Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  THERE was no controversy when Constable Wayne Sherwell shot dead Ian William Turner near St Arnaud in June, 1988. The country traffic cop, whose daily routine was to book speeding drivers, simply waved in a car to issue a ticket when he was confronted by Turner, who was armed with two guns.

  After a terrifying hand-to-hand struggle, Turner, who was later found to be an armed robber, was shot dead. Wayne Sherwell won the police Valour Award for bravery. He was a hero whose name appears on the Honour Board at the Victoria Police Centre.

  But, seven years after the shooting, Wayne Sherwell feared he was cracking up. He took six months off on sick leave and considered resigning. ‘I had reached rock bottom,’ he was to confide.

  ‘Taking a human life is the most serious thing you could do.’ He said that for years he thought about the shooting every day and even now thought about it every second or third day. ‘I have to remind myself that Turner was the architect of his own demise.’

  He thought about every split-second action he took when struggling with Turner. ‘If I had belted him over the head with the gun it may have been different. If I’d been a bit nastier he would be alive.’

  Wayne Sherwell was counselled days after the shooting but, still filled with adrenalin, he felt on top of the situation. ‘I didn’t feel bad at all. I felt bad about not feeling bad.’ He had a cup of coffee and a chat with the counsellor and then went home. But in the days, months and years that followed, his mental state deteriorated.

  Promoted to senior constable, Sherwell was unable to leave the shooting in the past. ‘I was consumed by it. I thought I was going around the twist.’ He said he suffered from broken sleep and became moody for years. It was only when he read a newspaper report that quoted a Victorian policeman involved in another shooting that he realised his feelings were natural. ‘I thought “that’s exactly what I’m going through, I’m not going nutty after all”.’

  He believes that only police involved in shootings truly understand the trauma and is a strong supporter of peer group counselling. In 1998 when police shot dead a man armed with a rifle at Maryborough he rang the station and left a message. ‘If you want to talk, talk to me.’

  He said that he now tried to force the shooting out of his mind. ‘I’m dealing with it differently.’ But he can never pull over a car without thinking of Turner. The police force has to confront conflicting demands when there has been a police shooting. The police involved may need immediate counselling, but the investigators into the actual incident must be given priority. They must not only do their job professionally, but be seen to be doing so. It is no easy thing.

  Senior police psychologist, Gary Thomson, says counsellors are available immediately after shootings but they make sure they don’t intrude on the investigation.

  He said police involved in the shootings usually went into shock but, while some suffered emotional problems for years, others remained relatively unaffected.

  ‘Some people can become fixated and it can be a turning point for the worse in their lives’. He said counsellors tried to ‘be supportive without being judgemental.’

  US law enforcement studies showed that most police shot in the line of duty remained psychologically scarred for up to fifteen years.

  A study at the Los Angeles police department found that seventy six per cent of police involved in shootings retained vivid memories of the incidents for years.

  About seventy five per cent suffered from crying depressions and eighty five per cent suffered from sensory distortion, where they felt incidents were happening in slow motion.

  Some of the main symptoms included depression, crying for no reason, withdrawal, paranoia, irritability, flashbacks, and fear of going insane.

  An example. Two Massachusetts policemen were ambushed in the street by two burglars. One of the police officers was shot dead and the second fired four shots, wounding one of the burglars. But one of his bullets accidentally killed a six-year-old boy, playing in a nearby yard.

  The policeman who fired the shot was shattered. Although he suffered no physical injuries one hand became paralysed. It was the hand that held the gun that killed the child.

  CHAPTER 21

  Death in Brunswick

  Savage end to a life of quiet decency

  She was a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother. She could have been yours.

  YOU expect the very old to die, but never this way. Not at the hands of someone who breaks into a nursing home late at night, goes to a bedroom and stabs a ninety-five-year-old woman in the neck. A woman who has suffered two strokes and is so frail she uses a walking frame and has trouble speaking.

  But that is how Kathleen Downes was killed in a quiet residential street some time before dawn the last day of 1997.

  Mrs Downes would have turned ninety-six a month later, on 29 January, and many of her far-flung family would have gathered for the birthday. Instead, they gathered for her funeral.

  And the service, instead of being the peaceful passing they would have expected, was overshadowed by the brutality of a crime that has had police puzzled for a year.

  The facts, as known, are few.

  Mrs Downes was one of twenty-one residents at Brunswick Lodge, a nursing home in Loyola Avenue, Brunswick, an old working class suburb just north of Melbourne’s inner city area that is steadily becoming gentrified, like its near neighbor, Carlton.

  Loyola Avenue is a quiet cul-de-sac of mostly 1920s red brick and tile-roofed houses, lined with palms and plane trees, a block from Lygon Street, one of the main thoroughfares and shopping strips.

  Brunswick Lodge is a cheerful, modern place where Mrs Downes had spent eight happy years. She had the front room, overlooking the street, and was popular with other residents, staff and the owners.

  The last member of her family to see her alive was her granddaughter Jenny Irwin, who visited her a few days after spending Christmas with her parents at Anglesea, a seaside town of holiday houses and retirees on Victoria’s scenic west coast.

  ‘I didn’t see her on Christmas Day, so I wanted to see her before I went back to Deniliquin,’ Jenny was to recall a few days after her grandmother’s death, when she was still red-eyed with grief and fatigue. ‘She was excellent. She was giving me cheek. She liked a bit of a laugh and a joke.

  ‘I got there about 11.30 in the morning. I stayed about twenty minutes or half-an-hour, then walked her down to lunch.’

  On 30 December, Mrs Downes went to bed between 8pm and 9pm, leaving her bedroom door open into a hallway, as she usually did. It might have cost her her life.

  About 12.30am, when staff made a routine check, she was sleeping peacefully. At 6.30am, a staff member found her body on the floor beside her bed.

  At first it looked as if she had suffered a heart attack, but ambulance officers who arrived a few minutes later found she was lying in a pool of blood from a wound in her neck. Detectives later found a window had been forced. They can only guess that a would-be burglar attacked Mrs Downes. No-one saw or heard anything.

  It was a savage end to a life of quiet decency. Kathleen Downes, a great-grandmother, was born in 1902 at Fryerstown, near Castlemaine, central Victoria. She was the youngest of four children of a gold miner, David Fraser, and his wife, Phoebe.

  Kathleen often told her children she didn’t meet her father until she was nine because he had gone to the Western Australia goldfields after the Victorian mines petered out. He sent money to support his family for eight years until he returned about 1910.

  The Fraser family shifted to a house in Ascot Vale before the First World War. There, as a teenager, Kathleen met Lionel Downes, who was three years older.

  Like many other patriotic young men with an itch for adventure, Lionel put his age up to get into the army and was sent to France. He survived the trenches of the Somme and returned to Melbourne to court Kathleen.

  The couple married in the late 1920s, just in time for the Great Depression. Lionel built a weatherboard house in Hi
llsyde Parade, Strathmore, where they were to raise three children and live the rest of their married lives.

  The young bride was proud of her home. It was one of the first ‘all-electric’ houses in Melbourne, and included an early model Hecla electric range that Mrs Downes was to use until she left 60 years later.

  The house had two bedrooms, and Lionel, who could turn his hand to most things, added a ‘sleep-out’ on the veranda as the family grew.

  Unlike many in the Depression, he held a secure job – as head of a section in the ordnance factory at Maribyrnong.

  But money was scarce. To make ends meet he and his sons melted down scrap lead to make fishing sinkers for sale, and Kathleen bottled fruit from her trees.

  Their eldest child, Patricia Lack, a grandmother, flew from her home in Brisbane on New Year’s Day to join her brothers, Bill and Geoff Downes, in mourning for their mother.

  She was, says Patricia, ‘a bright and caring lady who spoke her own mind’ and worked hard to help her family and other people.

  As a young woman, she nursed her older sister, Doris, who was dying of tuberculosis. Later, she was to nurse her own mother through a long illness.

  She was awarded the long service medal from the Glenroy branch of the Queen Victoria Hospital Auxiliary for her charity work.

  During the Second World War, she and her husband took in servicemen on leave.

  ‘I don’t know how she fed them, because everything was rationed, but she did,’ recalls Geoff Downes. ‘Dad would play the piano and sing songs. They were kind and public-spirited people.’

  Like many of her generation, Mrs Downes outlived her husband by many years. He died of a heart attack in February, 1963, at the age of sixty four. She stayed in the family home until suffering her first stroke after a heart operation ten years ago. After eight months with her son Bill and his wife Yvonne, she moved to Brunswick Lodge.

  Her family visited her often and she was happy. On Christmas Day, Geoff and his wife, Phyll, drove over from their home in Templestowe and took her to the house of his daughter, Melinda, at Diamond Creek.

  There, with three of her grand-daughters, the grand old woman the family called ‘Nan’ had her last Christmas dinner, a traditional meal with all the trimmings. ‘She had a fantastic appetite,’ recalls Geoff. ‘She ate more than I did.’

  After chatting all afternoon, and a ‘bite of tea’, she packed up the presents the family had given her and Geoff drove her home. He didn’t see her again.

  Homicide detectives know little more than they did the morning the murder was discovered. They have no motive, no suspects and no strong leads.

  The only thing in their favor, they believe, is that the crime is so cowardly that someone who suspects they know who might have done it will make an anonymous telephone call.

  The head of the homicide squad, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins, sees it as an offence that crosses the boundary between criminals and police. ‘This is a crime not only unacceptable to the community but to the criminal element. We’re waiting for that call.’

  Kathleen Downes was a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother. She could have been yours.

  CHAPTER 22

  Taking the Mickey

  Beware the date rape drug

  It is a prosecutor’s nightmare – a star witness with amnesia.

  AN attractive young woman wakes up in her bed with a throbbing hangover. Partially dressed, she can only vaguely remember getting a lift home with the pleasant man she met in a Melbourne nightclub several hours earlier.

  She may have been a little tipsy, but certainly not rolling drunk, when she finished clubbing about 4am and stepped into the young man’s pale blue Falcon sedan. Yet her last memory was of sipping an overly sweet cup of hot chocolate the good Samaritan had kindly bought her at a twenty-four-hour convenience store on the way home.

  Within fifteen minutes she was woozy, drifting in and out of consciousness, helpless in the hands of a man who had carefully plotted her fate. She was drugged — and later raped in her own bed — by the friendly stranger in what police believe may be an example of a crime that goes largely unreported throughout Australia.

  The head of the Victoria Police Rape Squad, Detective Senior Sergeant Chris O’Connor, says police know women are being drugged and assaulted. He frankly admits, ‘We don’t know how big the problem is.’

  Police in Melbourne know of cases where girls have been given an unidentified drug that has left them semi-conscious for more than eight hours and with no memory of what happened.

  ‘We certainly have one offender on our books and there may be more,’ Detective Senior Sergeant O’Connor said.

  Detectives have targeted one man, dubbed ‘The Hot Chocolate Rapist’ who has drugged, or tried to drug, at least twenty-two Melbourne women, and probably more, since 1995.

  The Hot Chocolate Rapist’s style is consistent. He picks up girls at, or near, nightclubs and offers them a lift home. He stops at a convenience store where he offers to buy his potential victims a coffee, hot chocolate or soft drink. If the girl accepts the drink, within fifteen minutes she feels the effects of being drugged.

  According to police the drugging of women for sex could be a major unreported crime as the victims can’t remember details of the assault. Most can’t be sure whether they drank more than they thought or had been slipped a mind-altering drug.

  They can’t give police detailed statements of the crime. It is a prosecutor’s nightmare — a star witness with amnesia.

  Detective Sergeant Jim Macdonald from the rape squad says victims of the Hot Chocolate Rapist reported struggling for control after having the adulterated drink. ‘Some of the girls reported becoming really groggy and trying to fight off the effects of the drug.

  ‘Others have woken up in their own beds with no idea how they got there and no recollection of what happened after they had the drink.’

  Police know that of twelve women who have accepted lifts with the man in 1997, four have felt drugged but have remained conscious, six have woken up in their own beds, and two have been offered drinks but refused.

  Detective Sergeant Macdonald said some of the women reported that when they woke up they felt as if they had been given an anaesthetic or heavy sedative and often fell asleep again for several hours.

  ‘This man is a very cunning predator who presents well to the women he approaches,’ he said. In three cases he has offered two women a lift and another occasion he has struck twice in the one evening.

  While police cannot be sure of the drug the rapist is using, the case is remarkably similar to that of a Qantas steward who drugged and raped colleagues using Rohypnol, a powerful prescription sedative.

  In 1996 a former Qantas flight attendant, John Travers Robertson, was sentenced to six years jail after he was found guilty of using Rohypnol to drug female crew members for sex.

  One victim said she was given an ‘incredibly sweet’ hot chocolate in Cairns. Police believe Robertson drugged and attacked fourteen crew members using Rohypnol. He was eventually caught and successfully prosecuted only because police found the photographs he took of his naked, unconscious victims.

  Melbourne rapist and killer, Daryl Suckling, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of Jodie Larcombe, 21, bragged that he used Royhpnol to drug his victims.

  In the United States and United Kingdom the use of drugs to spike drinks at nightclubs and parties has become a big concern to law enforcement and health authorities. In both countries law enforcement bodies can test possible rape victims for traces of Rohypnol.

  Rohypnol is ten times more powerful than Valium and is used to treat sleep disorders and heroin addiction. Doctors say it can cause short-term amnesia and decreased inhibitions when used in conjunction with alcohol.

  US law enforcement authorities have been particularly critical of the drug, which cannot legally be sold in America.

  In the US it has been called the ‘date rape drug’ and has been blamed
for hundreds of alleged sexual assaults. In 1996 the US Drug Enforcement Administration described Rohypnol as the nation’s fastest growing drug problem. Cases of abuse have been reported in thirty-two states by mid-1996.

  The London Metropolitan Police have set up a group to look at the abuse of Rohypnol in rape cases. UK authorities have described the consequences of the use of Rohypnol as a doping agent as ‘horrific’ with rape victims being unable to testify to details of their crime.

  A senior drug enforcement officer, Terrance Woodworth, told a US sub-committee ‘untold numbers of unsuspecting young women’ were having their drinks spiked with Rohypnol and then being sexually abused.

  One law enforcement agent went as far to suggest women should accept only unopened drinks in nightclubs.

  One of the problems facing police is the difficulty of establishing whether a woman has been drugged with Rohypnol or simply drunk too much, as the effects are similar: staggering, slurred speech, memory loss and hang-overs.

  Even forensic tests can be unsatisfactory. Blood tests screening for Rohypnol must be done within thirty-six hours and urine tests within seventy-two hours and experts say the drug must be present in large doses to be identified.

  Police say some woman might suspect they were drugged to try to explain why they behaved in an uncharacteristic manner. Others may conclude they just drank too much, unaware they were drugged by a someone planning to manipulate them.

  Chemists say the drug has legitimate uses as a sedative and to control the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts, but that it is waning in popularity because it is such a powerful drug with potential side effects. Police worldwide are concerned it is gaining popularity as an illicit club drug.