The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  Keith Iddon and William Crocker, the two men eventually charged with her murder, desperately wanted this to be believed—so desperately that they offered money to Kathy to come up with a second deathbed confession from Dennis.

  Vicki Ward was Dennis’s girlfriend, but he didn’t kill her. I was offered $50,000 by the two that murdered Vicki to say that Dennis did it. But you see they wrote that in a letter to someone else who gave it to Homicide, so no way known was I going to get up and say Dennis did it. But I wouldn’t have acted for them anyway. They were fucking idiots, right off the planet.

  Kathy’s refusal didn’t stop Iddon and Crocker telling the jury at their trial that Dermis was the culprit. Both spoke of his reputation as a killer and of his sinister nickname, Mr D. It didn’t do them any good. They were convicted and sentenced to life with no minimum term. This was later reduced on appeal to twenty-two years with a non-parole period of seventeen years.

  Another victim was Albert Caulfield, the barman at the United Kingdom Hotel, Clifton Hill, who died from a stroke caused by a moving blood clot, after being shot when Jamie and Dennis attempted to rob the hotel in March 1980.

  And then there was Victor Frederick Allard. He was a Painter and Docker, a threatening figure who, police believed, dealt heroin. Allard was hit in the stomach by three bullets in February 1979, while walking down Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, one evening. Who was with him at the time?

  Dennis and Sissy were standing beside him on the street talking to him when he was shot dead. Nobody knows, nobody told. Later that night I rang the homicide squad and I said: ‘Listen to me. If Dennis isn’t home within half an hour I’m coming in there.’ They said: ‘Just because we’ve got him in here doesn’t mean we think he did it.’

  John Geary was the son of a close friend of Gladys and Harry. He was murdered in his bed in the mid-1980s. Kathy remembers his sister sitting on Dennis’s knee at 106 Stephenson Street some time after the murder.

  I never liked her. She said: ‘I’ve been going out with the homicide squad trying to find out who murdered John.’ Her brother. He [Dennis] just tipped her on the floor. I just looked at her and shook me head.

  Dennis did John’s eulogy at the funeral. Wore a good suit, and it was hard for Dennis to dress up in a suit. But he was a suspect. I don’t know what to think.

  There was another, unnamed, woman who died in 1983. Police believed she had evidence connecting Dennis to Victor Gouroff’s murder, and had been killed as the most effective method of ensuring her silence. Kathy refers to her briefly.

  There was also other women that they thought Dennis had murdered. There was one that came from Fitzroy. I can’t remember her name. She’s never been found since.

  In his book Walsh Street, former Age police reporter Tom Noble refers to a Maori who stole Dennis’s watch and was murdered and had his hand chopped off. Kathy believes this is a reference to a heroin addict who would regularly leave his watch as security against later payment for the drug.

  There was a junkie come in with a watch his father gave him for his twenty-first birthday, and we used to have it hanging up on credit all the time, and Dennis got sick of him and got the axe and just chopped the watch in half, and the bloke nearly had a heart attack. The junkie cried.

  And then there were the deaths by overdose of up to six unnamed heroin addicts, quite possibly caused by Dennis’s failure to ensure his supplies were sufficiently cut. The Enforcer remembers an incident when Dennis and another soldier both believed the other had diluted the drug when, in fact, neither had. What hit the streets shortly afterwards was lethal. The six deaths from overdose which occurred over the following weeks may, or may not, have been caused by Dennis’s heroin.

  Lastly there were the near-misses, like the bashing of the young man whom Kathy helped escape in his underpants and a similar incident she recalls from the same period.

  There was a girl kept prisoner there. Sue Guy. She gave up Jason, something to do with a car. So Dennis gives Jason a pick handle and he made Jason hit her over the head, and it stunned her. And Dennis had the black and white confession [Sue Guy’s statement implicating Jason]. I thought he was going to kill her, and I left. He didn’t kill her, but she was there about four days with no food or water. They kept hitting her on the head with the pick handle. I put her on the bunk in the bedroom and I think she stayed in there about four days. She was out of it.

  As Kathy said, she became almost blasé about murder in the end. And Dennis, through the distortion of paranoia and rage, saw it as a performance. The little boy who loved running down live rabbits and jumping off forty-foot bridges had found a new way of capturing an audience.

  But by the end most of that audience, and his friends, had deserted him. His horrendous abuse of speed had alienated all but the most desperate or the most loyal. Addiction had cost him something else as well—his good luck and his health. Before the end of April 1987 Dennis was gone—dead (literally) from a broken heart.

  * * *

  I. There have been many theories put forward to explain what happened next. One is that Stanhope changed a record at the wrong time. Kathy scoffs at this: ‘Nobody but Dennis was ever allowed near the record player.’ Jason Ryan suggested that Stanhope planned to steal Dennis’s jewellery. Kathy firmly believes the photograph described above was sufficient reason to convince Dennis that Stanhope was a police informer, there to collect information.

  II. In April 1993 Higgins was jailed for seven years, with a minimum of five, on corruption charges, after a sixteen-month trial and an inquiry costing an estimated $30 million.

  III. Nadia Tass and David Parker’s award-winning movie was released in 1986. Filmed in and around Melbourne, including Richmond, it tells the story of a slow-witted inventor and his entry into the world of crime.

  IV. A reference to a murder conviction recorded against Robertson at the age of sixteen for shooting a young Lebanese man during a robbery. He served eleven years.

  V. Name omitted for legal reasons.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Strange Screams of Death

  IT IS LATE AFTERNOON in the back garden of a luxurious home in the affluent suburb of Lower Templestowe. February 1986. Two adolescent Alsatian dogs have the garden to themselves, and are frolicking on the lawns surrounding the waterless, in-ground swimming pool. A man in bib and brace overalls, gold jewellery and tattoos, slips quietly into the garden. The dogs obviously know him, and as one approaches him, the man kneels and appears to pet it. He produces something long and thin from his pocket. Carefully, he places it against the dog’s neck, his favourite place at times like this, and, gently at first, applies pressure. The dog stiffens, but does not seem unduly concerned. After a few seconds the man releases the dog and repeats the procedure with its mate. Next the man catches both dogs and gently lowers them, one by one, into the shallow end of the pool. He leaves the garden as unobtrusively as he entered.

  Over the next two hours the dogs run and maul themselves, literally, to death. They have been injected with carefully calculated dosages of high quality speed, and the confines of the empty pool become an inescapable arena for their agony. The playfulness of late afternoon is replaced by a frenzy of snarling, frothing savagery as they tear themselves, and each other, to an inevitable end.

  Dennis has done it again. He’s overdosed Peter’s two pet Alsatians in their master’s den. Sibling rivalry? Jealousy over a shared woman? Partly, but also Mr D doing what comes unnaturally. Peter and the family don’t always see eye to eye, and if there’s a message needs delivering, Dennis knows just how to package it.

  It was in August 1985 that her second son Peter was finally released after serving twelve years in gaol for his rampage through the suburbs in 1973. Kathy visited him faithfully all that time, but at one stage while he was in Pentridge her visiting rights were curtailed, bringing a predictably outraged reaction.

  I told Dennis: ‘I’m going to chain myself up so I can get to see Peter.’ It was about eight at night.
He takes me up there to Pentridge with this friend, Arthur, and they chain me and this Colleen up, she was Arthur’s ex-girl, and he wanted to get rid of her for the night. They chained us up through the holes in the besser brick wall outside the prison.

  So the screws were trying to tell me to disperse and that. How could I? Somehow Colleen smashed part of the wall, and they called the police. They got the bolt cutters, and took us away to the Coburg lock-up. Couple of weeks later I go to court at Coburg on a drunk and disorderly.

  I said to the magistrate: ‘Listen to me your honour, I’ve been punished enough. I’m barred from Pentridge now, and I can’t get to see my son, Peter, and he’s doing years.’ He said: ‘Fined $40, and in default one day.’ But then he gave me back all the chains and padlocks, and I had to walk down the court with them all, and I felt such a fool.

  Prison offered little hope of rehabilitation for Peter. He came out in 1985 with no regrets for what he had done, and no intention of settling down. This statement of his philosophy, quoted by Tom Noble in his book Untold Violence, makes that abundantly clear.

  The soldier ants, they go to work for their three or four hundred a week, collect their pension and home, right. Pay their car. Say five hundred a week right, this is one off. I earn five hundred a week what do you earn?

  Well I paid a hundred and fifty off the house, I paid a hundred off the car, buy food, what are you left with, forty dollars, that’s what he earned a week, forty dollars. That’s to live on . . . I don’t feel remorse. I don’t feel remorseful, you know why? Because they choose. That’s what they choose.

  Peter obviously didn’t consider himself an ant, or a mere soldier. For the next eight months he behaved as if he was determined to make up for the wasted years behind bars. If he had wished he could have joined Kathy, Dennis and the rest of the family in Richmond, becoming part of a flourishing and influential circle.

  No-one knew better than Peter how powerful the family had become, as he vividly described in a secretly taped conversation, again quoted by Tom Noble, this time in his best-selling Walsh Street.

  The protection is created by the fucking psychological wall brought by the fucking family’s actions, right? People won’t dare go against . . . the family. Won’t move against me—oh, repercussions from the other brothers. Won’t move against them for repercussions from the other brothers. Then, so, all the murders, the fucking bashings, the shootings and the victories . . .

  Even so Peter was determined to strike out on his own without ‘the protection’. Additionally he had ties in Sydney, where his daughter from an earlier relationship with a model gave birth to the first of her three children, making him a grandfather at the age of thirty-five and Kathy a great-grandmother at the age of fifty-two.

  One of his first steps back into the real world after release was to persuade Kathy to go guarantor on a sports car, a Mazda RX7 worth close to $20,000. Next he found himself a girlfriend— a woman called Rhonda Meehan, who was separated from her husband and living in Brunswick with their son. Soon after they began living together, Peter ran into his first problems with the police since his release. He had begun dealing heroin and a raid on Rhonda’s flat caught him in the act of preparing a relatively large quantity of the drug for sale. After a couple of nights in the familiar surroundings of Pentridge he organised bail and was back on the streets.

  But things suddenly went wrong on the personal front when, characteristically, Dennis stepped in. He and Rhonda had an affair. The details and duration are hazy, but according to Kathy it had a devastating effect on Peter. Whatever the circumstances, he moved into the Fitzroy flat of Vicki Ward, ironically one of Dennis’s former girlfriends. However, this was simply a convenient business arrangement which enabled him to use her flat as a base for preparing his drugs for sale. Before long he patched things up with Rhonda and their relationship steadily grew closer.

  Peter had now established a wide and lucrative ring of subdealers to whom he was supplying drugs. He might not have been making quite the fortune Dennis was enjoying, but police have estimated his income around this period at $30,000 a week. His ambition was to buy his own house so that he, Rhonda and her son could live in some degree of comfort and security. But being Peter he wasn’t going to be happy with anything but the best, and set his sights on the upwardly mobile suburb of Lower Templestowe. He found a suitable house shortly before Christmas, complete with in-ground swimming pool, and by March 1986, seven months after his release from gaol, had paid the $170,000 asking price. He and Rhonda spent an additional $30,000 on furnishings, most of it, according to Kathy, with cash.

  And then there was the incident with the dogs:

  Dennis killed the dogs out of spite and over Rhonda. The pool was empty and they couldn’t get out. They run round and round and round in a frenzy with the speed. Peter was destroyed over Dennis’s affair with Rhonda. He used to fall in love too quick. He used to call them his Charlie’s Angels, they were all the same fucking type, scrawny blondes. I don’t know why Dennis took her off him, he could get anybody, even before the jewellery. He killed the dogs to hurt him. I think they got jealous of one another, because it didn’t take long for Peter to go back to gaol, and Dennis was still out, with all his money and his gold.

  By now Peter was dealing in firearms as well as drugs, and allegedly sold a number of machine guns stolen from an army base. He boasted that one of these ended up with Pavel ‘Mad Max’ Marinof, who was shot dead by police early in 1986, some six months after a rampage which put four policemen in hospital.

  Police interest in Peter was predictably increasing and the Templestowe house was under virtually constant surveillance. Then one night in April a squad of armed officers smashed in the front door, dragged Rhonda out of bed, handcuffed Peter while he was still naked and stood around him, guns at the ready. Peter was at his most vulnerable and therefore at his most vicious and threatening. His response is reprinted from Untold Violence:

  Be warned. I’m telling you, you aren’t bulletproof. Be warned, I’m telling you right now. You touch one hair on her and I’ll kill you all. I’ll hunt you down and I’ll kill you all. I won’t fuck around with you, right. It’s pretty hard to prove if you’re waiting up a driveway . . .

  As a result of the raid Peter was charged with dealing heroin and marijuana and conspiring to commit armed robbery. This time he didn’t get bail. Kathy won’t accept Peter’s accusations at the time that the family was against him, but confirms the bad blood between him and Dennis quite possibly had something to do with the arrest.

  As usual Peter defended himself, with Victor’s wife Wendy acting as his ‘clerk’ at the subsequent lengthy trial, which ended in 1988. Despite his allegations that police had set him up he was found guilty and sentenced to thirteen years with a minimum of eleven. His pride and joy, the Templestowe house, was also confiscated, along with other property police said he had obtained as a result of illegal activities. So, after just eight months of freedom, during which he was said by police to have made more than half a million dollars, it was back to square one for Peter— and for Kathy as well, as she dutifully resumed her weekly visits to him.

  She was having her own run of bad luck. For several years since her last spell in gaol in 1980 she managed to keep out of the clutches of the law, apart from being fined $125 for indecent language and using premises for prostitution. Then in March 1983 she was sentenced to twenty-eight days on five charges of assault and ‘assault by kicking’, but the prison term was reduced on appeal to a fine. It arose from the incident at the outer-suburban municipal baths recorded in Chapter Four. In March 1984 she was fined for possession of an unlicensed pistol, a magnum, and three months later she was fined $150 for assault on police.

  In 1986 she was sentenced twice, for possession of a firearm and drug dealing involving the eight ounces of heroin, with a street value of $200,000, dug up by police in the back yard of 35 Stephenson Street. She spent around five months behind bars, both at Pentridge and Fairl
ea. When she got to Pentridge it was almost like coming home, and she soon earned the grudging respect of the warders for her efficiency as head of the prison cleaning brigade, swabbing the bluestone floors spotless and gleaming.

  When she was released after finishing the second term in 1987, she came home to find the family’s affairs in disarray and Dennis sinking into decline. As time went by Kathy became more and more uneasy about the way things were going at Richmond.

  Number 106 had a smell of death, danger, and fear, the house, and I’d had enough, and I wasn’t going to go back in there. I handed the keys to The Enforcer and a woman I knew and they could go in there if they wanted to, but I was never going back.

  There was heroin in the house when I shut the doors for the last time. I gave them the keys, I wanted nothing to do with it. They went back and got the stuff. I’d had enough. I was too scared to go back into that house, I knew something would happen.

  TELEVISION COVERAGE OF THE ONE-DAY international between the Australian and English cricket teams is due to start any moment. It’s Sunday, 19 January 1987, and the warming rays of a beautiful summer’s day are filtering through the industrial grime and haze which seem permanently to choke light and life from the back streets of Richmond.

  Sunday is visiting day at Pentridge and most of the other prisons scattered around Victoria, and normally Kathy would be off somewhere with a carton of cigarettes to bring one or other of the family some temporary respite from the tyranny of boredom which is their life behind bars. But not today. She’s left visiting duty to Trevor, Victor and the rest of the boys. Today’s for the cricket. Kathy is an obsessive follower of the game and today promises to be particularly sweet, with victory over the Old Enemy on the cards. She has settled down on a banana lounge on the patio of 35 Stephenson Street, the TV in front of her, a long lead running back in through the window. No drugs, no bodies . . . just cricket.