The two oldest Perish brothers found places for themselves in this world. Andrew, who left home at seventeen and became a plumber, joined the Rebels in 1991 and would later become president of their Campbelltown chapter. Anthony never joined, but he associated with them and became a skilled cook of amphetamines, which he sold to the Rebels and other bikie gangs. In this way he came under their protection and gained a distribution network, but did not have to suffer the annoyance of walking around with club colours, a target for police, on his back. Anthony was always to be extremely effective at avoiding police attention, and it seems his thinking on this began at an early age. Until he was convicted of murder in 2011, his only adult conviction was for using offensive language in 1990.
The Perish brothers (when I use this term I am referring to Anthony and Andrew only, and not their younger brothers) and their criminal associates adopted their style from the surrounding society. They wore shorts and drove utes, and their approach to business reflected that of the many tradesmen in the burgeoning building industry of the area, where in the 1990s a new suburb seemed to be created each year. The business model for the building of thousands of new brick bungalows was not corporate, but based on contracting and sub-contracting arrangements made possible by the fact that Australia was a prosperous place where many young men could afford a house on a block of land, with a big ute and a shed in which to store the tools and materials of their trade. Supported by changes to the law that made it easier to be an independent contractor, this created a world in which the small businessman could flourish. Independence and flexibility were important qualities, which Anthony Perish possessed to an extreme degree. He’d never done well at school, but by the early nineties he’d worked out there was more money in drugs than in eggs, and was cooking in a shed on the family farm.
He didn’t just sell to the Rebels. On the evening of 5 August 1992, an associate met a woman in her car near McDonald’s in Bondi Junction. The woman had $92,500 and was keen to buy some drugs. The associate counted the money and told the woman to drive to Fairfield railway station, where two more accomplices got in the car. They then motored out to Leppington, onto a property that from the smell housed a lot of chickens. Anthony was waiting out front, next to his Holden ute. When they drove through the gate, he locked it and showed them a bag of speed. At that moment a car came roaring up the road outside and the woman declared herself to be an undercover police officer. Anthony took off into the night and would stay on the run for the next fourteen years.
It was a traumatic event for the Perish family, which despite its problems was still close-knit. But it was nothing like what happened less than a year later, when someone came to the home of Anthony and Frances Perish on a Monday evening in June and shot the old couple dead in their backyard. Anthony died from a .22 bullet in the front of his chest, while Frances was shot in the back, possibly while lying on the ground.
The day before, at 2 pm, Anthony called his son, Albert, who was then fifty-nine, and asked if he would come around, as there was something he wanted to talk about.
‘Is it important I see you now?’ asked Albert, who’d just got back from a trip out west to buy some grain. ‘I’m behind on the feeding.’
His father said it could wait.
Two days later, on 15 June, when his parents did not answer the phone, Albert drove around to their house with his wife, Thea. It was about 5.15 pm. There was no answer to his knocking, so he forced an entry and found his parents’ bodies. Anthony and Frances were not out back anymore. They had been moved into their bedroom and placed on the two single beds there, with a certain amount of respect. Each was wearing a cardigan. Anthony also had on a green flannelette shirt and blue King Gee trousers. Frances’ clothing included an apron now stained with blood. Each was face-up, their slippers arranged neatly beneath each bed, Frances with her dress pulled down modestly to her knees. It was as though the killer had cared, and yet he’d made a strange mistake for someone who cared—the bodies had been placed in the wrong beds.
There were bloodstains on the patio and some of the outdoor furniture behind the house. Inside was a mess, with trails of tissue and toilet paper throughout and mineral turps, methylated spirits and cooking oil splashed around. Some of the kitchen hotplates were on, and what looked like a crude timing device of candles taped together was lying on the floor. Although the autopsies showed neither of the old people had drunk alcohol recently, there were also five empty beer bottles in the house. It seemed the murderer had either socialised with the couple beforehand, or stayed around for a few drinks after the killings. A bloodstained jacket was found in the laundry.
After Albert found the bodies, many members of the family turned up. His daughter Colleen came with her boyfriend, David Taylor. Andrew arrived and ran up the drive, crying. Then there was a lawyer named Justin Birk Hill, who rolled up in his silver Mercedes 300E. Birk Hill had gone out with Colleen a few years earlier and remained a family friend. He had been a property developer in Queensland and, since 1982, a solicitor in New South Wales, running his own practice in Kogarah. He was an unusual lawyer, one who claimed to have been a founding member of the Mobshitters outlaw motorcycle gang, and did work, then and later, for the Black Uhlans, the Finks, the Rebels and the Nomads. He’d done some work for the Perishes, too, and had been advising the grandparents on their wills in the weeks before they died. This was not the first time clients of his had died violently: two years earlier, a man named Peter Wade and his girlfriend had been shot dead in a Surfers Paradise apartment Birk Hill owned.
Birk Hill refused to be formally interviewed by police, but did say Albert was an authoritarian figure who suppressed his wife and children. Police told a subsequent inquest, ‘It was [Birk] Hill’s opinion that Albert was of an unbalanced mind, very cunning and gives the appearance of a stupid oaf. He also has a violent temper and is susceptible to violent mood changes . . . [Birk] Hill stated that it was his opinion that the family was suspicious of Albert’s possible involvement in his parents’ deaths.’
He described the family as dysfunctional, and said Anthony (junior) hated his father but was close to his sister Colleen. Anthony and Birk Hill had become friends after Anthony approached him for legal advice at the age of fifteen. The two men would later go to restaurants and rugby league games together. Sometimes Anthony, Andrew and Colleen would stay at Birk Hill’s place on Grand Parade, Brighton-Le-Sands, the Riviera of southern Sydney criminals. It was a nice house with six bedrooms, six bathrooms, a pool and gymnasium, not far from the beach on the edge of Botany Bay. Anthony did not turn up at his grandparents’ house that evening as he was still on the run. Birk Hill told police he knew where his friend and client was hiding, but declined to reveal the location. He was aware that Albert was in serious financial trouble and had discussed this with his father, who had been upset by his son’s business failures and his constant requests for money.
For someone who did not want to give a statement about the family, Justin Birk Hill had a lot to say.
The detectives who ran the subsequent investigation came up with twenty persons of interest—a term that does not mean ‘suspect’ but does mean someone who cannot be ruled out as a possible perpetrator. In the end they focused a lot on the family, because many murders are committed by family members, and in this case there seemed no conceivable reason why a stranger would kill two old people and place them in their beds.
The problem was the detectives could find no reason any member of the family would have wanted to kill them. As a subsequent coronial inquest was told, much thought went into Albert and the hypothesis that he had killed his parents in anger because they would no longer help him financially, or for some sort of financial benefit, although it was never clear what this might be. Under his parents’ 1990 wills, Albert received the family company, which was heavily in debt, while his two sisters received their other assets, which comprised the Byron Road house, the seven acres it stood on, and $68,000 in the bank. To add to the c
onfusion, there was some question as to whether Albert had known the terms of the will, and there was also the possibility there had been a later will that had been destroyed in a fire at a solicitor’s office.
The extended Perish family was quickly riven by suspicion, and at first most immediate family members refused to talk to police, which was odd. But over the next year some information came in. One member of the family told detectives that Albert, referring to his father, had once said, ‘That bastard has been holding me back for years stopping me from doing what I want to do . . . If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be in this mess.’ Another family member explained how badly Albert was in debt, and how he had been trying to set up a sawmill at Coolongolook, and had asked for a large loan. In fact Albert and the egg business were pretty well bankrupt, with debts of some $750,000. Albert was behind on the interest repayments on the mortgages he’d taken out on the land he owned, on which he was paying 18.5 per cent interest. He had sold seven acres of the Leppington farm a few years earlier, and had been trying to sell another seven, without success.
An alternative theory about the deaths of Anthony and Frances—promoted by Albert for a while—was that they had been killed by another member of the family in order to stop them giving Albert any more money and thereby whittling away their own inheritance. In July 1993 police placed listening devices in Albert’s house, but all they got was him talking about wild theories such as that one of his sisters had hired a hitman with the assistance of her solicitor. Then and in the coming years, he would flood the police with a variety of unhelpful notions about the deaths, one involving a Bermuda-registered company linked to organised crime. All these theories he set out at length on paper. He was obviously and irritatingly eccentric, but at the end of the day there was no evidence he was a killer.
The following year, Albert was evicted from his property in Heath Road when the mortgage was foreclosed and the place was put up for sale. He was allowed back in to collect his equipment, and was seen there the evening before the auction. At 4.30 am the next day, two buildings on the property were set alight by an unknown person.
The murder investigation dragged on for years, and police found nothing to enable them to identify the killer or killers. In 1995 a reward of $100,000 was offered for information, but to no effect. For those left behind, life went on. Justin Birk Hill’s girlfriend’s place was raided by police, who found lots of false identity papers and an encryptor used to scramble mobile phone calls. Birk Hill abandoned his legal practice and moved to South Australia, where he became national president of the Gypsy Jokers outlaw motorcycle gang. Anthony Perish joined him in Adelaide for a while. In June 1996 Birk Hill was convicted of conspiring to manufacture amphetamines and ecstasy—he arranged finance for a big factory in the Adelaide Hills—and jailed for a minimum of three and a half years. He was debarred from practising as a solicitor in New South Wales.
In the end, police could not find anyone to charge with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish, so the matter was referred to the coroner to confirm that the investigation had exhausted all avenues and could be dropped. The inquest, under coroner Derek Hand, began in February 1997 but sat hardly at all. Hand was frustrated by the unusually long time police had taken to conclude their investigation—four years—and the lack of thoroughness. At that stage there was still confusion as to when the couple had been shot. Neighbours were no help: apparently gunfire was common in the area. One told the inquest: ‘If my dog goes on someone’s land . . . they have all full rights to shoot my dog.’ Police had not even thought to fingerprint items such as the switches on the stove or the handle of a pan of fat found on top. Hand decided the inquest was a waste of time, and on 12 June adjourned it and ordered a new investigation, involving senior officers not connected with the original inquiry.
Strike Force Seabrook was set up with eight officers and pursued the matter with some vigour. A letter requesting information was sent to 560 homes around the old Perish house, with senior officer Dave Laidlaw writing, ‘I believe the key to the solving of these murders lies within the Leppington community.’ But the Leppington community wasn’t saying anything. Nor were some members of the Perish family. When police knocked on the door of Colleen Perish and David Taylor in Arncliffe in 2001, she told them, ‘It’s been eight years, our memory is no good now,’ and slammed the door in their face.
The reinvestigation took four years, and the name of Terry Falconer cropped up, as it had during the first investigation. Falconer was a long-time criminal in his fifties, well known in the south-west. On 15 March 2001 an anonymous caller rang Burwood police station and claimed Falconer had committed the murders. Two days later, someone told police they’d heard Colleen Perish say Falconer had played some role in the murders, possibly by helping arrange them. On 9 July Andrew Perish told them Falconer had admitted his involvement to two individuals. The police were unable to confirm this with the individuals. When Andrew Perish, by that stage a senior Rebel, was told this, he expressed his great unhappiness with the police investigation’s lack of progress.
Terry Falconer was approaching the end of a jail sentence at the time and on daily work release. On 24 August 2001, Seabrook officers called on him at his place of work and took him to a police station where he was interviewed about the rumours. He denied all knowledge of the murders, and said he’d been at his property near Brewarrina when they occurred. In the next few weeks there was further contact between Falconer and police, some of it initiated by himself. Lots of people knew he was a person of interest, but there was no evidence to link him to the deaths. And then he disappeared.
COPS
Wisdom is the principal thing: therefore get wisdom:
and with all thy getting get understanding.
1
DEATH OF A COOK
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
The cops came for Terry Falconer again on Friday 16 November 2001, a fine and warm day, at Wreck-A-Mended Smash Repairs in Ingleburn. The busy workshop was situated in three factory units off Louise Avenue. Early in the afternoon, head spray painter George Kaillis was mixing paint when a blue Commodore stopped outside and two men in suits came in and asked for the boss. Told he was out, they asked where they could find Falconer. Kaillis knew Terry was a friend of the boss, and that he was on work release from Silverwater jail.
The men sure appeared to be cops. The Commodore looked like an unmarked police car and the driver was wearing a uniform shirt. One of the blokes in suits produced a badge and Falconer, a fifty-three-year-old man of medium build with brown hair and lots of tattoos beneath his work clothes, allowed himself to be searched. It seemed like a professional job and was certainly thorough: the cop put on latex gloves and even looked inside Falconer’s mouth. Then they cuffed him and took him out to their car, put him inside and drove off.
Alan Morcomb, who owned Wreck-A-Mended, was out buying some paint. When he got back at 3 pm and learned what had happened, he was concerned—his daughter Leonie had rung the prison and been told they knew nothing about the police visit—so he drove straight to Macquarie Fields police station to see what was going on. An officer there checked and said Falconer had not been taken to any police station. Eventually detectives drove over to Wreck-A-Mended to begin the investigation into what they now knew was a kidnapping.
In theory, Falconer’s abduction should have been known by Corrective Services the moment it happened. He’d been wearing an anklet the day he disappeared, a sort of leg bracelet that can be detected by a receiver, thereby recording the location of the person wearing it. Ideally there should have been a receiver attached to the landline at Wreck-A-Mended, sending a signal to Corrective Services indicating Falconer was at his place of work—and warning them if he left. But due to a shortage of equipment, there was no receiver at the workshop that day.
The police had no leads, and Macquarie Fields called in detectives from the Violence and Major Offenders (VMO) Unit based in Strawberry
Hills in the inner city. They specialised in kidnappings, and this job was given the name Strike Force Tuno. (Like all investigation names, this one was randomly generated by a computer.) One of the detectives from VMO who arrived at Ingleburn was Luke Rankin. He recalls that staff at Wreck-A-Mended gave the detectives likenesses of the abductors using the COMFIT photo book in use at the time, but these composite pictures did not match any known criminals. No one at the workshop had noted the plate number of the Commodore, and neither the police nor Corrective Services had any intelligence suggesting who might have kidnapped Falconer. So the detectives did what they always do in this situation, and began to go back over the victim’s history, looking for people who might have a motive to do him harm. It’s what they’d done with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish, without success. But with Terry Falconer they found no shortage of people with the necessary motive.
Falconer was born in 1948 and had a troubled childhood. Both parents were alcoholics, and his mother showed him little affection. He tried to commit suicide several times during his life, first when he was twenty, after which he was admitted to Parramatta Psychiatric Centre for a month. He became a miner and was working at the Appin Colliery south of Sydney in 1979 when there was a serious explosion that killed fourteen men, some of them close friends. In fact, he should have been working on that shift himself. He left mining and ended up driving tow trucks, in the days when the industry was corrupt and violent. Falconer was shot by rivals in 1980 and suffered serious injury, including brain damage. He trained as a panel beater, but later started making drugs.
In June 1996 he was arrested and charged with manufacturing methamphetamine and hashish on a property he and his wife, Elizabeth-Anne, known as Liz, owned near the inland town of Brewarrina. Falconer had been a big manufacturer of meth, with connections to the Gypsy Jokers, although he was not a member. His clients had also included some members of the Dubbo Rebels.
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