Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  In his first letter, Vince Murphy revealed that his daughter Kerry had recently given him a copy of Whitrod’s memoir, Before I Sleep, as a Christmas present.

  Dear Ray,

  I read with interest the summary of your book when it appeared in the Courier-Mail a short time ago and I was surprised that you would have remembered me as I was only a junior officer during your term as Commissioner in Queensland. Twenty-five years have passed since we lost the best Police Commissioner I ever served during my forty-two years in the force and there were eight Commissioners during that time.

  Murphy offered his condolences to Whitrod on the loss of his wife, before revealing the true purpose of his letter. He wanted to set some matters straight. Given that this was private correspondence, never intended for publication, Vince Murphy wanted to convey to Whitrod the contextual reality on the ground that Whitrod may have missed given the latter’s elevated role as Commissioner. Vince needed Whitrod to know the truth if he wasn’t already aware, and wanted to back up Whitrod’s theories where he knew he could.

  Having read your book I feel there are a number of matters which may be of interest to you and which support some of the claims made in your version of what occurred during your term as Commissioner in Queensland.

  Not long after you became Commissioner [in early 1970] and I was operating a one-man traffic patrol and based at Fortitude Valley, I happened to drive along Langside Road, Hamilton, which ran behind the home of the notorious politician Don [Shady] Lane.

  As I approached his backyard I could see him burning leaves and as I drove towards him he signalled that he wanted to talk.

  Vince wrote that this incident occurred not long after Glen Hallahan had been charged with taking a kickback from prostitute Dorothy Edith Knight on 30 December 1971. Detective Tony Murphy had already been charged with perjury stemming from the confessions of brothel madam Shirley Margaret Brifman.

  Tony Murphy was on the Police Union executive at the time and Vince recalled driving to Rockhampton for the union meeting.

  After leaving Brisbane Tony said that he wanted to call at the Maroochydore Police Station to talk to [an officer] because he wanted him to arrange interviews between himself and Terry LEWIS with the local Members of Parliament including Mike AHERN. Tony did not say why they wanted to talk to the local members of parliament …

  I later ascertained that they intended to meet all the coalition members and inform them that whenever senior members of the Labor Party such as Jim CAIRNS, Don DUNSTAN and Lionel MURPHY visited Brisbane they always stayed at your home at St. Lucia. They had no doubt that the politicians would be sure to inform the Premier [Joh Bjelke-Petersen]. The fact that this information was false did not bother them because they were aware of the Premier’s dislike for anything or anyone associated with the Labor Party.

  Vince then returned to his brief meeting with the diligent gardener, Don Lane.

  After a short conversation with LANE he asked me whether I would be prepared to assist a small group including himself, Tony MURPHY, Terry LEWIS, and a couple of his political colleagues to get rid of Ray WHITROD.

  I told him that I had no reason to want to have you removed from office and that I would not have anything to do with such a move.

  He [Lane] almost immediately terminated the conversation and returned to burning leaves.

  After all these decades, Vince’s letter provided additional support to the theory that Whitrod’s resignation was in fact the result of a carefully crafted political coup, and one that had started less than two years into his administration.

  Vince then ruminated over Lewis’s appointment as Commissioner in November 1976.

  I feel confident that one of the first projects carried out by LEWIS and MURPHY when LEWIS became Commissioner would have been to locate the statements we gave to Supt. FOTHERGILL [and his partner Terence O’Connell of Scotland, who came to Brisbane to investigate Queensland police corruption in August 1975 at the behest of Police Minister Max Hodges] and his colleague … and then to place our names at the top of their hit list.

  It did not take them long to transfer me to Innisfail, however, they would have been surprised when I made it clear that I did not intend to move on transfer.

  Vince dug his heels in, and Lewis ultimately relented to ‘save face’, agreeing to send Vince to Woodridge, south of Brisbane.

  Vince then informed Whitrod of a curious recent encounter.

  About 18 months ago I was claimed by the infamous ‘Bagman’, Jack HERBERT, at the Broadbeach Shopping Centre and he was obviously keen to talk to me about numerous matters including the ‘JOKE’ and he told me how he first became involved in corruption in Queensland.

  Herbert and his wife, Peggy, had also retired on the Gold Coast, having had a holiday apartment there for many decades. Vince continued:

  [Herbert] said that after resigning from the police force in England he came to Australia and joined the Queensland Police Force. After a short time in Brisbane he was transferred to Mackay. He said that not long after arriving there he became aware that all the Detectives all wore good clothes, drove respectable cars and could afford to spend long periods of time drinking in hotels. He said that he was soon introduced to corruption by a Detective Sergeant named Noel McINTYRE.

  (Interestingly, in Jacks and Jokers I had quoted Lewis talking about some of the early appointments he made after he became Commissioner: ‘I brought Noel McIntyre back as Assistant Commissioner. Unfortunately he didn’t have that long to go before retirement because he was a really great bloke.’)

  Vince Murphy went on to inform Whitrod that he had thrown a lot of names past Herbert to see if they were corrupt or not.

  He included as corrupt many who had claimed during the Fitzgerald Inquiry that they were innocent and he even told me where he had delivered money to them. He said that he used to meet Sid [sic] ATKINSON once a month at the Cascade Gardens at Broadbeach.

  I eventually asked him why I had been transferred to Innisfail and he said that I was interfering with their corrupt business particularly in the Fortitude Valley area and certain politicians had put pressure on LEWIS to get rid of me from Brisbane.

  The letter moved to Rat Packer Glendon Patrick Hallahan and the infamous Sundown Murders case – a triple homicide at Sundown Station across the Northern Territory–South Australia border in December 1956. A young Hallahan, stationed in Mount Isa, had supposedly solved the crime, arresting itinerant carpenter Ray Bailey.

  Vince Murphy mentioned a police officer attached to Mount Isa at one time. In the early 1970s, when the officer in question was in charge of the CIB, Commissioner Whitrod asked him for advice on Hallahan. Whitrod had heard that the top detective was corrupt. The officer told his new boss that Hallahan was a ‘first class man’, and the rumours about Hallahan were not to be believed.

  On a police union visit to Mount Isa we stayed at the Mount Isa Hotel and I can remember talking to the Licensee, a gentleman named Merv McHUGH, about police who had been stationed at Mount Isa. He said that it took a long time to get over the recession caused by [a senior officer] when he was in Mount Isa and they had no sooner got over that period when the new Inspector arrived in town. He said [the inspector] introduced a new system which the publicans referred to as [a tax] which was six pence on all bottles of liquor by all the hotels and clubs. It made no difference whether the sales took place during normal trading hours or outside normal trading hours.

  I hope that what I have written will be of some interest to you and perhaps explain how the cards were stacked against you by people in high places who were supported by corrupt police [and] who used every trick in the book to undermine an honest man who did so much for the Queensland Police Force under very difficult circumstances.

  Vince was at the typewriter again a month later on 4 February. It appeared the fallout from the publication of Whitrod’s memoir, Before I S
leep, was continuing.

  Since I last wrote to you I received a phone call from Ron EDINGTON and he informed me that Tony Murphy had contacted him after reading your book and he said that he saw reference to Ron writing to you.

  Tony was annoyed with Ron and he wanted to know why he wrote the letter. Ron told me that he informed Tony that he had a lot of respect for you and that he got some pleasure out of writing the letter. Tony said that he could not understand Ron’s actions after what ‘Ray WHITROD did to Terry, Glen and himself’.

  Vince cited further anecdotes about Tony Murphy.

  Tony was the senior member of the ‘Rat Pack’ chosen by BISCHOF and many of us were of the opinion that he was the brains and leader of the group. He could be very nasty when he wanted to be and he was similar to BISCHOF in a number of respects. The ‘Rat Pack’ did not lose any support or authority when Norm BAUER took over as Commissioner upon BISCHOF’S retirement and I can still remember BAUER giving Glen HALLAHAN the credit for apprehending the Sundown murderer in Mount Isa.

  Two weeks later he posted another letter. It, too, was filled to the brim with amusing anecdotes about the past, but there were vignettes that were gravely serious, like the night of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fire in Fortitude valley in early 1973 in which 15 people lost their lives.

  I was working on my own that night as a Supervisor at Brisbane Mobile Patrols and I was the first police officer to arrive at the scene closely followed by a male and a female officer who were also from Mobile Patrols. After having the bodies conveyed to the City Morgue by … the Government Undertaker and four ambulances I set up an office there and began the task of having the bodies identified.

  The only two who carried identification were two soldiers from Townsville. I worked at the morgue all day and at about

  3 p.m. I was told that I would be required to attend a preliminary Coronial Inquiry at 5 p.m. that day … I left the inquiry at about 6.30 p.m. and went home where I had a shave and shower and after having a meal I returned to Brisbane Mobile Patrols to commence work at 10 p.m. I did not get any sleep.

  Vince typed out his memories of other cases before again reflecting on the Whitrod era and the forces that were mounted against him virtually before he’d even taken up the job of Commissioner in 1970. Vince made a considered assessment with the benefit of hindsight and garnered wisdom over the years, and once more offered an apology on behalf of his fellow officers.

  After reading your book I feel that I now know the real Ray WHITROD and I am sorry that members of the Queensland Police Force were not given more information about your achievements prior to being appointed to the position of Queensland Police Commissioner.

  We did not know about your war service and many Police formed the impression that you were just a ‘university type’ who had not experienced the hard life.

  Those of us who were fortunate enough to have some personal contact with you were soon convinced that you had some very good plans for improving the Police Force and eliminating the corruption which had been in place for many years.

  He wrote that Whitrod would have expected some push-back from corrupt police, but he should have been able to rely on senior police and government members for backing.

  There were a lot of people in high places who knew what was going on, however, they were not prepared to stand up and be counted. Many Senior police officers knew about the ‘Joke’ but as Jack HERBERT told me they did not intend to speak out for fear of hindering their futures.

  Out of the Dark

  When I published a feature article in Qweekend magazine on the revelations of that former Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB) officer who had tried to investigate the Howard-Osborne files in the early 1980s and been warned off by his superiors, several people previously unknown to me emerged from the woodwork with more information.

  Yet another retired police officer, who’d actually seen and read portions of the Howard-Osborne files in late 1979, made contact. That former officer confirmed my original source’s version of events, and added even more detail. (A third officer would later confirm the observations of the other two.)

  Retired officer Smith, as we’ll call him, did not read my magazine article on the Saturday it was published in March 2016, but started getting social media notifications and messages from close friends. ‘I had someone Facebook me a message and they said, “You finally told the story.” And I just replied, “No! What are you talking about?” They said, “It’s in there, it’s in the Courier-Mail,”’ Smith said.

  ‘All I could see was the front page of Qweekend magazine online and that was the very first time I’d ever seen that bloke [Clarence Howard-Osborne]. I blew up his picture on my monitor and that’s the very first time I’d ever seen him. I mean, it hit me like a tonne of bricks … it sort of hit me that, holy shit, there’s someone else who’s actually corroborating my story. I couldn’t believe it. Part of me was elated, part of me was just in the pits.’ Smith said he drew the blinds that day and spent it in bed.

  Like my other police source, Smith also held an old secret, one that had seen his family threatened, his marriage end and his career with the Queensland police disintegrate. He, too, had tried to investigate the paedophile Howard-Osborne and his extensive files, and had paid the price.

  Officer Smith, however, didn’t have a clue about what he was getting into when, in September 1979 shortly after Howard-Osborne’s body was found gassed in his car at Mount Gravatt, he was called into headquarters for a special task.

  I communicated with Officer Smith via Twitter, and shortly after we met in the food court of a shopping complex on Brisbane’s northside. It was there he told me the story of his fateful entanglement with the Howard-Osborne case.

  Smith was a JAB officer in a suburban Brisbane police station when a senior officer in the city ordered him and his junior police partner to come into headquarters and examine the files taken from Howard-Osborne’s place. Smith’s partner was fluent in German, and many of the documents contained elaborate notations in German.

  ‘There were boxes of stuff, filing cabinets, there was film … all the stuff that was in the room that we were in was all the stuff that needed translation,’ Smith recalled. ‘He [Howard-Osborne] had the cards with all the details and the descriptions and all that. He had attached to them photos [of the victims]. Some had photos with two of them on them. With him performing sexual acts on them, or them doing them on him. And there were magazines, but also what he had was, he had sent their photos away and they got published. He had the page from the magazine attached to it as well. So that you would see the same photos that he had developed in the magazine.’

  Officer Smith ascertained, from briefly surveying the material, that the files recorded abuse by Howard-Osborne that stretched back decades. ‘There were letters and things written on them and there were also colours, most of them were blue.’

  ‘The index cards were blue?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, a lot of blue ones, a lot of white ones.’

  ‘And do you think the cards were colour-coded as well?’

  ‘Yes, I think they were; that’s the impression I got, that the colours signified different things. So I just assumed that obviously that colour meant something in some way.

  ‘I always thought – why would you keep records of you committing crimes? And at one point I said something to my partner – did this guy think that he wasn’t doing anything wrong? Now you might know a bit more about his mental state than what I did because as I said, we had nothing to do with him, he was dead and gone by the time we got called in there.’

  Both young men were horrified at what they saw. This was paedophilia on an industrial scale. Smith recalled his partner was responsible for translating the magazines. ‘They used to tell the stories about what he was doing, and how he was enjoying it and how he did this and how he did that. I mean it was all made up probably, but you know, it
just made it all so … I mean to be quite honest I think if we had been there any longer it really … I mean just the material itself gets to you.’

  Smith remembered the countless photographs of boys mainly aged between 12 and 14. ‘He [Howard-Osborne] had addresses and all that sort of stuff,’ Smith said. ‘That’s how I knew they were from other states and whatever. But there were overseas ones as well and I just assumed they were his … contacts and places where he sent stuff to. Once again, I mean I was naive … I didn’t know about this worldwide group of people. All I remember is there were European addresses, German addresses and there was a UK address.’

  As Smith and his partner started sifting through the material, some familiar local names began to surface in the index cards of victims. ‘They were public figures, and a lot of cops followed rugby league in particular, so they knew the players and they’d come across a photo of them, maybe five or six years before, that Howard-Osborne had taken of them with their name and all sorts of stuff,’ he said. ‘They were then A-grade footballers, rugby league footballers and rugby union footballers and that, and these were photos of them when they were kids in those files.’

  Even more disturbingly, Smith confirmed that he saw a special set of index cards and a master list of adult paedophiles who were in touch with Howard-Osborne, and in some cases, partnering him in offences against local children. ‘There was a file thing, a drawer full of things that had something like the word “Associate” or something like that on the front, which I took to mean “Associates”,’ Smith remembered. ‘He had all the correspondence, when he’d sent mail to them, when he’d received mail from them, and that sort of stuff.’

  I asked Officer Smith if he could recall any of the names on the ‘Associates’ cards. He offered several names, some of which corresponded with names given to me by my original source on the Howard-Osborne paedophile ring story.