by Justine Ford
It came as quite a shock to the men, but it didn’t mean the investigation was over. ‘I remember saying to her mum we don’t believe it, and having her ask the girl if she’d made it up.’
Soon after, however, they received a report that the girl had once more been attacked. Again, Ron and Gassner rushed to her aid. ‘But when we told her about the evidence we had, she admitted she’d made it all up.’
Even though Ron and Gassner effectively closed the case, it saddened them, and they never forgot the privileged but lonely girl. ‘I’d seen things at Collingwood, but this was something new,’ Ron says. ‘She had just wanted some attention and her story had developed as we’d taken an interest in her, had gotten stronger. Initially we believed her, and it wasn’t until the medical evidence showed otherwise that we doubted her story. It just taught me that every day, we’re still learning.’
Ron and Gassner made sure the girl received counselling, and even though Ron was glad to have helped, he believed his skills could better be used elsewhere. ‘I said to the guys, Camberwell’s not for me. I’m going back to the rough and tumble,’ he recalls.
‘So I went back to Fitzroy, where I stayed until I went to Homicide.’
5
WELCOME TO THE BROTHERHOOD
‘My first case at Homicide as the primary investigator was important to me. It was very complex because it involved the underworld, it involved armed robbery, and it involved criminals giving evidence against other criminals. It was also about a young woman’s innocence.’
– Ron Iddles
Ron had been back at Fitzroy CIB for just four months when the trusty Police Gazette listed two vacancies at the Homicide Squad. As soon as he read the advertisement, Ron pounced. ‘You had to write a two-page document setting down your skills and then you had to wait until you got an interview,’ he says. Not that everyone was granted an interview. ‘Realistically, you had to know somebody,’ he acknowledges. ‘It was a bit of a brotherhood.’
On paper, no one could doubt Ron’s credentials: renowned thief catcher, dux of Detective Training School, and while at Fitzroy, he’d even spent a couple of nights helping out on the 1979 murder of heroin dealer Victor Allard, who was gunned down in St Kilda. But senior investigators, especially those given the responsibility of hiring, usually require verbal references too.
They must have liked what they heard, because the head of the Homicide Squad, Detective Chief Inspector Paul Delianis, invited Ron to attend an interview before a selection panel including himself and two crew leaders, Detective Senior Sergeant Brian McCarthy and Detective Senior Sergeant Jimmy Fry. ‘Ron was very impressive and he spoke confidently and well,’ Delianis remembers. ‘He was self-assured and had a lot of experience for a young detective.’
But to secure one of the jobs, the candidates had to do more than present well. They had to know the legal definition of homicide and manslaughter, and explain how they would react on the job under various circumstances. Ron recalls one of the senior sergeants showing him a series of photos of a dead man covered in blood. ‘Jimmy Fry said, “What can you tell me about these photos?” ’ The most obvious response would have been that there was a lot of blood, but the photo told Ron something more. ‘I said there was a possibility it was a suicide.’
He was right, and it was just the answer the older detective, who’d been at the Homicide Squad for nine years, was looking for. Fry had investigated the case himself, and the ‘victim’ had indeed taken his own life. ‘They wanted to find out whether you’d just assume every case was a murder,’ Ron explains.
Next, the panel asked Ron how he would respond if he was the most senior officer at a murder. He told them he would take charge of the scene and consider who to call in, such as photographers, videographers and ballistics experts, ‘although,’ he says, ‘not much blood spatter analysis was done in those days.’
The interviewers asked Ron what he would do if he found out the suspect had fled the scene and turned up at a nearby railway station. He said that would be a secondary crime scene, and aside from the usual crime scene analysis he would search the suspect and separate him from others, ‘to avoid him concocting a story’.
‘You really have to use your brain in the Homicide Squad and you have to nut out the cases and the people involved in them,’ says Paul Delianis, who’d taken over as head of the Homicide Squad in 1978.
‘You’d also have to take your arrest sheet, which showed what arrests you’d made and what for, and what court experience you’d had, for example, if you’d appeared in the County Court or the Supreme Court,’ Ron says. ‘They’d also ask you about post-mortems and whether or not you’d been involved in an inquest.’
‘It was important as far as the selection process was concerned that these people knew how to give evidence in the superior courts,’ Delianis explains. ‘And Ron had given evidence in the Supreme Court and the County Court.’
‘They also asked whether you could work any hours, whether you could work at short notice, whether you were prepared to do country travel and sometimes be away for two or three days at a time, and they asked you how you and your wife would cope,’ Ron adds. ‘The point of it was to see how you’d fit in and if the chemistry was right, because you’d be working in a team environment.’
Not surprisingly, Ron ticked all the boxes – and more. There was just one thing that bugged Brian McCarthy and Jimmy Fry: the fact that Ron lived at Launching Place. ‘It was some fifty-five kilometres from Russell Street and, as a Homicide investigator, you get called out a lot,’ Delianis says. ‘Getting into the city in some haste is a bit of an issue, but we decided he was good enough to overlook that.’
And so it was that Delianis – in a decision that would influence police history – phoned Ron and said the words he’d longed to hear: ‘You’ve got the job.’
Curiously – given how long Ron had yearned to go to Homicide, and that he has an almost photographic memory – he can’t remember exactly how he felt when he received the news. ‘I would have been excited,’ he says.
One thing’s for sure: Leonard Teale and John Fegan would have been proud.
*
In 1977, Detective Senior Sergeant Brian McCarthy was working as a general operational detective at Russell Street Police Headquarters when he was transferred to the Homicide Squad. ‘They sent me up to the Homicide Squad because no other bugger wanted to go there!’ he says. ‘There was a bit of a bad mark on the Homicide Squad because of the Abortion Inquiry.’ Seven years earlier, the Abortion Inquiry, headed by William Kaye, QC, had investigated an abortion protection racket involving three high-ranking Victoria Police officers, including Inspector Jack Ford, once the head of the Homicide Squad. It was found that doctors had been bribing the officers in order to carry out illegal abortions. As a result, and for perverting the course of justice, the officers were shipped off to Pentridge. Others were investigated but not charged and, for a while, it left the Homicide Squad looking shady.
It was fortunate that no one else had wanted the top job, because it suited McCarthy perfectly. He was a dedicated, methodical and sympathetic investigator, whose very nature proved an inspiration for Ron. ‘I called him Father McCarthy,’ Ron says. ‘In one way he was priest-like because he was caring and sharing.’
A particularly notable McCarthy characteristic ended up inspiring the screenwriters of the first Underbelly television series. ‘He always had a tin of biscuits that his wife Betty had made. They were chocolate chip or shortbread,’ Ron says. Charmingly, Frankie J. Holden’s fictitious Homicide Squad boss, Garry Butterworth, used to offer his younger charges his wife’s homemade shortbread.
Conveniently, all of McCarthy’s crew, including Ron, Jack Jacobs and Roland Legg, lived fairly close to one another, so Ron used to pick them all up on the way to work, starting at the boss’s place. ‘I’d leave Launching Place at five-thirty in the morning and get to Brian Mc
Carthy’s around six,’ Ron remembers. But McCarthy was rarely ready on time, which explained his nickname, Scratcher. ‘His wife Betty would be up when I got there and she’d often say, “He’s just scratching around”,’ Ron remembers fondly.
Ron also recalls how every now and again, McCarthy – an avid rock collector – would ask him to stop the car. ‘If he saw a rock on the side of the road that was an unusual shape or colour, we’d go and pick it up for him,’ he says. It was a regular occurrence and often involved heavy lifting. ‘Some were like boulders!’ Ron adds.
It was important for the crew to have moments of levity because day in, day out, they investigated the most violent of murders, and an effective crew’s strength came not just from their investigative skills, but from their unity.
Ron’s bloody entrée to the Homicide Squad, when he first worked under McCarthy’s supervision, was the Maria James murder in June 1980. By that time, the squad had recovered from the Abortion Inquiry.
‘Right from the start Ron was a good operator, very conscientious and meticulous,’ McCarthy says. ‘He was just a very good crew member. He’s probably the best operator I’ve ever struck, and I was in the police force for thirty years.’
McCarthy knew from the start that he had Ron’s respect, and the feeling was mutual. ‘Any ideas he’d suggest were useful,’ Brian says. ‘He always told you what he thought. He didn’t pull any punches. He was so efficient and he wasn’t over-proud about it. He was just matter of fact and liked to get the job done properly. He was a great bloke to work with.’
Ron also impressed the big boss, Paul Delianis, who tried to spend as much time as he could at the Thornbury bookshop where the mother-of-two had been murdered. ‘Ron was energetic, enthusiastic, professional and had a great desire to succeed,’ Paul says of Ron’s investigative skills. ‘He worked well in a team and his demeanour of strength and determination was well known, while he recognised he was the new kid on the block.’
Towards the end of 1980, Delianis was promoted to Detective Superintendent and soon after became the Assistant Commissioner of the Crime Department (he ultimately became the Deputy Commissioner). Even though he was no longer involved in the minutiae of every case, he remained in charge of the detectives at Homicide. And as the murders continued to stack up, everything Delianis heard about Ron told him he’d made one of the best decisions of his professional life.
*
At the start of the 1980s, there were five crews of four at the Homicide Squad. It was their job to investigate an alarming number of murders, many of them the result of violent domestic arguments. ‘Back in 1980, we were averaging eighty to ninety murders a year and about seventy per cent of them were domestic related,’ Ron says, reinforcing the view that domestic violence was prevalent because the governments of the day did not take it seriously. ‘Now we average about fifty-five murders a year in Victoria,’ Ron says. ‘And I would say that fifty per cent of those would be domestic related.’
After the Maria James murder – about which, more later – Ron investigated numerous domestic murders where, often, the murderer – a husband or boyfriend – was still present at the scene. ‘As a homicide investigator, you cut your teeth on domestic murders and then move into other kinds of murders, which took a lot of effort and investigation,’ he says.
There were police from other squads who didn’t take the Homicide Squad seriously, suggesting that investigating murders was not very challenging. ‘The Armed Robbery Squad gave us the nickname, “The Heavy Domestic Squad”,’ Ron recalls. ‘We were perceived by them as not being very tough because they thought we only did household murders.’
But the Homicide Squad – in those days, without computers or DNA technology to help them solve cases – also worked on complex, protracted investigations, including murders related to criminal activity, some of which involved drugs or armed robbery.
Ron will never forget his first major investigation into the murder of an armed robber. ‘At four-thirty one Sunday afternoon a guy walking along Britannia Creek at Yarra Junction smelled an awful smell,’ Ron begins. ‘He went down to the creek and found a body that was pretty badly decomposed. I was the first at the scene because it was only ten minutes from my house.’
The only evidence left at the crime scene were a few twelve-gauge shotgun cartridge cases, but without a wallet or a driver’s licence, the victim’s identity was anyone’s guess. ‘So we arranged for the body to go back to the Coroner’s Court in Flinders Street,’ Ron says. As far as mortuaries went, the one at Flinders Street was less than impressive. ‘Even then, it was antiquated. It was just a small room with three or four steel tables and an overhead light. They didn’t even have the facilities to do X-rays,’ Ron remembers.
The police weren’t impressed by the forensic pathologist who worked there either. ‘He‘d been a medical officer in the air force or the army and now he called himself a pathologist,’ Ron says. ‘But most of us had some doubts about that.’
Once the so-called pathologist had conducted a preliminary examination, the man’s body was taken to Prince Henry’s Hospital on St Kilda Road for X-rays. It was protocol that the body be transported under police escort. It was an awful job, no matter how strong an officer’s stomach. ‘The body was badly decomposed and the stench was unbelievable,’ Ron recalls.
After the X-rays were taken, the man’s body was returned to the Coroner’s Court so the pathologist could determine the cause of death. It was no wonder the detectives had their doubts about him: even the way he read X-rays did not instil confidence. ‘Brian McCarthy had to say to him, “You’ve got them upside-down”,’ Ron remembers.
Nonetheless, the pathologist was convinced he knew how the victim had met his untimely end. ‘He said, “I reckon he’s been hit on the back of the head with a lump of wood”,’ Ron says. It was a surprise to Ron and his fellow crew members, given the presence of the shell casings near the dead man’s body.
Fortunately, the detectives were able to find out the victim’s name. ‘We got him identified from one or two fingerprints,’ Ron says. ‘His name was Sidney Graham, and he came from Sydney and had been living in a boarding house in Hawthorn, where he’d been a storeman at an electrical wholesaler’s. We found out that two weeks before he disappeared, there had been a burglary at the wholesaler’s, and that he had some priors for armed robbery.’
With a fellow crew member on leave, Ron’s colleague from Fitzroy, Ken O’Connor, was seconded to Homicide to work on the case with him. Soon, they received some most unusual information. ‘A Justice of the Peace who lived in Fitzroy came forward with a tape recording,’ Ron recalls. ‘He said that at night, his phone sometimes tingled. He’d picked up that he’d been hearing a person talking about criminal activity on the other end and so decided to record it.’
What the caller had said during the taped phone call shed light on Graham’s murder. ‘He said something like, “The cops say we hit him on the back of the 3KZ [rhyming slang for head]. But they’ve got it wrong because the ARs [the Armed Robbery Squad] took a bag off me with the gun in it a week ago”,’ Ron says. ‘So we went to the Armed Robbery Squad and said, “Did you take a bag off anyone with anything in it?” They said, “Yes. We took it off a Lee Patrick Torney”.’
The Homicide Squad investigators were miffed that someone within the police force had leaked a victim’s apparent cause of death, but that wasn’t their foremost concern; their priority was to find Graham’s killer. They took a close look at Torney, and discovered he’d been living in the same block of flats in Fitzroy as the JP. With the likelihood the JP had recorded the known armed robber on the phone, Torney was starting to look very suspicious indeed.
*
From the outset, Brian McCarthy was not convinced that Graham had been bashed to death, as the pathologist kept insisting. Now, with the possibility that Torney’s gun had been used in Graham’s murder, McCarthy insisted he
piece the dead man’s fractured skull back together.
Once again, the ‘pathologist’s’ methods were questionable. ‘When we got there, he was using Superglue to put the skull back together,’ Ron says, marvelling at how the pathologist hadn’t realised he could permanently glue fragments in the wrong place. ‘So Brian got some plasticine and put on some gloves and put the skull back together himself.’
What the crew leader found justified the grisly procedure. ‘He found a large round hole and buckshot,’ Ron says. ‘Brian could tell from the pellets these were SG [Sellier & Bellot brand], and they were matched to the cartridge case found at the scene.’
The next step was to go to the Armed Robbery Squad and examine the sawn-off shotgun they’d found in Torney’s bag. Bingo: it matched the cartridge case and the pellets. ‘We knew we were on the right track,’ Ron says. There was only one problem he could foresee. ‘Lee Torney was a career criminal, part of the underworld, someone to be feared. And we knew he would never tell us anything.’
But if they dug deeper, someone else might.
*
The detectives soon discovered Torney had been regularly visiting a scrap-metal dealer named Albert – or Alby – Renwood, in inner-city Richmond, so they asked Renwood to the police station to find out how much he knew about Torney’s affairs. ‘He was extremely nervous,’ Ron remembers. Even so, he revealed that Torney, along with two other men – Grant Curran and victim Sid Graham – had recently held up the State Bank in Hawthorn. It confirmed to Ron that Torney and Graham knew each other.
‘Alby allowed them to come back to his house and whack up [divide] the money afterwards, and get changed out of their balaclavas,’ Ron says. But, as Ron well knew, there is rarely honour among thieves. ‘The week after the armed robbery, Torney became worried that Graham was going to dob them in, as there had been a dispute over the money.’