The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders

by I. J. Fenn

  No, Steve Page didn’t know either. But he didn’t know why anyone would make up stories about Merlyn McGrath admitting to them that she’d killed someone. Somebody – maybe everybody – was lying. Looking at the woman in front of him he came to a quick decision. There was no point in going at her hard, no point in intimidating her: she was under enough stress already. If he left it there, they could wait for more intelligence from the phone taps because he knew, knew with absolute certainty, that Merlyn McGrath’s phone was going to ring red hot for some time to come after this interview. He leaned forward in his chair, his arms resting on the table, and ran through his direct questions routine: did you kill … were you present … do you know who…

  No. No. No. No. No.

  Finally, the detective sergeant leaned away from the table. It was over. ‘I’ve got no further questions,’ he said. ‘Is there anything further you wish to tell me about this matter?’

  She looked barely able to keep the tears from spilling down her face. ‘I just want to know what’s going on,’ she said. ‘This is starting to scare me. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve not done any, I got nothing to do with any of this and you’re making me scared. I swear I don’t know. I don’t know any of those people. I don’t know what I might have said to Vicki, but I didn’t hurt him. I don’t know who did or anything. And you want me to go back to a time where I was getting beat up, I was on drugs and I can hardly remember. But if I, if I hurt anyone like that, I’d know. And I can’t remember. I’ve only ever hurt anyone bad once and I paid for that. I paid very hard. This is scary shit. I got three little boys. I don’t know about any of this.’

  iii

  What would she do when she reached home, the police wondered? Would she run to the phone as soon as she’d closed the front door? Would she feel she had to call somebody, had to share her terror, to bring it out into the open, to expose it to daylight so that its power would diminish? They thought she wouldn’t want to speak to her sister, not yet, wouldn’t want to talk to her brother or … She would probably need to talk to someone who wasn’t involved, they guessed, someone she could trust but who was on the outside …

  And it seemed they were right in their guess. She rang her friend, Monica. Rang and, as soon as Monica picked up, she babbled for a minute, two, barely coherently. Until she sounded calmer.

  ‘Oh, fuckin’ look, mate,’ she said. ‘They’re fuckin’ scaring the fuck outta me. They asked me about the disappearance of this Ross Warren guy and they said “we’ve had, got three witnesses that say you know his whereabouts and you fuckin’’ … I bashed him or something.’ She waited, maybe for a response that didn’t come, maybe for reassurance from her friend. When the silence stretched too long she continued. ‘And then they asked me about the death of another guy … And they’re all gay. And then he asked me about an attempted murder on another guy. I said, “look, mate, you’re fuckin’ freaking me out”. I said, “this is sick shit.” I said, “this is serious.” And fuck, I got upset, mate. I started crying. I said, “you know,” I said, “I’ve got three boys and a man at home.” I said, “I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.” I said, “Fuck, you think I’m gonna waste my life on this shit? Because I … if I knew something, I’d tell ya.” But it frightened the fuck outta me, mate. He told me to get a solicitor.’

  She was crying again, now, crying into the phone as the words spilled from her mouth and she listened to them like they were coming from someone else. ‘But, fuck. I’m scared, Mon. And the worst thing is, there’s fuckin’, I’ve got nothing to do with it. Like, that’s what’s pissing me off.’ A deep breath, steadying and controlling. ‘Like, when they first called, I thought, three people saying that I said fuckin’ I gave him a hiding and knew where he was or some shit? He reckons … I said to him, I said, “Look, the only person that would have ever said that,” I said, “would have been fuckin’ my brother’s ex-girlfriend,” I said, “and what I may or may not have said to fuckin’ her,” I said, “is despite the fuckin’ fact. I … I’ve got nothing to do with this.” ’

  Having finished with Monica, McGrath called her sister and retold her story, going over the same details she’d earlier given to her friend. Her protesting her innocence became stronger, more pronounced, as she built up a defence against all the implications that she’d been there, seen it all go down, had had a hand in it going down. But she needn’t have worried. When she’d gone over it for the second, the third time, her sister cut her short. She had evidence, she said.

  ‘You were with Bill in ’89,’ she said, as if that was proof in itself. ‘I found photos. And ’89 I hung around Brad – poofter Brad – and, and remember when they, youse all came down and stayed? With a stolen car? I’m sure that was ’89.’

  Slowly it dawned on her, what her sister was saying. Slowly the possibility began to seep into her like a new consciousness, fresh and bright and vibrant. ‘I was living in Mount Druitt,’ she said almost reverently, pausing for a second or two. ‘Fuck, we didn’t used to go to Bondi at all then.’

  So, she was in the clear. Not that she hadn’t always known it, anyway, but. If she’d never gone to Bondi in ’89 then she couldn’t have bashed this bloke, this Warren, she couldn’t have seen anybody else bash him and she was in the bloody clear. She should tell that fuckin’ cop right now, should ring him up and say, fuck you. It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there. I was in fuckin’ Mount Druitt, mate. That’s what she would do, ring him right now … She stood there, holding the phone, listening to her sister without hearing her, listening to the sound of her sister’s words tinkling like wind chimes in her ear while she thought about how the nightmare was over because she now knew…

  Steve Page could imagine the relief she’d feel as she listened to her sister at the other end of the line. The relief and then the doubt. How could she prove that the photos were from ’89? How could she …? The cops would just say, shit, that’s, that could be any time, could be last fuckin’ week, mate … Well, not last week, but … He could imagine her as the reality sank in: she had to think this through carefully, had to make sure there could be no mistake about…

  ‘I’m gonna try and put it out of me head for now,’ she said, cutting into whatever her sister was saying, ‘’cause it’s driving me nuts. I keep thinking Bill and Lee, they were into graffiti.’

  ‘Yeah, but they didn’t do much but tag things, though, did they?’ her sister asked. Come on, she was saying, you’re free.

  ‘Yeah. Not really. Just bombing trains and shit. We didn’t go to Bondi. We used to hang around the town. Like, out Mount Druitt and shit. But Bondi wasn’t our area.’

  ‘Then that confirms you were with Bill in ’89,’ her sister said, meaning the photos she’d found, ignoring what McGrath was saying. Except for the Mount Druitt stuff. ‘And if you were with Bill that gives you a fair idea of what you might have been up to.’

  ‘Which was nothin’ ’cause we were in Mount Druitt.’

  As the day wore on, Page knew that Merlyn McGrath would be oscillating between a muted euphoria that she’d been vindicated and a nagging feeling that it wasn’t over yet. Afternoon stretched into evening, the heat relentless in its strength-sapping power. Her kids were probably playing up, fighting among themselves. A kind of headache might have started as she tried to sort things out in her mind. Questions, there were too many, the detective knew. Questions like: what if her sister was wrong? Wrong about the photos? Wrong about her being with Bill? What if the cops didn’t believe her? What if they didn’t believe her sister? What if they just didn’t give a fuck? Just ignored everything she said and charged her anyway? He knew she’d think about how they’d told her to get a solicitor. They were obviously after her, she’d think, obviously had no intention of letting her off the hook … What if they just arrested her, put her in jail whether she’d done it or not? There’d been stuff on the TV like that, innocent people locked up for years. She’d worry about who’d look after the kids? It was Christmas next week … He knew
she was scared.

  At 9.30 the next morning she was talking to her sister again, desperately trying to find reassurance that she wouldn’t be going to prison for something she knew she didn’t do.

  ‘Steven said the police contacted Vicki,’ her sister said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  Shit, they didn’t waste any time. And Vicki would’ve dobbed her in, would’ve made up all kinds of shit to get her in trouble, to get her … ‘Did they?’ she asked.

  ‘She doesn’t remember that conversation,’ her sister said, referring to Merlyn’s boast that she’d been part of the TV guy’s murder, that she was a killer.

  But Merlyn probably wasn’t listening any more: she was more likely thinking that if Vicki had talked to the police, if she’d told them what she’d said …

  ‘Oh, I’m fucked,’ she said. ‘I’m fucked. I woke up at five o’clock this morning, mate, and was throwing me guts up. You know, like, I’m as nervous as fuck. I’m scared to death, alright? I don’t know what the fuck’s going on.’

  * * *

  Her sister rang again in the evening. Just to make sure she was okay.

  ‘I’m alright,’ McGrath said. ‘Gotta keep going. Fuckin’ scary, mate … I’m scared and it’s not even me.’

  * * *

  So what did Detective Sergeant Page believe? Was McGrath one of the perpetrators of the murder of Ross Warren as she’d apparently claimed? Was she involved in the death of John Russell? Was she one of the females present when David McMahon was dragged towards the cliff edge preparatory to being thrown to his certain death on the rocks below? Or was she simply the victim of malicious gossip, of self-aggrandisement, guilty of nothing more than trying to upset the former girlfriend of her brother? Had she been living in Mount Druitt at the time all these incidents were occurring in Bondi? Certainly, much of her statement was in conflict with what she’d said to people on the phone, much of it conflicted with other parts of the same statement. But was that deliberate obfuscation or nothing more than simply being unable to recall events from a troubled past? Because the detectives believed that McGrath definitely had a troubled history, was the victim of all kinds of violence and abuse. The period with the boyfriend in Ashfield, for example: she had genuinely suffered at the hands of the boy in Ashfield. On balance, it seemed likely that Merlyn McGrath was a sad and pathetic individual with nothing of value to offer the investigation. The only loose end Detective Sergeant Page wanted to tie up was the claim that she’d been living in Mount Druitt in 1989. He traced Bill to an address in Westmead and arranged to meet him at Paddington Police Station.

  Bill confirmed Merlyn’s contention that she’d been living with him in Mount Druitt. Up to a point. They’d been boyfriend/girlfriend in the autumn of 1989, maybe for two or three months during which time she’d lived with Bill and his parents for no more than a month. They never went to Bondi and, as far as Bill knew, McGrath had never been involved in gay bashing.

  So, even though she’d only lived in Mount Druitt for a short period of time – and that almost certainly before Ross Warren disappeared – the detectives from Operation Taradale were inclined not to pursue that particular line of inquiry any further for the present time. If additional information surfaced via phone taps or new approaches to the police, then they could re-examine what they had. In the meantime, there were many other leads to follow.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘We Used to Bash Heaps of People’

  i

  On the day of Morgan and Mihailovic’s interviews detectives went around to Sean Cushman’s mother’s home and told her about their investigations. Almost as soon as they left, Veronica Cushman called her son, told him about the visit, told him that they wanted to talk to him about something that happened ‘way back in 1989’.

  Cushman knew all about it, he said. He’d been told about it the other day when he’d spoken to one of his mates.

  Veronica was worried, though. She knew her son. ‘It was a couple of gay guys,’ she said. ‘Killed – or pushed off the cliff, cliffs at Tamarama. And the dead man had a clump of blond hair in his hand. And you’re a suspect.’

  At the other end of the line, instead of the anticipated concern, the muted panic such news might be expected to produce, Veronica heard only laughter. Yeah, he’d heard all about this, he said. ‘I tell you, I’ve got nothin’ to do with this, mate. Alright?’

  Did she believe him? Could she believe that the police would be asking these questions, making these … insinuations, if Sean really wasn’t a genuine suspect? She no doubt desperately wanted to believe what he was telling her but … But there was something about Sean, about his temper, his … Did he swear on his son’s life, she asked? Did he swear he had nothing to do with killing these men?

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. Yes, he swore on his son’s life.

  ‘Oh, what a relief,’ Veronica sighed. She felt a weight lifting from her heart and with the lifting of it came the manic babbling that accompanied the sudden renewed ability to breathe freely once more. She told him what the detectives had said, how they had told her about the killings, the assaults, the attempted murder, told him how they’d thought he was the killer because of the blond hair. It had all taken place around from the Icebergs, she said. ‘You know, in that place where all the gay guys go to meet gay guys? You know, in that park up there? Between Bondi and Tamarama?’

  ‘I never used to go and beat gay guys up, mate.’ Serious now, as if he was somehow affronted by even the suggestion that he could possibly have done such a thing. ‘I’ve never done that before.’

  ‘So it’s not your hair?’ his mother asked.

  ‘Nah.’ Dismissive. ‘They can have, they can have my DNA. They can do whatever they want with it.’

  ‘Because, oh fuck, you don’t know how sick I felt after they left.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cushman sympathised, ‘I sort of felt the same way. But then I thought to myself, nah, that’s rubbish, mate. You know what I mean? Honest, I’d remember something like that. I woulda told ya, mate, if I did somethin’ like that.’ As any son would: Hi, Mum, I just murdered a guy because he was gay.

  The conversation was almost certainly enough to placate Veronica, if only superficially. Like any mother would, the listening detectives thought, she wanted to believe that Sean was telling the truth, had to believe it. So, if he said he wasn’t the one…

  The following afternoon she rang again. The detectives had called again, she said, the strain clearly audible in her voice. ‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘they’ve got it fuckin’ in for you, mate. Somebody has, uh, somebody has said that they witnessed that you were there on both occasions.’ Listening in, the detectives thought she sounded like she was going frantic with worry now. ‘And they’re after you for an attempted murder. Some guy called McMahon who was there with a group said … they’ve shown him photos and he, he’s identified you as - both times – as being there. And what they’re really interested in is that particular person said he … one guy that was being thrown over – or attempted to be thrown over – this guy has identified you as the one who was attempting to thrown him over the cliff.’

  ‘How can that be, mate?’

  How could it be that David McMahon identified him? How could it be that the police thought he was guilty after all these years?

  It was the same fucking detective, Veronica was saying, that bastard Page. On the phone, he was, telling her all the stuff her son had done, the murder, the attempted murder. She tried to tell them the truth, tried to tell them it wasn’t Sean. ‘You’re just wanting to pin this on Sean. Aren’t you?’ she reported to her son. She’d tried to defend him, she said. But, ‘he hung up on me,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s true, mate. It’s fair dinkum true, mate.’ Cushman obviously knew what she was talking about. ‘They fuckin’ hate me.’

  For a moment neither spoke, each probably thinking about what might happen. ‘How are we gonna get out of this?’ Veronica
finally asked, the detectives noting the ‘we’: they were in this mess together, mother and son, both claiming innocence but both presumably thinking innocence wasn’t enough.

  ‘I dunno, man.’ Was it hopelessness spreading before him like a vast void, black and limitless? The police tried to make out nuances that would give them a clue. ‘Like, I dunno. We’ll just … huh, I’ve done nothing wrong so I don’t know how they –’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t been doing – are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I wouldn’t lie to you, Mum. I would not lie to you, mate, and I did not do it.’

  Was she convinced? Could she let herself be convinced? The copper seemed so certain, seemed to enjoy telling her what … ‘At any time,’ she asked, determined to quell all doubt in her mind, ‘were you at any time doing sort of these things?’ Her question sounding more like a plea, pleading for him to prove to her once and for all…

  ‘No, no.’ What more could he say?

  ‘You never went up there with a group of people –’

  ‘No, I never.’

  ‘– you, know, giving fags a hard time?’ she asked,

  ‘Mum, I know. And I’d tell you if I did. You know I would.’ Explaining patiently, like he was talking to a child, like he was talking to himself. ‘I never did anything like that, mate. I never pushed anybody off a cliff, mate. I’ve never wit … I’ve never witnessed anyone falling off a cliff. No.’

  ‘Did you ever go up there with a group of friends?’

  ‘No.’

  Never? It hardly seemed likely but Veronica evidently wasn’t going to dispute her son’s claims, wasn’t going to dig more deeply than she seemed to feel she had to. Anyway, the detectives weren’t only interested in Sean. ‘They’re looking for this Pacific Islander, too,’ she said, ‘but they don’t, he doesn’t know his name. And there were girls involved, too,’ she added.