by I. J. Fenn
Steve Page: Have you ever been to the park during the hours of darkness?
Ken: No.
Steve Page: Prior to today were you, were you aware that this park was a gay beat?
Ken: No, I wasn’t actually.
Steve Page: I’ll now [show] you a photograph of Ross Warren. Are you able to tell me … if you knew, if you know this man?
Ken: Yes, I do. I did … We were introduced through a group of friends possibly at a bar or a nightclub [in the Oxford Street area] … I’m sure it was.
Steve Page: Alright. When would it have been that you met Ross Warren?
Ken: I think it was probably 12 months prior … to his disappearance.
Steve Page: Are you able to describe the relationship you and Ross had?
Ken: We were close friends.
Steve Page: It’s been indicated to me … that Ross portrayed you as being in a relationship with him. Is that the case?
Ken: No, it wasn’t the case. Not in a sexual relationship. We were close friends, yes.
Steve Page: Ross Warren disappeared from the area of Marks Park … in July 1989. Are you able to tell me anything about his disappearance?
Ken: No. As I recollect he had come up from Wollongong. He was living in Wollongong at the time. He wasn’t staying with us. He used to come up occasionally and stay with us. We were living at Potts Point at the time. But this particular weekend he hadn’t. But I think we had seen him on the Friday evening … he was staying with some other friends as far as I remember and it was a Saturday evening that I heard that his friends hadn’t seen him and they were concerned about his safety. That’s all I know.
Steve Page: When you say ‘he came to see us’, who are you referring to?
Ken: My partner and myself at the time … Michael … No, I don’t [know Michael’s current whereabouts].
Steve Page: It was on the night of the 21 and 22 July … that Ross was last seen … [shows newspaper articles from that time]. Do you recall where you would have been in July 1989?
Ken: I think I was out on Oxford Street that night, on the Friday evening.
Steve Page: Did you see Ross Warren when you were out that night?
Ken: No. No, I didn’t see him … I went to the Albury Hotel. I think Gilligan’s and I think maybe the Midnight Shift.
Steve Page: Do you know if Ross Warren was in a relationship with any other people at the time of his disappearance?
Ken: Not that I’m aware of. I don’t think he was.
Steve Page: Do you know of anyone who had any malice towards Ross?
Ken: Not at all. Not at all.
Steve Page: Have you got any knowledge … how Ross Warren met his death?
Ken: I have no idea, no knowledge at all. It came as a real shock at the time ’cause he was such an easy-going … he was a very careful sort of … character, very honest.
Steve Page: Were you aware that Ross Warren would frequent gay beats?
Ken: No, I wasn’t.
Constable Morieson: I may have written this down wrong but from what you were saying you said that Ross used to come up from Wollongong and stay with you —
Ken: Yes.
Constable Morieson: — at Potts Point —
Ken: Yes.
Constable Morieson: — often. I wrote down here that you actually saw him on the Friday evening but he wasn’t staying with you and then you heard on the Saturday evening that his friends started to be concerned.
Ken: Okay.
Constable Morieson: Later on, you said that you didn’t see him on that Friday night.
Ken: Yes, I do remember —
Constable Morieson: Can you clear that up for me?
Ken: I thought he had come up on the Friday and that he went missing on the evening of the, sometime on the Saturday. My recollection obviously is wrong with the dates, with the days. I think he’d been up the weekend before as well and actually stayed with us but he wasn’t staying with us that particular weekend … I may have got it confused, it’s so long ago. But I thought we had seen him on the Friday night.
Steve Page: There’s one last question that I’ve got and I’ll just get you to comment on this. At any stage were you in a relationship with Michael and have seen Ross on the side?
Ken: No.
The interview concluded with Ken declining to make a written statement but agreeing that everything he’d said was true and accurate, that he’d suffered no coercion or inducement to supply the information now preserved on audio- and videotape.
ii
So, was there a love triangle? And, if there was, did it involve Ken and his then partner, Michael? If it did, why was Ken lying about it now, a dozen years after the event? Everyone seemed to agree that Ross Warren was honest, reliable, a decent sort of person: why would an honest, reliable and decent sort of person lie about being in a relationship if he wasn’t? And, whatever the answer to these questions, were they relevant to Ross Warren’s disappearance? Maybe Michael would be able to shed some light on the subject…
• • •
Three months later Michael was traced to Cairns where he worked as a sales manager. He was interviewed by local police on behalf of Operation Taradale in June 2002.
In his statement Michael explained that Ken and Ross Warren were friends before he – Michael – entered into a relationship with Ken, either in late 1988 or early 1989. He and Ken lived in a unit in Potts Point, he said, sharing it with another gay couple, Brad and Greg, and they used to see Ross occasionally on his visits to Sydney, although he was fairly certain that Ross never stayed overnight at the unit. He always phoned when he was in town, though, and they usually arranged to ‘catch up’ in one of the gay venues in Darlinghurst.
Ken rang Michael at work, Michael said, to tell him that Ross had disappeared after friends Ross was meant to be staying with had called Ken to see if they – Ken and Michael – had seen him. They hadn’t.
Had Ross and Ken been lovers? Michael thought it was possible that they’d been in a relationship before he’d met Ken, although no-one had ever told him that that was the case. But as for any relationship continuing after he and Ken had become involved, Michael was adamant that it would have been impossible.
So, what did Michael think had happened to Ross Warren? When he’d first heard about the disappearance he thought that suicide was a possibility because Ross often seemed depressed about not being in a relationship. Other than that, he had no idea.
Michael and Ken split up acrimoniously sometime during a trip to Malta in August 1990 and hadn’t seen each other or spoken since.
Not a love triangle then? The light Michael had shed seemed to obscure rather than illuminate, implying as it did that Ross Warren was a fantasist who imagined himself in a relationship with Ken when, in fact, he was depressed at being alone. Yet the evidence of those who knew him well, argued against this. His mother refused to countenance the notion of suicide, Christine Jones dismissed the idea, as did Craig Ellis, Paul Saucis and Phillip Rossini, among others. Only two months before Michael aired his own suspicions, a former colleague of Ross Warren, Susie Elelman, made a statement to Constable Morieson in which she stressed how ambitious Ross was. Since she’d moved from WIN TV to Channel Seven, Ms Elelman had remained in contact with Ross, keeping him abreast of job vacancies he might be interested in. Ross, she said, was very keen to move to Sydney to further his career: he was extremely career-minded and always ‘full of life’. When she heard he’d disappeared and that suicide was suspected, she admitted to thinking, ‘No way. There must be more to it than that.’
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No suicide and no love triangle involving Ken. The options seemed to be diminishing towards the vanishing point, the final moment when the only solution is a sort of philosophical rationalism. But if the options were heading in that direction they had yet to arrive, there was still the avenue of bashings to be explored. However, before Detective Sergeant Page could focus solely on the street gangs known to have been operating
in and around Bondi in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he had one other loose end to tie up: the claims made by Anton Astone, as reported by Constable Robinson in his follow-up report citing the anonymous phone call to Constable Wicks in Wollongong. Astone, the man who it had been claimed Ross Warren was living with in South Australia
Page had already contacted the police in South Australia and Detective Inspector Phil Hoff of the Adelaide Police had supplied a statement earlier in 2002 confirming that he had conducted an interview with Astone in October 1990. His memory of the interview was now vague, he said, but he had sent a copy of the audiotape to NSW Police at the time. He did recall, however, that Astone was unreliable and evasive, and, Hoff thought, was under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time.
Hoff’s 1990 audiotape was located and listened to with scepticism: Astone’s voice was dull and distant, his mumbled words blurred and his thoughts jumbled. He claimed to have met Ross Warren at a nightclub in Wollongong. They (Astone and Warren) had entered into a relationship ‘in November last year’ – that is, 1989, four months after Warren had disappeared – although the relationship was not exclusive as Warren, Astone claimed, was promiscuous, having several other partners at the same time. According to Astone, when he and Warren first got together (in November ’89) Ross was still reading the news on TV. However, a week later he had stopped: Warren’s bosses, Astone explained, were unhappy with his work and he was taken off air. That was on the Friday night that he and Astone drove to Sydney (at another point in the interview he claimed that Ross drove to Sydney alone and that he, Astone was already there as it was Mardi Gras weekend) to attend the Rats Party at the Hordern Pavillion. Ross supposedly left the party at around 3am telling Astone that he was going for a drive to the beach but would be back in an hour. He was in the company of ‘a boy’. The recorded interview with Astone lasted more than an hour, during which time he stated that Warren’s companion was ‘a boy’, a drug baron, a handsome 21-year-old, a dangerous person. On more than one occasion during the recording Hoff tells him that his statement is contradictory, that he sounds confused and that he isn’t making sense. Astone defends himself by explaining that he’s heavily medicated, having taken a Valium tablet an hour before the detectives arrived at his house that morning. He emphasises, however, that the essential facts of his story are true.
So, Ross left the party with someone. Did he return as planned? No. Astone was staying with another friend who had a house overlooking the ocean, possibly at ‘Panorama’ (Tamarama?) and from the window of this house he could see Ross’s car some distance away, unoccupied, the doors open and the horn sounding continuously. Later, when he and his friend got out of bed the next afternoon, the car was still there, the doors still open and the horn still sounding. The car, he said, was a Laser. His friend was called Peter. Or Stephen.
What, then, did Astone think happened to Ross Warren? Astone didn’t ‘think’, he knew for a fact. Warren, he said, had staged his own disappearance because of the debt he was in through drugs. And prostitution.
According to Astone, Warren owed five or six thousand dollars to some ‘pretty heavy’ people in the drugs business. He’d also taken out a loan to buy a new car and he was contemplating buying his unit in Corrimal Street.[1] His debts were mounting and his contacts were getting impatient. So he vanished. He’d been planning it for a long time, Astone said. And he had that on the greatest authority, he said. After all, Astone argued, it wasn’t the first time: he’d done exactly the same thing three or four years earlier when he’d been living in Perth. That time, he’d resurfaced in Broadbeach, Queensland where his parents lived. And Astone had certain proof that that was what had happened this time because a friend of his, Trish, who he’d spoken to only a month ago, had told him that she’d heard that Warren was in the Northern Territory. Anyway, it was only natural that he should ‘disappear’, Astone claimed, because through his association with Astone, Warren wasn’t a much-liked person in Wollongong any more.
When, then, was the last time Astone saw Ross Warren? On January the first. This year? Yes. 1990? Yes. Where? At the party. But, explained Hoff, Warren disappeared in July last year … ‘But I didn’t go to any parties in July,’ Astone answered. Okay, the first of January. When did Astone move to Adelaide? The first of January. But he saw Warren at the party on the first of January? Maybe he arrived in Adelaide on the second. This year? Nine months ago? Maybe last year…
And there was the Redfern connection … According to Astone, Warren had lived in Redfern for three weeks with Stephen and another man. Drugs again. And prostitution. Warren was in it up to his neck. He’d probably be hiding with his two brothers.[2]In Redfern? In the Northern Territory. Because …? There were these two brothers in Wollongong … they owned a shop where Warren hung out ‘all the time’…
And when had Astone last seen Ross? Two weeks before he left for Adelaide. And he’d left for Adelaide on the …? The first of January … So when he’d last seen Ross, that would have been …? The thirty-first of December…
Hoff ended the interview and sent a copy of it to NSW Police. They could do with it what they wanted, as far as he was concerned, Astone was hardly a credible source of information.
A dozen years later, the detectives working on Operation Taradale listened to the recording and made up their own minds. The rantings of a deranged mind? Valium-induced delusions? Almost certainly. On the other hand, there were one or two leads to be checked out.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘greatest authority’ named by Astone was quickly cleared of having any involvement, as were the brothers who owned the shop. Trish, who Astone had claimed worked for Qantas (later confusing it with Ansett) had already been interviewed by Constable Emmett on 31May 1991. She hadn’t known Ross Warren personally, she said. She only knew what she’d read about him in the press, that he’d disappeared. And Anton Astone, she said, was a well-known liar who always made up stories to gain attention. But, no, she’d never heard him mention seeing Warren after the disappearance.
A former boyfriend of Astone and friend of Trish, David Moon, supported her claim that Astone was prone to lying, ‘to create a bit of drama’. He’d even told Moon that his father was a policeman when he was, in fact, a cleaner. Nevertheless, he had known Warren, as far as Moon knew. And he’d said that Warren had staged his disappearance but, like he said, Anton couldn’t help telling lies.
The Operation Taradale investigation into the circumstances of Ross Warren’s disappearance was, as Detective Sergeant Page had earlier recognised, complex: there were more twists and turns, false leads and red herrings than solid evidence, and the situation was further complicated by what the officers were learning about other incidents around that time, violent incidents involving other members of the gay community. Primary among those incidents was the death of John Russell.
[1] Warren’s unit was in Smith Street and he had no intention of buying it as he hoped to move to Sydney in the near future to further his career.
[2] Ross Warren had only one brother.
CHAPTER EIGHT
John Russell’s Last Night
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On Thursday, 23November 1989 a 43-year-old gym manager from Drummoyne, Neville Smith, was walking along the walkway at Mackenzies Point, from the Fletcher Street steps towards Notts Avenue. He happened to be in the Bondi area and had time to spare. From the walkway he took another set of steps down to the rock shelf at water level. It was a warm day in early summer and a few minutes in a secluded bay seemed like a perfect way to spend some time.
Once he’d reached the water, however, Neville Smith’s beautiful day came to an abrupt end. Not far from the steps a body lay face down in a small rock pool.
Smith approached the body, noticing, when he came closer, a few coins scattered nearby, and saw that the man’s jumper was pulled up from his waist, exposing his midriff. There was also, he noticed, what appeared to be blood in the water of the rock pool. From where he stood, Smith could see no sig
n of movement in the region of the ribcage and this, in conjunction with a discolouration of the visible flesh, persuaded him that the man was probably dead. To be absolutely certain, though, he felt for a pulse in the right wrist: there was none. Nevertheless, even though he was now certain that the man was dead, Smith wasted no time – he ran for help, returning to Fletcher Street the same way he’d arrived and knocking on a unit door to alert the occupant, to phone for the emergency services. There was no-one home.
Nearby, a block of units was being renovated and Smith saw a builder, Rick Saxby, working on the site.
‘Quick! I’ve just found a dead body. Can we get the police or ambulance?’ Despite the fact that the body was most definitely dead, Smith’s state of shock urged him to hurry.