorded conversations with boys and a meticulously organised filing cabinet filled with index cards bearing the details of his victims, from their names, ages and addresses, to their physical measurements. It was later estimated that Howard-Osborne had been involved with more than 2500 under-aged males over a 20- to 30-year period.

  Police took Howard-Osborne back to police headquarters in the city for questioning. They also confiscated three car loads of materials – a fraction of Howard-Osborne’s sordid trove of information. Initially, investigators were bewildered by the magnitude of the case. Here was a short, stocky, 61-year-old man, recently retired, who, if his own documents were to be believed, might go down in history as one of the planet’s worst serial paedophiles. And his playground was south-east Queensland.

  Down at headquarters, police noted that Howard-Osborne was remarkably cooperative. But what might they charge him with? It would take months to go through the photographs, index cards and pornographic material. The JAB and the legal department would have to be consulted. So that evening in September 1979, detectives drove Clarence Howard-Osborne back to Eyre Street.

  As I had documented in Jacks and Jokers, former JAB officer Dougal McMillan said the JAB was not informed of the Howard-Osborne case on the day he was brought in and questioned by officers from the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB). ‘They [the original investigating officers] never came near us,’ McMillan recalled. ‘I was absolutely stunned when I heard this story. I couldn’t understand why the CIB hadn’t followed it up and they’d let him go.’

  That night, Howard-Osborne wrote a note explaining he had been questioned by police and that ‘this was the best way’. He then went into the garage down a driveway on the northern side of the house, hooked a hose up to the exhaust pipe and into the cabin of his car, and started the engine. It was reported at the time that he pressed ‘record’ on the audio equipment he had rigged inside, used countless times to capture his illicit conversations with boys and the sounds of their sexual trysts. Howard-Osborne then reportedly recorded his own last words: ‘I’ve been sitting here ten minutes and I’m still alive …’

  What was true about this story and what was myth? This version of events surrounding Howard-Osborne’s death had been provided by Wilson in his book. There was little information on him in the files of the Courier-Mail at Bowen Hills, and he had no green index card in the newspaper’s crime files. Why would he? He had died before he’d been charged with anything. It would seem the story would remain a mystery until I discovered his true surname, Howard-Osborne (early newspaper reports simply referred to him as Clarence Osborne) and the paper-trail started to open up.

  Then, towards the end of 2015, I was approached by a man and his son at a book event in the city CBD. The man introduced himself as a former Queensland police officer, attached to the JAB. He said he had something he wanted to tell me that he’d sat on, essentially, for 35 years. The story he had to tell concerned the Howard-Osborne files, and how he had tried to investigate them but was warned off by senior police to the point that he was physically threatened.

  Some weeks later, I met him at his home in Brisbane’s south, and over a number of hours he detailed the Howard-Osborne case and how it had most certainly destroyed his police career and, in the end, changed the direction of his life.

  As a young officer he had viewed the Howard-Osborne material when it was retrieved from Eyre Street and brought in to police headquarters in the city. He had seen the names on the index cards, so dutifully recorded by Howard-Osborne, and while the bulk of the files related to the many boys he had seduced, there were also the names of adult co-conspirators – members of the judiciary, the legal profession, politicians, academics and even police officers – with sexual interests in children.

  He told me over coffee in his kitchen that the Howard-Osborne material was enough ‘to bring down the [then Queensland] government overnight’.

  This man, his face still rent with the anxiety of having kept this information to himself for so long, said that when he suggested at the time that the Howard-Osborne case deserved a thorough investigation, despite the fact that the man himself was dead, he was warned off by a senior officer and told to leave the matter alone.

  As I listened to the retired Queensland police officer, with his
conscience and his phenomenal memory, I suddenly realised I had underestimated the dimensions of Howard-Osborne’s story. In breaking his silence, this former JAB officer would link Howard-Osborne to an international paedophile ring, and the child abuse scandal that was rocking Westminster in the United Kingdom. It was only then I understood I had, all along, been standing on a very deep and extremely dark secret that ran all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Clarence Henry Howard-Osborne was born in Brisbane on 26 May 1918. His father was James and his mother Anna Elizabeth (nee Orth). Howard-Osborne had twin sisters, Anna and Irene, and a brother, Leonard. The family worshipped at the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in Woolloongabba and lived at 88 Dunellan Street, Greenslopes. An active youth, Howard-Osborne once listed his favourite sports as tennis, cricket and swimming, and his hobbies as reading, writing and sketching. He would later run a gymnasium from his house.

  Professor Paul Wilson’s peculiar book on Howard-Osborne purportedly exposed Howard-Osborne’s frustration with his family’s devotion to Mormonism; he felt stifled by it. Wilson wrote that in a manuscript Howard-Osborne had penned about his own life:

  Osborne constantly referred to his own very strict puritanical upbringing and often described his own childhood as being for this reason ‘hypocritical’.

  He stated that he was born into a very repressive religion and was not allowed to play with children outside the particular church that he belonged to. He had a brother two years older than himself from whom he was emotionally distanced, but he often wrote warmly about the very cordial relationship that he had with his twin sisters who were four years older. Osborne did not feel close to any other female figures, including his mother, whom he described as ‘strict’ and ‘aloof’.