‘I just looked at you and decided I could trust you,’ Daley said.
It was a surprising statement and, as it was to turn out, not totally honest. In fact, Daley was to harbour fears of the Tuno detectives throughout his dealings with them, at times convinced they were corrupt and meant him harm. There was nothing personal in this: it was only five years since the Wood Royal Commission, and many people still mistrusted the police in general; Daley would not have been reassured by the fact that Terry Falconer had been killed after being kidnapped by men who might have been police. And yet, in Daley’s mind such concerns coexisted with the feeling that maybe Browne and his colleagues could be trusted. It was complicated, but his was a troubled and dangerous world.
There followed a series of meetings—in excess of fifty—over more than a year. Daley remained nervous, especially after the detectives asked him to make a statement and give evidence in court one day. He knew this would mean relocating and starting a new life, and that was something he was still in two minds about doing, despite his desire to turn over a new leaf. But gradually the police convinced him this was the only course of action he could take if he wanted the information he’d given them to achieve any effect.
It took a great deal of skill and patience on the part of Browne and Jubelin to deal with Daley, to meet him again and again, to always answer his phone calls, and to listen to his rambling paranoia over the long months. Fortunately, each of the detectives could draw on experience that had equipped them with patience and empathy where difficult witnesses were concerned. Browne had grown up with a lot of people who went on to be criminals. As for Jubelin, he’d learned about patience at Bowraville.
Strike Force Ancud had been big at first and Jubelin gained an education in major investigations from watching OIC Rod Lynch, a quietly spoken man with a great grasp of detail. One thing he noted was how Lynch would give a detective a job and expect him to do it but nothing else—Jubelin’s own natural tendency was to go racing off in pursuit of further information, but Lynch would say, ‘No. I just want you to do the task I gave you.’ Jubelin came to see how this was essential for control of a complex investigation, where only the person at the top had a complete overview.
Once the publicity circus had moved on, Ancud lost most of its resources (as was to happen with Tuno a few years later). Lynch was promoted and left, replaced as OIC by a sergeant who had other jobs that distracted his attention. Jubelin became the de facto head of the investigation, which before too long had just one other officer, Jason Evers. Born in 1969, Evers was a rugby league player who worked as a bricklayer on leaving school. He joined the police in 1989 after it had rained for two months. He became a detective because it was a chance to use his mind more, and also for the challenge: he figured it was an opportunity to move up to a higher level of effort. He realised that Jubelin shared this ambition.
The most obvious flaws in the initial Bowraville investigation were that the officers had failed to talk to some witnesses, and obtained much less detail than they could have from those they did speak with. History shows there has been a poor relationship between police and Aboriginal people for two centuries. Many cops, who have generally been white, have felt a sense of unease with black people living in different conditions, where parenting arrangements, partly because of an acceptance of more extended families, are far from the white ideal of the nuclear family. Many black people have been—and still are—wary of the police, for all sorts of reasons.
In addition, there are fundamental differences in how the two groups communicate, with Aboriginal people often slow, hesitant, and with a tendency to agree with any proposition put to them, whether true or not. Some of their mannerisms, such as pauses before answering and refusing to look others in the eye, strike many whites as evasive—indeed, as possible evidence of criminality.
Jubelin and Evers adopted a thorough approach, requiring far more patience than either man had used in previous police work. They spent a lot of 1997 simply turning up to potential witnesses’ houses and hanging around, sitting and lying under trees and waiting, waiting for an old man to decide he trusted them or for a young mother to remember what she’d seen on a certain afternoon years before. At first the people generally ignored them, either politely or by ‘growling’, to use a word Jubelin heard in this context for the first time. Elaine Walker, aunt of Colleen, told him, ‘Look, you’re a white copper, I’m black. Coppers took our children from us. Why would I want to speak to you?’ But eventually she did, and so did others. The detectives gained more evidence, and learned a great deal about slow detecting.
It took a long time to convince Daley to agree to make a statement, longer for him actually to make it, and even longer before he signed it. The detectives sometimes discussed his motive among themselves. He’d just got out of jail and wanted to break away from his old world—by talking to the cops he’d made that move, at least in his own mind—and once he signed the statement, there would be no going back. Daley was a man looking for redemption. He told Jubelin some stories about his life, how he’d been in gangs since the age of fourteen. His recent experiences had given him the chance to reflect on the direction of his future.
As a bikie, Daley had been a recognised expert on surveillance matters and police methodology. He’d done a lot of research and had made his own listening devices, and it seemed to the detectives that this sort of activity might have developed his intrinsic wariness. Some of his fears seemed extreme, and yet maybe there was a basis for them. He said for a while that helicopters were hovering near his house, and described one as being quite distinctive. The police later found Anthony Perish often hired helicopters from a company in western Sydney, and one of them matched the description given by Daley. It was the only helicopter of its kind in the city.
Once the detectives decided Daley was telling the truth, the entire investigation became focused on the Perishes. The police spent a lot of time talking to colleagues from Seabrook, which had now wound up without finding out who had killed Anthony and Frances Perish. Their work had been referred to the coroner for an inquest.
Albert Perish had continued to act strangely in the years after his parents’ murders. He told Seabrook many things, including that the deaths had been predicted in a dream he’d had, and that the killer was a dark-haired stranger he’d seen about the property. He also said the murders were linked to Yugoslavian politics (in fact his parents had not been politically active) and, alternatively, had been carried out by a hitman hired by a group of solicitors. In 2001 he told the New South Wales Crime Commission that he had been defrauded of timber royalties over his property at Coolongolook and that his sister Elena and one of the detectives from the police murder investigation were involved. None of this was true.
For the detectives of Seabrook, and now Tuno, the problem of motive for the grandparents’ deaths remained. Although multiple informants claimed that while in jail Terry Falconer had admitted to involvement in the murders, either by doing them himself or assisting someone else, it was all hearsay: police could not find anyone to whom he had actually said this. There were practical problems in finding out: Falconer had shared cells with some two hundred other prisoners in seven jails. And why would he have killed Anthony and Frances Perish anyway?
Other persons of interest were even less helpful. On 27 February 2002, investigators had attempted to interview Andrew Perish about his movements on the day his grandparents were killed. He told them to ‘Fuck off.’
In September 2002 the rest of Terry Falconer turned up. Detective Glenn Williams of the Newcastle Crime Scene Section was called to a property on the Hastings River near Wauchope. Owner Ellen Old had found a blue package on the riverbank and opened it with a hacksaw, a decision she probably regretted. This bag was the same as the previous six, except it had no chicken wire around it. When an autopsy was conducted, the bag was found to contain all the remaining body parts except the teeth and lower jaw, which have never been found.
Follo
wing Strike Force Seabrook’s report, the coronial inquest into the grandparents’ deaths recommenced on 8 October 2002, an extraordinary nine years after the murders. On 30 June 2003 Deputy State Coroner Carl Milovanovich announced an open verdict—Anthony and Frances Perish had been killed by a person or persons unknown. He blamed this disappointing outcome on the initial police investigation, which was ‘deficient in many ways’. Opportunities to gather forensic evidence had been missed. The investigators, he said, had ‘disregarded all their training, and there is a feeling they adopted an attitude that this case would solve itself [presumably by assuming Albert was guilty]. How wrong they were.’ Of Anthony and Frances he said, ‘It saddens me when I reflect on their lives, the fact that they came to this country from Europe and through hard work and invariable sacrifice carved out not only a fortunate life for themselves, but also built the stepping stones for security and prosperity for their children and grandchildren.’
Tuno was now pursuing two possible reasons the Perishes might have killed Falconer. One was revenge for their beloved grandparents’ deaths, the other because they suspected him of informing on them or their Rebels associates.
The team made their slender travel budget go a long way. Officers who went to Dubbo to talk to the Rebels there drove furiously around neighbouring towns and made themselves visible, to create the impression they were better resourced than was the case. In everything Jubelin did, including his comments to the media, he wanted the bikies to think the investigation was big and remorseless, in order to increase nervousness that might prompt one or more to roll over. It was even possible the bikies might hand over the killer just to get the police off their backs: after all, a major murder investigation is bad for business if you’re in the drug trade.
In the end the Dubbo Rebels proved irrelevant to the investigation. ‘They were different to city bikies,’ Jason Evers recalls, ‘older and poorer. A bit more like a drinking group.’
One asset Tuno obtained in 2003 was analyst Camille Alavoine, an officer who discovered she had skill in sorting and arranging information. She had been involved tangentially in the investigation into the death of Caroline Byrne: in an experiment conducted by Professor Rod Cross to see how Byrne might have been thrown off The Gap, Alavoine was hurled into a swimming pool seventeen times by two male detectives. This was recorded on video. Cross based some of his expert evidence at the 2008 trial of Gordon Wood on this unusual experiment.
Alavoine proved adept at helping Tuno make sense of some of the information it gathered. Jubelin liked the way that she approached her work with the instincts of an investigator: unlike some analysts, she had a feeling for information that was relevant. She was a somewhat prickly character, a single woman aged around forty who lived in Campbelltown and kept show dogs, and insisted on doing things her own way. After a few arguments, Jubelin gave her her head: the results were worth it. Not only was she good, she was dedicated, and would often take work home on the weekend.
Alavoine was not ambitious but she was clever. In her early days with Tuno she told the others how she was buying cheap properties that no one else wanted, as investments. They wondered why she bothered, but eight years later she would have more money than she knew what to do with.
With Tod Daley’s information, the detectives began to push informants and other criminals for more information about Anthony Perish. They still hit a wall of silence, with many people they spoke to confiding that they were refusing to speak because Perish was just too dangerous. This was news to the Tuno detectives and to all the police intelligence to which they had access. Despite the attempts that had been made to catch him since he went on the run in 1992—which included publishing his photograph in the Readers Digest in an article on Australia’s most wanted criminals—he remained a ghost.
3
THE WIRE
Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
The information Daley had provided was important, but corroboration was needed before Tuno could charge the Perishes, so the detectives asked Daley to wear a wire to a meeting with Andrew Perish. Often, this is a point at which informants pull back, and Daley was reluctant at first, but not because of fear the recorded conversation would reveal he’d been lying. His concern was with his sense of honour: wearing a wire went against the outlaw code he’d lived by for most of his life. But in the end he agreed, seeing this as a further step along the path he’d chosen. Police taped half a dozen conversations at South Western Produce, Andrew Perish’s store in Camden, over a period of sixteen months. Daley was nervous about these meetings because he suspected the Perishes wanted him dead on account of what he knew about the plan to kill Falconer. And Andrew Perish was a dangerous man: Tuno suspected he had killed before.
Eight years earlier, on 18 August 1995, a man named Ian Draper had been working in one of the bars at the Railway Hotel in Liverpool when Andrew Perish came in with a friend. While drinking he got into some bother with an Islander named Kai Dempsey, who threw a punch. Andrew hit back and Dempsey went down, striking his head against the leg of a pool table. Some witnesses said Perish then kicked him, but Perish denied this. Dempsey died soon after from blunt force trauma, and Perish handed himself in at Liverpool Police Station three days later. He said he’d acted in self-defence, but refused to give a statement. He was charged with murder and manslaughter.
Draper had not witnessed the fight between Perish and Dempsey, but he had seen Perish’s companion swinging a stick at an Islander in the bar where he was working. He gave police a statement and was called to give evidence at Perish’s trial. Police had opposed bail for Perish from fear witnesses might be intimidated. At the committal a security guard told the court, ‘I seen Perish kick him [Dempsey] once in the head’ and said it had been like kicking a football. The Crown told the court the guard had been offered a paid holiday not to give evidence, and other witnesses had been harassed. Despite this, bail was provided. At his trial in November and December 1998, Andrew Perish was found not guilty. The jury took an hour and a half to reach its decision, including lunch.
In 2001, Ian Draper was working as a cellarman at Mounties—Mount Pritchard Community Centre—the biggest club in the south-west. On Friday 3 August he finished a shift at 3.30 am and drove out of the car park in his white Ford. He had his own place but had been staying with his girlfriend, Odette O’Connell, who was concerned when he didn’t come home. After she called Mounties that afternoon and found he hadn’t turned up for work, she reported him missing. As far as police know, no sign of Draper has ever been seen since, although his car turned up six weeks later, parked on an area of grass across the road from the Rebels national headquarters at 124 Bringelly Road, Leppington. Inside the car was an item that had been placed in an unusual position that clearly indicated Draper’s identity. (Police are not prepared to be more specific than that.)
The disappearance was a total mystery. Draper was a gentle man, very close to his mother, Janet, and liked by everyone who knew him. Police looked into his background and could find only one unusual incident, but it was very strange. About two months before he disappeared, Odette had gone to his house and found him in a bad way, half naked, dopey, his speech slurred. She’d got him to Campbelltown Hospital, where tests revealed he’d suffered drug-induced ataxia, meaning he’d had his drink spiked the night before, when he’d been at the Minto Inn. All he claimed to remember was being helped into a car by a waitress, and being given a lift home. His reaction to the incident seemed to imply he remembered more about what had happened than he was saying. He refused to talk about it, became very nervous at being alone, and started staying at Odette’s house.
The detectives investigating Draper’s disappearance couldn’t find anything more about the incident at the Minto Inn. They talked to the OIC of the investigation into the death of Kai Dempsey and learned that a witness at Andrew Perish’s trial had been threatened beforehand, but that had not been Ian Draper. Still, giving evidence—even making a statemen
t—in a matter concerning a Rebel could be dangerous, even if it did not support an accusation. Simply cooperating with the police was disapproved of.
The investigation ran down and in the end the matter was referred to the coroner, who in 2004 issued an open finding: there was insufficient evidence to say what had happened to Ian Draper. Andrew Perish was not called to give evidence at the inquest.
In the meantime he had become an apparently prosperous local businessman, starting an agricultural produce business in 2000, which soon reached an annual turnover of $3 million. As well as the big store in Hill Street, there was an offsite bulk feed storage facility and a breeding herd of a hundred Limousin and Charolais cattle at a West Hoxton feed lot. In October 2001, Andrew’s business partner in the cattle project, his sister Colleen, told The Land newspaper their company, Pacific Pastoral, hoped to create a boutique beef market in the wealthy eastern suburbs.
•
The detectives asked Daley to wear a wire to the meetings with Andrew Perish to seek confirmation of his claim that he’d been asked to assist in the disposal of Terry Falconer’s body. They were also interested in other information, most urgently the location of Anthony Perish. The plan was that Daley would go into the store and have a conversation in which he would try to elicit such information from Andrew.
Police have refused to give details of the methodology used in the meetings, or about their use of electronic surveillance more generally. They don’t want criminals reading this book to learn how it’s done. But from publicly available information on the subject, it can be noted that recording these days does not require the elaborate arrangements still sometimes seen on television, with wires taped to the body. The technology is now much more compact.
Also unlike what we see on most television shows, a great deal of preparation and care goes into operations. A plan is prepared, indicating things such as the nature of the target, the likely level of danger, the names and phone numbers of all officers involved, the roles of the various teams, and the location of the nearest hospital. The aim is for the operation commander to have as good an idea as possible of just what is going on at all times. To assist in this, a surveillance team can be used to ensure the target is on the premises beforehand, observe the conversation from a distance (where this is possible) and make sure the person with the wire gets away from the premises safely afterwards without being followed. A briefing is held beforehand to ensure everyone—and there can be ten or more officers involved in one operation—understands the plan.
Bad Page 6