by Justine Ford
He continues, ‘Through boxing and crime everyone admired me for my violence. I now feel ashamed of such thinking.
‘Ron Iddles has saved lives, mine included.’
*
When investigating one of Australia’s most enduring missing persons mysteries, Ron met a well-known serial killer who, while he had no links to the underworld, was another high-profile criminal who appreciated the detective’s honesty.
In 2010, Ron was looking into the disappearance from Kananook railway station of twenty-three-year-old Sarah McDiarmid in July 1990. Coroner Iain West had ruled it was foul play, but the question remained: who was responsible?
Paul Denyer’s name came up. In 1993, he had murdered eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Stevens, twenty-two-year-old Debbie Fream and seventeen-year-old Natalie Russell, and was dubbed ‘The Frankston Serial Killer’. Had he murdered Sarah McDiarmid too? Ron wondered, and headed to Port Phillip Prison to find out.
‘When I got there he said, “I’m not going to participate in a conversation with you unless you change the documentation to say Paula Denyer”,’ Ron recalls, explaining that the prisoner was transgender and identified as a woman. Ron amended the paperwork and Denyer agreed to see him. ‘He had long hair and wore lipstick but had not had a sex change.’
Ron got down to the business of McDiarmid’s disappearance. ‘He said, “I’m sick of being accused of that murder,” ’ Ron recalls. ‘He gave me sufficient details to form the view he wasn’t involved and wanted it to be publicly known. He thought it didn’t do justice to Sarah McDiarmid’s family. I could see the point.’
Soon afterwards, someone leaked to the Herald Sun that Ron had visited Denyer in jail. ‘I then gave some comments to the Herald Sun saying Paula was not involved,’ Ron says. ‘After that I got a letter from Paula thanking me for my honesty. And I probably got two or three other letters prior to leaving the Homicide Squad.’
A few years later, when Ron finally left the Homicide Squad, everything would change. Those who needed his help to fit back into society, or who wanted to give him crucial information, would still phone, but they all asked the same question: ‘Who am I going to deal with now?’
19
RIGHTING A WRONG
‘During this investigation I was in turmoil and an emotional wreck. I always had a feeling deep down that the bloke I’d charged with murder hadn’t done it.’
– Ron Iddles
Sometimes, even the most experienced cops get it wrong.
One night in 2002, Ron was called out to a popular wedding reception venue in Melbourne’s south-east to find out who had murdered security guard Slawomir Tomczyk. The forty-four-year-old had been savagely beaten to death while on his late-night rounds.
Four months later, Ron charged a thirty-seven-year-old named Peter Smith over the murder. Almost straightaway, Ron had a niggling feeling he’d nabbed the wrong man, and would spend a year trying to prove it.
‘It’s never an easy decision to lock someone up,’ Ron says. ‘If you’re going to deprive someone of their liberty, you’ve got to get it right. You never want to send an innocent person to jail.’
Not all cops would have the integrity to lobby for a man they’d locked up, but Ron was not motivated by ego. All that mattered was the truth – for Slawomir Tomczyk and Peter Smith – and Ron did everything in his power to find it.
*
Polish immigrant Slawomir Tomczyk, known to his family as Slawek, never wanted to be a security guard, but after being retrenched from his job as a jeweller, he was grateful for the work. Slawek was a peaceful man who helped support his elderly mother, Janina, who also lived in Australia. On weekends he enjoyed exploring his adopted country and hoped to meet someone special to share in his adventures. It was not to be.
On the night of Thursday, 21 February 2002, Slawek, who worked for a company called PSE Security, was conducting mobile patrols in Berwick, Narre Warren and Endeavour Hills. It was also his job to patrol the grounds of the Casablanca Reception Centre in Cranbourne, where he was required to make sure the doors were locked, four times during his shift.
His first visit to the reception centre that evening was just before 10 pm. As usual, he parked the security van in the driveway before ensuring the building was secure. When he returned to the van, Slawek noticed one of the front tyres had been slashed, so he called his boss, Sandy Sempel.
Sempel suggested Slawek replace the tyre then continue his other patrols. A few minutes later, a man walking his dog saw Slawek changing the tyre and asked if he needed any help. Slawek was grateful for the offer but turned it down.
At 12.20 am, Sempel’s phone rang again. Slawek had not turned up at the McDonald’s restaurant at Endeavour Hills, where he was due to conduct a routine check. It was unusual, because Slawek was reliable. Sempel decided to look for him.
Around 2 am, Sempel arrived at the Casablanca Reception Centre. ‘In the driveway, there was blood and skid marks,’ Ron says. ‘At first his boss thought he had injured himself changing the tyre but when he went around the back of the reception centre he found Slawek’s body.’
When Ron arrived at the scene, uniformed police directed him to a small wooden gate behind which Slawek had been dumped. ‘He had been hogtied and dragged by his belt on his back,’ Ron says with distaste. ‘He had probably been attacked in the driveway, though, because there was blood spatter on the car jack.’
The security van was no longer at the reception centre. Police recovered it at six in the morning, abandoned at Clyde North. ‘Bits and pieces from inside the van were scattered over a two-kilometre stretch of road,’ Ron says. ‘Various items had been thrown into the grass. I have no idea why.’
There were strange clues at the crime scene, too. ‘We found a wheel brace and bolt, which looked like it had been ground to a point at one end,’ Ron says. He did not know the significance of the bolt at the time, but kept it as holdback information so that only police and those involved in the crime knew about it. He chose not to tell the media that Slawek had been tied up either.
When Ron’s team spoke to Slawek’s devastated family, they told him he had no enemies. ‘So it looked like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ Ron says. The reception centre had not been broken into, so what was the point in murdering the security guard?
At 8 am, while Ron was still combing over the evidence at the crime scene, a man anonymously called the police and named who he believed was responsible. ‘We located that man but he had an alibi which, at the time, appeared to have been corroborated,’ Ron says.
About two months later, a used car salesman told police of a suspicious conversation he had overheard at his workplace, Cranbourne Auto Market. He said that two men – one young, and the other noticeably overweight – had driven into the yard in a yellow Ford XD station wagon. A green Mitsubishi L300 van soon turned up and a man with dreadlocks spoke to the others.
According to the witness, the man with dreadlocks allegedly asked if they had found the bolt or nut. The overweight man reportedly said ‘The jacks [police] must have it’. The man with dreadlocks then allegedly said: ‘This will show them we mean business. We bashed him with a bar – you could hardly recognise his face. We bound the fucken cunt. He had it coming. That will teach them a lesson – we don’t muck around.’
The conversation continued in this vein and the witness said he heard the dreadlocked man say that they’d dragged their victim around the back. ‘The idea had been to make it look like he’d been bashed in the RSL carpark,’ Ron says.
The salesman – who’d been working under a car during this disturbing exchange – ended up taking the man with dreadlocks for a test drive in a white Holden Statesman. During the drive the man had said he was separated with two children and that his brother, who owed him money, was going to pay for the car. Inexplicably, he drove to an address in Monahans Road in Cranbourne North.
A week later, the salesman said the same dreadlocked man returned and took the car out for three hours. He wrote down his licence details and entered his name in the sign-out book: Peter Samuel Smith. ‘And he later identified Peter Smith from a video identification tape,’ Ron adds.
Ron was interested to hear that Smith had allegedly discussed the unpublicised bolt, which he now knew had been used to puncture the security van’s tyre. ‘It had probably been welded onto a square metal plate and had broken off and fallen to the ground,’ he says. ‘So the man talking about it must have either been at the reception centre when the murder was committed, or known someone who was.’
Ron mounted surveillance on Smith, but did not find any evidence he had been to the address in Monahans Road. The investigators did, however, find a length of blue nylon rope identical to what Slawek was bound with at Smith’s house. With the Department of Public Prosecutions satisfied there was a case against him, Smith was arrested in June 2002, and charged with murder.
‘There was enough evidence to charge him,’ Ron explains. And while he accompanied the police when asked, Smith vehemently denied any involvement in the guard’s murder. He said he had only been to the car yard once, on Saturday, 16 March 2002. He had even entered that information in his diary, which Ron noticed was meticulously kept.
Smith’s vehemence bugged Ron. In his experience, murderers often ‘go quietly’ and fight the charge later in court. But Smith was outraged, unlike anyone he’d ever charged before. Was it possible he really was innocent? Ron wondered. ‘When you tell someone they are charged with murder and they have done it, it is not new information,’ Ron says. ‘If they have not done it, there is a massive reaction.’
He knew he had to dig deeper.
*
During the committal hearing, Ron grew increasingly uneasy, especially when Smith was ordered to stand trial for murder. ‘My emotions were mixed,’ Ron says. ‘If he stood trial and was convicted of something he hadn’t done, that would weigh on me heavily. It really did play on my mind and after the committal I was mentally exhausted.’
As Ron’s mind ticked over, something jumped out at him: he hadn’t seen the car salesman’s sign-out book himself. He had seen a faxed copy but not the original, so he arranged for the book to be forensically examined. ‘After the examination, one of the scientists told me that the dates in the book had been changed,’ Ron says. ‘He could tell by the handwriting.’
Yet it hadn’t been a deliberately misleading act. ‘The car salesman had somehow put two dates together and it resulted in a misidentification,’ Ron explains. He says the salesman was an honest family man with no criminal history, yet his evidence about the sign-out book had proved unreliable. ‘We shouldn’t run this,’ Ron said to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Coghlan, QC. ‘I don’t reckon he’s done it.’
Ron found other evidence to support his belief that the accused man was innocent. Among his discoveries, he learnt the rope found at Smith’s house was not the rope used to tie up Slawek Tomczyk. ‘I had it forensically tested,’ Ron says. ‘I’m glad I did that.’
As a result of Ron’s digging, Smith was exonerated and set free after thirteen months on remand. No one has ever been caught for Slawek’s murder, but Ron could give an innocent man back his life. ‘I couldn’t let it go to trial and say, “This is just a matter for the jury”,’ he says. ‘There would be some who would let it go to court and say, “If he beats it he beats it, let it run its course”. But for me it was about being true to myself. If you’ve got strong values, why wouldn’t you do something? I had to fix what was wrong, even though it wasn’t my fault.’
*
In 2007 Ron told an inquest into the murder of Slawomir Tomczyk that he believed the car salesman had indeed overheard the conversation between the men in the car yard but he had wrongly identified Smith as one of the people involved. Smith had taken a car for a test drive, but it was on the date in his own diary, not on the day the men had allegedly spoken of murder. ‘I was able to show that the first time Peter Smith went to the car yard was way after the murder,’ says Ron.
For a few moments during the inquest, knowing how close Smith had come to a lengthy jail term, Ron struggled to control his emotions. ‘I couldn’t hold myself together,’ he admits. Coroner Peter White – who later commended Ron on his integrity and for acting ‘in the best traditions of the force’ – adjourned proceedings for five minutes while the detective regained his composure.
‘The lesson is to never underestimate the power of a gut feeling,’ Ron says. ‘And my gut feeling told me, He didn’t do it. Even though I’d charged him, I was able to turn around and prove it wasn’t him. It was a massive relief.’
Outside the court, Smith said that despite being ‘a bit bitter’ about being wrongly imprisoned, ‘I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for Ron. He’s done more than he could possibly do’.
20
MURDER AT THE MALL
‘If you do not get out and talk to people you will never solve a crime. Crimes are not solved sitting at your desk.’
– Ron Iddles
It wasn’t just night patrol guards who had to watch their backs.
In the early to mid-2000s, there was a spate of terrifying hold-ups on armed vans owned by Armaguard, Brambles and Chubb. The hold-ups were highly planned and, during one, a security guard was shot in the stomach, but survived.
Chubb guard Erwin Kastenberger was not so lucky. He knew his job was dangerous but never expected to die. A conscientious worker who had migrated to Australia from Germany after being orphaned as a child, Kastenberger was a gentle and loving husband, father and brother, looking forward to the birth of his first grandchild.
On Tuesday, 8 March 2005, Kastenberger and another guard, Bob Crowe, were making a lunchtime delivery to the Commonwealth Bank at the bustling North Blackburn shopping centre in Melbourne’s east. As stunned retailers and shoppers watched, they were ambushed by two bandits in ski-masks and fluorescent tops. Ordered to get on the ground, Kastenberger did as he was told and promptly surrendered the bag of cash containing $162,000.
Police say that’s usually when an armed hold-up ends and the robbers flee with the money. This time, however, as fifty-eight-year-old Kastenberger huddled silently on the ground, making no attempting to pull out his gun, the taller of the bandits, clad in an orange vest, shot him in the shoulder. The bullet shattered Erwin’s vital organs and the grandfather-to-be toppled over.
As the bandits took off with the cash, Erwin Kastenberger took his dying breaths.
*
When Ron was first alerted to the murder, he was giving evidence in a Geelong court, so he asked another of the Homicide Squad’s crew leaders, Detective Senior Sergeant Jeff Maher, to accompany his crew to the crime scene. When Ron arrived at the shopping mall, which police had temporarily closed, he examined Kastenberger’s body in situ, and viewed the shopping centre’s surveillance footage. ‘It showed Erwin basically on the ground, and then the suspect bent over and shot him,’ Ron says.
He and the other investigators picked laboriously over the crime scene for clues and continued to speak to traumatised witnesses, including some school children. Meanwhile, Kastenberger’s body was taken to the Coroner’s Court.
Ron asked one of the shopping centre’s cleaners if they could wash the guard’s blood from the ground, but they said no. ‘In the end, I went to the cleaner’s room, got some disinfectant, a bucket and a mop, and cleaned it up myself. I thought, I can have it done in twenty minutes and the shopping centre can reopen,’ he recalls. There was no point waiting for crime-scene cleaners because no one could decide who should foot the bill. It was a ghastly job. ‘It hits home when you’re mopping up a fellow human being’s blood and you know it’s happened right there,’ he says.
Back at police headquarters, Ron met with detectives from the Armed Robbery Squad. Ro
n knew there had been a series of armed van robberies around Melbourne, which suggested a professional gang was at large. The Armed Robbery boys identified two men they suspected over similar heists.
‘I said, “We’re going to grab your suspects”,’ Ron recalls. The Armed Robbery detectives said they didn’t want Homicide to arrest them, but Ron put his size thirteen foot down. ‘I said, “No, that’s not how we work”.’ He explains, ‘It was about getting to them early, getting a commitment as to where they had been, to lock them into a story.’
The following morning, Ron and another detective arrested the suspects. ‘But within about half an hour we’d eliminated them both because they were alibied,’ he says. He asked the Armed Robbery Squad if they could nominate anyone else. They offered him a larger list of possible offenders. ‘They came up with about twenty-two armed robbers and some were higher on the list than others,’ Ron says. ‘I said to my crew, “Within seven days, we need to have spoken to everyone on that list. If we haven’t done it within that time, it will make things difficult, because people won’t be able to remember what they did on that day”.’
So the team split up and tracked down all the armed robbery merchants on the list. They were surprisingly cooperative. ‘Some of those who had priors for armed robbery were more than happy to have a conversation,’ Ron says. ‘Some of them said to me, “Ron, I might do armed robberies but I don’t kill anyone. This is a big shame on the profession”.’ Ron knew they were being honest. ‘It’s like a job to them,’ he explains. ‘Some of them take pride in what they do. They would not kill someone.’
Among those on the list were three men suspected of being part of a professional gang – Jerry Murphy,‡ Mark Dickson and a fifty-two-year-old named Hugo Rich, who had committed a series of armed robberies. Ron says Rich – who, curiously, had also worked as a stockbroker and a successful insurance salesman – was quite the snappy dresser. ‘He did several armed robberies dressed in an overcoat,’ he says, adding that he was born Olaf Dietrich in Germany but changed his name to Hugo Rich ‘because he loved Hugo Boss suits and wanted to be rich’.