by I. J. Fenn
Rose Bay detectives should now create the required brief for presentation to the Coroner. In view of the fact that only one (recent) original statement is attached a conference should be sought with officers of the State Coroner’s Support Unit to ascertain whether or not witnesses have to be re-interviewed on the basic known facts, or whether the third-person police documents will suffice…
Mrs. Warren, the mother of the missing person, should be informed as to the state of the investigation at this time.
Not such a simple matter of paper-shuffling after all. Steve Page saw that the Warren case was, to use his own word, ‘complex’. He assumed the responsibility of case officer himself and set about deconstructing the file.
v
Less than a month later Page submitted a ‘Report of (Suspected) Death’ to the coroner. Against the entry, ‘Suspicious Circumstances:’ he had entered ‘Yes’.
What had persuaded Steve Page that not only was Ross Warren dead, he had possibly died as a result of foul play? The answer was quite simple: Page had actually joined the dots of the case to reveal a much bigger picture than that of just another missing person. And this picture was ugly.
[1] This last would torment Steve Page later in his quest for a ‘result’ in the Warren case: one chief inspector removed resources from Page’s investigation to redeploy them against a certain nightclub owner who was transgressing the licensing laws. Several quick arrests – even for relatively minor offences – looked better on the inspector’s CV than a possible single arrest for murder after a lengthy investigation.
CHAPTER THREE
What Happened to Ross Warren?
i
Ross Bradley Warren was a newsreader for WIN4 TV in Wollongong when he disappeared in July 1989. He had driven to Sydney for the weekend, as he regularly did, arriving at a friend’s house in Albert Street, Redfern sometime around 7pm on Friday, 21 July. Later that evening he drove to Taylor Square where he met another friend with whom he visited various known gay bars on Oxford Street. Born on 26 October 1964 Ross Warren was 24 years old and homosexual.
As is still the case today, Gilligan’s, on the corner of Taylor Square and Oxford Street, the Vault, in the Exchange Hotel, and the Midnight Shift were de rigueur if you were part of the gay scene in 1989: if you weren’t there, you were nowhere. Ross Warren and his friend were there. Until about 2.30am on Saturday, 22 July when they parted company. (Another anomaly: Page had earlier gleaned from the case papers that Warren had last been seen at around 11pm on the Friday evening. This was, in fact, around the time when he left Albert Street to meet his friend in Oxford Street. He was actually last seen sometime around 2.30am on the Saturday.) Ross’s friend watched him climb into his brown Nissan Pulsar and (inexplicably, given that he was supposedly staying in Redfern) drive away to the east along Oxford Street instead of taking the more direct route down Bourke Street. (The traffic flow system around Taylor Square has since been considerably modified and you can no longer drive south down Bourke Street.) He never returned to Albert Street.
Later that weekend, inside number 14 Albert Street, Ross’s friend, Craig Ellis, waited in vain for Ross to appear. When he didn’t, Ellis became worried: Ross, he thought, must be in trouble.
On Sunday, 23 July Craig rang WIN TV. Had Ross turned up for work? He hadn’t. Nor had he called in sick. With another friend, Paul Saucis, Ellis reported Warren missing at Paddington Police Station at 8.15pm before deciding to conduct their own search.
With over 3 million people living in an area of more than 1500 sq km it would seem an impossible task just to know where to begin. Ellis, however, knew Ross Warren well. He and Paul went to the Marks Park area between Bondi and Tamarama, where they soon located Ross’s car outside number 24 Kenneth Street.[1] It was unlocked, there were items of clothing inside, both on the back seat and on the floor, and it was undamaged. So, where was its owner? Neither Ellis nor Saucis knew anyone who lived in the vicinity and Ellis felt sure Ross didn’t either. Having already expressed his concern for Ross’s safety to Constable Robinson, Ellis now began to have serious forebodings about his friend. The area, the social climate at the time regarding homosexuality, the time of day Warren had last been seen … All these elements conspired to produce a feeling of dread in the pit of Craig Ellis’s stomach, a feeling that, in 2000, Steve Page understood perfectly well as Ross Bradley Warren still remained unlocated.
ii
Despite having access to the original statements of Ellis et al, Page decided to reinterview the three friends of Warren who’d been the last three people known to have seen him: Craig Ellis, Paul Saucis and Philip Rossini, the friend Warren had been drinking with the night he vanished.
• • •
On 25September 2000 Craig Ellis made a statement to Detective Sergeant Page at Paddington Police Station. Ellis outlined his friendship with Warren, explaining that they’d had an intimate relationship for about two months after meeting at Marks Park sometime around Easter 1988, afterwards maintaining a close friendship. They spoke on a weekly basis and Warren stayed with him when Warren came to Sydney. Warren, he said, was warm and kind and well spoken, a little conservative and reserved. No, he said, Warren was never prone to mood swings, nor was he depressed, although, Ellis admitted, he wasn’t totally happy about living in Wollongong: Warren was ambitious and wanted to move to Sydney to further his career.
When Warren arrived in Redfern on 21 July 1989 he was in good spirits, urging Craig and Paul Saucis to go with him later that evening for a few drinks. They declined as they knew Warren was meeting a work colleague. They agreed, however, to go together to see a film the following evening.
Warren left Albert Street around 11pm to go to the Oxford Hotel where he was to meet Philip, but was expected to return and spend the rest of the weekend in Redfern. When he didn’t come back, Craig and Paul became concerned, reporting him as missing on the Sunday evening before going to look for him themselves. Even 11 years later Craig Ellis could recall every detail of finding Ross Warren’s Nissan near the corner of Kenneth Street and Marks Lane: the fact that Ross’s wallet was on the front passenger seat next to McDonald’s detritus, that it was dark but mild, that the car was parked on the ocean side of the street.
Ellis and Saucis went back to Paddington Police Station and told Constable Robinson what they’d found. In return, they were told about a body pulled from the sea at Bondi that morning. The body of a young man … Had Warren gone over the edge? Fallen from the cliffs as he walked along to the coastal walkway? It was inconceivable that it could be anything other than a horrible accident … Except that Craig Ellis knew of at least one gay man who had been bashed in the Marks Park area within the last few months and he had heard of others. Surely…
They were taken to Glebe morgue to identify the body but after speaking to a police officer it was decided that the body was not that of Ross Warren and it wasn’t necessary to view the remains.[2]
On the following morning Ellis and Saucis returned to the area and, after a fruitless door knock, during which they spoke in vain to local residents, they continued their search. Finding nothing in either Marks Park itself or along the ‘ocean track’ – the coastal walkway – Craig made his way to the rock shelf below the cliff. The surface was wet from recent tides, small pools of water lay in the pockets eroded over aeons by wind and sea and rain. Out towards the horizon waves rolled landward, occasional whitecaps visible on their crests. Staying close to the cliff face, Ellis picked his way over the rocks, expecting nothing but looking anyway. What could there possibly be to find? Still, he had to do something, had to at least feel as if he was making a difference. He looked into the rockpools and kicked over stones. He approached a section of cliff face honeycombed by the elements, lace-patterns poked into the striated sandstone like a huge moth-eaten theatre backdrop and it was here that he made a chilling discovery: Ross Warren’s keys had been placed in a recess in the cliff face, a kind of honeycomb formation created by wind and wave acti
on. Craig Ellis has always maintained that the keys appeared to have been ‘placed’ where they were found rather than having fallen or been thrown there, thereby posing the question: why would Ross Warren place his keys in a position of apparent safekeeping at the base of the cliffs in the middle of the night?
Ellis stayed with the keys while his friend Paul went away to contact police.
• • •
Later on 25September 2000 Detective Page reinterviewed Paul Saucis, also at Paddington Police Station. In essence, he corroborated Ellis’s statement, although he added that Constable Robinson explained that no action would be taken when they first reported Warren missing: Warren was a) an adult and was free to come and go as he pleased and b) hadn’t been missing long enough – in police terms – to warrant concern.
Neither Ellis nor Saucis believed that Ross Warren would take his own life and both asserted that they had not seen or heard from him during the intervening period.
A week or so later, on 4 October 2000, Detective Page received a statement via email from Warren’s friend Philip Rossini, with whom he had been drinking the night he disappeared. Warren, he said, was in a good mood. They talked about work, about Sydney, about forthcoming events. It was the first time they had been out socially and, despite stating that they met at around 11.45pm and spent ‘a few hours together’, Rossini claimed to have left sometime around midnight as he had to work the next day.[3] As he waited at traffic lights at Taylor Square he watched Warren pull out of his parking spot in front of the court house and drive east along Oxford Street. He never saw Ross Warren again.
iii
Armed with the statements of Ellis, Saucis and Rossini (who had moved from WIN4 TV in Wollongong shortly after Warren’s disappearance, having accepted a job in New York where he currently works as a sound recordist) Steve Page realised he needed more contemporary information regarding the topography of Marks Park and the nature of the ‘beat’ there.[4] In researching both he was to come across a culture of gay-hate crime far greater in depth than anyone knew.
Marks Park has changed little since 1989. Situated on a headland between Bondi Beach and Tamarama Beach it is a scruffy patch of litter-strewn open ground with a few wind-blown trees here and there, and an eastern border of scrubby vegetation. Empty soft-drink bottles, VB cans, used condoms and cigarette packets lie everywhere, evidence of its continued nefarious usage. It does, however, offer fantastic views over Bondi and the ocean, attracting artists of all calibre who spend most of the daylight hours sketching or water-colouring images of Campbell Parade and North Bondi. The park itself is in an elevated position with several sets of steps leading down to a coastal walkway that runs beneath the vegetation border, around the rock face. In 1989 this walkway was more ‘rural’ than it is today, having fewer safety rails and a less ‘constructed’ feel about it. Today, the walkway is an established tourist route and has been gentrified accordingly: the path is wider, the access is easier. Marks Lane, with a mixture of detached houses and blocks of units overlooking the otherwise secluded space, runs along the western edge of the park.
At the time when Ross Warren visited Marks Park in the late ’80s, it was known (and had been for decades) as a predominantly night-time beat used by both gay and straight men looking for a homosexual liaison.[5] A quiet night – or an early night (before midnight) – might find a dozen or so men cruising the park, especially at weekends. When it was busy, Marks Park would host up to a hundred gay males seeking casual sex. Other beats cater to different tastes: there are beats for transvestites, S&M, groups and so on. And not just in the decadent city. Country beats are often more extreme, more populated, because attitudes in the country tend to change more slowly than those in the metropolis and people involved in fringe activities are driven to greater secrecy and greater degrees of desperation.
But if the beats attracted those shunned by mainstream society because of their sexual preferences, they also attracted the predators, those who targeted those outsiders who were regarded as being sexually deviant. Bashings were rife.
In December 1999 Jenny Mouzos and Sue Thompson[6] presented a paper to the Hate Crime Conference at the University of Sydney. Steve Page read the results of their research with both interest and horror. Some of the main findings demonstrated that, compared to other male homicides, those that are gay-related tend to be:
~ Incidents which are more likely to involve multiple offenders and highly unlikely to involve multiple victims;
~ Where the victim is likely to be older than the offender(s);
~ Where the victim is more likely to be brutally beaten to death or repeatedly stabbed to death;
~ Where the victim is more likely to be killed by a stranger;
~ Where the gay-hate homicide offender is likely to be aged between 15 and 17 years;
~ Where victims and offenders are more likely to be Caucasian;
~ Where victims are more likely to be employed whilst offenders are more likely to be unemployed.
The writing of the paper had been prompted by the murders of two homosexual men in Sydney: one, in January 1990, by eight school-age boys from an inner-city public school and a local Catholic boys’ school; the other, the murder of a teacher employed (coincidentally, as it transpired) at the public school in question. In response to these murders the NSW Police Gay/Lesbian Client Consultation Unit started to gather data relating to gay-related homicides.
Part of Mouzos and Thompson’s research uncovered a tendency by some courts to endorse what became known as a ‘homosexual advance defence’ (HAD) in which the offender had claimed that the victim made homosexual advances that had triggered a sense of escalating violence because of the inherent challenge to the offender’s masculinity. This violence eventually culminated in death. Other research suggested that the motivation for these murders resided in the offenders attempting to build their sense of self-esteem at the expense of another.
Mouzos and Thompson’s paper is a masterpiece of clinical analysis, stark and unemotional, despite including detailed information on the nature of gay hate-related homicide. In a subsection on Victim Comparison, for instance, they report their findings regarding the brutality of the crimes in question, noting that in one case a gay victim had been stabbed 75 times in the chest, and in another, the victim had been stabbed 35 times in the neck. Other cases over the years, they claim, have involved mutilation and dismemberment.
For such research to have been undertaken in the first place, and such a paper to have been presented, the perceived problem of gay hate-related homicide – and gay hate-related crime in general – was obviously significant. But did it have any bearing on the Warren case? Had Ross Warren fallen victim to one of these apparently random acts of violence perpetrated against homosexuals across Sydney in the late ’80s? Detective Page turned to the work of Detective Sergeant McCann, the homicide detective who’d investigated the case in the ’90s. Maybe in his archived files there could be a clue to help solve the mystery. Or at least to point him in the right direction. But first, why not speak to McCann in person, to see what he could remember from that time?
Brief inquiries by Page ascertained that DS McCann was on extended sick leave as a result of stress and a phone call to him ended with McCann regretfully declining to make a statement that, he believed, could jeopardise the speed of his recovery.[7] Nevertheless, he recalled that his initial investigation into the Warren case led him to a number of other gay-hate cases at around the same time. These were: the murder of Richard Johnson on 24 January 1990 in Alexandria (one of the cases to prompt Mouzos and Thompson’s research paper), the murder of Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn, a Thai national, on 27 July 1990 at Marks Park, and the suspicious death of John Russell on 11 November 1989, also at Marks Park. The Johnson and Rattanajurathaporn murders had been solved, largely by McCann, who, in the case of Johnson, ‘fronted’ the suspected killers alone as they played basketball together, identified the one he thought would be the weakest link and pursued hi
m relentlessly until he cracked, giving up the other seven in his confession.
In addition, McCann stated, there were other crimes against homosexuals at that time which, although they didn’t result in the death of the victim, were certainly part of the broader social picture of that era.
Steve Page was beginning to sense the true scale of the Warren investigation as he spoke to McCann, beginning to see the endemic nature of the problem. This wasn’t some isolated incident in which the victim – Ross Warren – had been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, this was one episode among many, one instance of widespread calculated victimisation. Page found McCann’s archived reports and started to read.
[1] Constable Robinson’s original report states that the vehicle was found outside 24 Fenneck Street, adjacent to Fletcher Street, Bondi. As Detective Sergeant Page was to point out a decade later, there is/was no Fenneck Street in Bondi, and Kenneth Street – the actual location – is not adjacent to Fletcher Street.
[2] The body was actually that of a genuine suicide, Clayton Beackon, and had been recovered from the water beneath Ben Buckler Point, North Bondi.
[3] In an earlier statement to Detective Sergeant McCann of the Homicide Squad Philip gave a more detailed version of events. He and Warren met at Gilligan’s around 11.45pm, drank mineral water and spoke to no-one. He recalled the barman who was ‘large with a big earring’ and who was probably an Islander and he remembered that Warren had said, ‘I hope I don’t run into Ken.’ Philip believed Ken to be a Maori. When Gilligan’s closed they moved on to the Vault where they stayed for 30 minutes or so. Warren spoke to ‘several men’ who he introduced (but whose names Philip instantly forgot). After the Vault they went to the Midnight Shift, staying for approximately an hour, drinking iced water. Warren spoke to five men during this time but Philip couldn’t recall their names. They left the ‘Shift’ sometime around 2am with Warren unaffected by alcohol and in good spirits. This statement was made to Sergeant McCann on 26 July 1989, four days after Warren vanished. One potentially telling fact offered up by Philip suggested that in a general conversation two weeks previously, Warren had claimed to be so depressed that he said, ‘I could slash my wrists.’ Afterwards, however, he laughed and Philip assumed the outburst was no more than histrionics.