by Justine Ford
The Special Duties crew couldn’t help but feel sorry for the street workers they picked up. ‘We felt like it was a victimless crime,’ Hatton says. ‘Or that they were the victims. Often they were drug addicts who needed fifty dollars to buy their drugs.’
Realising the police could make them safer, the street workers increasingly shared information with the Special Duties crew. Ron remembers the prostitutes telling him about a man who was standing over them, forcing them to turn tricks to line his own pockets. ‘Many complained that he was violent and some prostitutes made statements that they were paying him money,’ Ron says. ‘So we had enough evidence to charge him with an offence called living off the earnings of prostitution.’
Aware that the man was staying in a cheap motel in Fitzroy Street, Ron, Hatton and Caulfield went to see him. It was a hot day so the pimp was lying on the bed with the door open. ‘We all went in and he was informed he was under arrest for living off prostitutes’ earnings,’ Ron says. ‘He became upset and violent, and in the process he punched Paul, which cut his eyebrow.’
‘Ron basically said to him, “The police run this town now. You’re not a required person here and it might be time for you to go”,’ Hatton adds.
Back at the cop shop, two further charges – police assault and resisting arrest – were added to the charge sheet. The pimp was bailed to appear at St Kilda Court; when he failed to turn up, a warrant was issued for his arrest. ‘And to this day he’s never been seen,’ says Ron, unsure whether his words of warning prompted the pimp to disappear.
Hatton suspects that’s precisely why he took off. ‘He realised we were incorruptible and that he’d be in strife if he stayed,’ he says.
*
Ron was achieving great results, but in a crime hotspot like St Kilda, it meant putting himself – a man with a family, like so many other police – in danger every shift. ‘Policing was dangerous back then but Colleen accepted it,’ he says. ‘You just hoped nothing happened to you. If you constantly thought about it, you wouldn’t leave the police station.’
One night Ron’s commitment to the job almost cost him his life.
At 3 am one morning in 1984, he and another officer discovered three men sitting in a car in a dimly lit side street. It looked suspicious. ‘I got them out and told them to stand beside the car,’ he recalls. ‘As they did, one of them dropped a gun on the ground.’ He took off and Ron’s colleague went in pursuit.
‘Then the second bloke swung round and I grabbed hold of him,’ Ron continues. ‘He reached down and grabbed the butt of the gun in my holster and at the same time pushed me over a small fence.’ Ron’s assailant would not let go of the gun. The strap was still holding it in place, but for how long? ‘I thought, If he gets it out of the holster, I’m just waiting for the bang.’
Ron had to think fast in this fight-or-flight situation. ‘As I went over the fence, I pulled him over with me,’ he says. That way, Ron figured, the crook wasn’t pulling back on the gun so there was less chance he could get hold of it. Ron’s instincts were right, and within moments he had overpowered his attacker and was on top of him, slapping on the cuffs. He got on the radio and called it in. ‘I’ve got an armed man,’ he panted, bleeding from wounds to his face and body.
It turned out Ron’s assailant was a prison escapee from New South Wales. Ron was lucky to be alive, and he knew it.
After a doctor stitched him up, Ron phoned Colleen. Her immediate instinct was to go to the police station to be by her husband’s side. ‘But he said, “No, don’t come down”,’ she recalls. ‘I didn’t know the severity of it. I was really upset that he didn’t want to tell me. I wasn’t made of cotton wool.’
Ron had not wanted to excessively worry his wife, so he played it down. ‘It was the early hours of the morning and I knew she’d been asleep,’ he says. But there was more to it than that and it revolved around the culture of the times. ‘Back then it wasn’t the done thing [to have a spouse come to your aid at the station].’
Colleen was mortified when she finally saw her bruised and battered husband, but realised why he’d left her in the dark about the extent of his injuries. ‘Ron always took things on himself,’ she says. ‘He thought if he shouldered everything, he wouldn’t have to worry anyone else. But I think I beat that out of him over the years!’
These days Ron rarely thinks about the night he almost came a cropper, ‘But if I do,’ he says, ‘I know how close I came to being shot, and that’s quite scary.’
*
Ron’s results at St Kilda spoke for themselves. The renowned thief catcher quadrupled St Kilda’s arrest rate. ‘We went on to become the detectives we were because of Ron,’ Hatton remarks. ‘He taught me how to collect evidence and how to interview people. Both Mark [Caulfield] and I had a natural ability, but to temper our investigative skills with someone like Ron was fantastic. The wealth of knowledge he had!’
‘Every three months we were arresting 180 people,’ Ron says of his team, who rotated every three months. ‘The arrests were mainly for offences such as stolen property, burglary, street prostitution and for substantial amounts of drugs.’
Ron was one of a new breed of sergeants at St Kilda Police Station. ‘There had always been issues over members being charged with dishonesty and assault, and some who had ultimately been suspended and let go,’ he says. But the new, younger group of sergeants – Ron included – all had a common purpose: to run an efficient police station without the whiff of corruption that had fouled the hallways before they arrived. ‘The new breed was more accountable,’ Ron says, acknowledging his strong senior sergeants for reinstating discipline at the station. ‘There had been a time when some of the officers had thought they were Starsky and Hutch,’ he says. ‘They didn’t even wear uniforms when they were meant to – they’d go out in the marked divvy van and get around in big jumpers.’
Ron remembers the first time he worked night shift at the St Kilda watch-house. ‘The divvy van crew came back at three o’clock in the morning and it became apparent to me that they’d been drinking alcohol,’ he says. ‘I instructed that they weren’t allowed to go out of the police station again and that they were to stay there until the end of their shift at seven o’clock.’ It came as a shock to the divvy-van crew because they’d been used to a more laissez-faire approach in the past. ‘I think sometimes members wanted to test the boundaries and test their sergeants,’ Ron posits. ‘But we were all committed to changing the culture.’
Still, the resistance mounted.
Ron recalls an occasion in which an expensive watch, which was meant to have been logged in the lost-property book, turned up in a young officer’s locker. ‘The junior member was charged with theft,’ Ron recollects. Yet other officers maligned the sergeant who’d charged him. ‘There was a lot of pressure put on that new sergeant because the attitude was, “How dare you put pressure on another police officer!” ’
The theft was small fry compared with what was to come. ‘One night at about two-thirty, the back of the police station caught fire and burnt to the ground,’ Ron says. At the back of the station were two demountables that housed the officers’ lockers, in which they kept all their notes and court briefs. At the time, the famous television journalist Mike Willesee was making a documentary about the challenges of city policing, so when he returned to Channel Nine in Sydney, he was armed with unexpectedly dramatic footage.
From the outset, there was talk the blaze had been started by a rat within the ranks. ‘The investigation by the fire brigade showed it had started internally,’ Ron says, adding that there was no evidence anyone had jumped the back fence to set the buildings alight. ‘While it was never proven, there was considerable suspicion that a police officer had caused the fire, possibly someone sending a message: “Don’t play with us”.’
St Kilda Police Station was a hotbed in more ways than one and the hierarchy wasn’t tolerating it
. About six months later, after a workplace review, most of the detectives were sent to Russell Street’s Criminal Investigation section. ‘It was a clean-out,’ Ron says. ‘About a dozen temporary staff were put in, again to try to change the culture. St Kilda was a work in progress but over the three years I was there, changes did occur.’
Some of the changes stuck, but years later the bustling station was back in the news again for all the wrong reasons: in 2000, a stash of firearms was found in the police station’s roof, followed by another stash – although fake – fifteen years after that. Who put them there, and when, remains a mystery, but it speaks yet again of St Kilda’s murky past – a time in which five of Ron’s colleagues ended up in jail or ‘on the other side of the fence’.
‘Many careers were shaped at St Kilda,’ Ron adds, ‘and some careers were ruined there.’
10
SAVING LOUISE
‘Heroin was engulfing the streets of St Kilda, and trying to help a young addict was my attempt at rehabilitation. I was naive thinking you could just provide support and some basic needs. I soon learnt the desire to give up drugs had to come from within, only when they had hit rock bottom.’
– Ron Iddles
In much the same way he’d spotted cars that were out of place in Collingwood, Ron recognised that Louise Burke, who wore designer clothes and spoke with rounded vowels, wasn’t born and bred under the glow of a red light. The first night she met Ron, the eighteen-year-old was on a fast track to trouble.
Louise Burke grew up with a loving mum and a success-oriented dad, an ‘oil tycoon’, as she puts it, whose sizeable income meant that, materially, she wanted for nothing. Her father John’s career took the family overseas and by her teens Burke had lived in three different countries. Yet even though she was interested in the world around her, the constant upheaval unsettled her. She found it difficult to form lasting friendships and felt that she didn’t belong.
While living in Thailand in the 1970s, Burke also found herself troubled by the Cambodian War. ‘I saw a man’s head blown off, and another with his guts eaten out and his eyeballs extending from his head,’ she says. She believes now that what she witnessed led to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
When she was fifteen, the family returned to Melbourne, where her parents enrolled her in a prestigious Church of England girls’ school. But no sooner had Burke arrived than she became the target of teenage xenophobes, who bullied her for having lived in Asia.
‘When I came back I was going, “What about the war?” But no one had heard of it,’ Burke says. ‘So I just left school and went to business college and became a fully qualified business secretary.’
Straightaway, the intelligent, statuesque blonde scored a job as an executive secretary for a leading advertising agency in South Melbourne. ‘They had big plans for me,’ she says. ‘But then I got led astray a bit.’
Burke was ‘led astray’ by a charismatic Moroccan-born man named Mick who was ten years her senior. Beneath a haze of cannabis smoke, she lost any ambition she’d once had, and despite her employers’ protests, she quit her job to squander her days with Mick on the streets of St Kilda. Mick introduced his impressionable girlfriend to heroin. ‘It was in Fitzroy Street and he was looking for a bit of pot,’ Burke remembers. ‘He spoke to this guy who was the scummiest person I’d ever met, who said, “We’ve only got scag [heroin], man”. Mick turned to me and said, “You wanna try that?” I thought, This doesn’t feel right and I don’t want to be a part of it. But he dragged me into it. He even showed me how to do it, like my personal heroin trainer. I did it just to fit in. I thought I was in love with him.’
Burke is the first to admit that love can make people do crazy things, but when heroin is added to the mix, all reason disappears. Under Mick’s powerful spell, and with the lure of as many opioid rushes as she could imagine, Burke followed Mick to Sydney’s Kings Cross. Soon, the former private schoolgirl was turning tricks to support their habits. Then, as quickly as Mick had entered her life, he left.
‘No bloke was going to look after me so I had to look after myself,’ Burke recalls. ‘I looked after four other girls as well and cooked for them. Just to keep them off the street because they were underage.’ It wasn’t the kind of life Burke would have chosen for herself, but heroin had her in its grip.
A short while later, as Burke can best remember, she met a new ‘street partner’, Gus, a gentle drifter about her age. ‘Gus had a good heart but he was not a strong soul,’ she remarks. Nevertheless, the two began a relationship and moved back to St Kilda.
It wasn’t long after that that Burke – on the nod and with drug paraphernalia in her handbag – first encountered Ron, working undercover, in a secluded laneway.
‘We were working in Fitzroy Lane at the back of Fitzroy Street when we came across her,’ Ron remembers. ‘We asked her what she was doing and searched her handbag. Inside we found a syringe and a cap of heroin, and we had a look at her arm and could see a bruise mark.’
She was irked to have been arrested, but came to realise that this perfect stranger – a policeman at that – had her best interests at heart. Not only did he keep phoning her parents to make sure she wasn’t using, but through regular pep talks, Ron encouraged Burke to lead a fulfilling, drug-free life. The way Ron saw it, Louise Burke was not a hopeless case, and with a loving family to support her, she might be able to get off heroin for good. ‘I guess I thought I could save her,’ he says.
When Burke appeared in court about six weeks later, flanked by her family and Gus, she told the magistrate she would never use heroin again. After the judge placed her on a good behaviour bond, Burke reassured her parents and Ron she had genuinely turned over a new leaf.
Ron’s welfare checks seemed to make a difference because, for a while, it looked as though Burke had indeed turned her back on drugs. ‘I walked into the police station at St Kilda in torn jeans and with a guitar to say thank you,’ she recalls. ‘The cops kind of ribbed me a bit. “Oh, you’re gonna play us a tune, are you?” “No,” I said, “I want to see Ron Iddles”.’
Just six weeks later, she was back on smack and was again busted for drug use. ‘Two divvy wagons had me cornered in an alleyway,’ she says. She told the police officers her name was Elizabeth Montgomery, after the actress who played Samantha in the television series Bewitched.
Moments later, a third police car arrived, and out stepped Ron Iddles.
‘She got charged again and I got the sob story – “You don’t understand, no one helps heroin addicts, and now we’ve got nowhere to live!” ’ Ron remembers her saying.
Ron racked his brain for what he could do to help the young woman this time, because his well-meaning gestures clearly weren’t enough. As it happened, he’d been asked to speak about the effects of drugs at a Lions Club meeting. Perhaps Louise might learn something from that? he thought.
‘So I asked her to come along, and she did,’ Ron recalls, adding that he also asked her to tell the group about her own experiences. ‘She was nervous about speaking but she did, and in the end, she even sang a song.’ Fittingly, it was Neil Young’s song about the perils of heroin use, ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’.
Ron even took Burke on a family outing to the famous Hanging Rock in the Macedon Ranges. ‘It was about resetting her environment,’ he explains.
Keen to bring stability back to her life, Ron enlisted the help of a St Kilda charity to find her and Gus somewhere to live. The couple had been sleeping rough and bunking down with other junkies, which Ron knew would only lead to temptation. ‘So we found them a flat in East St Kilda and set them up in it,’ Ron says.
This was not something policemen did for drug users every day, and Ron’s good deeds didn’t stop there. Gus was trying to find work and had been complaining he needed a car to drive to job interviews, so Ron held a fundraiser. ‘We got enough money so I bought them
a 1966 grey-and-white Holden HR sedan,’ he says.
On a roll, Ron then found Gus a job as a garbage collector. ‘I arranged for him to get a job with Cleanaway,’ Ron recalls. ‘He was very appreciative because now he had a car, a flat and a job.’
It could have been the start of a happy, healthy new life, but Gus didn’t share Ron’s work ethic. ‘He turned up on day one for the job, but not on day two,’ Ron says. ‘So on day three, I rang him at four in the morning and got him out of bed to make sure he turned up.’ Gus did, but not for much longer. ‘I think he lasted all of about eight days because he couldn’t commit,’ Ron says.
A couple of weeks later, Ron went to visit them at home and noticed the car he’d bought them was missing. ‘I found out Gus had taken the car to a wrecking yard and got fifty dollars for it, which was the equivalent of a cap of heroin,’ Ron says. ‘I felt very disappointed in him but it showed me that, while I could help them, they had to want to help themselves.’
Even more worryingly, about three months later, the couple moved out of the flat Ron had set them up in. ‘I was in contact with Louise’s parents who said she was off the rails and involved in prostitution,’ Ron says.
‘I was homeless in Melbourne,’ Burke says, remembering how she lost contact with those who cared about her and struggled to survive. ‘I was on a park bench with my eyes frozen. And then I lived in a cupboard for three months.’
Soon afterwards, she moved back to Sydney, although what happened there is largely a blur due to her heavy drug use. What is known is that Burke overdosed time and time again. She would literally die on the street, only to be revived by ambulance officers wielding life-saving shots of Narcan.
‘She’d ring from time to time, mostly off her face,’ Ron remembers. Yet she desperately wanted to get clean and periodically checked herself into rehabilitation clinics. Then one day in 1994, she phoned Ron with momentous news: she’d given birth to a baby girl called Bonnie and wanted Ron to be her godfather. ‘I always believed you only had one set of parents but if I could be a father figure then that was fine,’ Ron says.