By now he was working in Surry Hills—all the city’s homicide squads had been centralised as part of the reforms that flowed from the Royal Commission. Around this time, he began a relationship with a colleague, Pamela Young. She was a detective sergeant, one of the few women in homicide, and had come from the North West Homicide Squad, based at Parramatta. They got to know each other when they were chosen to give lectures about homicide investigation at the police academy at Goulburn, and worked on various on-call jobs together and on a strike force set up to investigate a serial rapist, which was part of homicide’s charter at the time.
Jubelin was attracted to her and impressed with the way she conducted herself professionally and personally. She taught him how to take a step back from things. Until then his practice had been to crash through something head-on, but he saw how she would take a more logical approach and invariably get the same result, with less collateral damage. There were certain costs in being a woman in a man’s environment—as Jubelin got to know Young better, he found the compassionate and caring side to her, which would have been seen as weakness and had to be concealed when competing with the men.
For her part, Young says she came to admire Jubelin for the effort and energy he put into his work. She also liked the affection he had for his children and the time he devoted to them when he could. After a while, she and Jubelin started to live together, and she saw that his energy did not stop outside work, but was channelled into formidable daily routines of exercise and training. He found it almost impossible to relax. ‘I dragged him to the theatre a few times but that didn’t work,’ she recalls. She says it was a rich and intense relationship, but sometimes the going was hard.
When the Olympics were over, Jubelin did his first job as sergeant, leading his own team. It marked an important step up, from working under experienced men such as Jacob and Waterman to standing alone. His senior constables were Jason Evers, who had joined him on the Caroline Byrne investigation after Bowraville, and Nigel Warren.
Their first investigation was into the murder of Barbara Saunders, a housewife from sleepy Normanhurst, near Hornsby, who was shot while walking home from the railway station in December 2000. For the first time Jubelin found himself fronting the media on an almost daily basis—a job normally grabbed by more senior officers, but due to the season most were away on holiday. He was struck by how distracting the media pressure could be, but it was valuable experience. After a few months they caught Saunders’ killer, a young local man named Nicholas Grayson who’d shot her while trying to steal her money.
In May 2001, the team investigated the murder of Jayden Marsh, an eighteen-month-old Aboriginal child killed by his foster carer, Linda Wilson. The child had been beaten to death. The killing had occurred in Sutherland—following centralisation, Jubelin was working all over Sydney, spending hours each day commuting. By now he regarded homicide as a sort of vocation, and resented colleagues not prepared to bleed for the job, which mainly meant working long hours and weekends. It is not hard to see why so many good detectives are divorced.
After charging Linda Wilson, who was later found guilty of manslaughter, Jubelin and his team moved on to Strike Force Tuno.
2
REDEMPTION
When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.
Tuno’s first break came in August 2002. It occurred during a house call to talk to one of the hundreds of people whose names had come up in the course of the investigation as having a link—usually tenuous—to someone who might or might not have murdered Terry Falconer. It was dispiriting work but, nine and a half months after Falconer’s death, the detectives still had no productive leads. That afternoon the man to be interviewed was a Rebel named Tod Daley. On 29 August, Glen Browne and Luke Rankin knocked on his door at Minchinbury in western Sydney. They had no great expectations of the interview, and half expected him to tell them to get fucked. It was what bikies often did.
There was a locked security screen providing largely one-way vision from the inside. When the door behind it opened, they could just make out a large figure looming on the other side.
‘What do you want?’ asked the man.
Once they’d confirmed his identity, they said, ‘We’re from homicide. We want to speak to you about the Falconer murder.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Homicide. We—’
‘I know who’s done it, and why they’ve done it,’ Daley said. ‘I’ll meet you later.’ He arranged to see them at another address.
As they waited for the evening meeting, the detectives wondered if this might be a joke, or the break they’d been looking for. There was no point getting too excited—police work is full of disappointment—but men can dream. Daley was in his thirties, a tough and long-time bikie, but he’d had his problems. While serving time for manslaughter, he’d been savagely assaulted. He’d also been summonsed to hearings at the Crime Commission on two occasions, in 1996 and 1997, and some of his criminal associates thought he was an informer.
Browne and Rankin met him in a granny flat out back of another house at 8 pm. It was a small place full of junk, and the detectives cleared some space so they could sit down. Daley had not been joking that afternoon, and proceeded to tell them an amazing story. He said he’d been approached by two men the previous October and asked to help them get rid of the body of a man they were going to torture and kill. The men were Anthony and Andrew Perish. This was the first time anyone had definitely linked the brothers to Falconer’s murder.
It was to take Tuno over a year to get the full account out of Daley, who was extremely suspicious of them. Several of the detectives got to know him well; Glen Browne was particularly adept at getting on with criminals. Luke Rankin recalls how the story came out in dribs and drabs, and how Daley would always be watching them warily, asking questions about what they’d done about things he’d told them previously. He was also high maintenance—for example, he would ring them in the middle of the night and express concern about a car he’d seen go by in the street. He’d insist on meeting at 10 pm in parks out the back of Mount Druitt and Blacktown, where Jubelin and Browne would go to talk with him while Evers and Rankin sat in cars on either side of the park, concerned for their colleagues’ safety as the hours ticked by. But in the end Rankin came to admire Daley, to feel he’d redeemed himself by telling the police what he knew.
For the sake of coherence I will set out most of Daley’s story now, apart from certain details that have to be left out to protect his identity: after he eventually gave his statement, he moved away from Sydney and changed his name. The following account comes from multiple sources, but is mainly what he would later say in court.
Daley had first met Anthony and Andrew Perish through their connections with the Rebels, in the early nineties. He was sentenced to jail for murder (later reduced to manslaughter) in 1996 for his part in a fatal brawl. One day in Long Bay jail in 1999 he briefly met Terry Falconer, whom he knew of but had never spoken to. He’d heard rumours that Falconer had killed the Perish grandparents. The main topic of conversation was Rob Institoris, another Rebel, who was going out with Falconer’s daughter Linda. Falconer believed, rightly or wrongly, that Linda had given him up to the cops for manufacturing amphetamines, and resented the fact Institortis was in a relationship with her. To make matters worse, they were living in Falconer’s house and not paying rent.
At one point, Daley changed the subject and said, ‘Rumour has it you killed Rooster’s [Anthony Perish’s] grandparents.’ In fact, Daley had heard the rumour from Institoris.
‘Yeah,’ Falconer said. ‘I heard that one too.’
Then the conversation moved on.
In 2000 Daley again met Rob Institoris, who had just started a sentence for forging not very good $100 notes. Institoris tried to be friendly, recalling incidents from their past, but Daley was deeply upset because Institoris ha
d given the police information about the offence for which he was in jail. Members of the Rebels were not supposed to cooperate with police if a brother was under investigation.
In the end Daley said, ‘You wrote a fuckin’ statement against me.’
‘What can I say? I fucked up.’
‘If I did to you what you did to me, you’d want me dead. As far as I’m concerned, I want a new bike [as reparation], and you’ve got two weeks to get it.’ Daley looked around the yard and saw two big blokes he didn’t know. ‘If I don’t get it, those two blokes over there are going to cut your fuckin’ head off.’
Institoris said he was broke, but eventually agreed to give Daley his major asset, a boat. It was a 4.9 metre Markham Whaler with twin Evinrude 70 horsepower engines. Ownership was signed over in jail, and Daley arranged for it to be collected.
Daley got out of jail in 2001, and it was a condition of his parole he not mix with the Rebels. He did arrange some casual meetings, to try to gauge their attitude towards him, but generally he was happy to be away from the club. He was nervous because members knew he’d been to the Crime Commission, and he believed he was a marked man. At one social gathering, a Rebel sang along to the song ‘Skunk Dog’, implying Daley was an informer. When the music stopped, the man mumbled, ‘You’re living on borrowed time, cunt.’
‘What did you say?’ Daley demanded.
‘Nothing, nothing. I’m just singing.’
In October a woman Daley knew as Denise aka Delirious (at one stage the wife of Anthony Perish’s driver Matthew Lawton) came by the house where he was living in Bringelly and told him, ‘I got a message from our mate.’
‘Who? Which one?’
‘Rooster.’
‘Oh yeah, how’s he going?’
‘Yeah, he’s going good.’
Denise gave Daley a thousand dollars and said, ‘Buy yourself some decent clothes to go to dinner in.’
‘When?’
‘Andrew will come and see you in a couple of days.’ And she drove off.
A few days later, Andrew Perish turned up in his four-wheel drive and told Daley, ‘Be ready [at 7 tonight]. We’ll go and have dinner with our Mate.’ He did not mean just any mate: Mate, like Rooster, was one of the nicknames of Anthony Perish.
Andrew returned in a Commodore and drove Daley into the inner city, telling him when they parked that they were in Newtown. They met Anthony, who was waiting for them on a corner, and after they’d greeted each other and hugged, they went into a small restaurant. Anthony ordered a bottle of wine and there was small talk. At some point he raised the subject of his grandparents, and asked Daley if it was true that Terry Falconer had told him in jail that he’d killed the old people.
‘Given we have mobile phones in jail,’ Daley said, ‘don’t you think you would have known pretty much straight away if I’d been told that?’
Anthony thought about it and agreed. Daley said, ‘Who told you this shit?’
‘We got a phone call from Liz.’
Daley had never met Elizabeth Falconer.
Later Anthony got down to business and said, ‘So, mate, what can you do for the company?’
Daley, who was mystified, said, ‘What would the company have me do for them?’ At first he thought that by ‘company’ Anthony might mean the Rebels, but that was not it at all.
‘You’ve got a boat?’
‘Yeah. It’s fucked at the moment.’
Anthony asked what the problem was, and Daley went into details.
Anthony said, ‘So, if it was fixed, would it make it out to the shelf and back?’
Assuming he meant the continental shelf, Daley said, ‘Yeah. Fucking oath.’
‘You know what you’re doing? You can handle a boat all right?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been a captain for a long time.’
‘How much would it cost to fix it?’
‘At least a couple of grand.’
‘If I gave you a couple of grand tomorrow, you’d put it in and get it fixed?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You won’t go to town and blow it?’
‘Mate!’
Anthony turned to Andrew and asked if he could give Daley a few thousand dollars that night. Then he said to Daley, ‘I want you to put the boat in and come up the Karuah River to Bulahdelah. There’s a wharf up there. Come up to the wharf and I’ll be waiting for you, just like a fisherman with an esky. A couple of eskies, because the cunt might be in a few pieces.’
So now Daley had an idea of what was going on. He said, ‘There’ll be people everywhere.’
‘Mate, nobody will know any different, we’ll just look like a couple of fishermen going out for a day’s fishing.’
Later in the conversation, Daley said, ‘Well, who is he?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s no one in the club.’
‘Who is the cunt?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s not you.’
‘What’s the pay like?’
‘Twenty grand.’
Daley just stared at him, and Perish thought about it. ‘Tell you what, I’ll pay you thirty.’
‘Half up front?’
‘No, no. I don’t work like that—’
‘Standard practice, isn’t it? Well, you pay me half up front and I’ll incur the expenses.’
‘No, I don’t work like that. We’ll give you the money for your expenses.’
Anthony said a mobile phone would be delivered to him, to be used for communicating about the job. When the meal was finished, Anthony paid the bill in cash and said goodbye. Andrew drove Daley home via his own house in Eagle Vale, where he went inside and came back with $2,000.
The next day Daley hooked his boat up to his vehicle and drove to Marine Scene in Campbelltown, where he left it for repairs. They later called to say the power head on the left engine needed replacing, which would cost $4,000 by itself. Daley rang Andrew, who said the extra money would be forthcoming.
A few days later, a mobile phone was delivered to Daley by a man he subsequently learned was Matthew Lawton.
‘Here’s the phone from Steve,’ said Lawton.
‘Who?’
‘Rooster.’
Lawton told him to keep the phone charged and on at all times, and not to use it except for contacting the Perishes.
Daley was nervous and confused about what was happening. On the one hand, he wanted to get his boat fixed, and in any case was reluctant to say no to Anthony Perish. On the other, he did not want to commit a crime and risk going back to jail. He was also concerned that maybe he was being set up, because of his contact with the Crime Commission. In his worst dreams, he wondered if he was actually the intended victim and it would be his body dumped off the continental shelf.
Daley had an interest in surveillance devices—his late father had been a private investigator. He set up two video cameras covering the front of the house, connected to a screen in the lounge room. This enabled him to record visitors, and to see who was outside without having to open the front door. The equipment captured images of one of the three or four visits Anthony Perish made over the next few weeks, in each case having been driven by Matthew Lawton. The purpose of the visits was to check on the progress of the boat repairs, and to discuss the trip up north. On one of the visits, Perish showed Daley a copy of the police running sheet indicating Falconer had been prepared to give information to the authorities about the drug dealings of the Dubbo Rebels.
In late October, Daley and his girlfriend drove up to Port Stephens via Newcastle. Along the way they dropped in at the Waterways office in Newcastle and bought a duplicate set of rego papers for his boat and some maps. He later said he wanted to leave a traceable trail of his trip, to cover himself in case the Perishes were trying to set him up. This is confusing, but Daley is a confusing man, a mixture of paranoia and intelligence and muddled thinking. He seems to have been concerned to keep his options open, to some extent making it up as he went along. A serious consideration was still that he might
be the Perishes’ intended victim—in which case, it made a certain sense to stay close to them by pretending to cooperate, in the hope of learning more.
After the reconnaissance trip, Daley told Anthony Perish the Karuah River was ‘crawling with cops’ and had a speed limit of four kilometres per hour. (It also does not run through Bulahdelah.) They discussed other places where the boat might be put in.
On Perish’s last visit, which occurred on 9 November 2001, the boat had been repaired and was back at the house on its trailer. Daley said it needed to be run in.
‘Get on to it,’ Perish replied impatiently.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing, mate?’
‘Hurry up, because this cunt goes this Friday, regardless.’
Daley learned the plan had changed. ‘You’ll come up,’ Perish said, ‘you’ll pick up a couple of eskies, you’ll go out and take them out to the continental shelf, you’ll empty out the contents over a big hole [located] using a depth sounder. On the way back, wash the eskies out halfway back and throw them over the side. When you get back, wash the boat out with ammonia.’
‘Huh?’
‘If you do that, they can tell there’s been blood in the boat, but they can’t tell whose it is. It fucks the DNA.’
Daley thought about what he’d just heard, and said, ‘What, you’re not coming with me?’
‘Nah. That’s what I’m paying you for.’
With the job now imminent, it was time to drop out. After 12 November Daley did not take any calls on his mobile phones, so attempts by Andrew Perish to call him were unsuccessful. The brothers did not visit him again—presumably they realised something was wrong and decided to cut all contact.
Once Daley had told the short version of this story to detectives Browne and Rankin, he used the television set and VHS player in the granny flat to play them the video he’d made of Anthony and Matthew Lawton arriving at his house to inspect his boat. When the video was finished, Browne, who’d been taking notes, asked Daley why he’d decided to talk to them.
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