by I. J. Fenn
Howard: Which big thing? Like a, a dome or something?
French: Yeah, with all them poles. You were there when we got him, weren’t you?
Howard: And we chased him on the, on the bikes? … Up into the bushes…
French: No, we chased him from the bushes … Punched him in there, mate … I can remember when we used to go out to Centennial Park every day.
Howard: I never done any at Bondi. I done Centennial and that and Moore Park.
French: Bondi, man. That was like Moore Park. You know the walkway that goes around? … That goes, when you go from Bondi to Tama? … There’s all fuckin’ tunnels, mate, and it led up, led up in the bushes…
Howard: Is that near that lookout thing?
French: There’s all poofters up in there. Heaps of ’em. Fuck … There’s all bushes. Heaps bushy, mate. And there’s just these little passages…
Howard: What? And they go in there? Is that where you got that poof from before?
French: … I don’t know who was there, man, but they hit him with this skateboard … Cracked him.
Howard: What, on the head? Did he have a go back after you hit him?
French: He just fuckin’ screamed like they all do.
Howard: What did you do after that?
French: Just kept crackin’ him. Someone pushed him over the thing about, like, a three, four foot drop. Something like that.
Howard: Who? Who pushed him? You?
French: No, not me. I was going over to pick up his skateboard. I was gonna hit him again … Heaps funny. Used to love how they scream, eh?
Howard: Yeah. What did you say when you first seen him?
French: Oh, well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t there when they said something to him first off. I was comin’ down from the top, from where the lookout is.
Howard: What, was he near the railin’?
French: No, he was down near … underneath the cliff. Just standin’ there. One of the boys said, ‘You’re a poof, eh?’ And I’ve come runnin’ down the stairs and I just looked around, mate. They were punchin’ into him.
Howard: Who was that?
French: Kerry, Justin, Manuel, James … Who else was there? I think little Popey was down, too.
Howard: What did you do when you ran down there?
French: Beat him. Fuckin’ grabbed his keys, ran back up to his car, searched his car … I think it was a Camry … Couldn’t find nothin’ in the car, found about three dollars … Just tossed them [the keys].
Howard: Whereabouts?
French: In the sea.
Howard: Straight off the lookout? … What happened to him then? Did he…
French: Oh, we’ve done a bolt. Left him, went around to Tama. Caught the bus home.
Howard: Was there anything in the paper about him?
French: Dunno.
Howard: You didn’t look?
French: Got heaps of clippings at home, man, about – from all the poofters that we’ve bashed.
Howard: Was that before our one, the one we done? Johnson?
French: Yeah. Heaps before. That was when we first found out about Bondi.
Howard: When was that?
French: Heaps ago. Fuck.
Howard: I never knew about it.
French: But I think Brad’s come out there. I think but I don’t know.
Howard: What, Morgo. Did Morgo go there? What did he do?
French: Fuck all, mate.
Howard: He’s a spin out sometimes, Morgo.
French: Yeah. Can be a funny cunt, eh? … That’s unusual that he’s funny, eh? He’s a dickhead.
Howard: What did Lopez do? Go crazy?
French: He’s, oh, mate. Fuck. I remember we got one out there. Sam was out there telling him to drop his pants and gave him a cigarette. Said, ‘Burn your dick’.
Howard: Did he?
French: Yeah … Fair dinkum. Sick cunts, man … We said to him, said, ‘We’re going down here, man. We’ll come back in five minutes. If you’re not here, we know where you live, we’ve got your wallet, we’re gonna come get you.’ He was still there, man. We come back he was still there. Then we come back about 10, 20 minutes later, he was still sitting there.
Howard: What, at Bondi? On the, where the trees are?
French: Yeah. He was funny.
Howard: Heaps of poofs there? How often do you go out there?
French: Only went out there about three times.
Howard: Did you shit when you pushed him off the cliff?
French: It was only small … Just dropped.
Howard: What, did he fall or…?
French: No, someone pushed him. Just got up and started screamin’.
Later. They talk about what they would have been doing if they hadn’t been sentenced for the murder of Richard Johnson.
Howard: Do you reckon you’d still be bashin’ poofs?
French: Probably. You would have been too.
Howard: Maybe. But that one before, the last one I done before I done Johnson was about four months ago [sic]. Before it, yeah. ’Cause I was going out with girlfriends every week and every night too … Too tired to go out ridin’ fuckin’ bikes with you.
French: Bentley, mate. Bentley’s heaps lucky he wasn’t in this.
Howard: Was he there that night playin’ basketball?
French: No. We seen him go up to ring him up. Bentley, come here and give a poof a beatin’. Let’s go. No, I’m goin’ for bongs. Remember? … He was in a taxi … He was goin’ up to Kate’s, man. They were gonna have bongs. I was thinking, mate, I was thinking if I had cash, I was thinking, I’m coming, man, wait there. No, fuck it, I should have went. I was gonna go up. I wish I would have been a mad fuckin’ pot head, then I wouldn’t have been here.
Howard: That’s all in the past. Fuck it. You do your fuckin’ time. I just wish the cops wouldn’t fuckin’ hassle. They fuckin’ piss you off, eh?
French: I know. Three times they’ve been to see me … nothin’ to say to youse.
Howard: Yeah, they ring my mum up, saying, ‘Oh, we’re gonna go interview your son.’ Mum goes, ‘No, you’re fuckin’ not. Leave my son alone, you bastards.’ … It fuckin’ stresses me right out. I feel like goin’ crazy when that happens.
French: They don’t ring my nan up and tell her. They just come straight down and see me … I just walk out, mate. I’ve got nothin’ to say. See youse later … They said, ‘We want you to make a statement.’ I said, ‘No.’
Howard: Is that about the Allen one?
French: Hmm. They asked me where I was on the dates. I said, ‘Mate, I don’t know. I don’t keep a diary.’ ‘Yeah. Just give us a rough estimate, you know, where you think you were.’ Nan told me I was in hospital … I was sick.
Howard: I think I was living in Wollongong when that happened. I’m not sure.
French: Morgan and Justin said they were down at Windang.
Howard: Yeah. They were, weren’t they?
French: I don’t know.
Howard: Do you know who done it?
French: Not really. Got an idea, but.
Howard: That … I reckon one of the boys done that … But I’m not sure. I was told but I don’t, I’m not sure. Don’t know whether to believe it or not … Did anybody tell you about it?
French: I found out just after … or someone told me about it.
Howard: What did they say? Did they say names?
French: Yeah. Oh, I think …Ben, Ben, Churchie, He. That’s what I heard anyway … Was that who you got told? … Don’t tell the coppers fuckin’ nothin’. Dogs.
Howard: That’s exactly what I’ve done. They haven’t come and seen me since I, when I first were locked up. That’s when they first came and seen me. But the last three months, two months, nothin’. Don’t even bother comin’ now. I, I was told that they, they stabbed him with somethin’ … Something, I’m not sure what it was. Did they tell you? Did you find out what they stabbed him with?
French: A long … screwie.
French: The shoulder. Tell me the fuck how that could kill someone? When, when … they said they found him in the bath.
Howard: In his bedroom or in his house.
French: In his house in the bath. That’s what I heard … I can’t remember who told me that.
Howard: I had an idea it was Ben. Did they use anything else, like wood or anything? Or just feet and that, like we did?
French: Ben’s a psycho cunt. It wouldn’t surprise me if he beat the…
Howard: Yeah. Do you know who stabbed him?
French: No.
• • •
So, for all French’s extravagant claims, all his bravado, all his crowing self-aggrandisement, in the final analysis it seemed that he knew little or nothing of the murders to which McCann was hoping to link him. Sure, he was a certified little thug who had been part of a gang that terrorised defenceless individuals, those who were vulnerable in their being alone against usually overwhelming odds. But his involvement was in only the comparatively small-scale assaults.[4] And he seemed to be out of the circle where information about the more nefarious crimes committed by those he knew were concerned: yes, he’d heard about the screwdriver used to stab William Allen but he’d heard that Allen had been stabbed in the shoulder whereas, in fact, he was stabbed in the hand. Nor could he remember who had told him things, who had actually committed the various acts perpetrated against the various victims. He could only really remember the keys he’d thrown into the ocean, the wig he’d supposedly ‘pissed in’ (although he later mentions Trindall having done that), the punching of helpless prey surrounded by packs of predatory delinquents. The recordings offered little to the investigating team, nothing concrete, nothing that would help gain a conviction. Even compared to his fellow ‘cons’ responsible for Richard Johnson’s murder, French with his four-and-a-half years, was small fry.
Howard’s other recorded conversations with Mark Church, Brad Young and Ronnie Morgan yielded more of the same. When the listening devices were working there was no solid admission of guilt by anyone (on the first occasion the device was used to record Morgan it failed: detectives were unsure whether that was because of a technical problem with the equipment or because of tampering by Howard. The second attempt failed because of interference in transmission).
And with that, the investigation ground to a halt. Until further evidence came to light, the cases of Ross Warren, John Russell, David McMahon and William Allen remained open but essentially inactive. Until Kay Warren stirred things up with her first letter in July 1998.
[1] It quickly transpired that the Gertsch murder was not linked to any of the others but it was nevertheless pivotal in that it caused the expansion of the inquiry which, in turn, led to the identification of other, linked, incidents.
[2] The day after Michael made his statement the police issued a media release asking for information in connection with the murders of William Allen and Wayne Tonks. At the same time, a further application was made by police for a warrant to use covert recording devices at Minda Detention Centre where several of those convicted of the Johnson murder were imprisoned. It was suspected that, because of the link with Cleveland Street High School (in the case of Tonks) and the toilet block in Alexandria Park (in the case of Allen), someone would know who had been responsible for one or other of the murders. Insufficient direct evidence was gleaned from the recording although part of the conversation towards the end of the tape is illuminating in a general way, showing the blasé attitude of those indulging in acts of violence against the gay community:
Ron Morgan: You know Mackenzies Point, that walkway … fuckin’ Coogee?
Barry Howard: Yeah, I know the walkway.
Morgan: We used to do training there … I made the training squad … They showed you that cliff where he fell and that … with all the condom packets and that. They used to get in the bushes, fuckin’. I’ve caught heaps of ’em in there banging one another … Dickhead Alex and all them used to make me start it all the time … Jump up and look in the bushes … just see ’em going for it. Oh, you dirty man … And they would just keep going. They just have been that involved in it, they blocked out all the noise … I had me new Boks on from America that day, too. I had blood all over ’em … Dave and Manuel came up and grabbed a handful of hair and went, Dirty fuckin’ maggot … He should’ve went off the cliff that night but he didn’t … only about fuckin’ that high … we went down and put a cigarette butt out on his head.
[3] Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn was a Thai national. ‘Curries’ is apparently the derogatory term for Thais, Indians and other Southeast Asians.
[4] Certainly, the viciousness of the assaults is undeniable and the victims would quite rightly argue that the attacks were savage in the extreme, the sustained injuries severe. But compared to the fate of Warren, Russell, Johnson, Allen and Rattanajurathaporn, these crimes must be regarded as being lower on the scale of heinousness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Street Gangs of Philadelphia
i
In June 2001 Detective Sergeant Steve Page submitted his second sitrep in relation to the ‘Investigation Status Surrounding Operation Taradale’.
Current Positions:
Incident room set up at Paddington Police Station … David McMahon has been interviewed and stated during his offence reference was made to another victim pushed off a cliff. Sean Cushman was previously identified as the principal offender in the McMahon matter. The Russell death predates McMahon by approximately 3 weeks, incident site no greater than 25 metres apart. A community source has been identified who nominates [Person of Interest] Cushman for pushing a gay male off a cliff at Bondi. Profiling and analysis of Cushman shows there are some 45 P.O.I.s to this enquiry who have to be interviewed. A draft [Telephone Intercept] affidavit and request for assistance has been forwarded to the Office of the Solicitor and Telephone Interception Branch for Cushman’s telephones. A media release is proposed … Cushman identified by surveillance and covert investigations to be residing at 6/928 Anzac Parade at Maroubra … Investigations have caused an organised crime group known as ‘PSK’ or ‘PTK’ (Park Side Killers/People That Kill) to be the target of this inquiry. PSK and PTK was a graffiti tag used by the group. Evidence available shows group members and associates are responsible for the following:
- murder of Raymond Keam (1987 Randwick, not cleared)
- murder of William Allen (1988 Alexandria, not cleared)
- murder of Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn (1990 Tamarama, cleared)
- murder of Richard Johnson (1990 Alexandria, cleared)
- murder of Noel Doull (1992 Alexandria, cleared/dismissed)
- murder of Brian Hagland (1996 Bondi, cleared)
Comment: … The initial investigations [into Warren, Russell and McMahon] when held up to scrutiny could only be described as ‘poor’, and [this] investigation has the ability of fixing these errors of the past. The Deputy State Coroner, Jacqueline Milledge SM has taken an interest in this matter and has indicated she will hear evidence. The media unit has stated the media attention on this investigation will be ‘massive’.