Also unknown to the CIU was the state of the batteries inside the recorder. They were running low on power – nobody had checked them.
When Hallahan stood and returned to his vehicle, Gulbransen and Early struck. Gulbransen retrieved sixty dollars from Hallahan, and Early recorded in shorthand their subsequent conversation.
Early says Hallahan was firstly surprised and then appeared resigned that he’d been caught red-handed. ‘He was caught fair and square,’ remembers Early. ‘When Gulbransen got the money back Hallahan knew Knight had put him in. He realised he was a done duck.’
Hallahan was driven back to police headquarters. When he requested to use the lavatory, Early accompanied him: ‘I said to him, “It’s strange we get to meet up again like this.” He said bugger all.’
The CIU searched Hallahan’s police locker and discovered two concealable firearms.
In another first for Queensland, Hallahan was charged with two counts of official corruption and brought before a magistrates court that afternoon. He was granted bail of three hundred dollars on the condition he have no contact with Knight, who was ‘afraid of Hallahan’.
That day, Hallahan, thirty-nine, was suspended from duty.
How had he walked into such an obvious trap? Or had he reached a point where he considered himself untouchable?
Ron Edington, former president of the Police Union, says: ‘He was a peculiar type of a bloke, old bloody Glen . . . bloody unscrupulous bastard, he’d do anything, you know . . . Fancy a stupid detective like [that] walking down through a park . . . You’d get a bit suspicious, wouldn’t you?’
Early adds: ‘He must have known we’d been asking around for months. He must have thought he was immune.’
After everything Hallahan had been involved in over the previous two decades, it took a makeshift listening device with dicky batteries, an old caravan, and sixty dollars to bring Hallahan before a court for corruption.
Now for Murphy
Over at the Licensing Branch, Jack Herbert was quietly running the Joke and still delivering payouts to his mates, as regular as clockwork, at the beginning of each month.
Murphy was still taking in eight hundred dollars a month – an annual total of double his police wage. Herbert alleged that Lewis received a nominal amount.
While money wasn’t a problem, Whitrod was. His wet behind the ears Criminal Investigation Unit had ensnared Hallahan. Now they were coming after Murphy.
Herbert and the Rat Pack had survived previous scrutiny through sheer cunning and the very thing they were trained to do as detectives. They may have shown creativity in exercising the verbal, but their ability to collate hard facts was just as formidable.
As Whitrod tightened the noose, they had to apply equal pressure.
So when Papua New Guinea–based barrister Eric Pratt – a friend of Lewis from the 1958 police interchange program – was in town on business, Lewis and Murphy arranged a meeting. Jack Herbert was asked along. Herbert had once worked as a police officer in Victoria, as had Pratt.
They met during the day at a motel on Coronation Drive overlooking the Brisbane River, not far from police headquarters.
‘I recall a discussion there about Whitrod,’ Herbert said. ‘I took it that [Pratt] knew him quite well, actually, from the conversation which followed along the lines that the boys – that is, the police in New Guinea – were willing to put a keg on for the Queensland boys for having Whitrod.
‘I also recall him stating that the only way to beat Whitty was to inundate him with paperwork . . . that he couldn’t handle it.’
Lewis was fully aware of Whitrod’s attempts to destabilise him. The police commissioner had planted new recruits in the Juvenile Aid Bureau (another was installed in late 1971), he was trawling through Lewis’s old police diaries from his days in the Consorting Squad, and was conducting a ceaseless audit of the JAB’s working patterns. Whitrod harassed Lewis for statistics and was clearly mounting a case against him and the JAB. But for what purpose?
Lewis again sought a personal audience with the police commissioner, but to no avail.
With Hallahan awaiting his corruption charges to be heard in court, Detective Tony Murphy, wearing a dark suit, arrived at the Queen Street chambers of his lawyer, J.P. Elliott, just prior to 1 p.m. on Friday 4 February 1972.
They were soon met by Gulbransen, Becker, Voigt and Early of the CIU.
Murphy was interviewed by the team for two hours and fifteen minutes over four charges of perjury stemming from false evidence he allegedly gave over Shirley Brifman at the National Hotel inquiry in late 1963.
Becker had earlier advised Early, the shorthand expert and interview stenographer, that he wanted every ‘um’, ‘er’ and ‘ah’ included in the transcript, right down to the last letter and punctuation mark.
Murphy answered all the questions put to him and told the investigators: ‘I find myself charged because of the untrue, malicious statements of Shirley Brifman, a drug addict, a self-confessed perjurer, prostitute and police informer, who has so obviously fabricated certain statements about me, hoping somehow to evade the consequences of the law with respect to her in New South Wales introducing her thirteen-year-old daughter to the sordid life of a prostitute.’
Murphy went on to suggest that Brifman had colluded with the member for South Brisbane, her lawyer, Colin Bennett, who had held a ‘grudge’ against him and other police since the National Hotel inquiry had failed to find any evidence of police wrongdoing.
‘I am not guilty of this charge,’ Murphy added in his usual confident way.
Becker then arrested Murphy by virtue of a warrant, and he was escorted to the Brisbane city watchhouse, where he was formally charged. He was briefly held in a watchhouse cell before he appeared in the courtyard at 4.08 p.m. The prisoner was called to appear before the magistrate at 4.21 p.m.
Becker requested that Murphy be remanded until 18 February. The detective was granted bail of four hundred dollars.
The hearing was over by 4.40 p.m.
It was front-page news in the Courier-Mail the next day: detective in court on perjury count: 1963 national hotel inquiry sequel.
Murphy, forty-four, was suspended from duty. Within a couple of months he would be going to trial over the perjury charges. And the chief witness against him would be his old lover, informant and patron, Shirley Margaret Brifman.
The arrest and charges shocked Murphy’s friends in the force and his family. Wife Maureen Murphy says the charges were ‘something small, pitiful’, and that ‘Whitrod was just determined to get him one way or the other’.
A Sudden Death in Bonney Avenue
It wasn’t a happy Christmas for the Brifman family at the end of 1971.
Shirley had had a huge falling out with her sister Marge Chapple in November, and had taken the children and vanished. With threats of death from a Sydney gunman, mysterious phone calls, drug overdoses, and the constant attention of police, it is little wonder that Marge, with her own family to take care of, had run out of patience.
Brifman also started telling family and friends that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
By the New Year the Brifmans reappeared, settling into a new safe house – a first-floor, three-bedroom flat at 75 Bonney Avenue, Clayfield. The flat was part of a large, subdivided Queenslander that contained the Brifmans’ spacious upstairs apartment and two smaller downstairs flats.
The property was just six blocks away from the Armagh Street mansion of stockbroker Robin Corrie, Brifman’s deceased friend.
While Queensland and New South Wales investigators had largely finished their formal interviews with her, and with Hallahan charged with corruption and Murphy charged with perjury, Brifman was on her own and vulnerable.
In a panic, she hit the phone, constantly calling her lawyer, Colin Bennett, and his wi
fe, sharing her fears and anxiety over the safety of herself and her children.
Bennett’s daughter Mary recalls a curious incident that occurred six months earlier following Brifman’s blowing the whistle on corrupt police.
Colin Bennett was phoned in the early hours of the morning at his home in Highgate Hill, by police at the Upper Mount Gravatt station. They said his presence was required at the station as his client, Shirley Brifman, had been found dead of a drug overdose.
‘Dad got dressed and was just backing the car out when he stopped and came back inside,’ Mary says. ‘It didn’t sound right. He made some phone calls and discovered that Brifman wasn’t dead but very much alive. He always wondered if the police had tried to lure him out on that night, and why.’
Brifman rang old girlfriends, particularly Lily Ryan, whom she’d known since well before the National Hotel inquiry days in Brisbane. She also kept in touch with journalist Brian ‘the Eagle’ Bolton, an alcoholic newshound who worked out of the Sunday Sun offices in the heart of Fortitude Valley. Another journalist at the end of interminable phone calls from a nervous Brifman was the Sunday Mail’s Ric Allen.
In early January 1972, she summoned Allen to the Bonney Avenue flat. They sat and talked in the lounge room, which had its own wooden bar and shelving separating it from the dining room. ‘I want to tell you my story before I die,’ she supposedly told Allen. ‘I’ve got cancer and the doctors have given me twelve to eighteen months to live.’
She made a similar cry a few months earlier to Norm Gulbransen of the CIU, who concluded: ‘This is very likely a move to gain sympathy.’
Ellen Russell, Brifman’s niece and daughter of Marge Chapple, says: ‘Shirley never had cancer. If she had cancer she would have told her sister.’ Did she ever suggest to any member of the family that doctors had diagnosed her with cancer? ‘No.’
In mid-February, around the time of Murphy’s next appearance in court over the perjury charges, Brifman told Allen that a woman had phoned the flat – Brifman had a silent line with permission from the Postmaster-General – and threatened the life of her youngest child, son Sid, then eight years old. It was eerily similar to a threat from a female received by phone at the Chapple household, across town in Paddington, the year before.
‘I’ve got things to do before I can die,’ she told Allen. It was a curious use of language, if the quote is accurate. Before I can die. As if the decision was out of her hands.
Brifman’s eldest daughter, Mary Anne, had rejoined the family from Moree by the time they moved to Bonney Avenue. She also had a new beau, ‘Graham’, a local boy who worked at a petrol station in nearby Kalinga and was very quickly drawn into the drama of the Brifman household.
Graham remembers seeing Tony Murphy in the last weeks of February 1972.
‘He actually came around to the flat a couple of times and spoke to Brifman outside . . .’ Graham says. ‘She was having an affair with Murphy.
‘She said to me: “They’re out to get me, I want to get them before they get me.” I thought, This is a lot deeper than I ever thought.
‘Shirley did a lot of screaming all the time. I’d say she was having a breakdown. She was going off her head a little bit.’
On top of the Murphy case, Brifman was finally facing her own court appearance in Sydney on 17 March. The pressure had become intolerable.
In late February, Brifman once again phoned journalist Allen. She supposedly told him, ‘I know I have cancer. The thought of dying is with me all the time.’
To add to Brifman’s depression, she learned a few days later that her good friend Lily Ryan had actually succumbed to the disease. It was a devastating blow, and it further fed Brifman’s own paranoia that she might suffer a similar fate.
The next day, Brifman phoned Colin Bennett at his offices at North Quay, looking for a sympathetic ear. She got Bennett’s wife, Eileen, on the line.
‘She said she had to go into hospital for an operation and asked me if I had seen where Lily Ryan had died,’ Eileen recalled.
Brifman wanted to attend Ryan’s funeral, but was feeling too tired and ill.
Earlier that week, former Regan sidekick John Edward Milligan was chatting to his mate Glen Hallahan about the impending perjury case against Tony Murphy. With the case due to be heard in a couple of months, time was running out.
According to Milligan, Hallahan let him know that the problem of Shirley Brifman would soon be no more: ‘I was told by Glen four days before . . . she was going to be murdered. I was told . . . that Shirley Brifman’s problems had finally been solved, that she’d be no more worries shortly.’
On that Friday evening, 3 March 1972, Brifman stayed in with husband Sonny, daughters Sonya and Helen, and son Sid. Early in the evening, Mary Anne had gone out with Graham.
Over in Garfield Drive, Lewis was presumably home with his family, having knocked off for the weekend at 5.10 p.m. He had a long weekend to look forward to, with Monday off duty.
Meanwhile, Detective Murphy, suspended, was supposedly in Sydney, conducting inquiries relating to his forthcoming court appearance in April.
At around 9.30 p.m. in Bonney Avenue, Brifman occupied her time by polishing an antique phone.
Soon after, Mary Anne and Graham returned to the flat. Sonny, Sonya and Sid were in the back rooms. Helen was asleep in the narrow room off the foyer.
As for Shirley, by now she was restlessly pacing the apartment, dressed in her nightgown. She was agitated. Occasionally she burst into tears and whimpered.
Graham, who had not known Mary Anne for long and ‘had morals’, decided to sleep alone on the couch in the large foyer. He says he was a light sleeper.
Towards 11.30 p.m., he noticed Brifman moving through the flat in the dark. She went into the rear room, where her husband slept. She checked Mary Anne and Sonya in the main bedroom. She stood briefly over Helen in the side room and then quietly came into the foyer area, where Graham was resting.
He sensed Shirley standing near the couch.
‘That night was quite eerie – I’ll never forget that night,’ Graham recalls. ‘You know when you get a feeling that someone is watching you?’
Graham opened his eyes. He saw Brifman standing over him in the dark. She was wearing a floral nightie with side pockets.
‘It’s all right,’ she said to him. ‘It’s only me.’
She seemed frightened.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
He sensed that Brifman was waiting for someone to come to the front door, that she had a prearranged meeting with somebody.
He says, ‘Why would she come and stand near me in that room? She was uneasy, she was scared.’
For whatever reason, Mary Anne was roused from her sleep.
At about 11.50 p.m., just as Graham had predicted, a car pulled up outside the Bonney Avenue flat and the engine was cut. Then faint footsteps were heard coming up the brick front steps.
Shirley Brifman went to the door. She may have seen a blurred face through the oval leadlight inset in the door, with its four small red roses. She opened the door halfway.
‘I heard a muffled voice,’ Graham remembers. ‘I was pretending to be asleep with my eyes closed. It was Shirley’s voice and a man’s voice, that’s all I heard.
‘It could have been a woman with a deep voice, it was muffled. It was midnight, probably a little later.’
Brifman and the stranger talked for about ten minutes inside the foyer. Mary Anne came out of the main bedroom and joined her mother halfway through the conversation. She remembers her mother putting her arm around her. Mary Anne says the visitor was a middle-aged woman wearing spectacles. Near the end of their talk, the woman, heading out the door, handed Brifman an amber vial.
‘I was fifteen,’ Mary Anne reca
lls. ‘Not a lot of things were that interesting to me about my mother’s life at that time. But I always remembered that night.
‘When the visitor left, I asked my mother who it was. She said it was [someone associated with] Tony Murphy. Tony and this visitor delivered the stuff, the vial, to my mother that evening. My mother said Murphy was downstairs. That’s what she said. I never sighted him.’
Mary Anne says her mother received a quantity of drugs that night that were guaranteed to kill her. The options were to take an overdose and die, or face being tortured again and having her children’s lives terminated.
Mary Anne says: ‘She’d had many overdoses. They delivered her something that was going to work.
‘She knew. My mother knew. She couldn’t take any more, really. If she didn’t do it, they’d do it for her in a bad way. When she put her arm around me it was an odd thing for her to do. It was like she was saying goodbye.’
At around 6.30 a.m. the following day, Graham got dressed and went to work at the petrol station.
At 8.15 a.m. Mary Anne and her young brother, Sid, went into the small room off the foyer. Little Helen was still asleep in a narrow cot in the room.
Sid fled at what he saw. Mary Anne wasn’t far behind.
Shirley Margaret Brifman, thirty-five, was dead, propped up on a number of pillows.
‘She was like frozen – the rigor mortis had set in,’ Mary Anne remembers. ‘She was lying back . . . half sitting up. Her hand was frozen up in the air.’
Mary Anne immediately dashed to the phone table in the hallway off the kitchen, and called the ambulance.
‘My sisters and brother had a look and that was that,’ Mary Anne says. ‘They didn’t go back in. That was too scary for them because of how she looked.’
Police eventually arrived in Bonney Avenue, followed by the press.
Mary Anne says: ‘I remember a few years later, a detective acquaintance of mine told me that on the day of my mother’s death, when it came over on the [police] radio, nobody wanted to respond because they were all scared. Their reputations could be tainted. No normal, straight detective wanted to go to the house.’
Three Crooked Kings Page 28