Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  The counsellor, a psychologist called Malcolm Morgan, noted that Vitkovic had ‘many problems’ and was ‘distressed by violent fantasies which focused on damage to himself and others’. His knee injury meant he ‘felt that since he could no longer play any sport his life was virtually meaningless’.

  Vitkovic claimed that his father was a ‘bit crazy and violent’. He said he would kill anyone who tried to burgle his family’s home, and said there were plenty of guns there. He complained that his friends were deserting him. The second appointment was four days later. This time Vitkovic guiltily recanted his previous complaints about his family. He was guarded, and said he was ‘unworthy’. He agreed to a third appointment on 16 December. But on the morning of that day, he telephoned to cancel it.

  Meanwhile, the psychologist discussed Vitkovic at a case conference, and agreed that a psychiatric assessment, medication and even hospitalisation might be in order. But when Vitkovic broke the appointment, he did not insist on referring him to a psychiatrist. He thought it would be a breach of ethics. It was a voluntary counselling service, after all, and patients had a right to decline treatment. In the circumstances there wasn’t a lot the psychologist could do. He didn’t have a crystal ball, and neither did anyone else.

  Vitkovic often dropped into the university in 1987, but he didn’t take up the offered arts course. He sometimes stopped to chat to Mary Cooke. He worked at occasional part-time jobs, but spent most of his time at home.

  His mental condition was eroding. He was now far heavier than he had been when playing tennis. In October, he was treated for mild hypertension, and was given tranquillisers. He complained of tension headaches, and took a CAT scan, which revealed nothing physically wrong.

  The same month, he saw another doctor and told him he was under stress at university and had split up with his girlfriend. He was not studying, and had never had a regular girlfriend, but he got the drugs.

  Other things happened that month. He took a ‘personality test’ carried out by the Church of Scientology. The volunteer who took the test was not a trained psychologist, but her assessment was no less useful than those of the professionals who had treated Vitkovic. She said later he was extremely depressed.

  Here, brooding alone, was a perfectionist who had failed to meet his own high standards. A favored only son, and baby of the family, of whom much had been made but much expected. A spoiled and guilt-ridden child inside a man’s body, angry with himself and with the world, and with only one fantasy left. Someone was going to pay.

  The last time Michael O’Riordan spoke to his old schoolfriend Frank Vitkovic was at the twenty-first birthday party of a mutual friend, David Fennessy, in November, 1986. They had known each other since primary school. At first Vitkovic seemed happy, but he became more depressed, telling O’Riordan that his knee injury had ruined his tennis, and that he couldn’t study any more.

  ‘Frank told me he had nothing to live for. I think he thought he was a failure in his dad’s eyes. I don’t think he had much contact with females,’ he was to tell the coroner’s court later.

  One thing stuck in O’Riordan’s mind. ‘He made the comment, ‘you know, sometimes I could get a gun and end it’.

  ‘When Frank mentioned ending it all, I replied jokingly, “Oh, come on, it can’t be all that bad.” Frank replied again to the effect that life was pretty bad.’

  O’Riordan didn’t see him again until late the following year. ‘I saw him walking down Gilbert Road whilst (I was) driving. He was walking in a funny bobbing motion and he was talking to himself. I had never seen him do that before.’

  Another friend, Con Margelis, had met Frank Vitkovic in fourth form at Reddan College. Others described them as best friends. They played tennis and snooker together, and had been out to discos occasionally with other friends after leaving school.

  When Vitkovic went to university, Margelis had taken a job as a credit officer with the Telecom Credit Union. At first they kept in touch, but saw less of each other as time went on.

  In 1987, Vitkovic channelled his swelling anger into a towering hatred of Margelis. In October, Margelis telephoned his old friend to see how he was going. Vitkovic said to leave him alone. It was a warning of what lay ahead.

  On 8 October Vitkovic applied for a shooter’s permit, which would allow him to buy and use any firearm except pistols or machine guns. He wrote on the application form that he had ‘a desire to go hunting’. On 16 October he paid a deposit on an Ml carbine at Precision Guns and Ammunition, in Victoria Street, West Melbourne. He returned on 21 October to pay the balance of the $250 purchase price. He also bought ten rifle magazines and 250 rounds of ammunition.

  No-one in his family knew about the weapon, which he hid in his room. He’d shown no previous interest in guns, although had gone once to the university rifle range with a fellow law student, Eric Tesarch, who was to recall how clumsy he had been with the single-shot .22 target rifles.

  IT was hot, and there was a train strike. About 2.30pm on 8 December 1987 when Mary Cooke looked up from her desk at the university. The student she called ‘Viko’ was there. She had seen him the previous week, when he had become angry with her assistant. This time he looked sad. She noted he was untidy, was wearing his glasses, and hadn’t shaved. She asked him if anything was wrong.

  He told her he had failed three subjects, which wasn’t true. He was no longer enrolled. She sympathised, and he replied: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go to see the bureaucrats.’ She offered to get him a counsellor, but he said, ‘I don’t think so’.

  He told her he had ‘a job at the post office to do’. Then he added: ‘You’re always a lovely lady to me,’ and grabbed her hands, adding ‘but I hate your assistant’.

  She noticed he kept looking down at a brown bag he was carrying, as if he was worried about something in it.

  No-one knows what Vitkovic did for the next hour and a half, but at some time before 4.15pm he entered the Australia Post building at 191 Queen Street. Con Margelis worked in the credit union on the fifth floor. At 4.17 Vitkovic walked in and asked to see him. Then, without warning, he pulled the sawn-off carbine from under his jacket, pointed it at his friend and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. He hadn’t cocked it properly. Margelis ran back into the office and warned other staff. Vitkovic climbed over the counter and started shooting wildly. Margelis escaped and hid in the toilets. Judith Morris, 19, and newly engaged, wasn’t so lucky. She was shot dead. The security alarm started at 4.17 and thirty seconds.

  After firing more shots, Vitkovic went to the twelfth floor. It was a random choice. He knew no-one in the entire office block except Margelis.

  John Dyrac helpfully opened the security door to let Vitkovic into the Philatelic Bureau. He was shot, but survived. Staff cowered behind desks and doors as he stalked up and down, shooting. Dead: Julie McBean, 20; Nancy Avignone, 18; Warren Spencer, 30.

  He walked down the stairs to the eleventh floor. Michael McGuire met him at the door and was shot dead. Terrified staff scrambled for cover as he sprayed the room with bullets. Marianne Van Ewk, 38, and Catherine Dowling 28, were shot dead hiding under their desks. Rodney Brown, 32, died soon after. Five others were wounded. One of them was Frank Carmody, who took a bullet in the back and suffered four other wounds. He watched as the gunman turned his back on a fellow worker, Tony Gioia.

  Gioia, a quiet father of four, and much smaller than the gunman, took his chance. He jumped on Vitkovic from behind, pinning his arms. Carmody ignored his wounds and jumped up to help. He wrestled the rifle from Vitkovic and handed it to a female worker, who hid it in a refrigerator.

  Disarmed, but not overpowered, Vitkovic lunged at a window, already broken by gunfire. Gioia hung on to his legs as long as he could. Then Vitkovic kicked clear, and fell to his death on the footpath below, as armed police stared up at his plunging body.

  Until that afternoon, when circumstances brought them together, no-one knew Frank Vitkovic or Tony had it in
them. One a crazed killer. The other an unassuming hero. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.

  CHAPTER 18

  Liar, liar

  How a goose cooked himself

  You’d rather confess to a murder you didn’t commit than to a fling?

  IT was the sort of crime to whet the interest of any self-respecting homicide detective. It had everything … the secret confession, contrition, the cover-up, a weak link in the chain and a desperate hunt for an unidentified corpse.

  It began with the mysterious death of a woman in October, 1997, which turned out not to be suspicious, but which led to another, stranger scenario.

  Police were about to close the original case in February, 1998, when an informer contacted them with a name. The killer, he boldly declared, was a Melbourne man in his twenties, heavily involved in the movie world. The man had allegedly confessed to his family that he had killed someone in October.

  Detectives made checks. They found out that the suggested killer had his van stolen at that time but, oddly, had not reported the theft until the vehicle was recovered by police.

  It was only one unexplained fact, but enough to warrant a chat with the movie man’s wife.

  The homicide detectives knocked on the door with no great hope of a breakthrough. Just a few questions, they told her. ‘Purely routine.’ To their surprise, the woman burst into tears. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come. He’s told me he killed a man.’ Suddenly, the bored detectives were all ears. This sounded serious.

  She told the police she had been worried about her husband’s strange behaviour and his absence from the family home, so she asked him if he had any problems. ‘I’ve killed a man. He was at the back door and I killed him,’ he confessed.

  Days after the revelation the wife called a crisis meeting of the extended family and Mr Movie again confessed to being a cold-blooded killer. He said he had taken the dead man in his van to the Mornington Peninsula, where he dumped the body. Checks by police found that the van had been found in scrub at the Peninsula, in a perfect place to dump a corpse.

  While his parents went into damage control to protect their son, the wife could not bear the thought of sleeping with a killer. It made her blood run cold. She kicked him out.

  For months the man urged his family to remain silent. To keep his awful secret. But he knew the police were closing in. Again and again they interviewed friends and family. They looked for enemies. Was this quiet, ordinary suburban man Melbourne’s Hannibal Lecter?

  They impounded his van for scientific tests. Take it to forensic, Senior. But, through it all, Mr Movie was curiously confident they wouldn’t find anything. After all, he told his parents, he’d spent three days cleaning the van.

  Police examined his house. ‘Take all the prints you find, photograph everything,’ Constable.

  The suspect remained cool. They wouldn’t lay a glove on him, he predicted.

  The detectives were up against it. No body, no hard evidence. Their case was on the nose. After interviewing more than twenty people, they risked playing their ace. They grabbed Mr Movie for a taped interview. ‘Let’s grill him, chief, give him the third degree.’ But after taking advice from his solicitor, he refused to comment.

  The ace wasn’t a winner. The cops then played the joker. We know you’ve got a sheila on the side. ‘Now tell us the truth, you goombah, or we’ll charge your whole family with conspiracy.’

  It worked like magic. The man began to sob. Yes, he would tell the truth. No, he hadn’t killed anyone. He had made the story up because he didn’t want his wife to know he’d had a dirty weekend down at the beach.

  The police were incredulous. ‘You’d rather confess to a murder you didn’t commit than to a fling, you idiot?’ He nodded sheepishly. Even though he’d been banished from the marital home in December he continued to pretend he was a killer.

  He was allowed to leave. The police bill for the investigation stands at around $40,000.

  The man has not been allowed to return home. He lost his job after police found some irregularities in the books of the movie business. His girlfriend has also lost interest. And he is unlikely to be invited to the next police ball.

  CHAPTER 19

  No Idea

  The betrayal of Debra Byrne

  ‘You look to the police to trust them, and then this happens.’

  WHEN troubled singer and celebrity, Debra Byrne, came home to find her house burgled in September, 1997, she thought things couldn’t get worse.

  She was wrong.

  Stolen from her inner suburban home was the usual berley for burglars – video player, television, computer and cordless phone. But also missing was a private video of Byrne taken with her then lover, a little-known Melbourne musician called Chris Bekker.

  For days she worried, knowing that if the adult video fell into the wrong hands, her career, already damaged by her well-documented bouts of ill-health and depression, could be further tarnished.

  After more then twenty years in the business she knew the combination of sex and stardom would make the video hot property should anybody be unscrupulous enough to copy and sell it.

  But while most burglary victims never see their goods again, the singer was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. Within three days she received a call from police that the burglar had been caught and her possessions recovered. Her relief turned to suspicion as police promptly returned all items except the video tape. For five days she repeatedly rang the police asking for her property. ‘They said they wanted fingerprints from it but that surprised me because the burglar was pleading guilty,’ she said.

  It turned out she had been burgled by a so-called friend, a fellow patient she had met while undergoing treatment at the Heatherton Clinic.

  Byrne, the mother of two teenage girls, knew the sexually explicit video had the potential not just to embarrass herself and her family – but to re-ignite showbusiness rumours that she was out of control.

  Her worries slowly began to dissipate when police finally returned the tape. But, almost eight months later, she received a call from her then manager, Steve Copeland. He had heard rumours that she had appeared in a pornographic video being privately pirated. ‘It took me three days to get my head out the door. I shed a few tears back then,’ Ms Byrne was to recall of that moment.

  ‘This was a private video. It was not to be made public. I haven’t broken any laws and I haven’t hurt anyone, but I’ve become the victim.’

  She complained, and the police Ethical Standards Department began investigating whether police had copied the video when they had possession of the stolen property.

  Regardless of the formal investigation, it had been an open secret in police circles the tape had been copied. At first only a few police had seen the one pirated copy. The plan was that it was to remain in a ‘safe circle’ and kept for a laugh, but eventually another copy was made, and then another.

  Within months it became freely available and had been seen by large numbers of detectives. Then it moved out of police hands, and the group ‘in the know’ became larger still. Copies ended up with members of AFL football clubs, fire brigade officers and several high-profile media identities of the sort known by their first names.

  Football commentators on one radio station began to make thinly-veiled references to the tape and to the singer. One of the biggest stars in television, a man easily stung by intrusions into his own dubious private life, breathlessly described the tape as ‘broadcast quality’ and one radio identity asked any listeners who had seen the tape to drop a copy off at the station. Ethical standards investigators found two copies of the tape, proving it had been pirated. Soon after the investigation began the message went out on the remarkably efficient police bush telegraph system: ‘dump the tape.’

  The official line was that there was no proof police had copied the tape, but privately they admitted it could have been no-one else.

  Ethical Standards Department investigators told the singer it was u
nlikely they would ever find the police officer who originally copied the tape. This didn’t mean they were not trying and that there was a cover-up; it meant they couldn’t get the proof to find the culprit.

  The tape had been in a busy station where more than fifty police could have had access to it. Without a confession this investigation was heading nowhere. And a voluntary confession was considered about as likely as finding the $3000 of charity money stolen from the Prahran police station safe in late 1998, but that’s another story.

  Byrne faced the humiliating truth that there could be hundreds of copies made of the tape. ‘You look to the police to trust them and then this happens,’ she said.

  The performer whose personal problems have always attracted keen public interest had to face yet another hurdle: how to deal with people who may have sat at home and watched her in her most intimate moments, courtesy of an illegally copied video.

  Understandably, she feels betrayed by police who distributed the tape, and nervous about the effects on how she is perceived.

  ‘When I am out somewhere like the bank and I see someone looking at me I wonder whether they are staring because I am well known, or because they have seen the video.’

  Byrne, who is in her early forties, was forced to tell her daughters, aged eighteen and sixteen, that their mother was in a private video that was gaining unwelcomed public notoriety. ‘I was very proud of them. They said “you’ve done nothing wrong; it’s the people who copied it who should be ashamed”.’

  Word of the tape’s existence inevitably leaked to the mainstream media. One published story said there was an internal investigation into police pirating a tape involving a celebrity. The paparazzi started to circle, wanting to ‘out’ the star.