Next.
‘Spread your checks,’ the guard yelled. ‘Touch your toes.’
Singh reluctantly went through the obligatory search. He was stripped, showered and sent straight into the Killing Fields. Standing by himself, he looked at all the concrete and sandstone, wire and steel.
Sure it’s intimidating, but no more than Long Bay, right?
His thoughts were interrupted.
‘You Singh?’ a man asked, seemingly popping up from nowhere.
The rapist replied that he was.
‘Excuse me,’ the man said. ‘What did you say?’
The now curious Singh again replied in the affirmative.
‘Are you SINGH?’ This time the man was louder and more forceful.
‘Yeah, I’m Singh.’ He nodded a third time. ‘That’s me.’
Those were the last words Singh ever said. The inquiring inmate, who was concealing a shiv in his right hand, unleashed, sending the sharpened steal into flesh.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
The blade tore holes in Singh’s torso, the 36-year-old folding his arms across his chest in a futile bid to shield himself from the blows.
The attacker adjusted his aim.
Pop.
The shiv took out Singh’s eye.
The Malaysian national was soon dead, the brutal attack over in ten seconds. The killer walked back into the wing.
Hours passed. Singh’s body was bagged and tagged, his night’s stay in Goulburn cut short.
‘Time to pay up,’ the killer demanded later, standing toe-to-toe with the man who had ordered the hit. ‘I killed him and now I’m here to collect.’
The other inmate laughed. ‘You ain’t getting a thing, mate – you got the wrong Singh!’
The killer turned white.
‘That fella was a case of mistaken identity,’ Camberwell later revealed. ‘His murder was a mistake. There was a contract out on an inmate with the same last name and he also had a very similar first name.’
Few felt sorry for Singh. The murdered man was part of a trio who had kidnapped and raped a 29-year-old woman in a sickening attack that was recorded on a video camera. Singh and another man, Biswaseet Singh, had grabbed the woman and took her into her Dulwich Hill home in Sydney and tied her to a bed. They then sexually assaulted her as a third man filmed the attack. The woman’s horror was not over following the assault. Singh and his gang held her captive until she agreed to pay them $1500 cash and sign over her car.
Singh’s immediate family was in the minority when it came to being outraged by his killing at Goulburn.
‘Why was he out in the yard mixing with the heaviest criminals when he was only a minimum-security prisoner?’ asked an uncle.
The killer was left angry and humiliated. He was not paid for the hit, having mixed up his Singhs.
‘They get information about the new arrivals,’ said a guard who asked to be unnamed. ‘Just through the jail grapevine. They know who’s coming in and whether or not there is a contract out on them.’
Kevin Camberwell said inmates were willing killers for hire; they had so little to lose. ‘It didn’t matter how big the payout was because most of the blokes who would do it were already in for life. They couldn’t serve any more than life. They would wait around in the yard when they knew someone was coming in and just walk up to people and ask them their names. If they said a name that was on a contract, they would kill them there and then.’
And that’s what happened to Singh.
The killer was never identified. At least not officially.
‘Most of the killings … nobody was stung for them,’ said Camberwell. ‘We knew who [murdered Singh], and we had the cameras there, but it couldn’t be proved. The cameras did not show enough to identify anyone, and no one would talk.’
The officers did know enough to have a laugh. Not about the killing, of course, but over the killer not getting paid.
‘He was just lucky the guy he got was a rapist – or he may have ended up with a contract of his own,’ a guard said.
Boots and Blankets
Night Senior Camberwell cracked open the gate and entered the yard.
‘G’day, chief,’ said the inmate as the Goulburn veteran watched the gate swing shut.
Camberwell nodded. 7 Yard was a heaving sea of prison green – inmates buzzing back and forth, a group of men laughing, another in a play fight.
‘I was coming back through the yard,’ the guard later recalled. ‘I usually worked in this particular wing, but for some reason I was doing a shift in activities on that day. I had just finished. Nothing unusual going on. Just another Monday, the yard packed for lunch.’
Eyes forward, shoulders back, Camberwell walked purposefully through the yard. He was not in the mood for conversation, and a nod of his head was the only acknowledgement the prisoners were going to get. The officer’s mechanical march was suddenly broken.
‘I just hopped for a moment,’ the officer said. ‘A big step, not a jump.’
The officer looked back at what caused him to break stride. It was a blanket lying in the yard. Camberwell had stepped right over it. Oh well. Whatever. He turned his head and continued along.
‘Then I thought, That’s not right. So I stopped and took another look at the blanket.’ So what? Just another blanket dumped in the yard. Then he saw the boots.
‘There were two boots at the end of the blanket,’ Camberwell continued. ‘Two prison-issue desert boots, the toes pointing straight towards the sky.’ The officer retraced his steps. ‘I pulled up the blanket and a dead man was lying there. White as a ghost, except for all the blood.’
Camberwell knew who the body belonged to, even before he reefed the rug and looked death in the face.
‘There was a brown type of desert boot they could get,’ Camberwell said. ‘But there was only one bloke in the entire jail who wore them. His name was Henry, Terence Henry, and he was a bit of a nothing, really.’
So the blanket came off and the bled-out body did indeed belong to Henry.
‘There was blood everywhere,’ Camberwell said. ‘I pulled the blanket back. There was no need to attempt CPR or anything like that because he was long gone. All I could do was raise the alarm. I alerted the rest of the staff and they called the emergency muster.’
It turns out Camberwell wasn’t the only one who had stepped over the body.
‘He had been lying there for a number of hours,’ Camberwell said. ‘They had murdered him before lunch and just left him there, covered with a blanket. People either didn’t notice or didn’t care. The crims had been walking over him for hours like he didn’t exist.’
Henry had been at Goulburn for just four days. Slapped with a minor sentence for break, enter and steal, resisting arrest and common assault, he lasted less than 100 hours in Australia’s most murderous jail.
‘He got knocked for being an arsehole,’ said Camberwell. ‘He was a nobody that wanted to be someone. He walked into the jail acting like a big man, acting all tough.’
Allegedly a standover man in other New South Wales prisons, Henry demanded respect. He got death instead.
‘He pissed off the wrong people and they were quickly fed up with him,’ Camberwell said of the 22-year-old. ‘He was just a young bloke in way over his head.’
Henry’s murder remains unsolved – the latest victim of the Killing Fields. Once again, 7 Yard.
‘You couldn’t identify who killed him because there were so many around,’ Camberwell said. ‘The inmates just ignore shit like that. They don’t want to make it their business, and this bloke had no friends. He would have lain there a lot longer had I not literally stepped over his body. He would have been there until the yard was emptied and muster done.’
Henry was Goulburn’s seventh murder in just over two years, killed on 24 August 1998.
John Coffey 2.0
Allan Chisholm was the boss of Goulburn Jail during the height of the Killing Fields period – the most murderous time in Aust
ralian penal history. He was the Goulburn Governor who had to lift back the sheet and look into the eyes of four of the seven murdered men.
Chisholm had heard Maurice Marsland take his last breath: the wheezing rattle that whispered from his bloodied, bruised and brutally ripped apart breast, followed by a splatter of blood that landed on the governor’s wrist. He had helped paramedics load the dead rapist into the back of a truck.
Chisholm was also the man who had pulled Wanna Chamron’s prison file from a drawer, walked it to his body and then matched the mugshot to the dead face. He’d then stood beside the body, waiting for the police to come, his vision full of intestine as he shooed away insects attempting to infect the pile of innards.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I was called down for all of them. I had to look at all the bodies, because I was the one who had to identify them. I couldn’t leave the body until the police or coroner arrived. I had to make sure no one messed with the body, removed any evidence or walked over fingerprints.
‘I can remember on one morning we had five stabbings. They didn’t die, but it was only because of luck, and the quick-thinking reaction from officers. And then there were the bashings. Don’t even bother asking how many because I can’t count that high.
‘There were also assaults on guards. It was a very dangerous place. A very, very dangerous place. But it was best known for the bodies, and I saw all of them.’
So I asked Chisholm about the nightmares, about the mental scars. Which one of these deaths – the bodies, the blood and the post-mortem bruising – affected him the most?
‘None of them, to be honest,’ Chisholm replied. ‘Sure, it does affect you – watching a man die is not pleasant – but with all of them … well … it was just part of the job. But there was a particular death during my time at Goulburn that stands out. One that really got to me and one that I am still saddened by now.’
You didn’t have to be killed to be claimed by the Killing Fields …
‘Hey you, retard,’ the inmate yelled, throwing a handful of food slop.
Whack.
‘Yeah you, dumb shit,’ he continued to bully as the leftover meat and veggies slid down the target’s spine. ‘You giant piece of spastic shit. I’m going to hurt you. Hurt you real bad.’
Backed by a posse of tattooed arms and battle-scarred heads, the big-mouthed man stepped in.
Crack.
His leading left crashed into chin.
Smash.
His right, the enforcer’s trusted knock-out blow, slammed into temple.
The ‘giant piece of spastic shit’ shook his head. ‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to have to hurt you. No trouble, please.’
The prison heavy went red with rage.
Thud.
A body shot this time. Maybe the fat fuck likes being hit in his gluttonous gut?
Wrong.
The giant wrapped his hands around the attacker’s neck, and with nothing more than a flick of his wrists and a shoulder twitch, he lifted the prisoner into the air.
‘I told you!’ the giant screamed.
Crrrrrrack!
The force of the blow that followed knocked the name-calling, food-throwing man out cold.
‘He never hurt anyone unless he had to,’ recalled Chisholm of Robert Steele, a man imprisoned for his role in five murders.
‘Only once that I can recall. He was a bit like the guy [John Coffey] from the movie The Green Mile – a gentle giant who looked like a killer. He was simple but kind, and could have destroyed anyone in the jail but didn’t. He was that sort of inmate. I really had a soft spot for him, and I don’t think he should have even been in jail.’
March, 1993.
The rays of the rising summer sun, hot enough to wring steam from the damp grass, could not drive the evil away.
The light did not deter the devil. ‘I ain’t going out without a fight,’ said self-described socio-path Leonard Leabeater, surrounded by police in a Hanging Rock Station farmhouse at Cangai, New South Wales. ‘I’m going to make sure they kill me.’
He hugged the shotgun like a teddy bear as he reflected on the two hostages he had just released: Trevor Lasserre, 11, and his sister Tonia, 6.
‘I don’t kill people under 12,’ he boasted. ‘I’d rather be in South Australia killing cops.’
Leabeater had let the children go shortly after fellow fugitive Raymond Bassett surrendered himself to police; the 25-year-old wasn’t ready to die. The third murderer, Robert Steele, 22, stayed with Leabeater even after the children had been released. Like Bassett, he didn’t want to be shot down in a hail of bullets, but he couldn’t leave the man who had taken him in, either. Steele believed Leabeater was the religious prophet of the spirit Astra. He had followed Leabeater, who foretold that his own death would come when he was killed by a warlock, without question. But with the death he predicted drawing near – it would later be revealed he told his sister he would die on an altar on the fourth month of 1993 – Leabeater instructed his loyal follower to leave. He told him to walk towards the light.
At 6am Steele strolled from the farmhouse, calmly smoking a Winfield Red, and handed himself over to police.
But Leabeater remained in the dark. The fresh sun, the threatening guns and the pleas driven through police-issue PAs not stopping him from claiming one last life – his own.
After a 26-hour siege, the nine-day rampage that saw Leabeater, Bassett and Steele kill five people was finally over. Leabeater’s body was found lying on a blood-soaked bed, a half-smoked cigarette still gripped between his fingers. A shotgun was lying next to the remains of his head.
Bassett and Steele were charged with the murders of a pregnant 14-year-old, whose charred remains were found on a Queensland farm; three miners, all shot in the head and two thrown from a cliff; and a helicopter mechanic murdered near Mount Isa.
Bassett was given two life sentences for the shocking crime. Steele received five life sentences plus 12 years without the possibility of parole.
The giant Steele, 130kg of bulk and brawn, was sent to Goulburn Jail. That’s where he pulled out a packet of Winfield Reds and offered it to the boss.
‘I smoked Marlboros, and he looked at them and told me they were no good,’ recalled Chisholm. ‘He offered me his whole pack. I remember that because no one in prison had ever offered me anything, and smokes were a very big deal to them. They are like gold in prison. That was the first time I saw his good heart.’
The next time Chisholm saw the giant’s kindness was when he reluctantly flayed the bully.
‘A crook was picking on him,’ Chisholm said. ‘He was a heavy and he was giving Steele heaps because he was simple. The guy was in high-security because he was a handful; someone who couldn’t be contained elsewhere. He was a tough bloke, but he picked out Steele. It was a huge mistake. Steele upended him and knocked him out with a single blow. He could have kept on going, but he walked away. He didn’t hurt him more than he had to, and I was there soon after the fight. He was apologising. “It’s not my fault, chief,” he said. “He was picking on me. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, SORRY. I didn’t mean to hurt him so bad.”’
Chisholm knew Steele was telling the truth. ‘He could have killed the bloke if he wanted to – and everyone else in the room – with his bare hands. But he was just protecting himself.’
Chisholm found Steele to be incredibly kind but easily led.
‘He was involved in that hostage thing,’ Chisholm said. ‘He was involved in the killings and the siege, but it was a cult-type thing and he was very young. I’ll go further than that – to be blunt, he was retarded. He wasn’t all there. He was the youngest, and he was taken advantage of. He was like a big kid who is extremely strong. He believed in what the other two were doing and he did as he was told.’
Chisholm became fascinated with the behemoth man-child.
‘I was always in close contact with Steele,’ Chisholm said. ‘And I built a rapport with him, mainly because we init
ially thought he was going to be such a threat to everyone else in the jail and a major problem. But he didn’t hurt officers or anyone else. I would tell him to get back to his cell and he did.
‘I honestly believe he should not have been in jail,’ Chisholm continued.
‘He should have been in some psychiatric facility. He was a child trapped in a giant’s body. Yes, he deserved to be punished because of his horrendous crimes, and he couldn’t live in society, but Goulburn wasn’t the place for him, and it would kill him.’
Chisholm got the call on Christmas Eve, 1994.
‘He’s dead, boss,’ said an officer. ‘You better come down.’
Steele was on his knees, a twisted blanket the only thing stopping his head from falling onto the cell floor.
‘About 12.05am we got a call to say he had necked himself,’ Chisholm said. ‘He was so big that he had to kneel down and fall forward to get enough tension on the sheet. He had tied it to the cell bars and pulled forward until he was dead. It took us ages just to get him out of the cell because he was so big. It was really a horrible thing to see.’
Steele was to spend Christmas in solitary confinement after threatening to go out with a bang.
‘I went and saw him on that Christmas Eve because of some allegations he had made,’ Chisholm recalled. ‘He always said that he was going to go out with something big and that he was going to make headlines. He said he would take officers with him, and that he would do it on Christmas Day. We didn’t think he would harm anyone, but we had to take the threat seriously. He could have caused absolute havoc in the prison. We would not have been able to handle him. It would have taken lots of men to contain him, and there would have been a lot hurt.
‘So we put him in segregation for the night. We told him no officer was going to go near him because of what he had said. We told him no officer would come, even if he knocked. They would have to call me first, and I would come and see him. He assured me there would be no problem. He seemed absolutely normal.’
Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail Page 4