by Justine Ford
It was a terrible scene, but there was nothing their father Nick Zikos could have done to stop it. ‘I knew the husband must have heard the commotion because of the way the bedclothes were thrown back as if he was in a hurry,’ Ron says. ‘Then he ran down the long hallway and into the bedroom, where she stabbed him about twenty-six times in the heart.’
While at the crime scene, Ron couldn’t stop to consider his feelings; he had a job to do. ‘We did the normal things – we got the photos, and I think we had video, even though it was pretty basic. To some extent you were process-driven. But on jobs like this you’d sometimes go home and bawl your eyes out.’
‘I don’t think any police officer likes to deal with children’s death,’ Colleen says. ‘And some of them affected Ron more than others. The Zikos case was really terrible. That one affected him so much. Maybe because the mother was left behind and she was so distraught.’
The murders threw a light on Ron’s own family life. ‘Seeing the children stabbed to death made me realise how amazing Colleen was with Joanne,’ he says. ‘I was so lucky to have her.’
When the police told Nick Zikos’ brother, George Zikos, what had happened, he was understandably devastated. ‘He asked, “Can I go to the house?” ’ Ron says, recalling how he warned George about the horrendous scene inside. ‘I said, “We don’t have cleaners”.’
But George was politely insistent. ‘He said, “It was my brother’s blood – I’ve got to clean it up”,’ Ron remembers.
So, around eight o’clock that night – after Ron had been working on the case for more than seventeen hours – he went with George to clean the house. ‘We lit a fire in the backyard and carried the mattresses out, then burnt them one by one,’ Ron says. ‘Then we carried the wooden beds out. We cut the carpet up and burnt everything, and then we cleaned everything up.’
Today, it is unimaginable that a detective and a grief-stricken victim’s relative would have to clean up a murder scene themselves. ‘How can you let a brother clean up his own brother’s and nephew’s and nieces’ blood?’ Ron asks, still incredulous.
To this day, Ron feels deeply sorry for George Zikos and the good friends who had tried to help Pina. ‘How can her friends from Cockatoo ever get over it? She left their house at eleven or eleven-thirty, and by two-thirty, the whole family was dead.’
‘She pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity and was kept [in prison] at the Governor’s pleasure,’ Ron says. ‘To my knowledge, she’s served her time.’
8
NO HARD FEELINGS
‘This case fascinated me because when someone I’d put away got out of prison and back in the real world, I was the first person he contacted. Why did he want to have contact?’
– Ron Iddles
Ringing Ron Iddles was always a safe bet, even if you were a criminal. With a reputation for playing it straight with everyone – from victims’ families to crooks – Ron has never promised anything he could not deliver. ‘Criminals have always felt comfortable ringing me because they know I’m not going to somersault them. I never lied to them,’ Ron says. ‘It’s a big thing for a criminal to pick up a phone and call Crime Stoppers but it’s a bigger thing to call a police officer about something that might implicate them. They might think, What are the consequences of doing this?’
Increasingly, criminals were drawn to Ron because they knew he was honest. And it never hurt his investigations. ‘I always considered everyone as a source of information regardless of their status in life,’ Ron says. ‘It was not a matter of cultivating them, but treating them with respect and letting them know I was always available for them.’
It’s that quality that may well be the greatest secret to Ron’s crime-solving success. Take the following case from 1981.
The East Keilor market gardener’s day began much like any other – tilling the soil, planting seeds and harvesting Brussels sprouts. The peace was shattered when a young man named Thomas Kyte turned up on his doorstep, begging for help. What made the stranger’s presence even more confronting was that he had been shot in the back and the groin and was bleeding profusely. ‘So the gardener called the police, the police attended, and Thomas Kyte was taken to hospital,’ Ron says.
Kyte survived but he wasn’t the only one on the wrong side of a shotgun that day. One of his mates was also gunned down but didn’t live to tell the tale. ‘The local police found the body of a man named Garry Jennings near the river,’ Ron says.
When Ron was called in to investigate Jennings’ murder and Kyte’s attempted murder, he expected Kyte to tell him who was responsible. It wasn’t that simple. ‘Initially he didn’t want to cooperate at all,’ Ron says. ‘Even in the early 1980s it was still fairly common that you didn’t cooperate with police, especially if you’d been shot, because they’d always think someone would come and even up the score. So the attitude was usually, “Tell the police nothing”.’
After a while, Kyte had a change of heart and turned witness. ‘Through information he and others gave us, we worked out that three men took Tom Kyte and Garry Jennings from a home in Albion Street, Brunswick, at gunpoint,’ Ron says. ‘They were taken to the river and made to stand against the river bank and were shot with a shotgun.’
Jennings died straightaway but Kyte hung on. ‘He basically played dead until the three men left,’ Ron says. ‘Then when he thought it was safe he crawled down the road for 1.5 kilometres to the gardener’s house and raised the alarm.’ It was an incredible effort and Kyte was lucky to survive.
With Kyte’s help, Ron identified the three men responsible for the bloody showdown, and Ron learnt they’d kidnapped Jennings and Kyte over a drug debt.
He vividly remembers going with Brian McCarthy to a house in Broadmeadow an alleged where one of the suspects, twenty-seven-year-old Bruce Nicholls, lived with his mum. They hoped to find Nicholls there or at least some clues to his whereabouts. ‘We knocked on the door and heard a rustle inside,’ Ron says. ‘An elderly lady – Bruce’s mum – opened the door and invited us in. She said, “Would you like a cup of tea?” Much to Ron’s surprise, his boss said yes. ‘He would have been happy to sit down and engage in conversation to get some information, but first and foremost, we were there to search the house,’ Ron says.
Before Mrs Nicholls could put on the kettle, Ron caught McCarthy’s eye and motioned towards the rear of the house to suggest they look back there for the wanted man. ‘As it turned out, Bruce was in the wardrobe,’ Ron says.
After tracking down all three of the men, the police charged them with murder. ‘And after a lengthy trial, the three of them were convicted,’ Ron says. ‘They were each sentenced to life, but it came down to twenty-five years, from memory.’
*
Bruce Nicholls, like a lot of men jailed for murder, had thought long and hard about the man who’d locked him up.
‘I never held it against him,’ Bruce says. ‘He’d done his job and my aim was to walk out the front gates the same way as I went in – as a free person – and I thought, I’ll ring him when I get out.’
‘Bruce Nicholls rang me within a week of getting out,’ Ron remembers. ‘I said, “How can I help you?” He said, “I just want to come and meet you”.’
Ron knew it was prudent for a homicide investigator to be on his guard when meeting a man he’d put behind bars. ‘I thought, Is he going to be bitter? Is he going to be twisted? Is he vindictive? Is it possible he’s setting me up?’ Ron says. ‘But I went because I knew that after all those years in prison he’d have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things and might give me information. When you work in Homicide it’s good to have a network of people who are hooked into criminal activity.’
It turned out to be a pleasant meeting. ‘We went and had a cup of coffee and there was no animosity,’ Ron recalls. ‘He thanked me for what I’d done for him and said if there was any way he could help out in the
future, he would.’
One of the reasons Nicholls regarded Ron so highly was because Ron had spoken plainly and honestly during the 1981 investigation ‘as he tried to get behind the truth of it all’. There was no heavy, bad cop act. ‘He was just his normal self,’ Nicholls says. ‘He just asked the questions correctly and as far as I was concerned he did a good job and that’s why I respect him. I never felt like any injustice was done.’
Nicholls spent his entire sentence in Pentridge. ‘Even when I was in jail I used to follow his story and think, “Keep up the good work”,’ Nicholls says. ‘Every chance I could, I read about him [in the newspaper]. I always paid attention to what cases he’d been covering and I’d think, They’ve got the right person.’
Nicholls also credits Ron with keeping him on the straight and narrow after his release in 1997, aged 41, after having served the minimum eighteen of his twenty-five-year sentence. He says that even though he and Ron are about the same age, he sees Ron as the father figure he never had. ‘I always wanted to be like him. I didn’t want a criminal record,’ Nicholls says. ‘You couldn’t have a better role model than Ron.’ When he was first released, Nicholls, who was on an invalid pension, lived in Shepparton before moving back to Melbourne. He stayed in contact with Ron throughout.
As the years went by, Nicholls phoned Ron whenever he came upon information about a crime, or sometimes just to invite him for coffee. He says when he turned up at Ron’s office with a hot tip, Ron always treated him with respect.
‘The greatest gift you can give anyone is the ability to listen,’ Ron says. ‘And you never know what someone might tell you. Information about a crime might come to light or a life might be saved.’
Which was exactly what happened when Nicholls phoned Ron late one night to report that his best mate’s de facto had died of a drug overdose and that the dead woman’s baby was alone in the house with her body. Nicholls’ friend hadn’t wanted to call the police himself because there was an intervention order preventing him from visiting his partner and he feared he’d be accused of her murder.
Nicholls could simply have reported the matter to the local police, but he knew Ron would handle things properly. ‘Bruce Nicholls said I was an honest policeman and that he trusted me,’ Ron says.
So after Nicholls made his late-night call, Ron arranged for Footscray police to go to the woman’s house. ‘They found her body and they found the baby,’ he says. ‘And the story checked out: the woman had died of an overdose.’ Fortunately, before he left the house, the woman’s de facto had fed the baby, who was in good health when the police arrived.
The incident told Ron he’d been right to meet Nicholls for coffee all those years ago, and that he did the right thing by answering the phone that night. ‘Sometimes I think, if I didn’t answer that phone call, what would have happened?’ he wonders.
‘As far as Ron goes, you can’t go wrong if you tell the truth,’ Nicholls concludes. ‘That’s all there is to that gentleman and that’s what’s fascinated me over the years.’
Postscript: Bruce Nicholls died of natural causes shortly after this interview.
9
ST KILDA
‘I went to St Kilda because it was time to move up the ranks, and to do that, I had to leave Homicide for a while. St Kilda wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve always enjoyed a challenge.’
– Ron Iddles
In February 1983 Ron Iddles – no longer a detective senior constable but, at nearly twenty-eight, a sergeant – applied for, and was offered, a job in Melbourne’s famous red-light district, St Kilda. The post appealed to the renowned crook catcher because ‘St Kilda had the reputation of being a very tough, rugged area, but also police had been involved in minor corruption, prostitution and drugs,’ he says. ‘As it also had a reputation of having a poor police culture, I knew there’d be a lot of challenges there. I knew I’d learn a lot.’
Ron’s reputation preceded him. ‘He was well known from Collingwood and the Homicide Squad,’ says Paul Hatton, then a senior constable at St Kilda Police Station. ‘He was coming to St Kilda with this incredible reputation as a crook catcher. Everyone was saying, Ron Iddles is coming here?!’
On his first day, Ron was called into Superintendent Jock Caddle’s office. Caddle oversaw policing in the city’s inner south-east from his office in Prahran, and told Ron he wanted him to set up a new Special Duties unit. The previous unit, which had been disbanded eighteen months earlier, had been tarnished by allegations of corruption. The superintendent knew Ron was one of the force’s rising stars, and would remain unbent despite the colourful suburb’s many temptations, outside and inside the station.
Ron’s task was monumental. His skeleton crew was to clean up crime in St Kilda, Melbourne’s version of Kings Cross in Sydney. ‘I had two staff members – Senior Constables Paul Hatton and Mark Caulfield – and we were given an open slate. We could work on drugs, street prostitution, stolen property, whatever we wanted.’
Pretty, bayside St Kilda, dotted with quaint Art Deco buildings, towering palms and tempting European cake shops attracted tourists, bohemians, performing artists and trendy urbanites. Yet parts of the suburb were so seedy it was no wonder the place was rife with illegal activity. The hub of all the action was Fitzroy Street, a commercial and residential strip that ran down to Port Phillip Bay. The street was home to fish-and-chip joints, dingy bars and the now infamous Gatwick boarding house, a slowly crumbling 1930s mansion that housed junkies, street walkers, break-and-enter merchants and other flea-bitten drop-outs.
‘Fitzroy Street was surrounded by other cheap accommodation too,’ Ron says. ‘There were boarding houses in Grey Street and Dalgety Street – single rooms that were cheap and attracted numerous drug users and criminals, so it became a bit like a cesspit.’
It was well known around town that if a man was looking for a good time, Grey or Robe Streets were his best bet. Lurking on corners or perched on brick fences in short skirts, the hookers were value for money so long as you didn’t mind risking the clap.
‘Down on the Esplanade you had Bojangles nightclub, which was renowned for conflict between bouncers and the public,’ Ron continues. ‘But other parts of St Kilda were very affluent and the people who lived there would probably never have ventured into Fitzroy Street. A lot of people wouldn’t go there for fear of being robbed, bashed or solicited by prostitutes. There were dodgy second-hand shops there too. It really was the hub of evil.’
And thriving like blowflies on top of this pile of human waste were corrupt coppers. ‘I remember one crook who said to me, “Are you gonna take my money? The guy before you didn’t leave me with enough money for a cup of coffee”.’
*
Heroin was St Kilda’s public enemy number one. ‘One of the biggest dealers was a man who owned a café on Fitzroy Street. He was liked by a lot of police, and he provided them with discount hamburgers and cigarettes,’ Ron says disapprovingly. ‘But we found out from street prostitutes that he was probably dealing more than anyone in St Kilda.’
By the time Ron arrived in St Kilda, times were changing in the police force. ‘I can remember going there with my Special Duties crew,’ Ron says. ‘We worked in jeans and t-shirts, so we went in and ordered a cappuccino each.’
The café owner guessed Ron and his sidekicks were police, and told them they didn’t need to pay for their coffees. In a flash, Ron eyeballed him, hard: ‘I leant across the counter and said, “Just remember this: we owe you nothing and we’ve paid for the coffee”.’
Six weeks later, after the cafe owner sold several caps of heroin to an undercover officer, Ron arrested and charged him with trafficking. ‘We closed down the shop, then searched high and low but didn’t find any more heroin,’ he says. ‘We even brought in a dog but he couldn’t find the stash either.’
What the police did find was a wad of marked notes in the café owner’s
pocket, and a few thousand dollars under the fish-and-chip paper, sitting around in various places. The unusual locations in which they found the cash suggested to the officers it was drug money.
‘Then, back at the police station, the café owner tried to offer me a $5000 bribe,’ Ron continues. It was another bad move. ‘He was convicted and sent to jail for trafficking, and he got a heavy fine for offering the bribe.’
The café owner might have been done for trafficking horse, but he wasn’t the only dealer in town. Ron planned to catch every one he could.
Part of the reason most crooks didn’t see the Special Duties team coming was because they looked like everyone else in St Kilda, with their collar-length hair and in their faded jeans. ‘Even the crooks would say they didn’t know we were policemen,’ Hatton says. And when Ron and the crew started driving an old Volkswagen from the Ugly Duckling Caryard instead of their police-issue Holden, they attracted even less attention. ‘We’d be parked in the street and they wouldn’t know us as coppers,’ Hatton says. ‘They’d think we were just crooks.’
Ron occasionally used his colleagues to bait the young men lurking in the shadows of Shakespeare Grove, a secluded street behind Luna Park. ‘I would leave the crew members on the street just standing there, and wait until they were approached by a young male,’ he says. ‘Once there was an offer and a request for payment, the young males were arrested for loitering for the purpose of prostitution.’
Sometimes Ron acted as bait. ‘It was about trying to clean the street up, but at times trying to help those who were affected by drugs,’ he says. ‘On one occasion I arrested the son of a prominent judge, who was charged and convicted. I am sure he never worked the street again because I spoke to his father, who offered great support for his son.’ It was a quiet victory Ron never forgot.