by Justine Ford
To make ends meet, Ron worked a second job, five days a week. ‘After a night shift, I’d leave Collingwood at seven, arrive home at eight, then work as a bricklayer’s labourer until 1 pm,’ he remembers.
Ron also did all the gardening, built a shed, concreted the driveways and paths, and took another job driving tractors and slashing grass on the roadside and on vacant blocks. ‘We used to have a great time,’ says Harry Derix, who rode a tractor alongside Ron, and lived two doors down. ‘And Ron always used to make sure the equipment was in tip-top shape.’
When he wasn’t working, Ron, Harry and Harry’s brother, Matthew, who owned the tractors, would catch up over a barbecue, and soon became firm friends. A while later, they even played together on an indoor cricket side they called ‘The Yobbos’.
‘At six foot four, Ron’s such an imposing figure,’ Harry says. ‘But we used to joke that, even though he looked like Tarzan, he bowled like Jane!’
Ron’s bowling skills were the only thing Harry could fault in his friend. ‘He was a fabulous fella,’ he says. ‘He was so dedicated to his job and a nice fella to get on with. You knew he’d get all the way to the top.’
Even though Colleen was excited to move into their own home, she felt isolated initially. As she says, ‘There were no shops! And the roads were unmade – they were dirt.’
The young family didn’t have a telephone either, which meant they had to go to a public phone booth to make calls. ‘I had no contact with Ron at work so I didn’t know when he was coming home,’ she says. ‘Not only that, but we didn’t have a TV for at least six months, just a radio. In those days you couldn’t go out for a coffee because coffee shops didn’t exist, and there were no mothers’ groups.’
They were tough circumstances for any young mum, let alone one used to the hubbub of the city. Colleen missed nursing and wanted to return to study, and was desperately lonely. ‘Visits from our families were rare, unless it was a special occasion,’ she says. ‘And the only friends that visited were the ones I made at Launching Place.’ Adding to her loneliness was the fact that her husband was always at work.
‘Sometimes he would work for fifty or sixty hours at a time,’ she remembers. And while she accepted he had an important job, Colleen felt alone even when her husband was at home, because he seemed distracted. ‘It’s such a strain on the relationship, the police force. And in those days there were no support groups. I’m not surprised there are so many divorces and separations.’
Colleen became so upset one day that she briefly left Ron. She bundled Joanne into the backseat of her car and headed to her mum’s in Caulfield. ‘I only walked out once, but it was really hard,’ she says, adding that she returned home that evening. ‘I just wanted to shake him up, because he was working all the time.’
Ron remembers the day: ‘I remember Colleen pulling me up, and basically giving me an ultimatum, which was that I had a family and needed to engage and be part of it. Being a police officer puts you in a hyper-vigilant state every day. You experience massive dumps of adrenaline, and then when you get home you’re the opposite – tired, quiet and detached. This is something you don’t have control over, and your body undergoes a biological change. You accept it as part of the job, but it does have an impact on your personal life.’
Ron knew something had to give. ‘Police work had become all-consuming,’ he admits. ‘Slowly I changed, Colleen went back to study, and I supported her by working around her nursing shifts.’
Colleen was much happier, but quietly acknowledged Ron was always going to work harder than most. Still, she says, she would never have left him. ‘I felt that Ron would always be my protector,’ she says. ‘I always felt he would never desert me. I always felt he would never have an affair. I always felt he was genuine with me.
‘He’s safe,’ she says. ‘Very safe.’
*
In those five years at Collingwood, Ron saw everything, including his first dead bodies when he was nineteen. He suspects the very first was someone who had died from a drug overdose or natural causes. Having seen so many bodies over the years, he cannot be sure. ‘If it was an overdose or natural causes, they generally looked peaceful and just like someone sleeping,’ he says.
But there were other scenes the young policeman was called to that were more confronting. ‘I remember being called to three or four suicides where people had jumped off the high-rise buildings at 229 and 253 Hoddle Street. At 241 Wellington Street in Collingwood too,’ he adds. All were public-housing units.
‘I remember one call in which a male had jumped from the eighteenth floor,’ he says. ‘By the time we arrived someone had put a blanket over him, but you could see a lot of blood and skull parts. Was I horrified? At times those things can affect you, but back then it didn’t really worry me. It was part of the job.’
There were also the times when Ron and his fellow officers were called out to conduct welfare checks on people no one had seen for two or three weeks and had passed away, decomposing in their own house. ‘The smell was horrible,’ he says.
Ron was stationed at Collingwood when the notorious Easey Street murders were committed. Twenty-seven-year-old Susan Bartlett and twenty-eight-year-old Suzanne Armstrong, who had also been raped, were ferociously stabbed to death at their Easey Street home on Monday, 10 January 1977. Two days later, their bodies were discovered in the house, along with Armstrong’s sixteen-month-old son, who had not been harmed, but was in a cot not far from his mother’s body. News of the horrific crime spread across Australia.
As a uniformed officer, Ron didn’t work on the case, but his suspicious nature led him to make a significant discovery. He was out on patrol, so it was his job to search cars for drugs and other prohibited items. ‘I stopped someone one night who was known to me and the local police and I found a bloodied knife in the boot of his car,’ Ron says. ‘The guy claimed he’d found it at Victoria Park railway station, which was a short distance from Easey Street.’
The Crime Department at Russell Street arranged for the knife to be tested and found the blood matched one of the slain women. It didn’t look good for the driver Ron had pulled over, but he was telling the truth: he’d merely found the knife, but had not murdered the women.
*
You couldn’t be a cop in Collingwood in the 1970s without encountering the Painters and Dockers, members of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union. In the 1960s and 1970s especially, the waterfront was a hotbed of industrial unrest and, at times, blatant thuggery. There were rumours that bodies of murder victims had been buried at the docks beneath tonnes of concrete. The union’s activities eventually led to a royal commission in 1980, before its deregistration in 1993.
The Painters and Dockers members frequented four or five hotels around working-class Collingwood. There was the Ivanhoe Hotel, the Royal Hotel and the nineteenth-century Grace Darling Hotel, named after a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who saved a group of sailors from drowning after they were shipwrecked off the Scottish coast.
Most popular amongst the Painters and Dockers, however, was the Retreat Hotel in Abbotsford, where Crawford’s wartime TV show, The Sullivans, was filmed. It is a charming, cosy, wood-panelled pub with a colourful past. ‘Back in those days, the carpet in the main bar was dirty and the rubber flooring around the bar was sticky where beer had been spilt,’ Ron says. ‘Smoking was permitted in bars in the 1970s, so it was a smoky environment. And there were no women allowed in the public area.’ Times have certainly changed.
Ron regularly charged the Painters and Dockers with driving offences. ‘Often they drove without a licence and under the influence of alcohol,’ he says. But it was Ron’s way of killing two birds with one stone because, once he’d pulled them over, he often discovered they had been handling stolen property too. ‘It was an effective way in which you could charge a well-known criminal and obtain a prison sentence without much effort.’
Ron was just playing by the rules and the Painters and Dockers respected him and the police in general. ‘If you caught them, they’d never admit anything, but they’d accept it if it was proven and they’d do the time,’ he says. ‘I also caught them for house break-ins.’
They were tough people but there existed a mutual respect between the unionists and the police. ‘If there was an issue in a hotel where a police officer was getting attacked, I reckon the Painters and Dockers would have stood up for you,’ Ron continues. ‘They weren’t affected by drugs and they weren’t irrational, whereas now, people are affected by a whole range of substances and don’t have the same respect for police.’
*
Even though he was a Geelong supporter, one of Ron’s favourite jobs as a uniformed officer was attending Collingwood games at Victoria Park. Collingwood played at the ground between 1892 and 1999, and it remained their home until 2005. In the 1970s, when Ron was stationed at Collingwood, eighteen police from Collingwood, Richmond and Fitzroy stations were on duty during the games.
‘Our job was to patrol the grounds,’ Ron says. ‘I often ended up at the eastern end where there were no seats, lots of mud and, back then, the fans could drink whatever they wanted. If it rained it was like a pig-pen.’ The eastern end was inhabited by a small group of away fans hemmed in by a teeming mass of black and white. ‘It often ended up like a bloodbath,’ Ron says. ‘By half-time there was always a blue at the back of the goals. On average, we’d lock up fifteen to twenty people for brawling.’
Even though there wasn’t a Collingwood fan among them, the games were a highlight for the whole Iddles family. ‘We’d watch them on telly,’ Nancye says. ‘We liked seeing our brother, or in Dad’s case, his son, between the flagpoles with his police hat on!’
But no one got as much of a thrill as Ron himself. ‘On the days the football was on, we’d use the special brawler van which would fit six policemen and up to fifteen people we’d arrested in a pod at the back,’ he says. ‘We’d also walk through the hotels and if we found anyone drunk we arrested them and put them in the brawler. We had a sense of power because there were six of us together. And we were usually big blokes of six foot and over, so when we all walked into a pub, it was a good signal that we meant business.’
There were one or two hotels in the area known for serving drunks, and they were especially busy when the local team had lucked out. ‘If Collingwood won, it was like a full moon. The hotels went off!’ Ron remembers. ‘But if they lost, you could shoot a gun through the street, because they all went home to sulk!’
*
Knowing who was who around town meant that anyone Ron hadn’t seen before stood out like a sore thumb.
Ron recalls turning up late one night in 1976 or 1977 at a Turkish coffee club in Victoria Street in Abbotsford. There were two or three of these sparsely furnished clubs in the area, and they were open all hours of day and night. Inside, middle-aged men sat around laminex tables playing a game called Red Aces. ‘They would have a piece of paper as a score sheet, but it was actually a betting sheet,’ Ron says.
‘I went away and found out it was an offence to gamble in a public house or shop,’ he continues. ‘So if it was really quiet we’d back up the van to the front door, swoop in and arrest everyone in the building. ‘I’d often go there, charge the owner with suffer gaming – allowing illegal gambling to take place – and everyone in there with being found in a common gaming house. The maximum I arrested was twelve at a time. It was a good experience, as not many police got to arrest people for illegal gaming.’
Ron started dropping into the Turkish clubs so frequently he got to know the patrons by name. It was like the future American sitcom Cheers, except they served thick, strong coffee instead of beer. Then, in the late 1970s, Ron noticed an Australian-born man in their midst. It signalled to him that something was changing, but what?
‘Through my observation and information I received from men who attended the clubs, I found out they were dealing large amounts of heroin,’ Ron says. ‘This was when heroin was beginning to be a problem. It was coming in through our ports. In the Collingwood area, for some reason, a group of Turkish men became more involved than anyone else. The guys I dealt with did not deal with the day-to-day user. They sold heroin to mid-level dealers from St Kilda, who distributed it in the streets.’ Ron was aware of the occasional overdose in Collingwood but points out that, ‘Most of what was purchased was going back to St Kilda.’
What Ron was seeing marked the start of powder drugs in the 1970s – and a whole host of new policing challenges. Police saw a rapid rise in house burglaries and street prostitution – crimes which helped pay for heroin users’ habits.
Suspecting the Australian man was behind the drug dealing at the club, Ron and a sergeant staked it out, waiting for him to leave. When he did, ‘We pulled his car over and what do you know, there was half an ounce of heroin inside,’ Ron says.
Ron and his sergeant passed on the information to Detective Senior Sergeant Bob Falconer at the Drug Squad, who was always grateful for a tip-off. ‘Any detective worth their salt will tell you that when you’re a detective, the uniformed police are your best source of information,’ Falconer says.
‘The Drug Squad then arranged large-scale raids,’ Ron says. One morning, a group of three, including Ron, raided two or three of the clubs, but didn’t find the stash of drugs they were expecting. ‘We believe they knew in advance we were coming,’ Ron says. ‘When we got there, they were all playing cards.’
Worse, it looked like whoever had made the call had paid with his life: that night a Turkish man was murdered outside the Builders Arms Hotel in Fitzroy. The police suspect it was payback for talking to them.
*
After five years at Collingwood, Ron had spent the requisite time in uniform to become a detective. It was the only way to edge closer towards his dream of becoming a Homicide investigator. ‘So I applied for a detective’s spot and got a post at Russell Street,’ he says.
‘I was ready.’
4
THE NEW DETECTIVE
‘Learning how to be an investigator was another step towards my dream of going to Homicide. I soon learnt that books could only teach you so much; it was often about understanding human behaviour.’
– Ron Iddles
The moment Ron arrived at Russell Street Police Headquarters in 1979, he was herded into the ‘Bull Ring’, a large office on the third floor for new detectives. ‘It was like a resource pool,’ he says. ‘There were about twenty who worked there in the morning and twenty in the afternoon, and as vacancies arose, they left. For example, if Carlton CIB wanted a couple of detectives, they would take them from there.’
Ron was moved into ‘Special Duties’, which was considered a detective’s job even though its officers were still waiting their turn to attend Detective Training School. ‘The work generally involved investigation of a particular target followed by surveillance on them to build up a profile,’ Ron explains. ‘Often the work was around drug trafficking, and once Special Duties officers established their targets were dealing they’d conduct a raid, and hopefully arrest the offenders and seize drugs and money.’
Aware that Special Duties was a plainclothes job, Ron wasn’t surprised that his new boss looked nothing like the clean-cut Ivan Smith from Collingwood. His name made him sound more like an embattled comic-book character than a police officer: ‘My new boss was Sergeant Charlie Brown, and he had long black hair and a beard, and wore black horn-rimmed glasses,’ Ron says, recalling how, instead of wearing crisply starched uniforms, he and his colleagues worked in jeans and t-shirts.
‘We drove unmarked cars and our role was to work on low-level drug dealers, look for stolen property and get information on people who’d committed burglaries,’ Ron explains. ‘We were proactive, not reactive. In other words, we’d act on information that we’
d received or obtained ourselves from criminals.’
From the back of a parked panel van, Ron and his team of three spent up to eight hours a day conducting ‘static’ surveillance, which involved photographing suspected drug dealers through a gap in the van’s heavy black curtains. In the days before all cars came off the production line with air conditioning, the van could become stifling hot or freezing cold, depending on the weather. The Special Duties officers stepped outside only for quick toilet breaks, and made sure they brought a cut lunch and a thermos to get them through the day. Once they’d collected enough evidence, they moved in – and out of the cramped panel van.
Ron recalls that the crooks used all sorts of underhanded tricks, and would even involve their own children in criminal activity. ‘I remember once, we sat off a house in Heidelberg then followed as a drug dealer drove to a car yard with his two kids,’ Ron says. ‘The kids were running around the car yard while he was breaking into the office. They were his cover.’
After four months tailing low-level crims, Ron moved another step closer towards proactive detective work when he was transferred to Fitzroy CIB. ‘It was across the road from Collingwood,’ he points out. ‘That was an advantage for me, because I knew Fitzroy and I knew Collingwood.’
As Ron continued to wait for a place at Detective Training School, he was moved into ‘Crime Duties’ at Fitzroy CIB, where he helped investigate offences committed overnight. The first officers at the scene – uniforms – were hardworking and diligent, but some of the detectives at the CIB were less committed. ‘It was the norm for detectives to work and drink,’ Ron says, explaining how the detectives often met their informers at the pub, or got on the tiles together during work hours.