The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  The final member of the party is Wayne Stanhope, twenty-nine, an open-faced, relatively recent acquaintance of Dennis. Kathy met him for the first time a few weeks earlier when Dennis brought him to the Gaslight massage parlour. Unknown to Stanhope, some days ago Dennis has been shown a photographI which will come to assume considerable influence over the events about to unfold. In the photograph Stanhope wears a policeman’s hat with his arms fraternally around the shoulders of two uniformed officers.

  During the afternoon the party proceeds uneventfully enough—Dennis and Stanhope go down to The Cherry Tree a couple of times, a few phone bets are made on the race meeting at Sandown, and everybody gradually loosens up. By early evening Dennis is acting the generous host, pouring drinks and injecting himself and Stanhope with free hits of speed. The tasteful and expensive furnishings of his new home provide a bizarre setting for a social gathering that is about to go hideously off the rails.

  It’s around 11 p.m. when Dennis changes from congenial host to maniacal killer. Jason is in his room by now—even criminals’ nephews get sent to bed before the grown-ups. Dale has gone with him, but the rest are in the lounge room. Stanhope is standing near the record player when without warning Dennis pulls a silver .38 pistol from the front of his trousers and fires across the room. As the first shot rips into his shoulder Stanhope spins around and says just three words: ‘Oh, no, Dennis.’

  A second shot explodes into his forehead and a third into his chest. He slides down the wall and slumps face down onto the carpet, a couple of metres from where Sandy is sitting in mute horror. Dennis walks deliberately across the room, holds the silver pistol a few centimetres from Stanhope’s head and empties the remaining bullets into him. At each impact his head jerks and convulses, blood starting to seep onto the carpet. Nobody speaks as Dermis walks over and, incredibly, knocks on the door of the bedroom where Jason and Dale are sleeping.

  Jason opens the door almost immediately and Dennis mutters something inaudible to him. Jason ducks back inside the room and returns with a firearm which he hands to Dennis. Dennis walks back to where Stanhope is lying. Jason follows him as if hypnotised. Again Dennis places the weapon inches from Stanhope and empties its contents into his head.

  By now Dennis is beyond reason, beyond control, screaming his rage at his horrified guests. ‘That’ll happen to all of you if you don’t keep your mouths shut.’ For some reason he won’t believe Stanhope is dead, and orders Miss Jones to pass him a knife. She hands it to him and he pulls his victim’s head off the floor by the hair and cuts his throat, the sudden welling of blood adding to the gore which already stains the carpet.

  Someone is vomiting. Someone else is screaming their terror. The deed is finally done, and now it’s clean-up time. Where’s Kathy?

  I’m not sure what time it was he came next door to my place, about two or three in the morning I suppose. And he’s standing at my bedroom door. I sensed someone was there, I wasn’t in a deep sleep. He says: ‘Get out of that fuckin’ bed, cunt. I’ve just blown that fuckin’ arsehole’s head off.’

  I said: ‘What arsehole?’ He said: ‘That fuckin’ Wayne.’ I wasn’t sure which one he meant. I said: ‘Well, who else is in there, Dennis?’ and he mentioned all those names. And I said: ‘Well, I’m not getting out of this fucking bed ‘til you go in there and you knock ’em all.’ Because I knew they’d give people up. I knew it. I’d already sensed it. Not Jason, I wasn’t worried about Jason.

  He was going to kill Stanhope right from the start. But I didn’t think he’d shoot him in the house in front of all those people. But that’s Dennis. He shot everybody in front of people. He always wanted an audience. Anyway there was a load of shit written about the clean-up, about dragging the body onto the tile floor. He died in one small square of carpet which the police took up later for forensic reasons. But he’d had my vacuum cleaner which had a tin base. And that’s what he used to vacuum up his brains and that. And then he burnt my bloody vacuum cleaner, which he didn’t have to do because it was tin.

  How has Kathy come to this, more disturbed by the waste of a vacuum cleaner than the waste of a human being cold-bloodedly murdered by her own son? And how could she have considered using the appliance again after it had been employed to suck up ‘brains and that’? The same way, presumably, that she could consider giving Jamie the tracksuit trousers removed from the battered frame of another of Dennis’s victims.

  How could she have allowed things to reach such a stage? When she learned of Dennis’s first murder, or the first time he informed on a friend, why didn’t she read him the riot act, disown him, or segregate him from the rest of her boys?

  Logical as this may sound today, there was too much in the way. Only sixteen years separated the two of them, and Dennis spent half of his life under the impression Kathy was his sister, not his mother. By the time he became blasé, even about murder, it was too late, and his addiction to speed made communication virtually impossible. Kathy rejects any suggestion that she had the opportunity of influencing, let alone disciplining her murderous son in his last few years.

  You couldn’t do it. He was mad by then. You would have had to find the time to say it, and then it would have preyed on his mind, and the next time he was rocking on his heels and gone thirteen or fourteen days without sleep, I would’ve got a bullet.

  I wasn’t frightened of him, but at times he forgot who I was. Like when he chased me into my house, and I slammed the door, and he kicked it open. He didn’t know who I was that night. He confused me with one of his girlfriends. He followed me in and I said: ‘Listen, Dennis, put the gun down, I’m your mother.’ And he turned around and left. Even before Richmond when we were at Northcote, Dennis and I had a fight. He chases me round my place, handcuffs me and steals me money. I was there for hours. What could you do?

  If there is any blame to be attached to Kathy for Dennis’s life, maybe the roots lie somewhere among her childhood memories of decapitated corpses and dead men’s teeth. Or perhaps they can be found in her later experiences after Dennis joined her in Richmond in July 1982, some two years before the murder of Wayne Stanhope. As the death toll mounted in the charnel house of 37 Stephenson Street and elsewhere, perhaps Kathy, like Dermis, was becoming oblivious to human suffering and pain.

  I think I got blasé about murder in the end. The first murder of Greg was the worst. I’ll tell you about Greg’s death.

  The very first murder, in May 1983, of Greg Pasche, a twenty-two-year-old whom Kathy regarded in many ways as her own son, is something she still remembers with horror and remorse. Kathy had first met him in his early teens when he was an inmate of Turana Boys’ Home at the same time as her fifth son, Lex. From then on, typically, she regularly had him to stay, and unofficially adopted him.

  Greg’s death came not long after Kathy had been involved in a punishing binge at Dennis’s place at Chestnut Street. Finally she told him: ‘Dennis, I’m not drinking no more after the next one.’ So he gave her a ‘half a yard’ (a long glass tube holding more than a litre of liquid) containing half a dozen different varieties of spirits mixed together. Kathy eventually knocked it back and lurched off home to Stephenson Street. Her head hit the pillow around four o’clock in the morning, but two hours later she woke to a banging on the front door.

  It was Dennis. ‘You’ve got to go to Sydney.’ Kathy, still drunk, asked: ‘What for?’ Dennis told her her son Peter, then on the list of the ten most wanted criminals in Victoria, had just been arrested on the run in Sydney, where he had been operating a drug ring.

  Dennis told Kathy to follow him round to Chestnut Street, where he would give her the money for the next flight to Sydney. Then three or four of Dennis’s soldiers, who had accompanied him to Kathy’s house, jumped her. A week earlier, at Dennis’s insistence, the same soldiers had taken Kathy through a bizarre form of dress rehearsal to gauge her reaction if police sprang a surprise raid. On that occasion Kathy was prepared, and kicked and punched her way free. This time
the element of surprise, and the alcohol still befuddling her brain gave her little chance. The soldiers had her securely held.

  I’m thinking: ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ Next thing Dennis whacks a needle in me arm. It was speed. Because I got the worst hangover, right? By the time I got to Sydney, the minute my foot touched the ground I was buzzing. It’s the answer to all hangovers.

  Kathy visited her son Peter where he was being held in Long Bay Gaol after his arrest, and then returned immediately to Melbourne. Dennis ordered her to go straight back to Sydney, this time by road in the company of three soldiers. The plan was to bring Peter’s car and machine guns back—a little difficult on Ansett Airlines. The other job for the soldiers was to stand over the people who owed drug money to Peter and collect it where possible. Kathy, meanwhile, was in the Sydney flat where Peter had been staying while on the run.

  Kathy managed another visit to Long Bay to see Peter again on this second trip. He told her he had found out Greg Pasche was also in the prison. She immediately paid the $500 bail to secure his release and took him back to Melbourne with her and the soldiers when their debt collection duties were finished three or four days later. Then on the Friday following his return, Greg suddenly disappeared. Kathy assumed he had gone back to Sydney to collect his valuable Harley Davidson motor cycle he’d left there.

  The next day Kathy called around to Chestnut Street to get money off Dennis for her weekly trip to play bingo. He had just lost $10,000 on the races and was sulking. He wouldn’t let Kathy in, but gave her the money anyway. When she got home later in the day Dennis sent a message that he needed to borrow her electric heaters. Kathy couldn’t work out why he wanted them, but took them over to Chestnut Street where, for some reason, the carpets had been stripped from the floor, which was noticeably wet. Then to her amazement Dennis suddenly threw some bizarre form of fit, cowering in a foetal position in a corner of the room and moaning. Kathy had never seen him behave like this before and was genuinely shaken by the experience, particularly because she had no idea what might have caused it.

  Two months later Kathy and Dennis were drinking together in The Cherry Tree Hotel when Dennis dropped the bombshell. ‘Greg’s dead,’ he said. Kathy simply refused to believe him. But a few days later a detective from Greensborough called in to see her at 106 Stephenson Street and said: ‘There’s no nice way to tell you that Greg’s dead.’ Greg’s body with its badly battered skull and multiple stab wounds had been found near Mount Dandenong not far from Dennis’s boyhood home at Monbulk.

  Well, I went to pieces. I’ve never gone to pieces like that since. Never. It was killing me. I was guilty. I brought him down to be murdered. I didn’t even ask the copper how or what or why. I just went berserk. That’s the only word. I was like a wild animal. I finally worked it all out. That the wet floor is where he died. His body was found at Olinda, he’s been stabbed to death. Greg is the sort of person, if he didn’t like you he wouldn’t speak. Don’t forget he was only twenty-three. And they took it for arrogance. So this Victor Gouroff I believe he murdered him, maybe Dennis couldn’t stop it. He had the fit later on for remorse, fear, whatever, I couldn’t say.

  Kathy is still unsure of the role Dennis played after Greg’s murder. She is certain, however, that Dennis took no part in the act itself.

  I’ll tell you why. I was living with this bloke at the time. He was coming down the back lane, and Dennis was paranoid, and he heard footsteps, and got up on the back fence and went to shoot him. And he saw it was my bloke. And his first thought was: ‘What would me mother do if I shot him?’ So, he knew how much I loved Greg. He would have thought, ‘No.’ So he either wasn’t there, or he’d gone to The Cherry Tree, or he’d gone, maybe out to tea or something. I don’t think he was in the house even.

  So if Gouroff was the killer, whether Dennis actually assisted him in the murder, or whether he simply didn’t do enough to stop him is unknown. Either way, Pasche’s body was found three months after his disappearance. Kathy hadn’t seen anything sinister in his absence—he had always drifted in and out of her life, and three months between visits was nothing out of the ordinary.

  The search for Pasche’s killers was hampered by two red herrings—the first being a theory that he was murdered by someone employing him as a male prostitute. Police made special appeals in the red light district of St Kilda for information from street kids who sold themselves for drugs, or even food. Pasche was believed to have been a part-time male prostitute working the notorious Fitzroy Street beat. The second theory was very much a sign of the times. His death was linked with that of two drug-related slayings around that period. This was the mid-1980s and Melbourne was only just getting used to the idea that heroin dealers would murder one another to protect their territory. Much more realistic was the anonymous detective who told the Sun he believed Pasche had got out of his depth in his dealings with ‘a group of notorious Melbourne criminals’.

  Kathy’s theory today is that Pasche had taken a dislike to Gouroff on that Saturday in May and had reacted in his normal way, by refusing conversation. In the resultant conflict, he was stabbed and beaten to death. Six years later, at an unrelated trial, Kathy’s daughter-in-law, Wendy Peirce, gave evidence that she was present when a man called Peterson cut Greg’s throat. He was carried out into the back yard where Dennis ‘did something to his head’ and his body was then disposed of.

  The inquest into Pasche’s death was held on 29 June 1984, and found that he died from multiple stab wounds and a fractured skull, having been murdered by persons unknown. Giving her occupation as ‘housewife’, Kathy said in evidence that she had last seen him alive on 27 May 1983. Today the one point about which she has no doubt is that the murder took place in Dennis’s house in Chestnut Street, where the heaters were used to dry the floor. Whether or not Gouroff murdered Pasche, he did not live long to tell the tale. But before he died there was a second murder for Kathy to grieve over—although this one had nothing to do with Dennis. The victim this time was Tom Wraith, thirty-three, a close friend.

  He was God to us. We all loved him. I’ve got a photo of Tom with Dennis and my daughter Vicki, because she lived with Tom, but she wasn’t the one that murdered him. He was murdered with my tomahawk.

  The woman who was eventually charged and convicted of Wraith’s manslaughter was Rae Elizabeth Collingburn—wife of Neil Collingburn, whose death two days after an incident at Russell Street police station in March 1971 resulted in manslaughter charges against Detective Senior-Sergeant Brian Murphy and another officer. Both were acquitted.

  Wraith, a heroin addict, had been at the drug shop in Stephenson Street with Kathy on the night of 14 September 1983 until about 11.30 p.m. By two o’clock in the morning he was dead, killed with Kathy’s tomahawk, which he had borrowed to chop firewood. Kathy was not called as a witness at Rae Collingburn’s trial, although evidence concerning the tomahawk could have played an important part.

  In her defence Rae Collingburn claimed Wraith kept the tomahawk by his bed, but made no mention of his having borrowed it from Kathy. Collingburn had said on the night of Tom’s death he was telling her about a woman called Grace O’Connor whom he had killed in England. ‘He was cleaning his gun and clicking it and pointing it at me,’ she claimed. Wraith finally put the gun to her head, so she grabbed the tomahawk and hit him in the head. Wraith fell back but then started to get to his feet. So Collingburn hit him again.

  She denied having murdered him but was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter, being sentenced to four years’ gaol. Mr Justice Southwell, sitting in the Criminal Court, told her that with remissions for good behaviour she would probably serve only one year. She did, but died not long after her release, leaving Kathy outraged that she could not take the revenge she had planned when told in prison of Collingburn’s death.

  I said: ‘What? She’s dead? I’ve been looking for her for three fucking years. And I haven’t had any justice.’ Tom used to come to me every morn
ing, because I was in bed with the grief with Greg. He’d bring me a flower and wipe me dressing table over. He was a very good gentleman, right. And three weeks after Greg’s body’s found he’s dead too. So I had two tragedies. He was my best friend.

  Today most police who were involved with Dennis believe he murdered both Greg Pasche and Victor Gouroff. Kathy disagrees. She believes Gouroff was responsible for Greg’s murder. Gouroff’s body has never been found, but nobody police or underworld, doubts that he is dead. For a long time Dennis was rumoured to be Gouroff’s killer, as a payback for Greg Pasche’s death.

  In many ways it suited Dennis to be known in underworld circles as Gouroff’s murderer. The dead man had once enjoyed a reputation as one of Melbourne’s heaviest armed robbers, and the rumours sent out a clear message that anybody who messed with Mr Death, as he was starting to be known, was in deep trouble. Wendy Peirce told the same unrelated trial mentioned above that she saw Gouroff sitting dead in a chair. A drug addict with a long and varied record for crimes of violence and dishonesty, the German-born Gouroff was known to police to have been an associate of Dennis, adding further credence to the rumours. However, Kathy has a different theory:

  Victor Gouroff did kill Greg, but Dennis didn’t kill him. I know that because I know who did. It was his friend that killed him. He injected him in the neck.

  Despite what Kathy says, a protected witness in a Sydney court case, the previously mentioned ‘Miss X’, later gave evidence that Dennis was responsible. Miss X told the Glebe Court in 1988, a year after Dennis’s death, that she had been taken by him to meet an unnamed Melbourne detective in the outer suburb of Nuna-wading. Dennis and the detective told her they were to meet a man, who she later learnt was Gouroff. Miss X told the court she watched from Dennis’s car, parked in a deserted side street, as Gouroff approached. Dermis and the detective spoke with Gouroff for a few minutes before Dennis pulled a gun and shot Gouroff four or five times, she said. Again, Kathy denies that Dennis ever met Miss X.