The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders

by I. J. Fenn

  Six months later, in May 1999, Kay Warren’s tone was more firm. She had still to hear from the police. There had been no response whatsoever to her requests.

  ‘This is my third letter requesting that some action be taken re: my son’s case.’ (It was, in fact, her fourth). It was now, she pointed out, 10 years since Ross had vanished. Her words were less placatory as she explained that there were loose ends to be tied, personal affairs to be settled: this wasn’t just a legal issue – it had practical implications, too. She made sure to draw attention to the family’s new address: there was no point in gifting an excuse for not having received a reply because it had been sent by some uncaring officer to the wrong house. And to make doubly certain that nothing could go wrong, she phoned to make sure her letter had arrived safely. She was told it had and it had been passed on to the Crime Manager at Rose Bay Local Area Command. Now, she believed, something was at last happening.

  ii

  The vast majority of the Australian law-abiding public has a straightforward attitude towards authority, an attitude based on respect born of exclusion. After all, it reasons, lawyers, doctors, teachers and policemen are in possession of an esoteric education beyond that which most of us attain: they are the keepers of great and arcane knowledge, a knowledge that endows power on those who possess it. They are the people we turn to when we need advice, when we’re in trouble: they are the people in whom we, as a society, place our trust. They are society’s protectors and should be shown all rightful deference.

  Kay Warren had been told her request had been passed on to the people who had the knowledge, the authority, to make things happen. After almost a year of letter writing those in power were about to do something.

  Or were they?

  Worongary

  QLD 4213

  7th December 1999

  The Crime Manager

  Rose Bay Police

  Rose Bay

  Sydney

  Re: ROSS BRADLEY WARREN

  Dear Sir,

  I am enclosing copies of earlier correspondence, the last of which was forwarded to your office.

  I would like to know why there has been no action on my request. I understood that a person was presumed legally dead after seven years.

  If there is a reason or something about my son’s disappearance that we have not been told, I would like to be informed. Sgt. Steve McCann who was investigating the case at the time told us after about three months there was nothing much more to be done and the case was put on file.

  Will someone please do something to finalise this matter to enable the family to put the matter to rest as ten years is far too long.

  Yours faithfully

  The Warren family was losing patience. But although the request might have seemed simple, the logistics of it were less so. The Ross Warren file had been archived, relevant notes and reports had long since been destroyed, investigating police had left the force and moved away, retired, died. Kay Warren’s letters had so far found their way into the ‘too hard’ basket.

  Until now. On 17 December 1999 the Crime Manager at Rose Bay Local Area Command (LAC), Detective Sergeant Warwick Brown, had received the correspondence and he replied to Kay Warren. He explained that the apparent delay in dealing with the matter was due largely to the ‘collation of many documents and enquiries from the various police units’ but that, now that it had been brought to his attention, the Warrens would be notified as soon as the enquiries were completed. Furthermore, in a PR move that should have been employed more than a year earlier, Detective Sergeant Brown made the following commitment to Kay Warren: ‘I can be contacted on the above phone number and … I undertake to keep you regularly informed of the progress of the enquiry.’ Efficient and compassionate, these few lines could have avoided many months of frustration and heartache had they been written earlier. Still, they were written now and a sense of relief flooded through Worongary as news of developments was awaited. Kay Warren replied after the New Year with a sense of relief, expressing her anticipation of an early outcome.

  But three months later no news had come. It seemed that, despite his promises, Brown, too, had failed the Warrens.

  On 26 April 2000 Kay Warren wrote to the NSW police for the sixth time. No longer overly polite, she made her points with bluntness: after almost 11 years since her son’s disappearance she still found it impossible to have a death certificate issued in his name; she failed to see how it could take so long to organise the necessary paperwork for a death certificate to be issued. And, she said, she realised ‘that to the Police he is just another statistic but he was a very important part of our lives and we want to put the matter to rest’.

  Bureaucracy, however slowly it may grind, grinds inexorably and, unbeknownst to the Warrens, the file marked ‘Ross Bradley Warren’ was, indeed, being collated and organised. And on 9 May 2000 it landed on the desk of Detective Sergeant Steve Page at Paddington Police Station for review and allocation. In the bald, official language of the police, Detective Sergeant Brown outlined the case in a few lines: a missing person whose next of kin wished a death certificate to be issued … the case already created to facilitate the formulation of the brief of evidence. Nothing too difficult, merely time consuming. It seemed, at last, as if a coroner’s brief was about to be prepared.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Simple Matter of Paper-Shuffling

  i

  In May 2000 Detective Sergeant Page had a history of getting things done. Determined to the point of single-mindedness, he had been instrumental in the solving of some of New South Wales’ highest-profile cases, patiently sifting evidence, building a case with infinite care, painstakingly manipulating funding that was often only grudgingly agreed to as senior officers preferred the political kudos attached to high numbers of easily solved cases over lesser numbers of serious and difficult cases: guaranteed quantity over only potential quality.[1]

  Described in certain areas of the press as ‘burly’, Page bore more than a passing resemblance to a heavy-set Kevin Spacey: high, intelligent forehead, bright eyes constantly seeing beyond their point of focus, rounded features that suggested a likeable quality within. But he also looked tough. Not ‘hard’ in the way that criminals are often labelled ‘hard’, but immovable, relentless. His reputation for being determined was well known; it was apparent in the way Steve Page inhabited his suit, in the way he carried himself and in the way he spoke with a soft but undeniable assurance.

  He was 35 years old.

  The file he now took charge of was unremarkable by case standards: a few letters, a handful of reports and statements, the request by Warwick Brown that a suitable brief be prepared for the coroner. All in all, pretty straightforward.

  Some of the reports were those of the officers who had been involved at the time of Ross Warren’s disappearance, reports written by Constable Robinson and Detective Bowditch outlining information received in relation to the case. Page read the correspondence from Kay Warren, noting the letter from Brown to Mrs Warren in December 1999 and her subsequent acknowledgement of that response. He read a report dated 1 June 1999 created by Senior Constable Hill of the Missing Persons Unit (in response to Kay Warren’s fourth letter) recommending that the case be reviewed ‘with a view to submitting a brief to the Coroner’. Despite the fact that it would have saved Kay Warren some considerable heartache had action been taken two years previously, it appeared that Hill’s recommendation had not been acted upon.

  As he turned over the occurrence pad entries, the running sheets and various other incident reports connected to the case, it became apparent that several errors had occurred in the conducting of the case: in one of Constable Robinson’s follow-up reports an anonymous tip had reached the police suggesting a connection between Ross Warren and one Anton Astone. They were rumoured to be living together in a homosexual relationship in South Australia. According to Robinson’s report, inquiries had been made of the Western Australia Police and the claim was proven false. But �
� South Australia … Western Australia? The error in the report was either sloppy police work or a deliberate confusing of the facts. Either way, Page was unhappy about it.

  Another occurrence pad entry again related to the Astone claim. Plain-clothes Constable Chock in Sydney had spoken to Constable Wicks of Wollongong on 21 July 1990 as Wicks had been the recipient of the anonymous phone call. The caller alleged that Warren had staged his own disappearance because he owed serious money in Sydney in connection with drugs. An intelligence report was attached to the occurrence pad entry but the report had been ‘clipped’ so the author was unknown and, therefore, the information couldn’t be verified. Again, sloppy work or deliberate obscuration?

  There were also a couple of other items that caused the detective concern: red herrings, certainly, but the kind of red herrings that appeared to have been set deliberately to hinder the course of inquiries at the time of Ross Warren’s disappearance.

  What had originally seemed a time consuming but simple enough task of summarising an already extant file now seemed something altogether different: some of this stuff had to be re-checked before it could be aired in open court.

  ii

  No-one within the Rose Bay LAC knew anything about the case. The events had happened 11 years previously and 11 years in policing sees a lot of water flow under a lot of bridges. If Page was going to make headway he would have to find a way through the obstacle course of fact, obfuscation and possible incompetence before him. He needed the perspective of someone who had been involved in 1989.

  Flicking through the documentation he found what he was looking for: a four-page occurrence pad entry (strangely, it had been created some days after the events of 22 July 1989) written by Detective Sergeant K Bowditch, who had conducted the original inquiry, and nominating a Detective Sharrock and Constables Ryan and Glascock as assisting the investigation. Constable Robinson was nominated as the officer in charge.

  Inquiries determined that Bowditch had left the NSW Police at the end of August 1996 and was now the managing director of a security firm in the city. Senior Detective Gordon Sharrock, however, was still in the force, at City Central LAC. On 11 May 2000 Page sent him the Warren file, noting that as he had been ‘involved in the preliminary enquiries it [was] most appropriate that he have carriage of this matter’. Even if Sharrock couldn’t remember all the details, he should still be able to put his hand on his notebooks from that time.

  iii

  At the conclusion of the original investigation Warren had become a statistic: one of the 3000 people who went missing each year in Sydney alone. Most of them turned up sooner or later, either red-faced and apologetic, having tired of whatever adventure lured them away in the first place, or dead, their bodies washed up on shorelines or discovered in obscure places, victims of suicide or accident. But in almost 11 years Ross Warren hadn’t turned up at all. Reported as a missing person in July 1989, Ross Warren’s disappearance bore few of the hallmarks of a suicide – the usually expected outcome of these situations if the absconder fails to materialise after a given time. Yet members of the police force continued to regard the case as exactly that, a suicide.

  The bare facts as Page knew them were simple enough: Ross Warren was last seen about 11pm on Friday, 21 July 1989 in the vicinity of Taylor Square after an evening with a friend in the gay bars on Oxford Street. His brown Nissan Pulsar was later found – close to Marks Lane, Tamarama – near a ‘gay beat’. Marks Lane is adjacent to the coastal walkway between Bondi and Tamarama. Keys to Warren’s vehicle were found at the base of a nearby cliff. So, maybe it was the obvious case of suicide that some people believed? Depressed, Warren could have driven to the Tamarama area, parked his car and thrown himself over the edge: clean and simple. An open and shut case.

  But Steve Page wasn’t convinced. In Kay Warren’s letters she had never, not once, even hinted at the possibility that her son might have ended his own life. There was no suggestion of moodiness or depression, no recent changes in his personality or behaviour. In her desperation to have the issue finalised it would have been understandable had she tried to speed up the investigation by pointing the police in the direction of what we might call, least resistance: if the police were to accept, at her instigation, that Ross Warren threw himself off the cliffs at Tamarama, they would be obliged to do no more than collate old notes and shuffle paper to effect an easy conclusion for the coroner. But Kay Warren hadn’t done that: she hadn’t offered the police that easy option. Why not, Steve Page wondered? Presumably because she didn’t believe it: she had no doubt that, whatever had happened to her son, he had not committed suicide. And after examining the old case papers, neither had Steve Page.

  The more he thought about it, the more Page was becoming intrigued by the fate of Ross Warren.

  iv

  On 14June, a month after he’d received it, Gordon Sharrock forwarded the Warren file to the sergeant assisting the coroner’s court with the following notation:

  I have checked my records concerning this investigation. I did not investigate this matter initially. The only knowledge I have of this matter is what is recorded in this file and information that I was told by retired Detective Sergeant K. J. Bowditch in the past 7 days.

  He informed me that in his opinion it was not a murder investigation and that he had forwarded a Brief of Evidence concerning this matter to the Coroner’s Court, Glebe in early 1990.

  Why, then, if he did not investigate the matter, Page asked later, was Sharrock listed as assisting in the original case? Another piece that didn’t seem to fit the puzzle.

  Sharrock also suggested that Constable Robinson, as the officer who took the initial report of Warren being missing, might be in a position to help. He also forwarded the file to the coroner’s court to instigate further searches for information. The coroner’s court, finding no trace of Bowditch’s brief of evidence from 1990, promptly returned the file to Detective Sergeant Page.

  Acting on Sharrock’s suggestion, Page forwarded the file to former constable, now sergeant, Daniel Robinson. As the officer on the front line, as it were, at the time in question, Robinson could be expected to have enough relevant information to enable Page to move some considerable way towards concluding the case. Robinson’s response, dated 24 July 2000, came as quite a surprise:

  My involvement in this matter is limited to receiving the initial missing person’s report whilst performing station duties at Paddington Police Station on the evening of 23/7/1989 and later causing inquiries to be made on behalf of detectives conducting the investigation. After taking and recording the initial report Paddington Detectives took carriage of the matter. My further involvement in the matter was specifically at the direction of investigating detectives who had carriage of the matter.

  I undertook no direct investigative function in relation to this matter and have had no further involvement other than providing information to investigating detectives or the missing persons detectives.

  Given that the primary investigative function in this matter has been undertaken by the Rose Bay LAC as far back as the initial disappearance of Mr. Warren and that the Rose Bay Crime Manager has been corresponding with the missing person’s mother since 7th December 1999, it appears prudent to me that this matter continue to be investigated by detectives from that LAC.

  Advice sought by me on the 13th July 2000 in relation to this matter from the Coronial Support Unit concurs with this view.

  Further to this, I have been non-operational for 8 years and do not have the investigative capacity to undertake such a coronial investigation. I also currently perform an administrative intelligence function and as such this precludes me from these duties.

  All bases covered.

  Behind the stiff and formal language of Robinson’s report there lies a distinct flavour of political buck-passing: he may well have been the first police officer to have been made aware that Ross Warren was missing, to have been officially involved, but apparently he was simply
the conduit for the information. The responsibility lay above and beyond a mere constable performing station duties. And with that view the Coronial Support Unit concurs.

  The file, once again, eventually came back to Steve Page at Rose Bay LAC.

  On 28 July Warwick Brown (by then Inspector Brown) returned the file to Page with the following comment:

  This file has been inspected by nearly every serving Police officer who might be able to have detailed personal knowledge of the matter. There has been no success in locating original statements and there appears to be no alternative to preparing a brief of evidence from the Rose Bay LAC.

  The original report was taken at Paddington. Paddington police dealt with all enquiries. Warren was last seen in Oxford Street at Taylor Square in the Surry Hills LAC and his car was located at Marks Park Bondi in the Eastern Suburbs LAC. However, extensive enquiries were dealt with by Paddington, with some assistance from the Homicide Squad.