by Justine Ford
Next, Ron scrutinised every phone call that had hit the mobile-phone tower near the shopping centre around the time of Kastenberger’s murder. ‘Then we interviewed everyone to ask them why they were using their phones near the shopping centre,’ he says. The detectives also managed to track down Mark Dickson – who shared a flat with Jerry Murphy – and asked where he was when the crime was committed. ‘He said he and Jerry Murphy hired a car and went to Ballarat for the day and got back at around 4.30. Jerry then decided to go interstate to see his mum.’
The detectives asked Dickson to get his flatmate to call them when he returned to Melbourne. A day or so later, Murphy turned up at police headquarters. ‘He said he had nothing to say and exercised his right,’ Ron recalls.
They caught up with Hugo Rich, too. ‘He said he was at work in Little Bourke Street all day,’ Ron says. ‘He claimed to work for a solicitor.’
In the meantime, Ron sent detectives to Ballarat to look for video footage of Murphy and Dickson that might corroborate their story. On 8 March, the cake shop’s surveillance camera had captured images of Dickson, always on his own, but not Murphy. ‘It shows Mark coming out and walking up a mall section in Ballarat,’ Ron says. ‘There is also other footage of Mark Dickson in a phone box in the mall around 12.30 that day. Other footage shows him back in the phone box around one o’clock.’
Ron was curious to know who Dickson had been calling from the phone box. ‘He tried three times and on all occasions he rang two different mobile numbers,’ Ron says. ‘We discovered those mobile numbers were hitting the mobile-phone tower at the shopping centre.’ It suggested to Ron that Dickson was phoning other gang members who were involved in the heist.
Ron’s theory was confirmed when he and his team identified that the phones Dickson had been ringing were purchased from a small phone shop in the Melbourne CBD. ‘We went there and the shopkeeper identified Murphy from a photo board as having purchased those two phones in false names,’ Ron says. ‘By now I was fairly confident Murphy was involved, confident that Dickson was providing an alibi for Murphy and, more than likely, Hugo Rich had something to do with it because he was part of that crew.’
When Ron’s team spoke to a man named Brett James, who worked for Rich on a casual basis and was on parole for armed robbery, he said Rich had not been at work at the time in question. ‘He was pretty sure Hugo was involved in armed robberies and said the week before he indicated he was going to do a job which was going to be a dry run,’ Ron says. ‘And when we established his movements for 1 March, we were able to put him at North Blackburn.’
Brett James also told the police that a few days after the murder and armed robbery, Rich, aware that James had a knack for electronics, wanted him to produce a DVD that showed him and Rich in the office. ‘He said Hugo was going to have a solicitor walk in [and appear on the footage], and have Brett stamp it to say 8 March at 12.40,’ Ron says. Ultimately, Rich’s workmate did not produce the falsified disc.
Meanwhile, Rich maintained he’d been at work that day and explained that at around 12.40 a solicitor came in and gave him some papers, which proved he hadn’t been out of the office. ‘So I went and saw the solicitor and we had a fairly robust discussion,’ Ron says. ‘Another team member took a statement from him in which he said he gave the documents to Hugo Rich around 12.40, then saw him again a couple of hours later,’ Ron says. ‘But at that time Hugo Rich was hiring a car in Werribee, which cast doubt on the solicitor’s statement.
‘I went and saw the solicitor and said, “I don’t put any credit in that statement. You can’t have seen Hugo Rich at that time because he was hiring a car. You might want to consider your position”. By that time, he had the shakes.’ A couple of hours later, ‘[The solicitor] came in and gave a statement to say he hadn’t seen him and that Hugo Rich had basically prepared his statement for him,’ Ron says, believing the solicitor had felt intimidated. ‘So by now I’d confirmed that Hugo Rich, Mark Dickson and Jerry Murphy had been involved, and that Mark Dickson had provided an alibi.’
By intercepting the two new phones Murphy had purchased, the police discovered the gang was planning another armed robbery. Knowing the last job had escalated to murder, Ron urgently ramped up the investigation – he wasn’t going to let another innocent person die.
‘We then identified another bloke called Sean Hogan,’ Ron says. ‘He’d never been in trouble before. Then we identified his cousin, Chris Cullino, who’d never been in trouble before either.’ In the meantime, Ron was running intense surveillance on Dickson. ‘It got to the point, a few months after Erwin Kastenberger’s murder, that we knew they were going to do an armed robbery in Dandenong,’ Ron says.
On the day of the planned hold-up, the entire Homicide Squad was on edge. Ron, sleeves rolled up in his trademark style, led a forty-five-man operation from headquarters, where listening devices allowed him to eavesdrop on everything the robbers said inside their van. Aware the job was going down at Dandenong Plaza, it was up to Ron to ‘call it’ – in other words, decide when to send in armed officers to arrest the bandits.
‘Then we heard someone in the van say something like, “Oh shit, the A-Team’s here”,’ Ron remembers. That told him an Armaguard van was present: in armed robbers’ parlance, ‘A’ stood for Armaguard, ‘B’ for Brambles and ‘C’ for Chubb. Yet even though the robbers had been looking for a Chubb vehicle, Ron feared they might take the opportunity to hold up the Armaguard van instead. Ron urgently called Armaguard. ‘I said, “Under no circumstances are your guards to get out of the vehicle because we reckon something’s going to go down”.’
Ron instructed the police at the scene to keep out of the armed robbers’ sight. ‘If we intercepted them at that stage, we might have been able to get them for a stolen car, say, or having a handgun, but we couldn’t yet prove conspiracy to commit an armed robbery,’ he explains. ‘A situation like this is very tense. If you make the wrong call, if you let it go on for too long, they could do the armed robbery and someone could die.’
The would-be robbers left the scene, ‘possibly because they were looking for the C-Team,’ Ron posits. ‘They went to the Bunnings carpark where they put on overalls, gloves, pulled their caps down, then headed back to Dandenong Plaza.’
It was do or die. ‘I was convinced the job was on and said to pull them over,’ Ron says. In a flash, Homicide and Armed Robbery detectives swooped, arresting the occupants of the van – Dickson and Hogan. ‘Then someone said to a member of the surveillance team, “There’s been a bloke sitting where the armed van should have come in”,’ Ron remembers. ‘I realised he’d probably been waiting for the armed van and was the person known as The Eyes. He’d be the one who’d call and say, “The van’s coming in”. They arrested him too – that was Chris Cullino.’
Murphy, however, was not there. ‘He was in the Supreme Court listening to the trial of Mick Gatto over the murder of Benji Veniamin,’ Ron says, adding he did not believe Murphy knew either Gatto or Veniamin. It did not surprise Ron that Murphy was absent, because he’d worked out that not every member of the gang was present at every job, and that they generally recruited others to take part. He says each job ‘belonged’ to someone and that members of the gang used documentary evidence to prove they were elsewhere. On this occasion, Murphy had signed into the courthouse – proof he was not at Dandenong Plaza. Rich wasn’t there either; he was serving time in jail for deception.
Hogan was relieved to be arrested. ‘He said, “Thank God you’ve got me. I didn’t want to do this”,’ Ron recalls. ‘He also said something like, “I hope you blokes have had a listening device in my house or garage because I’ve been saying, ‘Come and get me. Help me out of this position’ ”.’ Hogan could not have made it clearer that he hadn’t wanted to be involved: ‘He made full admissions and said he was also involved in the North Blackburn job,’ Ron says. ‘He was approached by Mark Dickson.’
Hogan told Ron that during the North Blackburn hold-up he was sitting outside the Commonwealth Bank in one van while Murphy and Rich were in another, at the back of the shopping centre. ‘As soon as he saw the Chubb van come in, it was his job to make a call to Jerry to say, “Job’s on”,’ Ron says.
Hogan didn’t see what happened next but he did hear it because he and Murphy had kept the phone line open. ‘He heard a bang,’ Ron says. ‘He took off in his van.’
Later that day, Hogan drove the van to Montmorency in Melbourne’s north-east. ‘He left it parked on the side of the road and put the phone down a drain,’ Ron says. ‘Then somehow he heard on the news that a security guard had been shot dead and thought, Shit. He caught up with Hugo and Jerry later that night and he and Jerry went and burnt the vans out.’
Eventually, Hogan returned home. ‘He got $20,000 out of it but he just felt sick,’ Ron says. ‘Then he said Mark wanted him to do another job, the Dandenong Plaza job. But last time someone had died and he didn’t want to be involved,’ Ron explains, adding that Hogan was prepared to plead guilty and give evidence against Rich, Murphy and Dickson. ‘Chris Cullino also made admissions about Dandenong,’ he adds.
Murphy, however, was nowhere to be found. ‘We did a lot of publicity about the fact I was looking for him and had a warrant for his arrest,’ Ron says.
Murphy must have seen the news because soon after, around one in the morning, he phoned Ron. ‘He said, “It’s Jerry. I want to give myself up”.’ It was good news, just at a strange time of the day. ‘He said, “You’re following me”. I said, “Jerry, I’m here in bed”,’ Ron recalls, acknowledging that no one really believes he sleeps. Jerry told him he wanted to go and see his girlfriend before handing himself in. Ron considered the request and said yes when Murphy gave him an undertaking he’d be at police headquarters at four o’clock. Not all police would be so trusting but Ron’s gut feeling told him Murphy would stick to his word. The following afternoon, Murphy turned up at St Kilda Road as promised, where Ron and other detectives interviewed him over the murder and armed hold-up at North Blackburn. To Ron’s surprise Murphy stayed staunch and told the investigators he had nothing to say.
‘Afterwards I said, “Consider the possibility, Jerry, that if you go down for this you’ll do twenty-five years for murder”,’ Ron recalls. He said he believed Rich had shot Kastenberger. ‘I said, “You didn’t pull the trigger. You might get ten years off”. But he said he wasn’t doing anything.’
After an intensive investigation, Ron ultimately charged Murphy, Dickson and Rich. ‘I also charged Sean Hogan and Chris Cullino, who pleaded guilty to armed robbery, and were prepared to give evidence against the other three,’ Ron says. ‘We probably had about a hundred witnesses, all sorts of different people,’ Ron says. ‘They were committed for trial.’
Ron then received a call from a solicitor who said Murphy wanted to talk to him. ‘He said he’d plead guilty to armed robberies and would give evidence,’ Ron says. He spent about a week taking a detailed statement from him. ‘He said it was the hardest decision he’d ever made, going from the dark side to the light side,’ Ron says. ‘He said he was going to be considered a dog but he wasn’t going down for something he didn’t do. Then Mark Dickson came along and I took a statement from him too. Both pleaded guilty to charges of armed robbery and conspiracy to commit armed robbery, which left Hugo Rich standing on his own.’
‘I had a lot to do with Jerry Murphy, leading up to the trial,’ Ron reflects. ‘He had a brilliant mind, analytical. He became a brilliant witness. And he told the court that Hugo Rich had fired the fatal shot.’ Ron says life is now very different for Murphy, who served his minimum six years in jail. ‘He has totally turned his life around. He is a success story.’
*
The trial of Hugo Rich lasted almost five months and, in June 2009, a jury found him guilty of the murder of Erwin Kastenberger as well as one count of armed robbery. In sentencing Rich the following November, Justice Lex Lasry said, ‘I am [equally] satisfied that you deliberately and cold bloodedly shot Mr Kastenberger … The unknown factor is why you did that … Both guards were armed but neither made any attempt to use their firearm to defend themselves or the money being carried.’
Turning to the victim impact statements, the judge said, ‘Each of these victim impact statements highlights the phenomenal tragedy which was the murder of Erwin Kastenberger. Not only was his life extinguished but the lives of a number of people, including those close to him, have been forever affected. Each member of the family has described the extreme emotional and psychological effects of this tragedy. These statements also demonstrate that the time between 8 March 2005 and the present has been very difficult and the continuing legal process which has occurred during that time has, itself, been extremely difficult … Nothing that the Court can say in these proceedings can possibly assuage the loss and grief that this family obviously continue to feel.’
Justice Lasry sentenced Rich to life in prison for murder, and twenty years for armed robbery. He directed Rich to serve a minimum of thirty years without parole. Rich, however, considered by many to be ‘the best bush lawyer in jail’, appealed the decision. By 2014, aged sixty-one, he exhausted his appeals and continues to serve his life sentence.
‘You could say that Erwin Kastenberger’s family are serving a life sentence too,’ Ron remarks. ‘Their lives have never been the same since he was killed in the line of duty.’
‡Name changed
21
DOUBLE MURDER AT SAND BAR NUMBER TWO
‘You have to be prepared to lead your staff even if it means stripping down to your jocks to retrieve a body from the river.’
– Ron Iddles
What does a murderer look like? Ron learnt early in his career at Homicide that wherever there are humans, there are disagreements, grudges, jealousies and murder and neither geography nor any amount of fresh country air can change that.
‘Sometimes the motive for murder is revenge, sometimes it is lust, sometimes it is broken relationships, sometimes it’s over finances,’ Ron says. ‘But sometimes you can look deeply for a motive and it can be obscure or minor.’ He harks back to the Christmas Day murders where everyday people slaughtered family members because they didn’t like their presents. ‘I’ve even investigated a murder that took place after an argument over the music being played on the CD,’ he adds, shaking his head.
Once there was a time when people thought it was safe to live in the bush. But by the mid-2000s, crystal methamphetamine, or ice, had found its way to Australia. A decade later, its use had spread like a festering sore to the farthest reaches of the country, leaving people from Ballarat to Breadalbane looking sideways at their neighbours to see if they were sporting ice scabs.
But even before everyday Australians started breaking bad on methamphetamine, there was trouble in country towns, just like anywhere else. However, when those squabbles turn to murder, the ramifications run deeper in smaller regional towns than in larger cities.
On Sunday, 9 February 2003, the townsfolk of Shepparton in north-eastern Victoria learnt a canoeist paddling up the Goulburn River had found a man’s battered naked body submerged in the water. By the time Ron and his crew arrived at Kialla, five minutes out of Shepparton, the lifeless man had been fished out of the water and was lying on the riverbank. Even though his identity was unknown, a seasoned homicide cop like Ron knew that dead men tell tales: ‘He was of Caucasian appearance, in his late fifties to early sixties, and he appeared to have some type of head injury,’ Ron says. ‘It’s often unclear, though, when a body has been in water, because they can sometimes have marks which look like they were homicide victims, when in fact the marks might have been the result of fish or yabbies eating the flesh.’
But yabbies didn’t do this. Once the man’s body was taken to the Coroner’s Court in Melbourne for a post-mortem, the pathologist confirme
d that Ron was investigating a murder. ‘The man had died of blunt trauma to the head,’ Ron says. ‘He had a fractured skull caused by a piece of pipe, or similar.’
Solving a murder is generally impossible when you don’t know the victim’s name, so Ron held a media conference by the riverbank in the hope that someone who’d been camping or fishing there could identify the man. ‘The other hope was that they might be able to tell us if they’d seen anything suspicious,’ he adds.
As the media conference drew to a close, a journalist peering past Ron’s shoulder and into the river, piped up. ‘That looks like another body!’ Ron turned around to look at the protuberance jutting out of the water and reassured the young reporter it was just a cow carcass. Satisfied, the journalists each recorded their pieces-to-camera along the riverbank, then headed off to file their reports.
Ron turned to his team of detectives. ‘I think it is a body,’ he admitted. He had suspected it from the moment he saw it, but hadn’t wanted to startle the reporters. It was just as well, because Ron stripped off his shirt, tie, trousers and socks and said to his crew, ‘Guess what? I’m going in.’
He knew that most detectives wouldn’t be inclined to paddle out to a cadaver, but Ron wasn’t most detectives. ‘If you thought about everything you did as a policeman, you wouldn’t survive,’ he explains. ‘It mightn’t have followed all the protocols but it was about getting the job done.’
No one was going to stop him – he was the boss. But no one was going to join him either. ‘One of the reasons I swam out is because there was a current and I didn’t want it to take the body away,’ he says. ‘The other is that it would have taken quite a long time before we could get a police boat out there.’ Also, he had to know for sure that the body was human, not bovine. It turned out that he and the TV reporter were right – it was indeed another dead man, this time with no visible injuries.