Three years later, police received information that Dallas Fitzgerald, son of Felix Lyle, then president of the Bandidos, might have been the intended target of the shooting. He was interviewed on 11 August 2005, along with his father, and confirmed he’d been in JB’s at the time, with two friends named Paul and Mark, whose surnames he didn’t know. Fitzgerald was dismissive of the suggestion he’d been the intended target, for several reasons. He wasn’t Maori or an Islander, for a start, and the shooter had had plenty of time to make a correct identification: ‘I saw him walking up to the window and then he just stood there and then he selected [his target]. It was definitely intentional on that person because he was only less than three feet away from him, it was a hundred per cent that’s who his target was.’
Fitzgerald had left the scene immediately, and declined to be interviewed later. In the 2005 interview police asked if he’d had disagreements with anyone in the period before 8 October 2002.
‘No,’ Fitzgerald replied. ‘Not that I can recall, no.’
‘So, you haven’t been shot at all since then?’
‘No, not at all.’
He declined a police offer of protection.
The whole thing remained a puzzle, although it produced one thing of interest. DNA found on a glove in the burning van, and assumed to belong to the shooter, was matched using the national database to DNA recovered in similar circumstances at the time of the shooting of a man named Michael Davies on the Gold Coast in April 2002. There too DNA had been found on an item recovered from a vehicle burning nearby. In that case the shooter had managed to kill his victim, and with only one shot.
The Crime Commission looked hard at the two shootings, but couldn’t match the DNA to any known person. It was thrown off the trail for a long time by the fact that someone had called a Sydney crime family from a public phone box near Davies’ home around the time of the shooting. Naturally they assumed the family were involved in the killing, and looked into this with rising hope. But in the end it turned out to have been just a coincidence.
•
Not long after the success of the Bob Ljubic murder investigation, Jubelin’s personal and professional life took a downturn. His relationship with Pamela Young broke up. She’d found it a rich and intense period of her life, but very hard. She believes a good homicide detective needs to be fearless in all sorts of ways, able to triumph over criminals and reluctant witnesses and lazy staff and bosses who don’t want to provide necessary resources and personnel. To do this often requires you to put aside personal needs, and this was something Gary was good at, but his private life suffered. It happened with many detectives, but more than most with Gary, so that it destroyed many of his relationships, not just with partners but with people he worked with, including some of his bosses. At times he seemed to view the police hierarchy as having no value except to help him with cases. ‘He’s an extremist,’ Young recalls. ‘His dedication to work was unusual even by the standards of homicide. It was like an addiction.’
When her relationship with him ended, Young felt exhausted, as though he’d taken everything she had. And yet, she acknowledges, this single-minded intensity helped make him such a good detective: ‘If I was murdered, he’s the one I’d want to work on it.’
Jubelin acknowledges he was selfish during this period and should have paid more attention to his personal life. He knew he was lucky to be in a relationship with such an impressive woman and has great memories of their time together.
•
In February 2006, Jay Hart went on trial for the murder of Evelyn Greenup at Bowraville, as recommended by the coroner back in 2004. Jubelin, Jason Evers and Luke Rankin went up to Port Macquarie to support the witnesses, for whom simply attending a court was difficult enough even without the traumatic nature of this particular trial. Jubelin spoke to the community beforehand, explaining what it would entail. One of the people in the audience, a thirty-six-year-old Aboriginal woman, was not from Bowraville. She was from the other side of the country, and found herself intrigued by Jubelin, far more than she’d ever thought she’d be by a cop.
Tracy Eastman was born in 1970 in a place just about as far from the big cities of the south-east as you can get: the north-west corner of Australia. As a small child she lived on Tarmla Station, near Shark Bay, where her father was a station manager and her Aboriginal mother a shearers’ cook. Later the family moved to Useless Loop, where they lived in a shack with a dirt floor, finally settling in the mining town of Tom Price when Tracy was seven. At the age of fifteen she realised she wanted to be a psychologist, and eventually became the first Aboriginal person in Australia with a clinical psychology PhD. Frustrated by the limited opportunity to improve things by seeing individual patients, she decided to create intervention programs for whole communities, so that far more people might be helped. She began her own company and now works around Australia, training mental health workers and helping communities with her team. She has won awards for her research and her work, and her programs have been adopted by the Canadian government.
In 2004 she was asked to assist the Bowraville community, which was still devastated by the unsolved murders of thirteen years earlier. When Eastman first drove into Bowraville, she was struck by its physical beauty but shocked by the extent of trauma in the community, which still referred to time as being before the murders or after them. Eastman was involved in intense part-time work there and, as the trial approached, she returned to help the people cope with what was about to happen.
She heard that the detectives who had reinvestigated the murders were to meet with the victims’ relatives at the Bowraville Health Outpost. She went along and was impressed by Jubelin, who spoke clearly about the way the trial would proceed, and warned that information relevant to the other murders would not be admitted. The people obviously knew and respected this officer, something Eastman had never seen before from an Aboriginal community. She left the meeting curious about the white policeman who seemed to care.
The trial’s outcome was a bitter disappointment. When the jury delivered its verdict of not guilty, Jubelin was shattered. Normally he is a stoical person, but this, after all the hard work and the long years, was devastating. He didn’t rant and rave, but he went deep into himself and didn’t emerge for some time. He felt as if no one understood what had happened during the trial, and how wrong the verdict was. When he got back to Chatswood Police Station, well-meaning colleagues joked about whether he’d enjoyed his four-week holiday up the coast. Jubelin just laughed, unable to explain what he’d been through. The only colleague who understood was his friend and workmate Jason Evers, but for some reason they both still don’t understand, it took a year before they could even begin to talk to each other about it. Something about the Bowraville investigation had affected them deeply.
The only person he could talk to was Tracy Eastman, who’d returned to Perth. Over the next months they had a series of long phone conversations, and she soon realised he was an unusual man: most people tend to favour a justice ideology or a welfare one, but Gary was somewhere in the middle. And it was not just talk: she’d spoken with members of the victims’ families at Bowraville, and discovered how much they admired him. One of her transcontinental phone conversations with Gary went for two hours but seemed to last only five minutes. Eastman recalls wryly, ‘It was then we knew we were in trouble.’ They lived three thousand kilometres apart, and neither could move. It was not a good basis for a relationship—but they proceeded to embark on one anyway.
•
Glen Browne kept working on Liz Falconer. She claimed Terry had been saying she had informed on him, and said she was afraid for her own life. She had responded by telling people he was an informant, back in 2001, and realised he might get beaten up in jail as a result of what she was telling people. But she hadn’t wanted him killed. In fact, she thought he could look out for himself—he was a violent man who had broken various of her bones during their marriage. Finally, in 2005, Liz admit
ted she’d met Andrew Perish in 2001 at a pub near Penrith, and showed him the police running sheet that indicated Terry might be prepared to give information about the Rebels’ drug dealing. She’d been denying this for four years, so it was an important addition to the case.
Then, in late 2005, came another big break. An informant got in touch with Glen Browne and told him where Anthony Perish was hiding out. Given that police had been unable to locate Perish for fourteen years, it was tremendous news. Perish was living on a semi-rural block leased from the Department of Infrastructure and Planning at West Hoxton in Sydney’s south-west. He had turned it into a secure compound with three-metre-high walls, electrified fencing, twenty-seven security cameras and a room lined with steel plate inside the house. Apparently this was common knowledge among many of the crooks of western Sydney—a member of the Rebels was living next door—but none had mentioned it to police for fear of Perish.
Glen Browne decided that, rather than moving straight in, he would try to milk the situation first, finding out as much as he could about Perish before arresting him. To do this Tuno again enlisted the cooperation of the New South Wales Crime Commission.
•
The commission has the power to jail people if they refuse to provide information. It can also offer them the chance to provide ‘induced’ statements, meaning anything they say cannot be used against them in a court of law. (This is different from immunity, though, as the person can still be prosecuted if evidence of an offence is obtained from another souce later.) Most people respond to this arrangement, and only a few are jailed each year for refusing to say anything.
Perhaps the commission’s greatest strength lies in its analysts, who are highly trained and adept at working out how best to use its capacity to persuade suspects to talk. One common approach is to look at the people a suspect talks to on the phone, then use phone taps to find out more about these people, and then call them in for a hearing at which they will (hopefully) reveal information of value about the suspect. In this way the commission can build up information with which to challenge the suspect when he is finally summonsed to a hearing.
All this means the commission has a different focus to a lot of police work: it is interested in finding out what happened rather than gathering evidence for a prosecution (although the former will ideally lead to the latter), and spends far more time looking at, and talking to, people who are neither suspects nor witnesses. One of the reasons its operations are secret (compared, say, with the Independent Commission against Corruption) is because so many of those it talks to have committed no crime.
The commission can only work on jobs called ‘references’, referred to staff by the management committee, consisting of the police minister and commissioner, the commission’s own commissioner and the chairman of the Australian Crime Commission. Its resources are limited—it has about one hundred staff—so it selects jobs where it feels it can make the biggest difference. With murders these tend to be cases where the police have been baffled and a fresh perspective might be productive. It had already done quite a bit of work on a number of the murders covered by Tuno, and now amalgamated them in a reference called Hampton. In total, the amount of work the commission had done and was to do on these murders was extensive—there were over a hundred hearings, involving some seventy people (many were called more than once), and recordings were made of some 180,000 phone calls. Much of this was enormously helpful to Tuno.
Attempts were made to introduce electronic surveillance to Perish’s place at West Hoxton but, due to the high level of security, without success. So in September 2006, having ascertained Perish was at home, heavily armed police surrounded the property and rushed in, with a helicopter in the air, a truck to ram the fence, and motorcycles to get officers to all the buildings in the compound as quickly as possible. There’d been concerns about the outcome, and the possibility that Perish would choose to die in a hail of bullets. But in the end he surrendered quietly. It had been fourteen years since he’d committed the drug dealing offence for which he was now arrested.
The place was pretty clean—Perish must have had other locations available to him for illegal purposes. One thing police did find in the house was a large number of photos, some of police surveillance teams. It was a glimpse—a rare one—of the scope of his operation, and of his paranoia. Police also found camouflage gear in which Perish and his associates would roam the property and adjoining land late at night.
There was great excitement among the detectives after the arrest: finally, they’d found the ghost. Perish was put in jail, and the Crime Commission proceeded to haul in him, Andrew, and family and acquaintances to question them about Falconer’s murder. But in the end they got almost nothing. The brothers certainly had little to say. Anthony appeared cool in the witness box although his stutter, which always stops when he is angry, disappeared.
Looking at all the information the commission had gathered, its analyst working on the reference—who cannot be named—decided to return to the murders of the grandparents. The analyst formed the view, based partly on Andrew’s anguish at the time and the grief shown by him and Anthony in the recent hearings, that they hadn’t killed their grandparents. The boys had loved the old folk, perhaps more than they loved their father, and there had been no financial incentive to commit murder, especially for Anthony. He had pioneered a new way to make amphetamines and reputedly would later be the first person in Australia to make ice (crystal methamphetamine), according to one informed guess eventually raking in maybe ten or fifteen million dollars from selling drugs. But even back in 1993 he was doing well, and stood to gain nothing from his grandparents’ deaths.
The analyst considered the theory that Terry Falconer had committed the murders, and wondered why he would do such a thing. There was no personal motive, so presumably he would have been paid. This made sense because the commission knew Falconer had been a very violent man, far more so than was reflected in his criminal record. He might well be hired for a murder. But this left the question of who would have paid him. The police who’d conducted the first investigation had spent a lot of time looking at Albert, but he did not have any connections with criminals, including Terry Falconer. There was one person close to the family who might have known Falconer, and this was Justin Birk Hill, the lawyer who had turned up at the house the day the bodies of Anthony and Frances Perish were found. Both men had long associations with the Gypsy Jokers. But the question of motive remained. The analyst knew Colleen Perish had continued her relationship with Birk Hill for a very long time, right through the nineties (even when she was living with David Taylor) and into the next decade. Colleen had felt desperately sorry for her mother, and hated the way her father, Albert, behaved towards Thea. Was it possible Birk Hill had decided Thea’s situation could be improved in some way by killing the grandparents?
One problem with this hypothesis was that Thea had not inherited anything after the grandparents’ death—according to their will, Albert was a beneficiary but Thea received nothing. But poring over the evidence from the time of the deaths, the analyst then found something interesting: there had been calls from the grandparents’ home to Albert on 13 June. The analyst discovered that Anthony senior had called his son and asked him to come over to the house, but Albert had said he couldn’t go because he was too busy. Was it possible the killer had forced Anthony to make the call at gunpoint, hoping Albert would come over and also be shot? Maybe there’d already been several calls, with the earlier ones unsuccessful because Albert was out. This would explain one of the mysteries of the crime scene, the evidence police had found that the killer (or killers) had drunk beer and eaten food at the house. It had struck people as macabre that the killers would shoot the old couple and hang around drinking afterwards. But maybe they’d been waiting for Albert to answer his phone?
This theory would only make sense if the couple had been killed on 13 June. This was a possibility—although the coroner had settled on 14 June as the
most likely date of death, he’d acknowledged it might have occurred on one of the days either side of that.
The analyst discovered something else. According to the law of succession in New South Wales, if a number of people die in a related event, the oldest one is considered to have died first. So if Albert had gone to his parents’ house that day and been shot, even if forensics could not say who died first, he would be considered the last to die for legal purposes. This means he would have inherited his share of their estate before dying, which meant it would pass on to Thea. (Whereas if he’d died before them, the inheritence would have to go to his two sisters, with Thea getting nothing.) It seemed to the analyst that a lawyer’s mind might be detected behind the killings.
This elaborate theory explained some strange aspects of the case, but it contains some major problems. One is that, as we’ve already seen, the business was almost bankrupt, so if Albert had died, he’d have inherited almost nothing to pass on to Thea, who would have been pretty well penniless. But maybe the person who’d arranged for the grandparents to be killed hadn’t known this. And yet Justin Birk Hill presumably would have known this, as he’d been advising Anthony and Frances on their wills before they died.
Had Anthony and Andrew Perish had any suspicion of Birk Hill or Colleen? Presumably their having Falconer kidnapped rather than killed outright suggested a desire to question him about who had paid him to commit the murders. How had Birk Hill reacted to the abduction? He was living in Adelaide at the time, and the commission had no idea if he’d reacted at all. But they did find that a fortnight before his murder, Terry Falconer had been visited in jail by two Gypsy Jokers up from Adelaide. Maybe this was related to the fact that he’d been interviewed by officers reinvestigating the grandparents’ murders—maybe the Jokers had been sent to tell him to keep quiet.
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