Then the analyst looked at the movements of Colleen Perish, Birk Hill’s long-time girlfriend, and found she’d got on a plane within a fortnight of Terry Falconer’s abduction, and had lived overseas ever since, although she visited Sydney from time to time. Was this departure just a coincidence, or had she had something to do with her grandparents’ murder too? Intelligence emerged to suggest Colleen had let something slip at a family meeting soon after Falconer’s disappearance that might have caused Andrew to think she was involved.
Like everyone else who’d examined the deaths of Anthony and Frances Perish, the analyst was confused. Looked at logically, there was no explanation for the deaths. Looked at illogically—assuming the person or people who’d arranged them had had a flawed idea of the circumstances—you could come up with several theories. This was one of them.
I stress that there is absolutely no evidence that either Justin Birk Hill or Colleen Perish had anything to do with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish. However, as we shall see later, there is evidence that Anthony (junior) and Andrew Perish might have believed they had commissioned the murders, and that these had been carried out by Terry Falconer.
And then, after the excitement of Anthony’s arrest, things went wrong. In a great twist of fate, the police who’d investigated him back in 1992 were unavailable to give evidence and the prosecution couldn’t proceed: six months after he was arrested, the matter was effectively dropped. In March 2007 Perish was a free man again, still without a criminal record.
In another surprise, Andrew was arrested the following month, charged with manufacturing amphetamines. Police had discovered not one but two meth labs he was running. The main one was inside a locked forty-foot shipping container, itself inside a locked shed on a rural property at Theresa Park. It was a big set-up, complete with two hundred litres of chemicals and a pill press capable of producing five hundred ecstasy tablets a minute. During their investigation, police had managed to break into both shed and container, examine them, and depart without leaving any traces. Now they went in with the Chemical Operations Unit from the Drug Squad and shut the lab down.
They found another lab in the back of Andrew’s business premises, South Western Produce, Camden, where Daley had gone with a wire five years earlier. Also on the premises were three hidden guns, including a shortened pistol in a filing cabinet near the front counter.
Perish told the court he’d made the drugs in order to pay a tax bill he couldn’t afford because an employee had stolen a large amount of cash and stock from him. (The pistol must not have been much of a deterrent.) In fact his affairs had been rocky for some time. In July 2006 he’d been to the Federal Court to stop the winding up of his company because it hadn’t paid a tax bill of $85,945. On that occasion Perish said he’d been experiencing unspecified personal problems because his wife was pregnant, and had not been giving his full and proper attention to the management of his company’s affairs. He’d paid his bill in full, and the winding up was stopped.
Now the court was told his only recent conviction had been for stalking and intimidation of an unnamed victim earlier that year, for which he’d received a two-year good behaviour bond. He pleaded guilty to the drug manufacture charges and got a relatively short sentence—the police hadn’t actually found many drugs—of a minimum of three years and four months. The earliest he could be free was August 2010.
Meanwhile Gary Jubelin was still at Chatswood, recovering from the disappointment of the Bowraville trial. He had continued to stay in touch with the victims’ families and do what he could to help them. A significant achievement occurred in December 2006, when the state government, at the urging of the Bowraville community and its supporters, modified the previous ‘double jeopardy’ law, which held that someone could not be tried twice for the same murder. It would now be possible, if certain criteria were met, to retry Jay Hart for the killing of Clinton Speedy or Evelyn Greenup—or preferably both. This was important because one of the problems with the aftermath of the Bowraville murders had been the decision by a judge back in 1993 that Jay Hart could not be tried at the same time for both murders. This was disappointing as the circumstances were so similar that many believed a joint trial would have increased the chance of a conviction. Now, thirteen years later, there was a chance such a trial might finally be held. Jubelin wrote a report recommending that the police approach the Director of Public Prosecutions to ask the Court of Criminal Appeal to approve such a prosecution.
It still upset him not just that someone had killed three children, but also that the initial investigation had not been conducted well, and the rest of the justice system had—to his mind—proceeded to let down the children’s memories. Other police were not upset; in fact, some colleagues criticised him, if not to his face, for persisting with Bowraville. But Tracy Eastman was impressed, and their long-distance relationship continued to gather strength.
5
FEAR
There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.
One of Tuno’s distinguishing features was the number of witnesses the detectives eventually persuaded to give evidence, despite the danger this created for them and those near them. In each case the motive was different. For one person, as we’ve seen, it was redemption. For another, it was fear.
Before arresting Anthony Perish in September 2006, police had discovered he was in frequent contact with two men nicknamed Larabee and Redmond. They had no luck identifying Redmond, but did discover that Larabee (named after an agent in Get Smart) was David Taylor, former boyfriend of Colleen Perish. Photos they obtained of Taylor showed a clean-cut man who resembled the witnesses’ descriptions of one of those who’d abducted Terry Falconer. Naturally this interested Tuno a lot. The detectives knew from the descriptions that neither Anthony nor Andrew had been among the kidnappers, but until now they’d had no idea who any of the three were. In fact, they’d wondered if the men had been brought in from interstate to do the job. Now they thought Taylor might be one of Anthony’s crew.
But they were wrong. They investigated Taylor’s background and found he was clean, and had not abducted Terry Falconer. Yet he’d lived with Colleen Perish for many years and had a long relationship with the rest of the family, including Anthony, who continued to be in touch with him after leaving jail in March 2007. In fact, Perish moved into Taylor’s flat for three months.
Glen Browne and the analyst at the Crime Commission decided Taylor might be able to tell them more about the murder of the Perish grandparents. They summonsed him to appear at the commission where, on 2 November 2006, he told them very little. Over the next year they started talking to members of his family. The Perishes were upset when they learned about this and started applying pressure from their side. Anthony Perish sent two of his employees to Taylor’s workplace and his parents’ homes to intimidate him, and them. This had the opposite effect to that hoped for—Taylor came to believe his life was in danger, and agreed to become a police informant and disappear. The Crime Commission called him in again, on 21 November 2007, and later that month he provided police with a lengthy statement. It was another big break in the Tuno investigation. The following account of Taylor’s time with the Perishes is taken largely from the evidence he later gave in court, but it reflects information he gave to Tuno in late 2007.
Taylor met Colleen Perish in 1986 while studying accounting at TAFE. She was attractive, slim and about 152 centimetres tall, with long hair. (Taylor himself cannot be described here as he is living under a new identity at a secret location.) They began seeing each other and Colleen took him home to Leppington one night. Halfway through dinner, the police raided the house. That was his introduction to the Perish family. He must have found it interesting, because the friendship with Colleen persisted, even when he learned the brothers were involved in dealing with stolen property and selling drugs. Taylor became friendly with Andrew, but not Anthony. Before long he was living with Colleen.
On the evening of 15 Ju
ne 1993, Taylor was at home alone in Brighton-Le-Sands when Thea Perish rang and told him the grandparents had been killed. When Colleen came home he passed on the news and she broke down and cried. They drove over to Leppington and joined the other relatives, including Andrew, who Taylor recalled ‘running up the driveway, crying and screaming . . . He was very upset.’
Over the next few years, Taylor also became friendly with Anthony, socialising with him and sometimes Matthew Lawton. He spent a lot of time with the Perish family—Colleen has a strong personality, and was known as the family ‘Queen’—and there were many gatherings at which members discussed who might have killed the grandparents.
In 1998 Taylor received a call from a woman he knew saying she’d just heard Terry Falconer was the person who had killed Anthony and Frances Perish. It was hearsay at several removes: her husband had heard it from a man who’d heard it from his neighbour in Wells Street, Macquarie Fields (where Terry and Liz Falconer had their home). Taylor told Colleen, and a few nights later they visited Anthony, who was staying at the Sheraton on the Park in the city, the hotel of choice for many criminal visitors to Sydney. They told him what they’d heard but refused to disclose the source. This seems to have been the point from when Anthony began to brood on Falconer as his grandparents’ killer.
Taylor and Colleen’s relationship ended in 2000, but Taylor and Anthony Perish remained friends, and Taylor often visited Perish’s place in north Turramurra, where he’d moved after living for some years in a waterfront house in Hunters Hill.
They would also go out for meals together, and in March 2001 went to a restaurant in Double Bay, a meal Taylor later described in court. During the conversation, Perish asked Taylor if he would ask a relative who was a police officer for some items of uniform. Taylor said he would, although he didn’t, and later told Perish the answer had been no. He’d been afraid to reject the request directly—despite the friendship, Taylor retained a fear of Perish’s potential for violence, which sometimes manifested itself in a bizarre fashion. In one incident in 2005, Perish took Taylor to a shed in western Sydney and held him captive there for three days. Perish seems to have enjoyed his friendship with Taylor but at times become nervous at just how much Taylor knew about his criminal activites.
By then Perish was living at the property in West Hoxton. Once when Taylor visited, a man named Redmond was there too, a tough guy about Perish’s age who worked for him as a sort of enforcer. The three men discussed the Perish grandparents’ deaths. Perish had copies of documents from the inquest, and raised the possibility that his sister Colleen and the lawyer Justin Birk Hill had been involved.
Tuno and the Crime Commission were very interested when Taylor told them this in late 2007. It strengthened the possibility Colleen and Birk Hill might be the ‘missing link’ between Falconer and the Perish grandparents’ deaths, at least in Anthony’s imagination. But if Falconer had been kidnapped in order to be questioned about this, why was Anthony still in the dark in 2007?
Taylor said Perish and Redmond seemed to feed off each other’s capacity for violence. In 2006, when he was having a meal with them at the Lavender Blue Café in McMahons Point, Perish said to Redmond, ‘Should we tell him?’
‘Yes.’
‘We did it,’ he said to Taylor.
‘Did what?’
‘Killed Falconer.’
‘Bullshit. Who killed Falconer?’
‘Me and Undies [Andrew Perish], and Redmond was one of the kidnappers. We killed him at Redmond’s mother’s property up the coast.’
Taylor looked surprised, and then the conversation took an even stranger turn.
Perish said to Taylor, ‘What, you did it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Did you kill Falconer?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, going along with what he assumed was a macabre attempt at humour, ‘I killed Falconer.’
At which point Redmond produced a dictaphone and turned it on to record the conversation.
Taylor didn’t know if they were joking or not, but he felt shocked. He went outside to have a smoke, and when he returned Redmond asked him if he’d ever felt like killing himself after his separation from Colleen.
‘Yes, it went through my mind.’
Again Redmond produced the dictaphone and tried to tape Taylor’s words.
These were not normal men, yet Taylor continued to spend time with them. They possessed a weird fascination for him.
When Anthony Perish was arrested in September 2006, he applied for bail and Taylor was asked if Anthony could live with him if bail was granted. The hope was this might find favour with the magistrate because Taylor had no criminal record. Taylor reluctantly agreed, but for a long time bail was declined.
As previously noted, in late 2006, with the Crime Commission hearings in full swing, Taylor was called in and asked to tell them everything he knew about the Perishes. There were more hearings the next year.
Anthony Perish became increasingly concerned about what Taylor might be saying. In November 2007, Taylor, his mother and his girlfriend were having lunch at the St George Rowers Club at Wolli Creek when he received a call from Redmond, who said, ‘Mate, it’s Redmond.’
‘Oh, how ya going, buddy?’
‘How are ya, you bastard, what ya up to?’
‘Oh, not much.’
‘Mate, come down the Rowers.’
‘I’m at the Rowers.’
‘We’ll be there in one minute.’
A minute later, Redmond turned up with Anthony Perish. Taylor left the women to join them, and Perish (referring to the Crime Commission) said, ‘Who do they reckon it is [who killed Falconer]?’
‘You and Undies.’
‘Oh good. Get in the car. Tell your dad [for whom Taylor worked] we’ve got to go for a road trip and we’ll be back in a week.’
Taylor declined the offer. It was around this point that he seemed to realise he might be in need of police protection.
After Taylor told police he would give them everything he knew, he was taken up the coast and interviewed for two days. Then he changed his identity and moved. Soon after this his father was contacted by a stranger asking after his son’s whereabouts. The father refused to say, and presently there was an arson attack on his golf buggy in the carport next to his house, causing $9,000 damage.
Taylor was able to provide Tuno with valuable information about the Perishes in general, including—as we’ve seen—Anthony’s request for a police uniform before the Falconer murder, and the existence of Redmond and his role in the abduction. The general picture of Anthony he gave, based on his long acquaintance, was chilling, but it was these last details that were most useful in building the case against Terry Falconer’s killers.
At first glance, the main advances by Tuno had had little to do with the work of the police themselves; instead they had involved the decision by Ted Daley to come forward in 2002, and the decision by the unnamed informant to tell the detectives where Anthony Perish was living in 2006. But both those decisions would almost certainly not have been made without the police activity. Daley was uncertain of his future, but if Glen Browne and Luke Rankin had not called on him that day in September 2002, he might never have talked to the police. And the informant who gave up Anthony Perish’s address in 2006 took that risk because he was aware of Browne’s enduring interest in the case. The detectives of Tuno had hung on by their fingernails in the hope—maybe the faint hope—that something would come up. And it had. And, of course, they’d made the best of every break they’d got, spending a year convincing Tod Daley to sign a statement, conducting extensive surveillance on Anthony Perish once they learned his location, and identifying David Taylor as a potential witness and persuading him to come over. These achievements came from extraordinary skill, patience, and persistence.
•
Gary Jubelin had been constantly applying to return from his position as Chatswood crime manager to State Crime Command and detective work. In July 2007 h
e was successful, but didn’t get a job in homicide. Instead, he went to the Gangs Squad.
By now Glen Browne had developed a brief (meaning a formal collection of evidence), which was sent to police Legal Services for an initial opinion on whether there was enough to charge the Perish brothers with conspiracy to murder Falconer.
As part of the brief, it was assumed Tod Daley would still be prepared to give evidence, but now this had to be confirmed. He had been living happily in a place far away for almost four years. He must have thought Terry Falconer’s murderers had escaped justice, and the long statement he’d provided Tuno had been consigned to a secure archive somewhere, so he was deeply unimpressed when Glen Browne and Gary Jubelin arrived at his home in September 2007. (Jubelin was there because of his previous involvement with Daley.) The detectives felt bad about asking him to give evidence after all this time, and wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d knocked them back. Several of their bosses had always said this would happen. Daley was upset at first—in fact he had the shits: it had been five years since he’d offered to help the police, and in the meantime he’d stayed out of trouble and built a new life for himself far from Sydney. But Daley was strong. He thought about it overnight, and when Jubelin and Browne returned to his house the next morning, he said, ‘I’ll finish what I started.’ It was an impressive decision: he had actually lost a lot of money through dealing with the police, sacrificing assets and having to move out of Sydney with minimal assistance. He owed them nothing legally and little enough morally, but he agreed to help, partly, Jubelin thought, because he respected the fact that Tuno had done what it had promised all those years ago, and was about to bring the Perishes to trial.
Things seemed to be picking up, but there was another blow in October 2007: Browne learned it was now his turn to rotate out of homicide. After some argument, he was told he could take Tuno with him if he could find another squad to accept it. This he decided to do, sensing that despite the progress that had been made, Tuno might still die if he left it behind. The bosses were still dubious about whether Daley and Taylor would come through in court, with one manager telling Browne he’d just been ‘chasing rabbits down holes’ for years and would never solve the murder of Terry Falconer.
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