by Adrian Tame
14 May: (Rogerson’s version) After being phoned the previous day by Kath Flannery, Chris Flannery’s wife, expressing concern over her fifteen-year-old son who is depressed at his father’s disappearance, he takes the boy and his sister, together with his own two teenage daughters, on a boat trip on the Georges River, presumably at the same time as the airport exchange is alleged to have taken place.
21 May: Rogerson opens two accounts in false names at the York Street, Sydney, branch of the National Australia Bank, and in three visits deposits a total of $110,000 cash.
As a result of this chain of events Rogerson was initially convicted of conspiring with Dennis to supply heroin between March and May 1985, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. Later Rogerson was charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice by allegedly misleading a police inquiry into the source of the $110,000 deposited in the false accounts. Rogerson was initially convicted, but after serving nine months of his eight-year sentence was released in 1990, pending appeal. He lost the appeal and was returned to gaol in 1992 with a reduced sentence. He was released in December 1995.
Before his dismissal from the New South Wales police force in 1986 Rogerson was one of the most highly decorated officers in the force. He had also shot and killed two men. The jury sitting at the inquest into the death of one of them, heroin dealer Warren Lanfranchi, declined to find he was shot either in self-defence or in the course of duty.
(Rogerson’s eventual imprisonment meant a special problem for New South Wales prison authorities. The first night he spent in gaol in 1988, after being charged with conspiring to murder Drury, a fellow inmate poured boiling water over him. After he received his eight-year sentence for conspiring to pervert the course of justice, his mother said in an interview he would cope with gaol ‘because he has what it takes’. But within days of starting his sentence he was placed in protective custody along with child-molesters, sexual deviants, and particularly feminine-looking prisoners. Prison authorities used a computer to examine records of all the prisoners Rogerson had placed behind bars during his career, to find him a relatively safe cell.)
Rogerson’s release pending appeal in 1990 didn’t please Miss X, who claimed at the time, in an interview with Melbourne police reporter John Silvester, that her years as a protected witness had wrecked her life. Saying she would never have helped police if she had known the outcome in advance, Miss X spoke of living in five States under false names, costing her a settled relationship with her teenage daughter. She claimed to be in fear of her life from Rogerson who, she said, had mouthed death threats at her in court during his committal hearing. The restrictions of the witness protection scheme, she added, were barely preferable to the horrors of her alleged association with Dennis.
There was one genuine connection between Dennis and Rogerson—the New South Wales policeman was mentioned on numerous occasions in a court case involving the death of a man called Lindsay Simpson. Nine months before the alleged airport incident Dennis was said to have taken out a contract to have Alan Williams murdered, possibly over a drug debt rumoured to be in the region of $20,000. But the hit went horribly wrong and Lindsay Simpson was killed by mistake.
Until their dispute, although preoccupied with his battle to stay out of gaol, Williams managed throughout most of this period to continue supplying Dennis with heroin.
Kathy’s views on the entire Rogerson-Williams-Miss X episode are typically to the point. She disputes the widely held view that Williams was Dennis’s main source of heroin, conceding that the pair did do business, but not on the scale alleged. She also denies Dennis sent Miss X to Sydney to buy heroin from Rogerson.
Never happened. Never happened. I’ll tell you why. It was the day Jamie died for a start, and Dennis never met Miss fucking X and he wasn’t making as much as $110,000 at the time. The most he made at that time was much less. There was a connection between Dennis and Rogerson and Williams. They had their heads together. Williams was not his main dealer—that’s a bloody fallacy. There were times he did buy heroin off him.
Dennis and Williams were talking about having Drury shot. I went up to Sydney for Rogerson’s committal, but I didn’t give evidence that time, it was later. It was at the trial involving the $110,000. I didn’t have to say much, there weren’t many questions. I was appearing on Rogerson’s behalf to say the whole thing was bullshit. It was after Dennis died, but I wanted to clear his name, to show he had nothing to do with it. There was no way of him getting $110,000. 1 spoke to Rogerson both times, I was filmed coming down the court steps with him. Rogerson said to me: ‘You’re a breath of fresh air.’ He’d been speaking to me on the phone through another detective*
You know who I’m talking about. He said to me: ‘Would you talk to Rogerson?’ I spoke to him on the phone and he told me what was going on, and I knew that was lies—there was no kilo of heroin come down from Sydney.
Kathy also denies Dennis took out a contract to have Williams killed. She believes he wanted to commit the murder himself, and attempted to do so.
* * *
When the Richmond era was getting under way, after his release from gaol in 1982, Dennis began living in a flat at Ascot Vale. Kathy wanted him to move to 106 Stephenson Street, where the rent was only $40 a week.
Having her own son in 106 would remove the risk of trouble from nosy neighbours about the parlour she owned at 108. Dennis agreed to the move, but he didn’t stay long. He had married a woman called Heather Hill, amazingly enough inside Pentridge gaol shortly before his release.
Heather, or Sissy as she was always known, was the great love of Dennis’s life and bore him two daughters, Lindy, in 1981, and Jade, in 1983. Tragically both girls were born addicted to heroin because of Sissy’s long-term dependence on the drug, even during her two pregnancies. Lindy, Jade and his son by the girl over whom he was charged with unlawful carnal knowledge were the only three children he is known to have fathered.
Apart from her heroin addiction, Sissy was often before the courts. On one occasion in April 1982, Sissy then aged twenty-three, and her nineteen-year-old sister Tamara appeared with their mother Heather Bolden, forty-two, in Melbourne Magistrates Court. All three admitted shoplifting from a Myers store in Northland Shopping Centre. Tamara also pleaded guilty to kicking a security officer and a policeman who had arrested the two.
Kathy is unsure exactly when or where Dennis and Sissy met, but she knows where Dennis proposed—inside the cells at Brunswick Police Station. The couple had been out on the town together and were booked for being drunk and disorderly after a fight with a taxi driver. Being separated from his beloved by a cell wall did nothing to dampen Dennis’s ardour, and his proposal was accepted.
Appropriately enough, their wedding took place in Pentridge where Dennis was serving one of his later sentences, with special dispensation from the prison governor. Sissy, eight months pregnant, had come straight from hospital where she was being treated for her addiction. The marriage did not last long, however, and they broke up soon after their second daughter, Jade, was born. This was when Kathy’s daughter-in-law committed what was, in her eyes, an unforgivable sin.
In the hospital she had Jade all ready to be adopted, saying she wasn’t married. And Dennis had gone into the hospital and brought the baby out to me. He took the baby from the cot by the side of her in the Royal Women’s, because she was ready to adopt it out. And he brought Jade home to me and said: ‘You’ve got a grand-daughter.’
He brought her about ten o’clock at night, pissed. He had her in a bassinet. At midnight there was a knock on the door, and it was Sissy. She’d discharged herself. Said she wanted to see the baby. She didn’t want to see the baby. She wanted the smack underneath the mattress in the bassinet.
Today Sissy’s mother, Heather Bolden, brings up the two girls.
According to Kathy, the marriage was a stormy, violent affair:
Round in Chestnut Street, where they were living, he used to chain her up on the washin
g machine of a night. She’d be standing on top of the washing machine with the chain round her neck, fixed to the ceiling. Mind you she loved that sort of thing, she loved being tied up.
And one day he told his sister-in-law Wendy to look in this soldier’s car. He’s bought an old car like mine. He’d paid $300 for it. Dennis said to Wendy: ‘Go and get something out of the boot.’ So she opens the boot and there’s Sissy gurgling in her own blood. And Wendy slammed the boot down, right, and Sissy had to go and have all these stitches in her head ‘cos he’d bashed her something shocking. And I said to the bloke: ‘Why didn’t you fucking drive it into the Yarra? I would have given you the three hundred you paid for your rotten fucking car.’
One time I went back into Pentridge, and I got called to classo [classification]. They said to me: ‘What would you do if you got to Fairlea Women’s Prison and Sissy’s there?’ I said: ‘I’d murder her.’ Just like that. So I stayed at Pentridge for five and a half months. Soon as she left Fairlea I was taken over there. I had no love for her. Her kids were born junkies and she tried to adopt one out.
One day Sissy’s mum was round at Cubitt Street, where Dennis used to fly the Jolly RogerIII outside, and she’s been saying things about Dennis’s little son. So Dennis rang me and said: ‘Get round here.’ Because she mouths off when she’s drunk. I said: ‘If I hear another fucking word about you saying anything about Dennis I’ll put a bullet right through your fucking brain. Right here and now.’ We never got on.
Sissy’s end, like her wedding, took place in Pentridge. On 27 August 1986 at the age of twenty-seven, she was admitted to the prison and later the same day took her own life. Kathy believes Sissy didn’t intend going the whole way.
She thought she’d be discovered. She didn’t hang herself—she choked to death. It was eight months before Dennis died. He was upset, but none of the rest of us were. We boycotted the funeral. I reckon he really loved her.
He may well have done, but by the time of her suicide, Sissy didn’t reciprocate—none of the notes she left behind in her cell mentioned Dennis. This didn’t stop him placing a death notice in the Sun—’Sissy. Gone but not forgotten. Forever in our hearts. Loved forever. Your husband Dennis, daughters Lindy and Jade.’ Of the other sixteen notices only one, from Vicki, was placed by a member of Dennis’s family.
In one of those unthinkable strokes of coincidence the inquest into Sissy’s death took place on 13 April 1987, the day Dennis died, only a kilometre or two across town in St Vincent’s Hospital. The coroner found that she had died . . . by hanging in circumstances of being locked within her cell, writing notes indicating an intent to take her own life, standing on furniture to secure a bed sheet to pipes near the ceiling, then proceeding down from the furniture with the sheet around her neck, and all without prior indication or warning to anyone. I find the deceased herself contributed to the cause of death. I am satisfied . . . that Heather Allen, for whatever reasons, intended to take her own life, and did so.
A letter and three notes were discovered on a table beside her body. One of the notes was to her sister Kerry, and read: ‘Kezza, I love you. Sorry this has happin [sic]. XXX and you will always be my best sister. Love ya. Sissy.’ The second note was to her mother, Lindy and Jade: ‘Well, my time has now gone, but I love you all so much, and I couldn’t handle any more hurt. Love Sissy.’ The third note, and the letter, were expressions of love to a man named Peter Gaidan.
The only other exhibit tendered to the inquest was Dennis’s handwritten identification of Sissy’s remains, made the day after her death.
Evidence was put to the coroner by Pentridge governor Peter Hannay that Sissy had previously ‘made a number of what appears to be attention-seeking self-inflicted wounds to her person’. These included an incident in November 1984 when she swallowed a razor blade and vomited blood.
* * *
By the end of 1982 Dennis had amassed enough capital from his drug dealing to purchase the house at 86 Chestnut Street for $35,000 cash. He, Sissy and Lindy moved in immediately, but before the purchase Dennis accepted some advice from Kathy.
We went and looked at the house in White Street, Richmond. It was a shack of a place, right? Well, the bloke who owned it had died eating his dinner. And there was the bloody rancid butter, and there was the plate with the maggots and the knife and fork. And it had no bathroom inside. But Dennis said: ‘I’m going to buy this place.’ I said: ‘No you’re not. No, you’re not. It’ll cost you a fortune to redo.’ So we walked round the street and he bought 86 Chestnut Street instead.
This is the part where it gets funny, right? We lived in the Shire of Jika Jika, same as the maximum security unit in Pentridge. We get the deed of the house—the man’s name that Dennis bought it off was Crook. And I said: ‘How poetic is that, Dennis? A Crook owned it. You’re a crook, and we live in the Shire of fucking Jika Jika.’ I couldn’t believe it.
Dennis’s next purchase, late in 1983, was the little weatherboard worker’s cottage at 102 Stephenson, a few doors down from Kathy’s parlour at 108 and a stone’s throw from the pub that was becoming his local—The Cherry Tree. He paid the $37,000 asking fee with cash, and got $4,000 knocked off the price simply by standing on a floor board that broke under his weight. Within a matter of weeks before the end of the year, he and Kathy had bought two more houses in Stephenson Street, number 35 for $38,000 and a few days before Christmas, number 37, for $20,000. This was badly in need of repair, but Dennis earmarked the property as his future home. When he first saw it there was little more than the front door and wall intact. He opened the door and, surveying the wreckage, commented: ‘Jesus, I love the air conditioning.’
Dennis had only been there for a while when he acquired a neighbour.
At 39 Stephenson Street a little Vietnamese moved in. Dennis was in gaol before I got him out on bail, right? So this Vietnamese must have dumped rubbish in the lane out the back. So Dennis goes to his front door with the meat cleaver, and told him he was going to chop him up, right? But after that the two of them became friends, how I don’t know ‘cos neither of them could speak the same language. And Dennis had gold numbers, 35 and 37 on Stephenson Street, and he got gold numbers put on 39. A present, ‘cos he liked him. And the slope’d make him meals and stuff. Well, the police thought, seeing the 39, he was part of our stuff, and they used to raid the poor bloke.
When Dennis died the slope said: ‘Where’s Den?’ and I couldn’t explain it to him. I tried all sorts of languages—I said ‘Morte’ and ‘finito’, and things like that. I didn’t know the slope word for dead.
By the time he moved into number 37 Dennis had developed a taste for fine furnishings, particularly eastern antiques, and having a place to showcase his growing collection of statues, wall hangings, sculptures and $15,000 worth of gold-plated lighting was his way of rewarding himself for the growing success of his heroin business. Within six months he had moved in. This was due largely to the hard work of a builder named Wayne whom Dennis paid $500 a week and allowed to stay rent-free at 102 Stephenson Street while he refurbished a number of the properties. Not long after Wayne had made 37 habitable for Dennis, Kathy moved in next door at number 35.
Dennis’s pride and joy at number 37 was the four-by-two-metre fish tank, taking up an entire wall in the loungeroom. Significantly none of Dennis’s random bullets ever found a target near the fish tank, and on one occasion when he was firing shots in the room a visitor took refuge by standing beside it. Dennis insisted he was the only one who could feed the fish, a number of which were worth $800 each. ‘There was no TV round there,’ Kathy laughs. ‘You had to watch the fucking fish all the time.’
Within ten months Dennis doubled his Richmond real estate portfolio, buying the five run-down weatherboard cottages in Cubitt Street for a total of $125,000. This purchase was made through a registered company called Mr D Investments, named after Dennis’s nickname—the ‘D’ standing for Death, not Dennis. The company, which listed among its directors one o
f Dennis’s girlfriends and a builder friend, lasted four years before a series of resignations led to its deregistration in 1988.
A few weeks after buying Cubitt Street, early in December 1984, Kathy sent Dennis to buy dog meat. On his return he said: ‘Give me a cheque for $7,000, I’ve just bought another house.’ ‘Yeah, but did you get the meat?’ Kathy responded. This property, in nearby Dunn Street, would have been Dennis’s ninth, but for some reason negotiations for the $74,000 deal fell through. Dennis made his displeasure known with a display of macabre humour and his growing awareness of his power to intimidate others.
He had been on the telephone to the local representative of the finance company involved when he realised he was getting nowhere. Calling on The Enforcer to accompany him, he picked up a garden spade and walked to the company’s premises. Ignoring the protests of the receptionist, they strode past her into the manager’s office, where he was interviewing a client. Without saying a word Dennis walked in and stood with his back to the wall, leaning on the spade. The Enforcer, equally silent, beside him. The manager looked up uneasily: ‘What do you want?’
Dennis glanced down at the spade. ‘We’ve come to bury you,’ was all he said.
Needless to say, the manager proved more cooperative, though the deal was never actually completed.
Another incident illustrating the same cruelly extravagant streak of humour came during Dennis’s much publicised relationship with champion footballer Fred Cook. One night, with a girlfriend in tow, he visited the Station Hotel in Port Melbourne, run by Cook.