The Good Cop

by Justine Ford

  ‘Quite often, at twelve o’clock, the sergeants would write in the duty book that they were going out to conduct inquiries, and wouldn’t come back until five o’clock,’ Ron says. ‘Some of the hardworking detectives were on to them, and they’d write “Gone to Lunch” in the duty book next to the sergeants’ names.’

  Ron never went out for a long lunch, ‘But it didn’t take long to work out who was keen and dedicated, and who wasn’t. Coming from a structured, disciplinary environment, it was important to align yourself with the hard workers because some didn’t work as hard as they should have. And it caused a bit of friction.’

  After two months, Ron was accepted into Detective Training School where, for the next three months, he didn’t have time to think about his tanked-up superiors; he was too busy studying towards his ultimate dream.

  *

  An ounce of information is worth a ton of investigation.

  A written note will outlive a mental note.

  Failure to search is failure to find.

  The whiteboard at Detective Training School was crammed with punchy sayings, designed to give the student investigators an advantage in the field. Ron was quick to learn the mantras by heart, and years later came up with many of his own.

  There were thirty-four officers in Ron’s class at Detective Training School, otherwise known as ‘Bonehead College’. Established in 1938, it was Australia’s first investigators’ training course, located at the Police Depot on St Kilda Road in the city. The men were broken up into syndicates of about six members. Ron remembers, ‘Detective Sergeant John Hill was my syndicate leader, so he was my “go-to” instructor.’

  Ron quickly came to regard Hill, a former Homicide detective, as his mentor. ‘I remember him speaking about how to interview suspects, and I later adopted some of his techniques,’ Ron says. ‘Nothing was ever a problem. He was always prepared to listen, and he understood where you were coming from. He’d stay back after class to assist you if required. He was known as a very thorough investigator, and I wanted to model myself on him.’

  One of the students in Ron’s class was his former workmate from Collingwood, Leigh Gassner. Gassner, who sat next to Ron in class, was not surprised that Ron was drawn to Hill. ‘He was very much like Ron,’ Gassner says. ‘He was a quiet, methodical detective who attracted people. They were probably of similar character and I imagine Ron was attracted to him because he could relate to him. He was a very good investigator.’

  Every now and again, Gassner would drive Ron to class, as they both lived north-east of Melbourne. ‘I had a Honda Scamp,’ Gassner says, a tiny, second-hand car that couldn’t have been comfortable for a man of Ron’s stature.

  The course was broken up into a few key units: law, investigative techniques and practical exercises. Ron says, ‘Once a week we’d do an exercise where there’d be a dummy in a room that was set up as a crime scene. The practical exercises always involved homicides and forensics, and it was our job to conduct a seven-point crime-scene examination.’

  The first step in the seven-point crime scene examination was to visually examine the scene. ‘We were taught to look, but not touch,’ Ron explains. Then trainee detectives had to photograph the crime scene and closely examine it, looking for any physical evidence. ‘Once you’d located any evidence, you had to photograph it in situ. You then had to label and collect your exhibits.’ The trainees also had to explain what they were doing and what their next step would be after leaving the scene. ‘You might say you were suspicious of the person next door, so you might then be asked how you were going to interview him,’ Ron adds.

  The instructors drilled other important procedures into the group too. ‘You had to know how to conduct an identity parade, you had to be able to tape confessional evidence, and you also had to be able to do a tape recording of a read-back interview,’ Ron says. ‘In those days, if police had a suspect, they would type up their record of interview with them. We were meant to type as quickly as the person spoke. Then you’d get the suspect to read it over, and tape-record him reading it back. He’d say it was true and correct, and then he’d sign it. That was a read-back interview.’

  Every Monday – even on their very first day – the would-be-detectives sat an exam made up of fifty multiple-choice questions. ‘If you hadn’t studied, you wouldn’t pass,’ Ron says. ‘And we had to learn a lot of definitions verbatim. For example, if you were asked to define assault, and there were three or four words missing from your answer, you didn’t get a mark.

  ‘On the second week you were allowed to fail the weekly test, but at four weeks you had to pass. At eight weeks you had to pass, and at twelve weeks you had to pass,’ he continues. ‘If you didn’t get over sixty-five per cent in your exams, you failed. And back then, you didn’t get a second go. It was an enormous amount of pressure.’

  ‘It was really full on,’ Gassner concurs. ‘It was none of the adult learning techniques of today. It was a really hard slog. But Ron was always really conscientious.’

  Every Friday afternoon, classes wound up at four, which wasn’t a moment too soon. ‘It was tradition that everyone went to Friday-night drinks,’ Ron recalls. Most trainees went to the nearby City Court Hotel, but there was a group of five, including Ron and Gassner who, because they lived so far away, drove halfway home before stopping in at the Frognell Airforce Base in Camberwell. ‘We’d have a game of billiards, those who drank would have three or four beers, and then we’d go home,’ Ron says.

  Friday night was the only night Ron allowed himself to take it easy. The rest of the time, he and his friends hit the books hard, determined to pass. ‘I’d study till ten, eleven, twelve at night,’ he says. ‘And in the morning, I’d read over my notes. I wrote lots of notes. I also had definitions on hand-cards so that I could get them word perfect, and a book of notes that précised every subject. Everyone had a different method, but we all put in massive hours.’

  The overall feeling among the trainees was that they were in it together. ‘It wasn’t everyone for themselves,’ Ron explains. ‘It was twelve weeks you’d never get back. So if you could help someone, you would.’ Ron tutored a student he’d known since the Police Academy: Denis Tanner.

  ‘It’s ironic that a guy who struggled there who I helped out was Denis Tanner,’ Ron says of a classmate who was later to come under internal scrutiny. ‘But he was a guy from the country. He was a nice enough bloke. He struggled a little with the concepts at Detective Training School, but he’d acknowledge that.’

  During week twelve, the last week of the course, the student detectives sweated it out in their final exam. Everything rode on it. ‘You had to be good to get through,’ Gassner says, ‘and if you didn’t get through, you got chucked out of the CI [Criminal Investigation Branch]. It was cut-throat.’

  On the final day, a panel of three instructors called the students in, asking them one by one to identify a fingerprint pattern through a magnifying glass. The instructors wanted to know if it was a delta, composite, whirl or loop pattern. ‘You had five minutes to identify the fingerprint,’ Ron says. ‘If you got it wrong, it didn’t go so well for you.’

  Ron got it right, but wanted to find out how he and his classmates had fared overall in the course. He knew he’d done reasonably well, but with everything coming down to the final exam, it brought out the trainees’ competitive spirit. ‘We ran a book!’ Ron says. ‘We each put one or two dollars in and the winner took all.’

  There was a funny saying at Detective Training School about those who didn’t come first, second or third. ‘They’d say you came equal fourth,’ Ron says.

  But Ron Iddles – even though he wasn’t the favourite – didn’t come equal fourth. He came first – and won a few bucks off his mates in the bargain. ‘I took the lot in the end,’ he laughs. Once again he was the dux.

  *

  The following Monday, exhausted and with ‘tot
al brain drain’ from the gruelling detectives’ course, Ron returned to Fitzroy CIB as a Detective Senior Constable. I now have these wonderful skills, he thought quietly to himself, bursting to use them.

  The new detective immediately learnt, however, that books can only teach a detective so much. ‘Straightaway, I was sent along to a factory burglary in Wellington Street, Collingwood,’ he recalls. ‘An air-conditioner, worth about $15,000, had been stolen.’

  As soon as he got there, Ron carried out the seven-point crime scene examination he’d had drilled into him over the past three months. ‘I knew that, first of all, I had to look at the scene and get someone in to photograph it, so I called in Forensic Services,’ he says.

  When the team arrived, the crime scene examiner, who seemed surprised to be there, asked Ron what he wanted him to do. ‘I asked him to take an overall photograph of the factory, and to photograph the burglars’ point-of-entry, the damage caused on entry and where the industrial air-conditioner was taken from,’ Ron remembers.

  More experienced detectives would have considered it overkill to call in Forensic Services, but Ron was only two days out of the investigators’ course and already his natural thoroughness was cutting through. ‘Having just completed Detective Training School, I thought I had to do those things every time,’ he explains.

  With his usual hawk-eye, Ron noticed tyre marks from a small truck in the factory’s laneway. He knew it was suspicious because a truck would have been needed to take away the sizeable air-conditioner. ‘So I asked them to make a cast of the tyre tread,’ Ron says.

  Upon his return to the station, Ron made sure the exhibits – including the impressive metre-long plaster cast of the tyre pattern – were promptly listed in the property book and locked in store. ‘When the boss saw them, he said, “Who put this shit here?” ’ Ron recalls with a chuckle. He then explained it was evidence from the crime scene he’d just attended. ‘What did they teach you at Detective Training School?’ the boss demanded. ‘If you bring this much stuff back, I’ll have a property office full of crap!’

  ‘Eventually I started to learn what you should do and what you shouldn’t do,’ Ron says. ‘I learnt that the plaster cast would only have been useful if the vehicle was found, or if someone rang in with information. That plaster cast would never have been enough to solve the job; it could only have been corroborative evidence. And while my boss was a bit hard on me, it was about putting theory into practice. I eventually worked it out, and it became second nature.’

  As soon as Ron adapted to his new role, he solved crime after crime, and his colleagues couldn’t help but be impressed. Fellow detective Ken O’Connor says that not only had Ron’s reputation as a thief catcher followed him from Collingwood, but he continuously built on that reputation. ‘Ron was the best policeman I’ve seen in my whole time. The best,’ Ken says. ‘And he was exceptionally popular. Anyone who’s ever worked with him will say that’s a common theme.’

  O’Connor recalls attending a violent demonstration with Ron at the Marjorie Noonan Nursing Home in North Fitzroy in 1981. The then prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, not the flavour of the month, had arrived to officially open the facility, at which time protesters began hurling fruit at him. ‘I remember the first guy we arrested,’ says O’Connor. ‘He was wearing orange overalls and he was throwing tomatoes at the prime minister from a little haversack. We thought, We’ll have him.’

  According to O’Connor, the man in the overalls provided ‘the spark that ignited the rest of them’. Suddenly, harder fruit like apples and oranges were being hurled at the PM. ‘So we arrested a few of them,’ O’Connor says. Among those pinched was a man who turned the protest on the fuzz. They arrested him for assaulting police and other street offences.

  The protesters pleaded not guilty, and one even tried to discredit O’Connor in court. O’Connor had told the court that during the affray he was holding one of the protesters by the right arm, and gave evidence to that effect. He was surprised when the protester suggested he was lying and produced a photo that told a different story to his own. ‘It had me holding his left arm,’ O’Connor remembers.

  ‘When police are asked questions in court, the accused are entitled to attack our credibility,’ Ron explains. ‘In other words, they can challenge an account which we have sworn on oath is the truth. And in this case, from memory, I think the man who attacked our credibility was acquitted.’

  The photo niggled at the detectives because they knew they had told the truth. When they looked at the image more closely, their doubts about the protester were justified. ‘They’d developed the photo in reverse!’ O’Connor says. ‘In the background, you could see the word “Milkbar” in reverse!’

  There was no way now that Ron was going to let the dishonest protester off the hook. ‘I took out a warrant, proved he’d turned the negative around to make the photo look different, and charged him with perjury,’ Ron says. ‘Then he was convicted.’

  The moral of the story: don’t try to outsmart the sharpest senior conny in town.

  *

  After three or four months back at Fitzroy, Ron’s mate Leigh Gassner gave him a call. ‘He said, “Do you want to come here? It’s a fantastic place to work”.’

  Gassner doesn’t remember trying to persuade Ron at all. ‘I don’t know why I convinced him,’ he says. ‘It was a pretty silly thing to do, actually!’

  ‘He talked me into it,’ Ron says, recalling how Camberwell was closer to home, and that another mate was stationed there too. But after working in one of the city’s busiest crime hubs, how would leafy, middle-class Camberwell measure up? ‘After the first week, I thought I’d done the wrong thing,’ Ron admits. ‘It was like a rest home.’

  For the locals, the tranquillity of the suburb was probably its attraction, but for an energetic thief catcher like Ron, it was dead boring. ‘It was a dry area,’ he says, explaining how there were no hotels in Camberwell. ‘So it didn’t have brawls and there were minimal assaults,’ he adds. Not that Ron wanted people to assault each other; he just wanted to be there to catch them when they did.

  What Camberwell did have, however, was a tonne of house burglaries. ‘That was because it was affluent,’ Ron explains. ‘It was a totally different area to Fitzroy and Collingwood where there were lower socioeconomic groups. There, you’d come down to people’s level, but in Camberwell, where there were doctors and lawyers, you’d have to come up to their level.’

  It didn’t improve Ron’s sense of dissatisfaction that many of the home owners treated the police like second-class citizens. Often, when they turned up to investigate a report of a break-in or stolen jewellery, they weren’t even allowed through the front door. ‘Complainants would ring up and say, “Can you use the tradesmen’s entrance?” ’ Ron remembers. ‘It didn’t always happen, but when it did, it was offensive because we were there to help them.’

  Frustrated by the lack of action, Ron took it upon himself to go find some. There’s got to be some shitheads around here, he thought. So when he discovered there were boarding houses in the area, he started dropping in. He learnt that some of the residents were unemployed, while others were straight out of jail. ‘I started to work out who was living there, and when I’d knock on the door of their bedsits, I’d casually look around from the doorway to see if anything was out of place.’

  Sometimes Ron would find a resident on a warrant, which at least gave him the satisfaction of an arrest. Other times he charged boarders with possession of drugs or theft. ‘I’d often find stolen milk crates in their rooms,’ he says. ‘Some people had up to a dozen because they used to put their belongings in them.’

  While charging down-and-outers with stealing milk crates may have seemed over the top, Ron maintains that, ‘It was stolen property and costing the milk company money. But I probably just needed to be back on the mean streets!’

  The most unruly the neighbourhood
seemed to get was when parents went away and left their teenagers home alone. ‘Every now and then we’d get called out to a noisy party and find a house full of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds,’ Ron says. ‘“Where’s Mum and Dad?” we’d ask. And they’d say, “They’ve gone skiing for the weekend”.’ Ron felt like he was on another planet: he’d never met anyone in Collingwood or Fitzroy whose parents could afford to go skiing for the weekend – or ever.

  While at Camberwell, Ron and Gassner investigated a troubling report from a teenage girl from a well-off local family. ‘A young girl came forward with her mum and said she’d been raped,’ Ron remembers. She told the detectives that nine boys had been responsible for the brutal attack. ‘She said they had carved initials into her leg.’

  Ron and Gassner immediately arranged for the Police Medical Officer, Dr Peter Bush, to examine her. They took her statement and started looking for her attackers.

  After a couple of weeks and with no sign of the rapists, the girl started calling the detectives with new information every second day. On one occasion, she told them her assailants were still stalking her, which Ron and Gassner knew they had to act on quick-smart. ‘She told us that a green panel van was often parked outside Camberwell Girls High, where she went to school,’ Ron says. ‘So we went and spoke to her school friends who said that, yes, she’d talked about it, but that they’d never seen the van.’

  It wasn’t until the detectives next saw Dr Bush that they realised they might not actually have a crime on their hands. The doctor confirmed that letters had indeed been carved on the girl’s body, but something about her story did not stack up. ‘He said that all the initials were straight and that they had all been carved at the same depth,’ Ron remembers. ‘Dr Bush said that if the letters had been carved while she was being held down, they would have been cut at different depths. “Sadly,” the doctor said, “I think she’s done it herself”.’