by Adrian Tame
Another day after the committal Trevor and I were driving along in Clifton Hill. We see Jason in a car, Trevor spots him. What do we do? Nothing. We just let him drive. Don’t forget he was my first grandchild. I idolised him, I minded him, I babysat him, and I still love him. He was living with me, not Dennis, most of the time, when he was thirteen. He wasn’t rough, like they say. I saw the quiet Jason. I’d call him for his tea and get him up of a day. I knew he stayed up late next door. He was wonderful with Dennis’s two little daughters, with anyone’s kids. Take them out and get ice cream and stuff like that. There was a huge bond with Dennis, he idolised him. I couldn’t blame Jason for going against the family. My first instinct was, I thought: ‘Aggh I’ll kill that little bastard.’ But deep down, I wouldn’t have.
He’s welcome here at Venus Bay any time he likes. He was only seventeen at the time of Walsh Street. I knew what he went through up the bush. We didn’t know where he was. We had to go to missing persons. They smashed his teeth, they broke his arm, they put his head in a creek, and tried to drown him. They shot over his head. And then they said he fell over a chair. We can’t get the medical records. At the same time they were threatening to charge him with being an accessory to the Wayne Stanhope murder.
Why then, if all this is true, did Jason tell the trial he was not frightened of police? Kathy responds:
Because by then he’d done the deal, he was like a robot, he looked like a policeman. He kept laughing, even at the committal. He’d look at the boys in the dock, and laugh. They must have give him a smoke [marijuana] in the room outside, because he’d look across at them and just burst out laughing, smiling. That’s when Anthony Farrell cracked and cried in court and said: ‘Jason, just tell ’em the truth, Jason tell ’em the truth.’ He was crying out to him.
If Jason emerges as the saddest member of Kathy’s family, Wendy must, and always will, remain its ultimate enigma. She had a criminal record dating back to 1976 for burglary, theft, resisting arrest, possession of stolen property, possessing marijuana and other offences. She had been an integral part of the inner circle since 1977 when Kathy first brought her home to stay. She soon became deeply involved in a relationship with Victor, eventually bearing him three children, and lived with him in Albert Park and through the Richmond years, most of them in Chestnut Street. She even sat behind Peter as a kind of acting unpaid law clerk during the weeks of his trial for heroin and cannabis dealing in 1988, making notes and looking up references. Peter never suffered fools gladly, and to entrust Wendy with a task as important as the fight for his liberty must have required considerable faith in his sister-in-law’s intelligence. But then nobody has ever claimed Wendy is stupid—just dangerously unpredictable and a dauntingly committed hater, as she was described at one stage during the committal. She has long been known within the family as Witch, a not entirely affectionate nickname, first given to her by Jamie, and some indication of the fearsome vindictiveness of her behaviour when crossed.
So after twelve years within the bosom of the family, it clearly took considerable pressure to force Wendy into the ultimate betrayal. She knew only too well what happened to informers, having witnessed first-hand, so she said at the committal, four of Dennis’s murders. She had also seen the wrong side of Victor’s temper. On one occasion, Wendy told the taskforce, he was in a rage and brought a revolver out of the bedroom to the table where they were sitting. ‘Get up and dance, cunt,’ he told her.
‘I said I wouldn’t, and then he shot twice at me between my legs. The bullets missed my legs . . . I was terrified of him,’ she said.
Wendy also warned the police that a defence tactic at the trial would be to suggest that if Victor had failed to avenge the shooting of his own mother, when Kathy lost her eye, he would hardly be likely to avenge the death of Graeme Jensen by taking the lives of two policemen. Wendy said that in fact Victor had got hold of Keryn Thompson, one of Kathy’s two assailants, in The Cherry Tree one night and was going to shoot her, but Dennis stopped him.
Kathy remembers first meeting Wendy back in 1977.
I was introduced to her by a friend, and I brought her back to stay with us in the flat at High Street, Northcote. Victor had just got out of gaol, and we all went out there, but he got out earlier and took a taxi and we must have passed one another. He runs into the flat, and I’ve done it all up, and he thinks he’s in the wrong joint. And there’s a sheila in the bed and he wakes her up and asks her for the money for the taxi. That’s how he met Wendy.
After seven years together Wendy and Victor moved to Richmond, where Wendy tried to rear a young family in an environment in which murder, drug dealing and prostitution were more commonplace than kindergarten, nappies and baby food. Dennis’s death may have brought a short relief from the mayhem, but what was around the corner was, for Wendy, much harder to deal with than Mr D’s evil empire.
Immediately after the killings in Walsh Street the raids on her home began. Police say there were nine, but Kathy disputes this, saying that Wendy and Vicki kept count of how many times their respective homes were subjected to raids—Wendy won, thirteen to eleven.
By the time police had finished with Chestnut Street, one observer commented, there wasn’t a piece of the house too big to fit into two cupped hands. And these weren’t visits which began with a polite knock at the front door and the showing of warrants. More often than not the raids involved members of the Special Operations Group (SOG), whose speciality was breaking down doors in the early hours of the morning. Kathy recalls Wendy’s horrific version of the first two raids on Chestnut Street, and the incident involving three-year-old Katie’s budgies.
Wendy, Jason and Anthony Farrell went to 86 Chestnut Street to feed the dogs. They burst in, the SOG, right—they were looking for Victor the day after Graeme Jensen was killed, but I had told him to go. They fired over Katie’s head, three years old, and the sound of the gunshot killed her two little budgies I’d given her. Beside that she wet her pants.
Wendy’s laying on top of her, Jason’s on the ground, and young Anthony Farrell’s there, right. So the raid’s over, looking for Victor. So I give Katie two more budgies. She’s three don’t forget. So they come in again. Do you know what they did in front of her? They strangled ’em. You wonder why we hate ’em. They’re sicker than us. Wendy said a classic: ‘They’re gangsters with badges.’ I reported it to internal investigations but nothing happened to my knowledge.
A second incident which Kathy claims Wendy related to her would, if true, have had an even more terrifying effect on her— and even more so on her little daughter Katie.
Do you know what the police did to her to make Wendy change? They put Wendy and Katie in the boot of a cop car and took them up the bush and dug a grave and dragged Katie up by the hair at three years of age. They took them up there, and dug her a grave, Wendy said. And they held Katie up by the hair, and went to put her in the grave.
This is similar to an episode Wendy mentioned at the committal when she allegedly agreed to show police where Wayne Stanhope’s body was buried, and travelled with detectives to an unnamed national park where parts of a belt and shoe were discovered after hours of digging. If these two events are one and the same, and Wendy had volunteered to go, it is hard to understand why Katie would have been taken along and systematically terrorised. Today Kathy suspects elements of Wendy’s story may have been invented to gain Victor’s sympathy as he was utterly devoted to Katie and, when present, the only adult who ever put her to bed.
So by November 1988 Wendy and the children were living in a splintered ruin, waiting for the next time the door would come crashing through. Victor was in gaol, charged with the murder of a security guard. And the pressure on Wendy was growing. Two days before Christmas 1988, in a Richmond pub, Wendy gave some indication of how close to the edge she had come. A woman called Glenys Wills had allegedly been claiming Wendy and Victor were police informers. Wendy repaid this ultimate insult with a broken glass in the face. She was ch
arged with attempted murder.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she learned that Vicki had provided the information to police which led to her arrest—the sisters-in-law were hardly close. Wendy was refused bail and spent Christmas inside separated from her children. Five days after Christmas the screws were tightened still further when Victor became the third person to be charged with the murders of Tynan and Eyre.
The early months of 1989 brought no respite. Chestnut Street was finally destroyed, family friend Peter McEvoy became the fourth man to be charged with the murders, and Gary Abdallah, another family friend, succumbed to police bullets.
By July Wendy had been granted bail on the attempted murder charge and was reunited with the children, living in a commission house in Cheltenham, well away from the pressures of Richmond. She also started a dialogue with certain police officers. One of them, Detective Colin McLaren, met her in the New Orleans Hotel in Prahran and delivered what was the final blow which broke any resolve she had left. McLaren showed Wendy love letters from Victor to Julie Crabtree, her best friend, and to a second woman, another friend. The words Wendy used during the committal to describe these letters indicate something of the effect they had: ‘I read through little bits and pieces of filth . . . I just felt sick.’
Wendy, finally, had reached breaking point. Again, her own words at the committal best describe her feelings: ‘I was sick and tired of running . . . I was sick and tired of the hassles, of the police, I was sick and tired of what I had on my conscience. I’d had enough. I had my children to rear, and I had just had enough, I’d had a gutful. I was literally just going downhill. I’d been in prison. I’d missed my children for ten weeks. I had missed Victor for ten weeks. I was at that breaking point. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to come through and tell the truth.’
So she agreed to enter the witness protection scheme, and give evidence against the family. The date set for the move was 15 July, when police were due to pick up Wendy and the children from the Cheltenham house. But before they arrived Wendy was visited by Trevor and his wife, Peter McEvoy’s girlfriend, and a man called Tim Neville, who had been sharing a cell with Victor. According to Wendy they gave her a hot shot in an effort to silence her. But Kathy believes differently. ‘It wasn’t a hot shot, I’m sure of that,’ she says.
Whatever it was, the police arrived that evening in time to avert any serious consequences and took Wendy and her three children into protection. Over the next five weeks she spent every day telling police what she knew or wanted them to know about the family, armed robberies, Dennis’s murders and Walsh Street. Much of this information she then repeated during her five days in the box at the committal. The most damning evidence she gave against Victor was an alleged conversation she said she had with him during a contact visit at Pentridge. Wendy claimed Victor had whispered in her ear that he, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah had shot the two young police officers.
She also detailed the events of the night of the murders, saying that she, Victor and the children had stayed in a motel in Tulla-marine, because of Victor’s fear that police were gunning for him. Under cross examination she said she would not have been surprised if the Armed Robbery Squad had shot Victor when he went to give himself up at police headquarters. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past the Armed Robbery Squad,’ she said. Wendy said Victor had left the motel late at night saying he was going to get the policemen who had shot Jensen. When he returned next morning he told her two police officers had been shot.
During her eighteen months under protection Wendy was moved to the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland, and, according to the officers who were guarding her, was difficult and demanding. ‘It got to the stage where she was picking the police she wanted to guard her,’ one officer told the Herald-Sun. ‘If she didn’t like a particular policeman, she would demand he be replaced.’ One car was allocated for police guarding Wendy, but in the end she had the car, and the officers went on foot, the same source claimed.
There is little doubt Wendy’s behaviour, and particularly her refusal to deal with Inspector Noonan, contributed to the highly damaging split in the taskforce. In a later, unconnected Supreme Court trial Inspector Sprague, by then Detective Chief Inspector Sprague, head of the police detective training school, admitted he and Inspector Noonan communicated only by passing notes through a third person. Wendy’s own view of her eighteen months under protection was hardly positive. She also spoke to the Herald-Sun about her suicide attempts in Townsville and Canberra.
She denied she had ever intended testifying against Victor, and maintained the police had made her tell lies. In an interview with Truth newspaper at the time of the trial, she spoke openly of her plans to marry Victor at the Melbourne Remand Centre—hardly the attitude of a woman whose evidence at the committal had seemed destined to have Victor sent down for life.
Strangely, in view of their often stormy relationship, Wendy described Kathy in the Herald-Sun interview as ‘a very kind-hearted woman who has helped me a great deal.’ But Wendy and Kathy had not seen eye to eye for years. Wendy was asked by Victor’s counsel, Geoff Flatman, if she hated Kathy. She replied: ‘Yes, and the feeling would be mutual.’
Kathy has no hesitation in confirming this. ‘She was never allowed in any family photos.’
No matter how great the strain Wendy was under in the witness protection scheme, Kathy will never forgive her for things she said during the committal. In an interview with the TyEyre taskforce’s Detective Col McLaren, Wendy gave the following description of the family: ‘Disgusting, the worst family in history that I can think of. The worst people I’ve ever come across. All they care about is drugs, guns, murdering people, disposing of dead bodies, shooting at you . . . they’re pathetic.’
Kathy’s reaction was just equally venomous.
Listening to Wendy’s evidence when she was in court talking about my family, I thought: ‘What a dog.’ But I swore, I swore I’d get her. If she hadn’t changed her mind I would have done. I would have tracked her down. I’ve got friends in every state. I would have got her.
So, having made the momentous, desperate decision to turn against the family, and having gone through the hardest part, giving evidence at the committal, why did Wendy do an about-turn and refuse to repeat that evidence at the trial? Kathy has her own theories on this.
The cops had told Wendy there was one way they would lose the case for sure and if that happened she was history. So that’s why she came out of witness protection. At the voir dire she stands in the dock like a fucking big cow and said: ‘I don’t see why my husband has to pay for his brother’s sins.’ And out she went. She had been convincing Victor for months through her mother that she was coming out. Her mother was visiting Victor. Wendy’d come to the Supreme Court for the voir dire, she was about seventeen stone, and they’d died her hair black. They must have something against blonde hair in the protection scheme. They did Vicki’s hair and another girl’s. Even after Wendy come out, I didn’t trust her even then. I thought she might go back again.
Almost perversely Kathy prefers to disbelieve evidence about Wendy’s alleged affair with Graeme Jensen, the man whose death at the hands of police sparked the entire Walsh Street saga. During the committal Wendy detailed the relationship right down to answering questions from defence counsel dealing with descriptions of Jensen’s penis. But Kathy maintains Jensen detested Wendy and would go to any lengths to avoid her.
I don’t know why the cops told her to say she was having an affair with Graeme. They even told Victor Wendy and Graeme used to meet outside Myers [department store in the centre of Melbourne]. Everybody meets outside Myers, so is everybody fucking everybody outside Myers?
In December 1992, three years after giving evidence at the committal, Wendy was convicted of perjury by a County Court jury. The offence involved her statement at the voir dire, not the committal, that she had never seen guns at Chestnut Street. She was gaoled for eighteen months, with a minimum of ni
ne months. For much of the period Wendy was in gaol, Kathy lived at her and Victor’s home in the outer Melbourne suburb of Rowville and looked after their three eldest children. The youngest, little Vinnie, went into prison with his mother. It was during this period that Kathy became involved in a series of events which led to her last appearance before a court.
Today an uneasy form of peace exists between Kathy and Wendy. They communicate irregularly by phone, generally about the children, to whom Kathy is devoted and sees on a regular basis. It is largely for their sake that Kathy has anything to do with her daughter-in-law.
* * *
The third family member to be involved in the witness protection scheme, and the most hurtful from Kathy’s point of view, was her daughter Vicki. The two have not met since the trial, and Kathy’s last sight of Vicki was in the witness box.
Vicki, possibly, was in the most difficult position of all when she opted to go into protection. In simplest terms she was faced with an unthinkable choice—between her son and her brothers. The police had allegedly told her Victor and Trevor were plotting from inside prison to have Jason killed before he could give evidence against them. Inspector Noonan admitted during cross examination at the trial: ‘I told her she would have to choose between her son and the family.’ If one accepts that Vicki was also told her brothers were plotting her son’s murder, could she be blamed for believing it? She was under similar pressure to that being brought to bear on Wendy—her home was being raided on a regular basis, her two brothers, and her tenant and friend, Peter McEvoy, had all been charged with the murder. And, worst of all, her son was in protection with rumours flying thick and fast about both his wellbeing and his likely fate.