by Justine Ford
O’Loughlin attributes most of the operation’s success to Ron. ‘I was extremely impressed with Ron’s demeanour during that investigation: down to earth, industrious, dedicated and very competent,’ he reflects. ‘We went our separate ways but I watched his progress in the force with interest.’
When O’Loughlin was at the academy, he was determined to appoint a lecturer who could elevate the level of crime-scene investigation training. The person he chose would have to be the cream of the crop, the detective’s detective. The only problem was that that person was now driving trucks for a living.
O’Loughlin pondered how to persuade Ron to return. ‘Thinking it would be best to get Colleen onside, I asked if she thought Ron would be interested in lecturing the students,’ he recalls.
But Colleen found the phone call rather peculiar. She had never met O’Loughlin, yet here he was, sounding her out. Colleen remembers O’Loughlin asking how Ron was going and if he was enjoying being a truck driver. ‘Then he said, “Do you think Ron would like to come back to the police force?” ’ Convinced her husband was content, Colleen decided on his behalf, saying, ‘He’s made up his mind and he’s fine doing what he’s doing.’ She even decided not to tell Ron about the inspector’s call, assuming he wouldn’t be interested.
But something in Ron was changing. ‘As the weeks went by I sensed something was going on in his head,’ Colleen reveals. Busy with the children, she didn’t ask what, and he didn’t volunteer any information either.
Not one to give up, O’Loughlin phoned Colleen again three months later. ‘Once more he said he really wanted experienced police officers in the force and would really like Ron to come back,’ Colleen says.
O’Loughlin – who was later awarded, among other distinctions, the Australian Police Medal – knew the importance of the follow-up call. ‘After chatting for a while I realised Ron still had an interest in the job,’ he says. ‘Colleen even said to me, “Ron talks to the TV when a homicide is being reported, saying, ‘I bet they haven’t done such and such!’ ” he laughs.
Colleen knew she had to tell Ron about this latest exchange, and was surprised by his response. ‘He said, “I was thinking of going back anyway”.’
The family had seen a great deal more of Ron while he was driving trucks. Generally he didn’t work on weekends, so they were able to go on outings together, and having him home at dinnertime still felt like a novelty. But as Colleen thought more about her husband’s recent pensive moods, it all made sense.
‘Deep down I felt he missed it and probably didn’t feel complete in himself,’ she says. ‘I think he needed to have a break from all the stressors of the job, so this enabled him to go back refreshed, with total commitment to the job, and further his career.’
Unfortunately for O’Loughlin, the Police Academy was not about to benefit. Instead, Victoria Police offered Ron a position back at the Homicide Squad. If he hadn’t fully made up his mind before, this was the clincher. It was, after all, the only place he’d ever really wanted to be since he’d watched Homicide in short pants.
‘So in the end I sold the truck and went back,’ Ron says with a smile.
‘I was happy for him once he’d made his decision,’ Colleen adds. ‘I was always supportive of what he did and I was also glad he got his old police number back.’
And Victoria Police, according to O’Loughlin, was already better for it.
*
By April 1994 Ron was recharged and ready to get back into the job he’d loved. First, he had to complete a refresher course at the academy as a thirty-nine-year-old. ‘As I recall, he quietly told the staff some of their training notes were wrong!’ O’Loughlin says.
Talented as he was, even Ron couldn’t avoid the force’s red tape. So even though he’d left as a senior sergeant, he had to return as a constable and work his way back up. ‘Initially it was a bit daunting because some people didn’t like reappointees,’ Ron explains. ‘Their attitude was, “How is it this bloke can just walk back in?” The mentality was, “He’s a retread”.’
Ron let the comments wash over him and, with the promise he would be fast-tracked to his previous rank within two years, he never acted above his station. ‘I never tried to be anything but a constable,’ he says. ‘I didn’t come over the top and say, “That’s a crap idea”. I did the work at that level.’ The work included helping fellow officers at crime scenes and taking statements ‘to get back into the swing of it’.
Ron noticed there had been significant changes since he left the squad. ‘One of the biggest was that we now had 286 word processors,’ he remembers. ‘They were very basic, but when I left we only had typewriters.’
It was the dawning of a new era.
*
Ron’s first brief after his reappointment was the murder in late 1994 of nursery owner Ann Taylor at Churchill in Gippsland. ‘She’d been stabbed three or four times at her nursery,’ Ron says. ‘Someone had tried to find her and hadn’t been able to, so they went inside and found her dead behind the counter. A knife was then found on the roof, which turned out to be the murder weapon.’
Ron remembers the crime scene so vividly it’s as if he’s still standing in it. ‘The cash register was open and the phone was off the hook,’ he says. ‘It gave the appearance that Ann had been standing behind the counter when someone had gone in demanding money. It looked like she’d then picked up the phone to call for help and was murdered.’
Ron noticed a stick at the front of the shop. ‘It was a very green branch, about 4.5 foot [1.37 metres] long,’ he says. ‘It had been whittled by a knife so it was now just a clean stick.’ What was its significance? ‘It was something that was foreign to the nursery,’ he says. ‘It hadn’t come from any of the plants and it just looked odd.’
Ron and another detective looked around the neighbourhood to see what else was out of place. In the meantime, news of Taylor’s murder had spread and a motorist had come forward. ‘He said he’d seen a young boy aged about thirteen or fourteen hanging around a bridge about one kilometre from the nursery,’ Ron says. ‘He saw the young person hide as he drove over the bridge.’
When Ron and his colleague investigated the creek bank beneath the bridge, ‘There were some bushes there and their branches matched the stick in the nursery,’ Ron says.
Already, Ron was back thinking like a homicide investigator. ‘Sometimes homicides are about trying to collect facts. That’s called induction,’ he explains. ‘Then you try to use the logical facts to work out what happened.’ That, he says, is deduction.
‘Our view was that whoever was responsible lived in Churchill,’ he says. Someone who knew Ann Taylor would be alone in her quiet nursery and, for some reason, took their time fashioning a branch from a nearby bush into a stick. He couldn’t help but wonder if the boy beneath the bridge had something to do with it.
It started to look more that way when the detectives doorknocked the houses near the nursery. ‘Someone said they’d seen a young boy from a troubled background in the local newsagency on the day of the murder,’ Ron recalls. ‘The boy had cash, which he didn’t normally have. He bought four or five packets of AFL football player cards. That was at about eleven in the morning.’
Immediately, Ron wanted to know why the disadvantaged boy was suddenly cashed up. Could he have stolen the money from Taylor and killed her in the process? There was only one way to find out and that was to identify the boy.
Ron and his offsider hotfooted it to the newsagency, hoping the proprietor knew the boy’s name. They were in luck. ‘He told us his name and said that he had been into the shop,’ Ron says. ‘The newsagent confirmed that the boy – who was thirteen years old – had cash on him and had bought some football cards.’ He also said the youth was a student at the local high school.
‘So our next port of call was to the school principal,’ Ron says. ‘We found out that they always
did rollcalls and that the boy wasn’t at school at 8.30 but there when the roll was called in the afternoon.’ The detectives also learnt that the teenager had taken the AFL cards to school to swap with his classmates.
Now convinced the uncharacteristically well-off truant had likely robbed and stabbed Taylor, the investigators went to the housing commission home he shared with his mother and siblings. ‘His mum said there was no way he could have done it as he was at school,’ Ron says. But Ron knew differently.
The investigators asked the boy some preliminary questions while his mum sat and listened. ‘From there we took him to Morwell Police Station, where we got a bail justice to sit in on the interview as an independent third person, rather than his mother, who agreed to the process,’ Ron says.
At first, the boy said he didn’t do it. ‘So I said a person of similar description had been seen at the bridge around 8.30, not far from the nursery,’ Ron says. ‘Then he confessed.’
It wasn’t like any homicide Ron had ever dealt with before. He wanted to know what could possibly drive a thirteen-year-old boy – a child – to kill. ‘Later he went on to explain that things were really hard at home financially,’ Ron recalls. ‘Every now and then he’d do a paper round, but he felt like he wasn’t included at school because other kids could afford to buy AFL cards or something from the tuckshop.’
So the penniless boy hatched a devious plan to obtain some money. ‘He decided to wag school, and while he was sitting at the bridge that morning he began whittling a stick with a knife,’ Ron says. ‘He knew the nursery opened at 9.30, so he went there and saw Ann watering plants outside. The way he saw it, that was his opportunity to go in and rat [rob] the till.’
But what began as a robbery ended tragically. ‘He didn’t see Ann come back into the office,’ Ron says. ‘She surprised him while he was taking money from the till and she picked up the phone, he assumed to call the police.’ But the boy had a knife. ‘He said he panicked and took the phone off her,’ Ron continues. ‘He said he didn’t know why but he stabbed her two or three times. He then left her there and threw the knife on the roof, and didn’t tell anyone what he’d done.’
The teenager returned to school, where he washed Taylor’s blood off his hands. ‘Then he went and bought the AFL cards and put the balance of the money he’d stolen from the nursery in a tin in his bedroom,’ Ron says. ‘He felt that by going back to school with football cards he’d be accepted in the community.’
He wasn’t. Instead, Ron charged him with murder and he was sent to a boys’ home while he awaited trial. ‘I can remember seeing Ann Taylor’s husband, David, and he just couldn’t believe the senselessness of the whole thing,’ Ron says.
Ultimately, the boy was found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. ‘The maximum he could get because of his age was three years, and he got the maximum, three years,’ Ron says.
He credits old-school detective work with the result. ‘We solved the case by doorknocking half the town. That’s what they taught us at Detective Training School: get out and pound the pavement. Make your own luck. Talk to people. They’re highly effective techniques that are sometimes neglected in the modern era.
‘It was good to solve the case, but I could never get over the fact that a thirteen-year-old could feel so displaced in his own environment that it could lead to this,’ Ron continues. ‘He came from a broken home. He didn’t dress as well as the other kids, and even though his mum worked, he didn’t have the money for football cards. The crux of this whole tragic case was that he didn’t fit in.’
Still, it was hard for Ron to comprehend. ‘I said to him, “Why’d you take a knife?” ’ Ron recalls.
‘I just took it,’ the boy replied. ‘Just in case.’
15
THE MONSTER INSIDE
‘This case proved the value of CCTV and to my knowledge was the first time in Australia that a murder had been captured on closed-circuit TV.’
– Ron Iddles
By 1996, Ron was once more a senior sergeant, leading his own team at Homicide. In the two years it took for him to move back up through the ranks, he proved he was no mere ‘retread’. His colleagues came to realise he was a man worthy of their respect, an experienced detective who could raise the standard of every investigation. It wasn’t long before his crew members were calling themselves his ‘loyal soldiers’.
But Ron still liked driving trucks. ‘Any kind of machinery, really,’ he says. So when his best mate, Ray Relf – who owned a poultry delivery business – asked Ron to give him a hand, the homicide investigator couldn’t resist. Ray needed some time off, as he’d been working seven days a week, and he knew how much Ron liked getting behind the wheel. ‘So I put in a request to do a second job but it was knocked back because it was in the transport industry,’ Ron says. It was considered a conflict of interest because police enforced the law on those employed in that industry, including taxi, tow-truck and truck drivers.
Ron saw it differently. ‘I argued it was the food distribution industry and that the mode of distribution was a truck,’ he says. He was pushing his luck, but even his superiors had to admit there was some logic to his argument. ‘In the end, I was called up to the assistant commissioner, who said my request was approved.’ And while the assistant commissioner felt satisfied that Ron wouldn’t break the road rules, he didn’t want him breaking food safety rules either. ‘He said, “I don’t want you delivering chickens to a refrigerator that says ten degrees when it’s meant to be four degrees”,’ Ron adds.
Soon, however, what began as a favour for a mate turned into a regular job when three other drivers asked Ron to fill in for them too. Ron drove the truck on his days off and the hours were gruelling (1 am to 10.30 am), yet, in a way, it felt like a hobby.
He liked it even more when he started doing runs to the bush. ‘I’d pick the truck up at the yard in Lilydale at about 12.30 am with five tonnes of chicken in tubs,’ Ron says, ‘then I’d make my way to Yea, then drive across to Seymour. Seymour Coles was the first drop at about 2.30, 2.45 am.’ After that he headed to Shepparton, then to small towns like Numurkah, Tatura, Kyabram and Nagambie. ‘I’d end up back at Lilydale at midday. So it was an eleven-and-a-half-hour shift, a round trip of 560 kilometres.’
It would seem eccentric to most – a little crazy even – that a busy homicide cop would want to drive a truck full of chooks through the night, let alone do the heavy lifting required of a delivery man, but Ron took great pleasure from the turn of the wheel, the open road and the fresh country air. Admittedly the chooks weren’t much company, but that’s how he liked it.
*
One summer’s morning, after driving the poultry truck all night, Homicide head Detective Inspector Paul Sheridan called as Ron was making his way back to the depot. Two men had been murdered and a woman was critically injured in the iconic Century Building in Melbourne’s gem-trading district. Sheridan knew Ron was on leave, but could he come in? Ron went home and had a shower, and was back at Homicide by 2.30 pm.
Designed by the renowned Australian architect Marcus Barlow, the white Art Deco Century Building in Swanston Street was considered one of the most secure buildings in the city, with cumbersome doors, security intercoms and surveillance cameras keeping the resident jewellers safe inside. But on Wednesday, 4 December 1996, the security was shattered when someone gunned down three people in an eighth-floor suite. The victims were Lean Thoeun Pin, 52, his wife Siv Eng Pin, 44, and their son, Virayuth Pin, 23. Both father and son were dead, and Siv Eng, who’d also been shot, was in hospital, clinging to life.
The Pins – as Ron’s team discovered – were model citizens. While working as a tram conductor, Lean Thoeun had operated a gem wholesaling business from home, hoping to open a jewellery store one day. In 1995, his dream came true when he used his life savings to open the doors of Pin Gems in Swanston Street. The family felt optimistic about the future, having fl
ed Cambodia twelve years earlier for Australia, a peaceful country where they could feel safe.
News of the shootings reverberated around the CBD. For some city workers, the incident was reminiscent of another multiple shooting in 1978, just a few doors down in the even more magnificent neo-gothic Manchester Unity building. On that occasion, three male gem traders were shot to death and eight precious diamonds stolen.
Sheridan told Ron there was a witness to the murders – a jeweller named Manuel Adajian, who occupied an office on the building’s fourth floor and had been in the Pins’ office during the entire ordeal. Adajian was at Homicide waiting to speak to Ron.
Ron recalls meeting the jumpy forty-one-year-old. ‘Manuel told me he’d gone up to see the Pins because he’d borrowed a diamond ring from them,’ he says. ‘He said he’d needed to take it back and there was a dispute over money.’
Adajian told Ron that while he was with the Pin family, someone pinched a nerve in his shoulder and he blacked out. When he regained consciousness, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing – the whole family, shot. ‘He said he then heard the police at the door and was very grateful he’d been rescued from this incident,’ Ron says.
But Ron wasn’t a mere student of human behaviour, he was a master of it, and there was something troubling about Adajian’s story and demeanour. ‘To me that story didn’t ring true,’ he says. ‘And I spoke to another member who’d driven Manuel back [to St Kilda Road]. He said he’d had eighteen hundred dollars in his pocket.’ Really? Ron thought. Where did he get that?
The whole story about waking up in the same room as three people who’d been shot sounded fanciful to Ron. ‘I said, “I don’t believe him. I want to do a formal interview”,’ he recalls. ‘He’s potentially the killer.’