Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  SHE signs on with a reputable agency in early 1997, one that specialises in looking after old people in their own homes. She produces glowing references, a few of which are genuine. The clients love her. They’re frail, elderly, lonely and rich. She’s bright, cheerful, and wants to be rich. ‘I saw the wealth and thought, “I wouldn’t mind a bit of that”,’ is the way she puts it to some of the other nurses.

  Her chance comes in October. The agency is having trouble filling a position with an elderly widower in Caulfield. He’s in his seventies, but still runs the importing business that has made him a millionaire since he came to Australia as a refugee during the war, when he was one of those shipped across the world on the ship ‘Dunera’. Despite his age, the feisty ‘Dunera boy’ doesn’t need a nurse; he wants a ‘live-in housekeeper’ who, he stipulates, has to be ‘under fifty and attractive’.

  Three women sent for interviews complain to the agency that he is a ‘dirty old man’ and that they couldn’t possibly work for him. Marilyn, however, thinks he sounds ideal for her plans. The agency tells the client she is forty-seven, attractive and very friendly indeed.

  When she gets to the house for the interview she finds a leering gnome with a big belly, a thick accent and a spa bath. It’s the spa that makes them both sure they’re on a winner.

  When Marilyn sees it she coos ‘Ooh, what a lovely spa!’ The gnome winks at her and suggests she might like to hop in it with him if she takes the job. Sharp business people both, they close the deal immediately.

  He insists on driving her to her existing job, nursing an old lady in Toorak. They sit in his big Mercedes Benz sedan, talking. He asks if she’d like to go interstate with him, and dine out every night. She says she would. She brushes his arm and kisses him on one jowly cheek before she gets out. She’s baited the hook, and he’s taken it.

  Days later he takes her to dinner at the Hilton. He reveals he’s staying at the hotel because his wife — mother of his adult children — has died only three weeks before, and he doesn’t want to sleep at his house yet. Tough as she is, Marilyn is shocked at this callousness; she’d thought he’d been widowed at least six months.

  She masks her distaste, and plays the part she has chosen with the ease of long practice. ‘Most of the old men like him are afraid of the young dolly birds, because they know that a twenty five-year-old gorgeous blonde must be after their money,’ she explains later. ‘But a nice, respectable-looking, middle-aged housewife like me is to be trusted.’ She laughs ironically.

  ‘That first time we had dinner at the Hilton, I said I wouldn’t stay with him. But of course I did. I had a couple of glasses of wine to make it look good and said (here she assumes a mock-genteel accent): “Oh, I feel a bit giddy. I must have a little lie down before I go home.” We went up to the room and, of course, as soon as I lay down on the bed he was all over me like a rash.

  ‘Next morning the silly old fool took me down to breakfast. There I am in evening clothes from the night before and he’s saying to the staff “Have you met my housekeeper? She’s just dropped in to see me this morning. Isn’t that nice?” I stayed with him two days. The doormen saw me, and smiled. They knew what was going on.’

  After a week of dinners, she moves into the house in Caulfield. There’s not much housework. She washes and irons the gnome’s shirts and squeezes him orange juice in the morning before he goes to the business. Her main duties are in the bedroom — which, uncharacteristically, she finds increasingly unpleasant. One reason is that the gnome occasionally injects himself with a drug that gives him a four-hour erection.

  ‘The sex nearly killed him,’ she is to recall. ‘He had to go to hospital one morning and have an ECG. They fitted all these wires and stuff on him. After that he took it easier. He’d just turn over, give my boobs a bit of a pat and go to sleep. I’d sneak off to the other room because it was like sleeping with a pig.’

  She kills time during the day by watching television — and entertaining a male friend, who doesn’t suspect what’s going on because she tells him the old man has a wife.

  At first, she schemes to lure the gnome into marriage. But she gives that idea up when she works out that most of his wealth is tied up in a family-owned business effectively controlled by his sons, married men who despise their father’s behavior so soon after their mother’s death, and are rightly suspicious of the housekeeper’s motives.

  The pair eat at restaurants most evenings. ‘His only friends were waitresses, and that was only because he carried wads of cash and stuffed money into their hands. He talked only about himself. All his business problems, his investments. He told me everything.

  ‘On the way home he would nearly make me sick talking about the girls in the restaurants. “See how they love me!” he’d say. “They can’t keep their hands off me.” I told the silly old goat they only wanted his money, but he wouldn’t take any notice.’

  After a month Marilyn senses the old man is already looking around for other women. Top of the list is an Asian girl in her twenties working in a Toorak restaurant. Marilyn deduces that the waitress and her boyfriend are setting up a sting of their own. She decides she has to get in first.

  The old man disgusts her in a way she hasn’t expected. There isn’t a photograph of his wife displayed in the house; he has thrown them all in a box in a back room. She discovers that he has been visiting brothels for years. And that he keeps pornography.

  Ironically, after returning from shopping one afternoon, she finds a syringe cap on the bedroom floor that hadn’t been there that morning, and guesses he’s brought a prostitute into the house.

  ‘I started to hate him. He was suggestive every day. I was sick of the suggestive talk.’ She buys a disposable camera, and takes pictures of the pornography, the syringe and sex-drug, and any business documents she can find.

  She makes her move in mid-December. He is going to Queensland for Christmas, and has asked her to go with him. She fancies the free holiday, and knows he will shower her with gifts. But there’s one problem: ‘I knew it won’t look good for my case against him.’

  The case being sexual harassment. First she goes to a doctor. Not her own — ‘he’d know I was up to something’ — but one she’d never seen before, in Malvern.

  She puts on an act she’s still proud of months later. She bursts into tears in the surgery. Tells the doctor, sobbing, that her employer is a monster who forces her to sleep with him and that she can’t refuse because she doesn’t want to lose the job. She asks for advice and sleeping tablets, and gets both.

  Next step, the law. She telephones Maurice Blackburn and Co., a well-known firm in workplace disputes, but they were too busy. Then she goes to a referral centre which recommends ‘the best feminist lawyer in Melbourne’, a woman at a small city firm that specialises in sexual harassment cases. She makes an appointment for the afternoon of Wednesday, 17 December.

  The lawyer is tough, efficient, and dead easy to deceive. She swallows her new client’s bogus tale of misery without question. Three hours later, when Marilyn gets back to Caulfield, the gnome is home, waiting. He complains, asking where she has been. She tells him she’s been to the city to get him a Christmas present. He brightens, and asks her what it is. ‘It’s a surprise,’ she says, unblinking.

  It’s a surprise all right. When the lawyer’s letter arrives two days later, he is very surprised indeed. And dismayed. The letter outlines a list of alleged offences under the Equal Opportunity Act. The bottom line: $36,000 ‘compensation’ to take it no further.

  The old man’s sons, themselves married with children, are furious and mortified. They tell him to settle it quickly and to avoid scandal at all costs. He settles for $30,000, on condition the settlement remain confidential.

  ‘I would have taken $10,000,’ Marilyn confides later. ‘I just hope he reads this.’

  She is in a suburban hotel lounge, crowded with pensioners hoeing into a Tuesday special discount lunch before playing the poker machines. �
�Look at them,’ she says suddenly over the din of dentures grinding half-price wiener schnitzels, waving her arm defiantly at a sea of grey heads. ‘They’ve done nothing in their lives except hang out the washing. At least I’ve lived a bit.’

  The truth is, Marilyn’s sting was never only about money. That’s why, just before she left the big Caulfield house the last time, she tipped out the owner’s expensive cognac — and filled the bottles with a mixture of cold tea and vinegar.

  Meanwhile, she wants to make the most of her most marketable commodity. She’s looking around for another rich old man with an itch for female company. ‘A knight would be nice,’ she muses.

  AND the gnome? In March 1998 he advertised for a new housekeeper. Three months is a long time when you’re seventy-six. Any night could be your last.

  CHAPTER 17

  Queen Street revisited

  No rest for the wicked

  A spoiled and guilt-ridden child inside a man’s body

  DESPITE the extreme nature of his crime, the mass killer appears to be extraordinarily ordinary – Dr Jack Levin, sociologist and author

  FRANK Vitkovic was ordinary, but not normal. Few glimpsed the black fantasies squirming behind the mask he held up to the world, and by the time they did, it was too late. He had set himself for a day of reckoning that would make him Australia’s worst mass murderer until Martin Bryant and Port Arthur.

  On a hot Tuesday afternoon in 1987 the failed law student walked into a Queen Street office block in Melbourne’s central business district to settle a score that existed only in his head. He was bent on killing an old school friend, then taking as many lives as he could before taking his own.

  It was a tragedy that he killed eight people, one more than the pathetic Julian Knight had at Hoddle Street a few months earlier. It was a miracle he didn’t kill many more.

  A thousand people worked on the eighteen floors at 191 Queen Street. In the brown bag Vitkovic carried into the building, he had a sawn-off military carbine and ten magazines loaded with enough high-powered ammunition to shoot scores of them.

  Afterwards, investigators were to find forty-one empty shells and 184 live ones, proof that the pudgy loner with a gun and a grudge had been prepared to keep shooting until police arrived. But chance, although it dealt death to eight and wounded five others, ruled otherwise.

  By some twisted blessing, Vitkovic had been cheated when he bought the .30 calibre Ml carbine at a West Melbourne gunshop a few weeks before.

  As a firearms expert was to explain in the coroner’s court much later, the semi-automatic’s trigger spring was faulty. Instead of springing back into position after each shot, the trigger had to be manually jiggled back into position before being squeezed again.

  It meant that instead of spitting out a stream of bullets as it was designed to do, the rifle was effectively reduced to a ‘bolt action’.

  Security film footage of the first minutes of Vitkovic’s rampage shows him repeatedly looking down at the weapon as he clumsily fiddled with it. This was to give a lot of people a chance to flee and hide before he could shoot them. It also might have given a brave man the opening he needed to tackle Vitkovic and disarm him. But that was later …

  NO-ONE knows when Frank Vitkovic felt the first twinges of alienation that festered like a boil in his brain and burst into the atrocity of 8 December, 1987. He was to leave behind a note that said he felt ‘the seeds of doom’ as young as eight years old. But if anyone noticed that the boy was disturbed, they didn’t talk about it then and haven’t since, at least publicly.

  Vitkovic was born on 7 September, 1965, two years after his only sister, Liliana. Like hundreds of thousands of young Australians of his generation, he had migrant parents. But, unlike most, his parents came from different countries and had married across different cultures. His father, Drago, was a Yugoslav, and his mother, Antoinetta, was Italian.

  Drago Vitkovic was a self-employed painter until he hurt his back in a car accident and became unemployed, circumstances Frank later hinted might have led to tensions in the family. Antoinetta Vitkovic worked as a domestic in hospitals. They lived in a neat house in May Street, West Preston, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, where they nursed ambitions for their children.

  Frank and his sister worked hard to live up to the migrant dream of forging a better life in a new country. Liliana became a legal secretary. Frank was renowned among his contemporaries at local Catholic schools for the prodigious amount of homework he did, often studying more than four hours a night.

  At secondary school, there was little outward sign of inner turmoil. But, in 1983, when he was seventeen, he was caught lying on the floor at Northland shopping centre, looking up a woman’s dress.

  Police called his mother and referred him to a psychiatrist, who reported that it was an ‘adolescent adjustment’. Vitkovic was mortified and remorseful, and claimed he had done it as a dare to impress his friends. It wasn’t the last time he was referred for counselling. But, to those who knew him casually, he kept up a mask that covered deepening depression and anger.

  Later, his sister was to give evidence that painted him as a normal young man. He was witty, intelligent and good company. He cracked jokes, did impersonations of politicians and teachers, could twist his mouth a funny way and make a sound like a tennis ball being hit. He was a passionate Collingwood supporter and liked pizza and McDonald’s fast food. He also loved classic horror films like King Kong and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. But, then again, a lot of people do.

  There was another, more intense, side to Vitkovic. Unlike most young males in that time and place, he had a social conscience, and did charity work for the Australian Birthright Movement. He felt for the underprivileged, and agonised about the sufferings of people in Ethiopia. He sometimes said that if he had a lot of money, he would give it to the hungry. He was awkward with girls, and subtly cut off from his male schoolmates by his self-imposed discipline.

  Friends marvelled at his freakish ability to recall facts and figures – especially football statistics. Sometimes they called him ‘the stats man’. They also called him ‘Viko’ and ‘Vik the Dick’. Like most nicknames, it had a double edge. There was the faint inference that some of his friends laughed at him behind his back.

  Vitkovic was ambitious and, as he grew older, his ambition had an increasingly obsessive edge. By the time he studied HSC, he was a perfectionist who hated to lose, and this fuelled his relentless study and practice at tennis and snooker. He scored outstanding marks – three As and two Bs – and won a place in the Melbourne University law course in 1984.

  It’s tempting to speculate, in light of later events, that Vitkovic was the victim of his own supercharged, over-reaching ambition. If he had failed or done poorly, he would have been bitterly disappointed and ashamed at letting his family down. But, ironically, by doing so well, he got into a tough course in which he may well have felt constantly under pressure and, maybe, subtly out of place.

  Fellow law students were to recall him turning up at university on the first day with his father, wearing a collar and tie. They also remember that, in first year, he studied long and hard. And that he displayed a fierce will to win in the two games he excelled at, snooker and tennis.

  ONE friend remembers finding him at Lindrum’s pool rooms in Flinders Street, practising alone. Others recall that he trained as if he hoped to play professional tennis. If he lost at either, which wasn’t often, he would become strangely quiet. It was, looking back, verging on odd behavior.

  He occasionally chatted to Mary Cooke, the kindly head receptionist who fielded inquiries in the university union house.

  Once, she remarked to him that he ‘must have come from a Catholic college’. Vitkovic said he was and asked how she knew. She told him that ‘all the quiet ones came from Catholic colleges’.

  Vitkovic passed first-year law well. But, towards the end of the year, a small thing happened that was to assume huge proportions in his mind. He hurt
his right knee while running, an injury he later aggravated at tennis.

  At first, doctors could find nothing obviously wrong with the knee. But they weren’t so sure about the patient’s mind. Ben Davie, who referred him to another orthopaedic surgeon, Ian Jones, wrote a letter describing Vitkovic as ‘a most peculiar young man’.

  Surgery found the cause of the knee problem – a damaged cartilage – but failed to fix it. At least, Vitkovic kept complaining of pain. The injury depressed him. He couldn’t play tennis, which made him unhappy and unfit. He even found it hard to play snooker.

  The clean-cut first-year law student changed in second year. He began to put on weight, grew his hair longer, often went unshaven and saw less of his friends. Significantly, he began to lose interest in studying so hard.

  The various effects of the knee injury were enough to fracture his already fragile self-esteem. He became introspective and brooding. He was teetering on the edge of a precipice only he could see.

  The crunch came in the second term of 1986, when he deferred his law studies. He told everyone it was the knee injury that had forced him to leave. He was suspended from the law faculty at the end of that year, and switched to arts. This followed a bizarre essay he handed in after a contract law examination.

  The essay was a rambling diatribe advocating capital punishment for civil libertarians, and had no relevance to the question set. It read in part: The reforms I would make to the present laws are to reintroduce capital punishment for all civil libertarians. The present criminal laws are a farce. One person has lost all his civil rights (i.e. has been murdered) whilst the son of a bitch who killed him is entitled, according to ‘civil libertarian philosophy’, to have his future considered, his reform considered, his state of mind considered, the stress he was under, the so-called provocation of the deceased … the fact that he only meant to scare the deceased, the gun just “went off” …’

  There was much more in this vein, broken up with a strange cross-heading that read ‘Warning: prophetic – St Paul’. Vitkovic was referred to the university counselling service by the sub-dean of the Law Faculty. The first appointment was on 5 December, 1986.