The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  Possibly Kathy’s proudest prison memory of all is of the time during her last spell inside, in 1993, when she brought close to 100 Fairlea prisoners out on strike.

  We got a message over the loudspeaker about 3.30 that the shop wouldn’t be open for cigarettes, and we were all without. So I said: ‘I’ve had enough of this, I’m calling the whole gaol out.’ And my girlfriend Julie, she said to me: ‘They won’t go out.’ So I went around to all the houses and cottages and everything, and I said: ‘Listen, we’re having a strike until we get our cigarettes, right?’ With that every one of us sat on the road [running through the gaol linking buildings] even the ones that didn’t smoke, and we wouldn’t get locked up.

  So we’re all sitting in the road, and everybody came from everywhere, and even Julie was astonished that I had the power to bring everybody out. So little Margaret Raby’s sitting next to me, and the next minute an officer who’s pretty reasonable comes down, and he says: ‘What’s the problem?’ and I said: ‘Well, you told me you’d see what you could do.’

  And the next minute I felt meself bodily lifted up, the girls got behind me and I was the spokesperson. So the officer and I walk towards the front and on the way to the office I said to him: ‘Listen, I’m not going down the slot for this am I?’ And he said: ‘No way, Kathy.’ He said: ‘This is an honest request.’

  So in the meantime the girls have been locked up. I thought to myself: ‘The top governor, Governor Moreland, I’ll let him stand over me.’ So I sat in the seat in his office and he said: ‘Why are you all congregated downstairs looking up here?’ and I said: ‘The officer told us to wait there.’ He said: ‘Well I was in a meeting.’ And then he said: ‘Well, it’s my fault. Give ’em all a packet of Peter Jackson.’ The officer would have given them to us anyway, if Moreland wasn’t on.

  So with that I go back, I knock on every cottage door, and I said: ‘We’re getting the smokes.’ And big cheers went up and everything, and I get inside, and little Margaret Raby said to me—who’s killed her husband, right?—she said to me: ‘It’s the most exciting day of my life.’ I thought to meself: If that’s all . . . you know, the poor thing.

  Among Kathy’s most prized possessions from her days behind bars are what are probably the only two surviving copies of The Fairlea Arrow, a weekly magazine named after Queensland’s legendary country and western singer.I At least a dozen editions of the magazine were published, each with Kathy’s name as editor, on the front cover. Complete with recipes, horoscopes, weather forecasts, crossword puzzles, beauty tips and letters, the magazines have an over-riding flavour of optimism. Somehow they seem to sum up perfectly Kathy’s attitude to life in gaol.

  * * *

  I. Fairlie Arrow was a little-known Gold Coast nightclub singer who sprang to national prominence in December 1991 when she faked her own abduction. Fairlie, then twenty-eight, was fined $5,000 and ordered to pay police the $18,000 costs for their investigation into the bogus kidnapping.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Going Down

  JUST ANOTHER NIGHT AT the Gaslight Massage Parlour at 108 Stephenson Street, Richmond. The usual collection of half-drunk, middle-aged desperates queuing for an empty. Exchanging their last few crumpled dollars for the promise of the unknown. Not romance, not love. Just the unknown, undiscovered flesh and unsmelled scent of a stranger. ‘Fucking thrillseekers,’ Kathy grins to herself as she watches through the evening as they shuffle out afterwards, the inevitable shroud of disappointment and disillusion hanging over them. But then Kathy can afford to grin. She’s the madam, and only rarely takes a tumble herself. She’s responsible for neither the illusion that brings them there, nor the disappointment that always marks their leaving.

  It’s 1 a.m., and time to lock the doors. As she passes through the front gate and walks briskly up the dark street to her home at 35 Stephenson Street, she decides to drop in nearby at 86 Chestnut Street to see what Dennis is up to. It’s still relatively early, and he’s been up speeding for days; he certainly won’t be in bed. As Kathy lets herself in, unlocking the front door with her key, the normal wall of sound, Bob Marley jacked all the way up, hits her like a warm, sticky breath of Jamaican air. As she heads for the kitchen she first catches sight of the young boy who had called round at the parlour earlier in the evening. Couldn’t be more than twenty-one, and not bad-looking. Said he was a mate of Dennis, and it was okay to get a freebie with one of the girls. But he isn’t looking so cocksure now, lying on the kitchen floor.

  Apart from the stainless steel meat cleaver embedded in the back of his head and the dried blood congealed around his hairline, he is half-naked and curled in a foetal position. Kathy knows she’s going to throw up if she doesn’t hit the bathroom quickly. As she turns sharply back out of the kitchen doorway she feels her stomach heave involuntarily. In through the bathroom door, groping for the light switch and there’s the toilet. Her skin feels clammy as she rests her elbows on the porcelain lid, propping her head on her fingers. And then she takes in her surroundings, and the churning in her stomach erupts into the bowl beneath her. The walls, floor and even part of the ceiling are a crimson tapestry. ‘Fucking abattoir!’ The words come out involuntarily between the heaving, panting breaths she is taking. The screen on the side of the bath is shattered and shards of glass litter the floor. Mechanically, and without thinking further than the need to do something about the mess, Kathy leaves the room to return moments later with a mop.

  As she begins to wash up and down the walls, she knows two things beyond doubt. One is that this is Dennis’s handiwork, and the other is that she won’t get out of here until it’s over. He loves an audience at times like this.

  The bathroom walls are as clean as they’re going to be tonight, and she heads back towards the kitchen to get a brush and pan for the broken glass before she tackles the worst of the gore smeared across the floor. As she passes the boy’s inert form she notices his tracksuit trousers crumpled beside him on the kitchen floor. She remembers them from earlier when he visited the parlour. They’d looked like new. She knows what’s happening. Dennis and a couple of his ‘soldiers’ are in the lounge drinking and shooting up speed. They’re going to knock [kill] the boy, they’re just taking their time, having a drink in between.

  Kathy opens the door to the lounge, and without looking at Dennis tells him: ‘Don’t burn the tracksuit. I’ll wash it out and give it to Jamie.’

  Not long afterwards Kathy hears Dennis and the soldiers grunting and cursing in the kitchen, as they lift the boy to his feet and drag him to the bathroom. She steps into the hall and asks one of the soldiers what is going on.

  ‘He spied on Den having a fuck a coupla hours ago. We’re making sure he won’t do it again.’

  Must have been after he left the parlour, Kathy thinks to herself, spotting the bloodied meat cleaver where it lies in the hall. At least that’s not going into the bathroom. This time the beating continues for the best part of half an hour. From the sounds coming through the closed door they’re using their fists, or maybe gun butts. When it’s over and they’ve left the room, Kathy goes in again, tries hard to ignore the boy’s moaning, bubbling sounds, and starts to mop the walls and floor again.

  By now it’s three in the morning and the anger is building inside Kathy. She’s had enough, but knows better than to challenge Dennis at a time like this. Instead she pulls the boy half-upright and splashes cold water from the bathroom sink onto the raw meat of his face. Somehow she manages to get him out, past the closed loungeroom door on the other side of which the soldiers and Dennis are drinking and talking. She half-drags him into the kitchen, opens the back door and pushes the boy into the yard.

  ‘Get out,’ she hisses in his ear. ‘Get going. Or else you’ll be dead.’

  She can see he’s never going to make it across the yard unaided, let alone out into the alley. He’s dressed only in underpants, but there’s no time to worry about that. Once again she pushes and carries him in the direction of the gate, pu
lls it open and shoves him onto the hard bluestone cobbles of the alley.

  And how he got home just in his underpants, I don’t know. But I didn’t want him to die. I saved one. And Dennis and the two soldiers didn’t see me. So for about an hour they didn’t miss him, and they never did find out it was me let him go. By this time I don’t know what happened to him. And then I got told later on that he’d become nearly a vegetable. He could still walk and that, but his mind was gone. And I was pleased that I let him go. To me it was stupid, stupid. I know he came from Ascot Vale. Probably an acquaintance of Dennis, or maybe a boy that just got out of gaol or something, I don’t know.

  Dennis had been having sex in his bedroom and the boy was spying on him through the door. That was it. I felt sick. To me I was disgusted. And that’s when I started to turn against him. I didn’t say anything. Every few minutes he was injecting himself with speed, and you can’t comment on someone when they’re drunk and on that, no you can’t. There was one occasion when he tried to shoot me, because he didn’t know who I was in his mind. He was even going to shoot a crossbow into Victor. And he didn’t pull the trigger. Mental. And that’s when I decided to kill him. I said that when they interviewed me on A Current Affair.

  The events detailed above, horrific as they are, were nothing out of the ordinary during the years between July 1982, when Dennis moved to establish his empire in the back streets of Richmond, and his death in April 1987. Kathy’s life at Richmond revolved almost exclusively around Dennis. Their relationship had had many aspects—mother and son, brother and sister, partners in crime—but it was always intense and almost claustrophobically close.

  This four-and-a-half year period marked the flowering of pure evil within Dennis Bruce Allen. The term mass murderer has rarely been used in reference to him, but that is what he became. Once Kathy asked a homicide squad officer if he believed Dennis was a serial killer and he replied: ‘Not really, there’s no pattern, Dennis just killed when he felt like it.’ Nobody is sure how many killings he was responsible for; the police have claimed as many as thirteen, Kathy believes there were less. The real truth will certainly never be known.

  Taking into account as many of the facts that can still be assembled, there were probably five or six slayings for which Dermis was directly responsible, and another four or five in which he was involved—either as an accomplice or simply by paying for someone else to take care of business.

  Then there were the ones that got away, like the boy Kathy helped to escape. There seems little doubt that Dennis enjoyed inflicting pain on others and often turned the procedure into a form of ritual—beginning the torture and then breaking for a drink or another hit of speed before resuming. People, women and men alike, were sometimes kept chained for up to four days, during which they were systematically tortured.

  Possibly the only point to be made in mitigation, the only faintly redeeming feature in this litany of violence is that Dennis chose most of his victims from within his own peer group. Reggie and Ronnie Kray, London’s infamous twin founding fathers of violent, standover crime, always boasted that their unspeakable cruelties were inflicted only on other members of the criminal classes. If he were still here today, incarcerated forever in some Australian equivalent of Broadmoor where Ronnie ended his days, Dennis could justifiably have made the same claim.

  So what made him the monster he had become by the early 1980s when the killings started in earnest? And what were the influences leading to his decline.’

  Harry Allen, whom Dennis knew as a father from the age of three to eighteen, is a frail, sweet-natured man in his seventies and has never recovered from the heartbreak of losing his partner Gladys three years ago. His memories of Dennis are coloured by the love he still obviously feels for him. That and a bewildered sense of disbelief that the young boy he brought up could have become a sadistic killer. It’s not that Harry can’t accept the dark side of Dennis’s nature, just that he can’t come to terms with other people’s refusal to believe there was a gentle, loving child somewhere in there as well. He clings to the good memories and, initially at least, there were many.

  Dennis was about three when he first come to us, and he lived permanently with us all the time from three on. He was a good boy when he was little, very affectionate. We always had a good Christmas for ’em. Kathy and her other kids would come. They always had plenty for Christmas. They got bikes one year, footballs and things like that, cricket sets. He’d come and give you a hug. We were a close family, very close.

  Harry would take Dennis ferreting in the paddocks at the back of Carrum. They had two ferrets, and if the rabbits escaped from the nets placed across their burrows Dennis would chase them across the rough ground. ‘He’d catch ’em, more often than not. That’s how fast he was.’

  When Dennis first started to get into trouble, Harry refused to believe it. ‘The police come around to the house, and I reckoned it must have been someone else they were on about. He would have been about twelve or thirteen, I suppose.’

  Dennis’s earliest troubles involved minor, petty affairs including assault, wilful damage—his first conviction in September 1968—indecent language, unlicensed driving and stealing from local schools. But there was an almost instant escalation. His reputation as a violent streetfighter was spreading. He was soon stealing cars, then he recorded three drunk driving convictions in one twelve-month period in Frankston, Sunbury and Footscray, and still later he was bashing people who tried to stand in his way, and finally he was caught in possession of a firearm.

  The response of the courts was, understandably, to increase the penalties imposed each time. After fines and probation came the boys’ homes, Turana and Malmsbury, and then Pentridge by the age of eighteen. When he was there he was attacked and savagely beaten with an iron bar by three men, including Jimmy Loughnan, who was to die in the fire in the Jika Jika wing of the prison in October 1987. Then shortly before his twenty-first birthday he narrowly avoided conviction on a rape charge, the lesser offence of unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under sixteen earning him a two-year good behaviour bond. The fourteen-year-old girl involved, who cannot be named for legal reasons, later became involved in a de facto relationship with him and bore him a son.

  His early problems stemmed from an obsession with cars. When he was as young as twelve or thirteen he would help out in nearby Frankston at a panel beating business, a job that Harry remembers made him as ‘strong as an ox’. He would work late and take a car for a run after his co-workers had all gone home. He received his first custodial sentence, in October 1969, for unlicensed driving. Says Harry:

  We had a go at him over it, but they put him in Turana. I think that was pinching cars. It never helped him any, in there, to tell you the truth. He was a boy, let’s put it this way, he couldn’t be locked up. When he come home he told us about the hours they used to lock ’em up and that. He was a bit of a wild boy, like, he liked his freedom. He used to jump off the Carrum bridge into the Patterson River, about forty feet, just to prove he could do it.

  As Dermis moved into his mid-teens, the darker, more violent side of his nature began to emerge. His problems with the police were becoming worse, and both Gladys and Harry began to suffer.

  It knocked the wife around a lot, upset her, his troubles. I used to get into him about it, but he was that big of a boy he’d stand up and fight me. Gladys used to give him a bit of a whack with the broom stick. From about fourteen on he stood up to me. He put me in hospital once, about a fortnight I think. I was black and blue. I tried to stop him from going out, actually. I said: ‘You’re not going out.’ He just turned around and he said: ‘I effin’ well am.’ And I went to grab him, like, to take him inside, and that’s when he took to me, punched me about and kicked me. When he come down and seen me in hospital he said: ‘I’m sorry I done it to you, Dad.’ I still loved him, I thought the world of him. I let it by. It was more or less temper with him. He had a vile temper.’

  One bizarre train of e
vents happened when Dennis’s violent behaviour became too much. Harry and Gladys had moved with the two boys to the suburb of Ascot Vale.

  I got sick and tired of him standing over me. I kept going crook at him and that, and he’d take to me. So we moved out, but we only went five houses down the same street, and he found us. One of his mates put him onto us.

  Later, when the family was living in Richmond, Harry again found himself on the wrong side of Dennis’s temper. He was brutally mistreating one of his guard dogs in his home in Chestnut Street, when Harry told him to leave the animal alone. But, says Harry, ‘He took to me and give me a hiding—he said to mind me own business.’

  Harry readily accepted Kathy and Dennis’s way of life. Once Dennis was in Beechworth Prison, deprived, he felt, of female company for too long. He had been granted a four-hour leave, and Kathy hatched a plot with Harry and Gladys. They drove up to Beechworth in separate cars. When Dennis drove out of the gaol for his leave, Harry and Gladys told him Kathy couldn’t make it. But as they drove on, they saw a car parked by the side of the road. Perched on the roof were two prostitutes, and on the bonnet was a sign reading: ‘Only twenty dollars.’ Kathy was sitting by the roadside.

  The car stopped that quick, he backed up and jumped out, he was that glad to see us. Then we had to sit in a room in the motel looking at one another like dills while he had his fun in the next room. And the fat girl went and robbed the motel as well. We got him a fat one and a skinny one. I didn’t know what sort he liked.

  Harry’s explanation of why Dennis’s life went so seriously off the rails hinges on his early contact with the police.