The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders

by I. J. Fenn

  In relation to the driver’s licence, inquiries showed that it expired in May 1990 and had not been renewed. Warren’s last transaction with the RTA had been in 1987: it was unlikely that he was in hiding unless he had changed his name.

  Page next turned his attention to the piece of paper which he presumed had been handwritten by Warren. Inquiries with Telstra confirmed that subscriber records were not available for that service, so Page contacted the owner of the property at 91 Ruthven Street. She had owned the house since 1986 she said, but had no knowledge of anyone called Derrick and no records to consult because in 1989 the property was being managed for her. The managing agent was spoken to in an effort to identify Derrick, but to no avail: records of tenancies were no longer available for so long ago.[1]

  ii

  In addition to those items found in Warren’s wallet, the Information and Intelligence Centre also provided Page with other documents. Among these was a notation, seemingly written by an investigator, containing the name of one of Warren’s colleagues at WIN4 TV. Detective Nuttall contacted the colleague in question and obtained a formal statement at Wollongong Police Station in November 2001.

  The journalist in question had known Ross Warren for about a year, more as a colleague than as a friend. In fact, he said, he didn’t think he’d ever associated with Warren outside work. However, he could recall a conversation they’d had early one morning. (It must have been morning, he said, because Ross presented the early weather and snow reports). During the course of the conversation he’d asked Ross what he would be doing that weekend and Ross had said he would be ‘keeping a low profile’ as he’d been caught in a sexual relationship with ‘a lady’. Apparently, the lady was already in a relationship with another man but had had sex with Ross in Liverpool. This conversation occurred, the journalist said, no more than two weeks before Warren disappeared and the only reason he remembered it was because, after Ross had disappeared, there were rumours at work about him being gay. The story of the lady in Liverpool and the suggestion he was gay didn’t gel, so the conversation stuck.

  It is a little surprising that the colleague had no intimation that Ross Warren was gay because he had previously declared his homosexuality to his boss at the TV station, as well as to others. The rumours alluded to by the colleague were, in fact, statements of truth. Nevertheless, it was accepted that Warren didn’t flaunt his homosexuality because he believed it might prejudice some people against him, a prejudice that could thwart his ambitions inside television.

  iii

  If the Liverpool ‘lady’ was nothing more than a red herring, it certainly wasn’t the first to come to Operation Taradale’s attention.

  In 1994 then Detective Sergeant Mark Murdoch, attached to the Homicide Unit at the Major Crime Squad, received a call from Rowan Legge, a friend of Ross Warren, claiming to have information relevant to the inquiry. On 1June 1994 Murdoch spoke to Legge in his Balmain home and was told that Legge and Warren were good friends who moved in the same social circle. About three months prior to Warren’s disappearance, Legge had introduced Warren to another homosexual friend, who worked as a flight attendant with Qantas, and the two new acquaintances soon became lovers. However, at the time of his disappearance, Legge alleged, Warren was in the process of ending the relationship, a development heatedly opposed by the other man. The flight attendant, Legge asserted, was a compulsive liar, an unsavoury character who Warren would be better off without. After all, why would Ross Warren want to associate with a nasty and conniving person like that? (Legge seemed to have forgotten that it had been he who introduced the two men in the first place).

  Furthermore, according to Rowan Legge, although he initially presented himself to his friends as ‘a genuine type of person’, the flight attendant was continually forced to move from one group of friends to another as he quickly became alienated when it was discovered what he was really like. In case of point, Legge’s immediate circle had long since ceased to associate with the man as they believed him to be totally untrustworthy and malicious.

  And then, subsequent to Warren’s disappearance, the flight attendant had become involved with a student named James. Some time later he, the flight attendant, had told friends that James had been murdered in Hawaii either on Christmas Day 1993 or New Year’s Day 1994 (Legge knew that it had happened on a specific public holiday but couldn’t remember which one). It had been the flight attendant who arranged for the body to be transported back to James’s family in Ohio. Since that time, however, Legge had not only seen James in Sydney, but understood that he was still in a relationship with the flight attendant.

  In terms of the Warren investigation, Legge admitted to knowing that Marks Park was a beat, but claimed that Warren told him that he no longer frequented the beat scene. This may have been untrue, Legge believed, as Warren might just have been covering his embarrassment at his continued attraction to such venues.

  Legge believed that it was possible that Warren might have committed suicide but thought that, had this been the case, he wouldn’t have done it in an area that would have highlighted the fact of his homosexuality. Warren, he said, was a very private person who didn’t advertise his sexuality. In fact, Legge said, he didn’t think that Warren’s family knew he was homosexual, he kept it so much to himself.[2] However, while suicide was a possibility, Legge believed that the flight attendant had a significant motive for murdering Warren: the ending of the relationship was much against his own desires and he had let the strength of his feelings about it be known. Besides, his reaction, when police started to ‘snoop around’ after Warren had disappeared, according to Legge, had been ‘so understated’, as though he knew something no-one else knew. Then, when he saw that he could be interviewed in connection with the case, he became ‘quite panicky’. Therefore, Legge concluded, the flight attendant might have been responsible for Warren’s disappearance.

  Sergeant Murdoch diligently followed up the information he’d been given by Rowan Legge, first checking with Qantas to make sure the flight attendant was who Legge claimed him to be. He was. And he’d flown out of Sydney as a member of the crew on a flight through Asia on the morning of 20 July 1989, returning to Australia on 24July.

  iv

  If Rowan Legge genuinely – though mistakenly – believed the flight attendant to have some involvement in Ross Warren’s situation, there was no confusion about the subject of Elizabeth Fitzpatrick’s statement to Constable Ryan on 5October. Here was a red herring that had been very deliberately tossed to the investigating police in 1989.

  Fitzpatrick was working on the switchboard at SBS TV station where she’d been employed for three months or so, when she took a call from a male purporting to be Ross Warren. The conversation, according to the receptionist went something like this:

  Male Caller: Hi, this is Ross Warren. I just want to let you know that I’m alive, and to say hello to all my friends at WIN TV.

  Fitzpatrick: Why are you calling here?

  Male Caller: To let you know that everything that was published about me was rubbish.

  Fitzpatrick: Where are you calling from?

  Male Caller: Central Australia.

  Fitzpatrick: What are you doing there?

  The caller didn’t answer Fitzpatrick’s question, but repeated that everything that had been printed about him was rubbish. And then hung up.

  Fitzpatrick left the line open and called Channel 4 and the police in the hope that the call could be traced. The caller, she said, had sounded sober, articulate and in his mid-20s. There had been no background noise.

  There are a number of possibilities to be considered in connection to this call. Firstly, if we assume that the caller was, indeed, Ross Warren (and the articulation, estimated age and polite delivery support this assumption) why call SBS and not WIN4? Hardly a mistake he would be expected to make. And why, if he wanted to stage his own disappearance, make any contact at all? Surely, to disappear effectively, nothing less than total silence would wor
k. Besides which, if Ross Warren had staged his own vanishing act but wanted to say ‘hi’ to anyone, it seems most likely that he would have spoken to his family rather than his workplace, as everyone agreed that he and his family were close.

  The second possibility is that the caller was no more than a prankster, some joker who thought it would be amusing to confuse police by pretending to be the missing man who had occupied so many column inches in the press. This could explain the call being made to the wrong TV station. It could even have been the flight attendant if he was as malicious as Rowan Legge had claimed. But the police didn’t believe the call had been made by a joker. It just didn’t quite work: if someone wanted to create mischief they would have offered more than the few lines reported by Fitzpatrick, more for the police to work with.

  Which leaves the third possibility: that the call was supposed to create a diversion, taking the police away from a more accurate line of inquiry. If Ross Warren had been murdered, for instance, a call from him would shift the focus of the inquiry away from the fact: there would be no point in pursuing a murder inquiry if the so-called victim wasn’t dead.

  No official conclusions were reached by the police: the call could have been made for any one of the above reasons. Privately, however, given that Detective Sergeant McCann of the Homicide Squad had become involved with the case, the third possibility seemed to be given the most credence, despite the continued efforts of some members of the public intent on causing trouble.

  One such person was Arthur Pillon.

  v

  In March 1991 Constable Keith Rees was on duty at Warilla Police Station when Arthur Pillon walked in. Rees knew Pillon. He was the proprietor of a local security firm, although Rees and other officers at the station, all of whom knew Pillon well, believed he should never have been issued with a security licence: Arthur Pillon, in police eyes, was ‘of doubtful character’ and had had more than one criminal charge laid against him (the most serious – a sexual offence – eventually being withdrawn when no evidence was offered).

  Pillon’s reason for being at the station on this occasion, however, was to offer information.

  About three weeks earlier, he said, he’d been making a payroll run to a ‘homosexual strip joint’ in the Bondi area when he saw someone he recognised. He’d approached the man saying, ‘I know you. You’re the fella off Channel 4 who’s gone missing.’ The man replied, ‘Get lost. I’ve got my own reasons for disappearing. Now get out.’

  The man, Pillon said, was Ross Warren.

  As with the Rowan Legge information, Pillon’s story was crosschecked for verification and it was found that, according to the local Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officers, there was no known homosexual ‘strip joint’ in the Bondi area. Considering this, together with Pillon’s reputation for ‘big noting’ himself, Rees and the police discounted his story as being nothing more than an attempt to put himself in the limelight.

  In July 2001, however, following his usual diligent approach to the investigation, Steve Page sent a constable to Pillon’s Warilla home to take a statement from his widow, Margaret.

  Margaret Pillon, at 68, was in full possession of her faculties and gave a lucid and comprehensive statement in which she explained that her husband had died in June 1993. Before his death, Arthur Pillon had been responsible for finding new clients for the security company (which was owned by their son, even though Pillon was known as the proprietor) and for going to Sydney on a weekly basis to perform payroll and banking services for several companies. Margaret Pillon always accompanied her husband, she said, because Arthur had had a heart bypass operation in 1990 and she would help him carry the heavy moneybags. Both she and her husband had security licences. She could recall visiting an address in Castlereagh Street in the CBD and one somewhere in Bondi Junction, although she couldn’t remember exactly where.

  Constable Harrison explained to Mrs Pillon that her husband had made a statement to police in 1991 concerning his having met Ross Warren at a homosexual strip joint in Bondi Junction. Could that be where they made their regular deliveries? Margaret Pillon agreed that the meeting with Warren could have happened, although she had never heard about it: her husband, she said candidly, would have kept the venue from her, but she knew that he frequented places of that sort. However, she was adamant that they never had business dealings with homosexual strip joints.

  On the other hand, she said, ‘my husband did tell lies. He didn’t always tell the truth’.

  [1] As a result of a later media release ‘Derrick’ did come forward to give a statement to police. He did live at 91 Ruthven Street in 1989 and he knew Ross Warren. They met at a gay beat on the Gold Coast sometime in 1983 or 1984 and they kept in touch when Warren moved to Wollongong and Derrick moved to Sydney. They often met at the Green Park Diner, where Derrick worked, in Taylor Square and would go to the Midnight Shift together for a few drinks – although he had never seen Warren intoxicated, he said. Derrick thought that Warren continued visiting beats but he never went with him. Derrick also used to go to Marks Park but had never known of any acts of violence occurring there and, with regard to the location of Warren’s keys, Derrick had never heard of rattling keys as a signal from one gay man to another that he was interested in casual sex.

  [2] A statement that seems to corroborate the ‘Liverpool lady’ journalist’s ignorance of Ross Warren’s sexuality.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Love Triangle

  i

  The fellow journalist at WIN TV had seemed fairly certain that Ross Warren was involved in an illicit affair with a woman already in a relationship. The journalist was unaware that Warren was homosexual and therefore, the police argued, the journalist might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. What if Warren had described his affair in only the very vaguest of terms, not actually identifying the sex of the other person? What if the journalist had misunderstood what he’d been told, had misheard or simply jumped to heterosexual conclusions? During the last evening anyone saw Ross Warren he’d said that he hoped he didn’t ‘run into Ken’. Warren’s drinking companion, Philip Rossini, believed that Ken was a Maori. Maybe Ken was the supposed ‘lady’ involved with Ross Warren. The officers from Operation Taradale set about trying to find out who Ken was.

  In the meantime, Constable Catherine Morieson reinterviewed Christine Jones, a make-up artist at WIN TV.

  Jones first met Ross Warren in 1986 or ’87, she said, when he started working at the station. Within a couple of months they became good friends, talking whenever they were both working the same shifts. Often, she said, Ross would come and talk to her after he’d finished recording. Occasionally they went to functions together as friends: but only as friends – Jones knew he was homosexual.

  She’d already made a statement to police, she pointed out. On 26July 1989, the day the newspaper report suggested Warren had been murdered. In that first statement Jones said she’d told police that Ross had told her about a man he was seeing, a man called Ken. Ross had also told her that Ken had a partner. It was because of the partner that Ross had ended his relationship with Ken at least a month before he disappeared. ‘He was unhappy that the relationship had ended but he didn’t feel comfortable being part of a love triangle,’ Jones said. He just didn’t want Ken to contact him.

  Suicide? Jones dismissed the idea unhesitatingly, arguing that Ross was not only a ‘very jovial’ person but he could also be quite mean with his money. Shortly before he’d disappeared he’d been complaining about having to spend $38 on a new side mirror for his car before he could register it: it was inconceivable that he would have spent the money if he’d been contemplating suicide. And, anyway, Ross was so close to his parents and his sister that he would never do that to them, never put them through that kind of hell. For the same reason – the fact that he was so close to his family – neither could Christine Jones believe that he would deliberately disappear without letting them know he was okay.

  • • •


  By March 2002 the officers of the Major Crime Squad had identified ‘Ken’ and, on 27March, he was interviewed at Waverly Police Station by Detective Page and plain-clothes Constable Morieson. Steve Page explained the nature of the interview and cautioned Ken that anything he said would be electronically recorded.

  Ken supplied his full name, address, date of birth and place of employment in answer to the first few questions put to him. His manner was relaxed and his replies prompt and polite. Page then moved on to more sensitive issues:

  Steve Page: I’m going to … ask you some questions in relation to the disappearance of Ross Warren. I’ll ask you some background questions first. Depicted in this photograph … an aerial photograph of Marks Park … Just to orientate you, to the right we have Bondi, to the left we have Tamarama … There’s a coastal walkway that forms a perimeter boundary to the park … Are you able to tell me whether you’ve previously been to that park?

  Ken: I’ve been along the walkway, yes.