The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  Standing at the centre of this menacing gathering, Kathy looked like what she had become—a middle-aged woman up from the country for the day, feeling slightly lost and out of her depth in the city. As the last of the murderers, armed robbers and drug lords released her from their embrace, I asked her if she needed a lift to the cemetery.

  ‘I’m not fucking going to the cemetery, love,’ she responded. ‘I’m off back to Venus Bay right now. I’ve had enough.’ Contrast this with Kathy’s performance at the wakes for Jamie and Dennis, where she was in the thick of the blues and violence which characterise such underworld functions, and some idea of her new priorities emerges.

  By the evening of the funeral Kathy was safe back home, still deeply traumatised by the death of a third son, possibly the one she loved most dearly of all. A group of neighbours were there to greet her, sitting up with her until the early hours offering comfort and friendship.

  ‘That’s my life now, that’s what’s important to me,’ she said.

  Kathy has become almost a pillar of the Venus Bay Community, receiving—along with hundreds of other Victorians—a framed citation from Victorian Premier Steve Bracks in 2001 for voluntary work she had performed. It is interesting to theorise over whether or not Kathy would have received her citation had those making the selection been aware of her life as Granny Evil.

  By then bingo had replaced prostitution, violence and drugs as her main interest. For years she used her broken down old Datsun to ferry a group of middle aged women from Venus Bay to Inverloch, 30 kms away, for their weekly bingo sessions. Kathy didn’t expect, or particularly want, any recognition. She was simply putting something back into a community which had demonstrated, in a thousand ways over the years, they were prepared to accept her for what she had become, rather than what she had been.

  * * *

  I. Even Lex Peirce was seen by police during the immediate aftermath of Walsh Street. Lex has had the least involvement in crime of any of Kathy’s children, and must have been an extremely long shot as a Walsh Street suspect. The statement he made to police at the time provides a saddening insight into what life must have been like during Dennis’s reign for a disenchanted family member. ‘I didn’t really like Dennis when he was alive,’ read Lex’s statement, ‘because he was kind of arrogant towards me. He was more or less my big brother and looked down on me as if I was a shitman, as if I didn’t really matter. It’s not that I cared about this, I just didn’t like him.’

  II. A reference to rape convictions recorded against McEvoy when he was barely out of his teens. He and a group of youths terrorised and sexually assaulted more than twenty girls in the Heidelberg area of Melbourne during the mid-1970s. McEvoy was convicted on two rape charges and gaoled for three years.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Venus Bay

  TREVOR PETTINGILL AND HIS wife Debbie are staying down on the coast at Venus Bay with Kathy in her hideaway cottage. Debbie’s mother Yvonne, who knows Kathy well, has set out to join them, and for the last leg of the journey has caught the local bus from Wonthaggi. It stops at the hamlet of Tarwin Lower, a few kilometres outside Venus Bay. It is early evening as Yvonne, a squarehead, and the only passenger, climbs aboard at Wonthaggi. The driver, a local called Ray, asks Yvonne where she’s headed. ‘Venus Bay eventually,’ she replies. ‘Ah,’ says Ray. ‘I’m from around there. We’ve got a wicked woman down there. Moved in a few years back. Her name’s Kathy Pettingill. You know, Walsh Street and that.’ Yvonne says not a word, but listens instead as, for the remainder of the journey, Ray regales her with tales of the family’s terrible doings. As the coach approaches the stop at Tarwin Lower, Ray spots a diminutive figure standing beside a parked car. Someone’s come to meet Yvonne off the bus. As they draw closer there’s something terribly familiar about that head of curly grey hair. And as he finally draws up and Yvonne climbs down the steps, his worst fears are confirmed: ‘Hello Kathy, love,’ says Yvonne. And turning to grin back over her shoulder at Ray: ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ Kathy chuckles as she relates the story.

  That was over eleven years ago, and I’ve been on that bus with Ray the driver. He knows who I am, and he speaks to me just like he would any of the other passengers. He’s a friend.

  The township of Venus Bay lies two hours’ drive from Melbourne. The six-lane freeway out of the city soon becomes a highway, cutting through little farming communities with names like Inverloch and Wonthaggi. Occasionally a great sweep of the Southern Ocean comes into view, lines of breakers surging onto a curve of beach half-hidden behind a dark headland. This is Gippsland, the name given to the southeastern section of Victoria, an area of rich pasture land and sleek, drowsy cattle. The further Melbourne falls behind the greater the feeling of security, as gently rolling paddocks that somehow remain green all through the year replace the concrete and clamour of the city. The last half-hour of the journey flattens out onto a plain that could have been the ocean floor a million years ago. By now the highway has become twisting and narrow, the River Tarwin flowing beside it for company. Venus Bay, with its collection of weekenders, three or four shops, and year-round population of a few hundred, marks the end of the road. The only way on is by boat on the open ocean.

  * * *

  Kathy first heard of Venus Bay in 1988 when she was being held on charges of conspiring to traffic heroin, trafficking in heroin and possession of heroin. It became the place of her dreams.

  When I was inside Wendy used to send me these books about houses for sale, ‘cos I wanted to leave Richmond as soon as I got out of gaol. I wanted to sell Dennis’s house. Young people had moved in at 37 Stephenson Street and it sounded the same as if Dennis was still in there. So then the Taxation took my house, which was in his name.

  There was a house in these books in Venus Bay. I kept thinking: ‘Why can’t this bloke sell this same house?’ I said to the screws: ‘When I get out of gaol I’m going down there to buy this house.’ And they used to take it with a grain of salt, ‘cos junkies say this and junkies say that, but I’ve never been a junkie. So I said to Wendy: ‘When I get out I want to go down to this Venus Bay and have a look at this house.’ What sold me was the view of the ocean as you drive over Kilcunda on the way down from Melbourne. So I came down here. The house wasn’t like this, I brought me own doors and chandeliers and stuff.

  So I come down and the owner was sitting there, and they’re Germans and they were Seventh-Day Adventists, linen press downstairs full of food for forty days or whatever their religion is. As soon as I saw the drive and come upstairs I said: ‘I think you’re sitting in my house.’ I gave the estate agent $20 deposit to hold it, but the rumour around Venus Bay was I opened the trunk of me boot on the old Torana and I gave ’em $80,000 cash. It didn’t cost that, it cost $70,000. For half an acre and this house. What made me laugh was Charlie Nikakis said to me: ‘What about the water rates?’ I said: ‘There’s no fucking water rates. I’ve got tanks.’ I moved here in July 1988, just before Walsh Street. I bought it because I wanted the kids to come down.

  People here didn’t know who I was ‘til Walsh Street. I was a bit of a hermit, I didn’t go anywhere. When I first got down here I didn’t have no money, just out of gaol. And I had to go to Tarwin to the welfare to get money for food. My car wouldn’t start, and I didn’t know the people over the road from a bar of soap, but they ran me there. I spilt water on me stove, and it catches fire, and me neighbour Ray—not the bus driver—put the fire out for me. He didn’t know me, and at the time I went to Melbourne and when I came back he’d mended the fire, and put the down lights and a fan in, and floodlighting outside. One day I went there and his wife Jean was sitting there knitting, and I said: ‘Do you ever go to the bingo?’ and she said: ‘No.’ And I said: ‘I go every Wednesday.’ Now I take Jean to Inverloch shopping every week ‘cos she doesn’t drive, and then we go and play bingo. Since I’ve known those two I’ve never got to know so many people in me life as in their house, and they all accept me.

/>   One of Kathy’s new friends, Pat, another neighbour, had a typically unorthodox introduction to her. Pat kept missing shoes from outside her house until after a while all she had left was a set of single shoes, none of which made a pair.

  Eventually Pat spotted the culprit, Kathy’s dog Julie, Dennis’s old guard dog, jumping over the fence with the evidence in his mouth. Jane hadn’t met Kathy and knew her only by sight as the middle-aged, grey-haired woman living nearby. So she approached the matter somewhat diplomatically. ‘You wouldn’t have seen some odd shoes lying around, would you?’ she asked when Kathy responded to her knock at the door. Without a word Kathy led her to a corner of the yard: ‘Take your pick,’ she said, pointing to a small heap of shoes. Pat thought Kathy’s manner a little rough and ready, but over the next two months the women became good friends, spending considerable time in one another’s company. At last Pat learnt the truth of her new friend’s identity.

  I was leaving her place one night, and she stopped me. She went very serious, which isn’t like Kathy, and she said: ‘Come back in, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ Well, she sat me down and she said: ‘I’m Kathy Pettingill.’ I’d never heard her last name, and she said it as if it should mean something to me. It didn’t and I said so. You see I don’t read the papers, and I wasn’t in Victoria when Walsh Street happened, so I was probably the only person in the State who didn’t know about it. So she had to start at the beginning and tell me about Dennis and everything. Over the next twenty minutes I could feel my hair standing on end. I couldn’t believe it, never heard anything like that in my life. I was just terrified. When she’d finished telling me she said: ‘Okay, that’s it, now it’s up to you. You don’t have to talk to me ever again if you don’t want to, but if you still want to be friends, that’s okay too. Up to you.’ She even told me to think about it overnight. Well I did, and we’re still friends.

  When I repeated this story later to Kathy, her only comment was: ‘Well, it wasn’t fair to keep it from her. Anyway she might have heard it from someone else, and that would have been worse than coming from me.’

  But it hasn’t always been sweetness and light among the townsfolk of Venus Bay. Shortly after the Walsh Street trial Kathy’s son Lex and his family came to live in the town for a while and Lex’s two children began attending the local school. According to Kathy other children regularly abused her grandchildren and even spat at them because of what they had heard about Walsh Street. Eventually Lex, and later Kathy, went to see the headmaster. Education Department officials were called in and rumours began to spread about Lex threatening the headmaster. There was even a story about the teacher being transferred to another school because of his fears.

  Eventually the rumours spread to Melbourne and in May 1992 the Sunday Age sent a reporter down. The president of the school council, Lindsay Marriott, put him right, explaining that if anything it was Kathy’s family that had been intimidated. Even the local police sergeant, Bill Waller, concurred: ‘Basically they just want their privacy respected,’ he said.

  Life was starting to return to normal for Kathy when she had another unpleasant reminder of Walsh Street.

  I saw Shane Richards [one of the prosecution’s protected witnesses who gave discredited evidence against Trevor] at Inverloch one night. His mother was living up here. I was going to the bingo. My first reaction was to jump out of the car and get him. But I was in someone else’s car, and he had two young blokes with him, and he was walking the opposite way to where I lived, so I didn’t.

  I also saw Lindsay Rountree up at the Stud Park shopping centre when I was up in Melbourne one day. He was going into K-Mart. Well, him and Wendy were talking like old time buddies from the witness protection. I just sat outside and thought. ‘I’m not talking ever to that dog again.’

  It was during this period the ABC ran the first of two highly regarded crime series, Phoenix and Janus. Kathy became an avid fan of Phoenix, and wrote to the producers over a technical mistake—they used the wrong robes for a judge during a court scene. As a result of her letter the producers contacted Kathy when they were beginning research for the second series, Janus. Kathy agreed to help out as an ‘authenticity consultant’. ‘It meant telling them what crooks wear, how they talk, what they eat, all of it,’ she recalls. ‘They knew nothing. They didn’t even know you never send a crook a card with a dog on it.’

  Kathy was paid the princely sum of $240 and two cab fares for her help on Janus. But what annoyed her even more than the ABC’s tight-fisted attitude was the hidden agenda she believed was going on. While producers and researchers asked her questions about criminals in general, they also pumped her for information about Dennis and Walsh Street, but gave her no indication Janus was to be based loosely on her own family.

  When she sat down to watch the opening episode, which included the murders of two police officers, she realised immediately what was happening, and got straight on the phone for legal advice. She was told there was little she could do, even though the central characters, Shirl and Mai Hennessey, clearly relied heavily on her and Dennis for inspiration. Mai wore a similar collection of gold jewellery to Dennis and Kathy firmly believes other characters in the series were based on Jason and Wendy.

  When the words, ‘The persons and events portrayed in this drama are fictitious. Any resemblance is coincidental and unintended,’ came up on the screen at the end of the first episode, Kathy laughed out loud. She strongly believed the producers should have told her they were basing their series on her family, and she would then have made her decision on whether or not to help them.

  The most Alison Niselle, joint creator and producer of Janus, will say is that it was ‘inspired by recent Australian history, but all characters and events are completely fictitious’. Strangely, given this explanation, not one of Kathy’s underworld friends failed to make the connection.

  * * *

  A major disruption to Kathy’s peaceful life by the ocean came in December 1992 when Wendy received her nine-month minimum sentence for perjury. Victor was already in prison, so there was nobody to look after the three eldest children. (Vinnie, the baby, went into gaol with Wendy, too young to be separated from his mother.) So Kathy faced the alternative of seeing her grandchildren being taken into care, or coming to the rescue. She chose the latter and moved up to Melbourne and Victor and Wendy’s home in outer-suburban Rowville, rather than disrupt the children’s lives by moving them down to Venus Bay. Unknown to her Kathy was almost immediately placed under surveillance and, she believes, was set up.

  They called it Operation Earthquake, and it turned out to be Operation Tremble. Supposed to be a huge conspiracy only we didn’t know the other people arrested at the time. They pulled in thirty people, but we didn’t know the rest. We were supposed to be a big gang, drugs, heroin, everything. I was supposed to have done all these drug deals.

  Two ladies moved in round the corner in Rowville and one of them I’d been in gaol with. Another neighbour rang me and said her kid, only fifteen, had bought a hot video off them and didn’t have enough money to pay for it, and they were threatening to cut her throat or something. Because I knew this woman from gaol I went round and stood outside and said: ‘Get out here, you’re cutting nobody’s throat. If anything happens I’ll cut your fucking throat.’ Little did I know this was part of the set-up. One evening I was dishing up the kids’ tea and one of these women comes round and says someone’s knocked on her door to score some drugs and wanted to know where Kathy Pettingill lives. I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t dealing. I never got any drugs for ’em.

  Then an undercover copper came round for drugs with one of the girls. And one said: ‘Can you get us some smack?’ and the other said, ‘Speed’ at the same time. I gave him a phone number to score. I made him take all his clothes off to make sure he wasn’t taped but it was her, she had it in her handbag.

  A few days later Wendy was released from gaol and Kathy moved back down to Venus Bay. Not long afte
rwards, on 16 September 1993, came the aftermath.

  It’s a quarter to six at night and I’ve just had a shower, hair in rollers, hair all wet and everything. I’ve got two little potato pies, tiny little potato pies, in the oven, and I’m waiting for the news. I hear a noise, then: ‘Police, don’t move! Police, don’t move! Police, don’t move!’ as they go from room to room downstairs. I’m sitting here on me own. One runs up the stairs with a big screwdriver, the other one comes up with a bulletproof vest, and he’s got a pump action shotgun, and he says to me, I’m sitting there, ‘Get on the floor! Get on the floor!’ I laid down like this on the floor, and he’s got the shotgun at me neck.

  The one with the screwdriver comes towards me and he turns me over and starts fiddling with me, and I think what’s he doing? ‘Cos there’s four lady detectives down there, which I didn’t know at the time. Why didn’t one of them search me? So he says: ‘I’ve got the gun, I’ve got the gun.’ And then they all run upstairs. There’s fifteen of them, looked like a car yard outside. And he’s got this silver pen pistol. I’ve never seen this gun before, and he says: ‘How many bullets are in it?’ And I said: ‘How the fuck would I know? You brought it, you know. Don’t insult me.’ I wouldn’t have a gun like that—I always had Magnums.

  Later on I get the trembles, and he says, the one with the gun at me neck: ‘I think you’d better sit up.’ I was handcuffed behind me back. Well, they wrecked the house, but the worst was when they came in. They said: ‘We’ve just shot Trevor, by the way. We’ve just killed Trevor, he’s up there talking to Dennis. And you won’t be coming back here for years.’