The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders

by I. J. Fenn

  ‘Never fuckin’ hung out with girls, mate.’ Cushman replied sharply, almost shouting into the phone with a kind of flourish. ‘Didn’t hang up with any girls, mate. And I was always at the beach, not up there. And I wouldn’t have done that, anyway, mate. Why would I do that for, mate? I haven’t … I do have a brain in my head, man, you know? I never fuckin’ hurt anybody in my life, mate. I haven’t … I’ve never bashed anyone for no reason, Mum. You know, not like, not pushed somebody off the fuckin’ cliff. No way, man … push someone else off? Like, come on. That’s a pretty heavy … I’m not worried, really, ’cause I know I didn’t do anything, mate. You know what I mean?’

  To the eavesdropping detectives Cushman sounded plausible – and his mother apparently believed what she’d heard. He’d never hurt anyone in his life. Never. Not once.

  This conversation took place just after one o’clock on the afternoon of 18 December 2001, five years and three months after Sean Cushman and Aaron Martin had beaten Brian Hagland to death at Bondi Beach, had pushed him under a bus.

  ii

  ‘They reckon I’m a prime suspect in a fuckin’ murder and an attempted murder. Shit like that, eh?’

  A few hours after speaking to his mother Cushman rang Donovan Reynolds, the friend he’d mentioned to Veronica, who’d told him about the events of ’89, who’d warned him.

  Reynolds listened to his mate. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘For that poofter that got pushed off the cliff?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cushman said, yeah that fuckin’ poofter. ‘And they reckon they have an eye-witness that saw me fuckin’ do it. They’re sayin’, they’re trying to pin it on me, bro’, tryin’ to fuckin’ pin it on me and, like, there was a couple of chicks and a couple of white fellers and a few other Maories and that.’ If he was deliberately affecting a blasé attitude, giving nothing, he was getting nothing in return. Reynolds stayed silent for a minute, letting it hang. Cushman broke first. And there was this guy, McMahon, he said – had Reynolds ever heard of him? ‘’Cause there’s an attempted murder and there was a murder and he reckons he’s seen me on both occasions. Like, he pulled me out of a book or something. But why didn’t he do that 12 years ago?’

  Reynolds sneered into the phone. ‘Well, it’s a load of shit, anyway,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, bro’.’

  ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t, eh?’

  In the background Reynolds could be heard talking to someone else, another of the named Bondi Boys. Tim Alger was talking about some of the others who’d been interviewed, how they’d been shown a photograph book and had been asked to identify anyone they knew. Like, doing the fucking detectives’ work for them. Fuck that. Yeah. Still, it looked like they were tracking them all down, talking to everyone from back then. Alger took the phone from Reynolds.

  ‘What’s this fuckin’ bullshit?’ he asked, the jutting of his pointed chin almost visible on the other end of the line.

  ‘I dunno, mate.’ Sounding disinterested, more than just nonchalant. Like, it’s all just an irritation. ‘They’re lookin’ for me. They reckon I’m a prime, prime suspect in a murder and attempted murder, mate.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Alger said. Like, ‘how can they be so fucking stupid?’ ‘That’s bullshit. What the fuck’s goin’ on?’

  ‘I dunno, man. And they reckon that the dude that died, he had a handful of blond hair on him, in his hand. So that’s why they’re fuckin’ really after me, sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, just send them one of your fuckin’ hairs.’ Alger said in an ‘it’s as easy as that, man’ sort of way. He suspected that they – the D’s – would come to him at some point, probably soon, he said. If they’d already got onto Cushman … ‘I’m not gonna tell ’em a fuckin’ thing, mate.’

  ‘That’s it. Tim. No, don’t help ’em at all, bro’.’

  If they all stuck together … they were all in it together so they should stick together, tell the same story. Not that there was a story to tell, they’d done nothing, they were only kids, man. Like, what were they supposed to…

  ‘Well, we were never there, eh?’ Cushman asked: their story should be straight. ‘We never –’

  ‘Nah,’ Alger interjected. ‘Nah, I don’t remember any … I never went to Tamarama, ever, let alone bash poofs there, man.’

  ‘And we didn’t throw no-one off the fuckin’ cliff.’ Cushman said vehemently. And no-one was going to say otherwise.

  While he was talking to Reynolds and Alger, Cushman’s mind mulled over the identity of this McMahon character, working out who the bastard was. From what the others were saying, it seemed he could be one of the … could have been … maybe he was the ex-copper he’d bashed one time in Bondi, maybe he was…

  He rang his mother again to tell her what he thought, how he reckoned that the McMahon guy was an ex-cop and how the police were interviewing ‘all the boys’. As he talked, Veronica was apparently infused with the beginnings of paranoia, an uneasy feeling of the world closing in around her. What if they’d bugged her house, she wanted to know? What if they could hear everything she said?

  Cushman laughed at the idea. Why would they bug her house? What would they get from bugging her house? ‘They’re not gonna bug it,’ he said before a thought suddenly came to him. ‘But maybe your phone’s bugged, now.’ He thought about it for a second or two. ‘Who gives a fuck, right? We’ve done nothing wrong. We’re not doing anything wrong. So what?’

  • • •

  While Cushman was talking to his mother, Tim Alger had shed his bravado and rung a friend. ‘And then I – now fuckin’ get this, I’ve fuckin’ found out that fuckin’ – did ya see in the papers? That poof that died? Ten years ago and that? In Bondi? He got thrown off a cliff or something. Well, fuckin’, the Homicide Squad D’s have been showin’ my photo, Sean’s photo and a few – all other Bondi Boys photos around for fuckin’ the last two weeks. To do with that. Oh, like, I’ve got nothin’ to do with it but I’m thinkin’, what the fuck’s goin’ on? Why, ’cause, um, they’ve been to, like, Sean’s house and that, too. They haven’t been here but I’m thinkin’, fuck, they could be here any minute.’

  Obviously agitated, Alger barely made sense at times, his words tripping over each other as they left his mouth. He knew they would come for him, knew that they would want to speak to him. And the certainty of knowing, but the not knowing when, maybe sent the adrenalin coursing through him, maybe heightened his nervous reactions to noise and light and peripheral movement. But if that was the case, it didn’t help him articulate his thoughts very clearly.

  ‘They always promised they were gonna set me up, and that’ he said. ‘For all I know, this is a set-up, bro’, and they’ve got us all. ’Cause I just heard from Sean today and he reckons supposedly there’s eight suspects and there’s another murder as well. A few other people who I know, the cops have been to their house and they’re asking about PTK, which is our old gang, and – and who are the Bondi Boys?’ Was it all coming down, all the stuff from …? It couldn’t happen. ‘I fuckin’, I swear to god it sounds to me like they’re, they’re about to fuckin’ just ruin our lives like they always said they would and that. It sounds to me like they’re building some sort of fuckin’ big case. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a set-up, bro’.’ Paused for breath, maybe not knowing what to say next.

  ‘But you never – it could’ve been them other cunts. You never know.’

  ‘Nah,’ Alger said, not even bothering to grasp at the straw offered by the suggestion. ‘Nah, it wasn’t, man. Like, we’d know. We used to bash heaps of people and that, and get in blues and that, all the time down there. But we’ve never thrown cunts off cliffs and that. And if anyone did, like, they wouldn’t have been able to keep it to themselves, you know? Unless it was one guy alone, or something.’

  • • •

  Which Detective Sergeant Page and the other detectives from Operation Taradale had already discussed – that the murders could have been perpetrated by a single person. But not the attem
pted murder of David McMahon. McMahon had identified Cushman and had tentatively identified Forrer and Carre as accomplices, as well as insisting that there were females present among the gang of more than a dozen who had tried to kill him. One guy acting alone? In the case of David McMahon, definitely not.

  iii

  For the police officers involved in the investigation, 18 December 2001 was a busy day. Not only was the telephone traffic among the former PTK/Bondi Boys gathering speed but two of the ‘Alexandria Eight’ were interviewed in relation to their possible knowledge of the events under scrutiny.

  Dean Howard, despite having worn a listening device to record his co-offenders in 1991, declined to make a statement when he attended Maroubra Police Station. The 10 years since his complicity with the authorities seemed to have imbued him with a belated sense of caution: having already earned the epithet ‘putrid dog’ from one of his former associates for that very complicity, he now appeared to be less prepared to dob in his ex-mates.

  Detective Constable Hooper advised Howard that the fact that he’d worn a listening device whilst on remand could be disclosed during the course of the investigation and let him leave the station.

  At the same time Howard was refusing to answer questions at Maroubra, Manuel Jong was being questioned at Waverley Police Station. His answers came easily as he knew nothing of any real interest. He’d never heard of any of those who’d died or disappeared, other than Richard Johnson, the victim whose murder he’d been prosecuted for. He recognised none of the photographs shown to him, neither those of the victims nor the aerials of Marks Park, and had never heard of any of the graffiti tags. In 1989 he was anti-gay, he admitted, but now he had gay friends. The only gay-related offence he’d ever known about was the one for which he’d been arrested. He was no longer in contact with any of the people involved in the Johnson incident except for James Lopez and that contact was infrequent, to say the least. He could offer nothing else to the investigation, knew nothing of the whereabouts of ‘the others’: it was, after all, he said, only a matter of pure chance that he and Lopez had been there that night in January 1990, that night when the game of basketball turned into a game of murder. He and Lopez lived in the area, knew the other guys vaguely because they lived in the area, too. But he and Lopez went to a different school, went to St Mary’s Cathedral. The others weren’t mates, they just happened to live in Waterloo, the same as he did. He didn’t really know them then, and he didn’t know them now.

  iv

  The following day continued where Tuesday had left off. With a flurry of phone calls between various persons of interest. So far, the police had learned little of real value: they’d heard that gang members had assaulted gays, beating and robbing them as a form of lucrative sport, they’d learned that those same gang members – the tough streetwise kids of the late ’80s and early ’90s – were now reduced to tears, pathetic denials and the most unsustainable lies when confronted with their earlier activities. But they’d learned nothing to directly connect any gang members to the deaths of Ross Warren or John Russell, and too little, too late to connect them to David McMahon’s attempted murder. And it wasn’t because the suspects were smarter than their pursuers – they were for the most part uneducated, inarticulate, drug-using marginals – it was because the time lapse of more than a dozen years had eliminated evidence and weakened memories. Which did not daunt the officers of Operation Taradale: they continued their investigations, arranging interviews, collecting statements and assessing what little evidence they had knowing that, at any moment, something new might come to light, some new piece of the picture, some admission of complicity, if not outright guilt. Something.

  And one possible source of that something was Adam French. He’d already been covertly recorded while he was in jail in ’91 and Detective Sergeant Page decided that now was the time to pay him a visit, to insinuate a little anxiety into his mind. But before making the trip, Page rang to give him advance notice: it would do no harm to make him sweat a bit. And it would give him plenty of time to ring his mates. The immediate result was a phone call to his grandmother the day after the police had spoken to him.

  ‘Hey, while I was at work yesterday, I got a phone call. Friggin’ two detectives from Sydney. About all that crap that –’

  ‘Yeah, I was expecting it,’ his grandmother said. ‘Yeah, I, when I saw it on the news. It’s been in the paper for about two weeks. About this bloke from Wollongong and another bloke at Taramara – Tamarama. Is that what it was all about?’

  ‘Yeah,’ French said, a single sullen, syllable. ‘Well –’

  ‘As soon as it hit the papers I, I thought of it, yeah? Yeah, and it’s been on the news nearly every night.’

  ‘I haven’t been reading the paper so I haven’t seen anything.’ Seemingly asking, why would he want to read shit like that? ‘It was at Bondi and stuff like that.’

  ‘Yeah, well there was one at, at, er, the bloke from here. He was a news reporter or something. They’ve never found his body. And then the other bloke, he’s grabbed a handful of hair off somebody.’ Did it all sound like something off the TV, some show, unreal, distant, as though it was happening to someone else? ‘Actually, when you were going through that thing at, uh, in Sydney … One of the detectives said then, oh well, they’ve got a handful of hair, he’s grabbed somebody’s hair. Yeah, that’s the bloke that went over at Tamarama.’

  ‘That thing’ being the kicking to death of Richard Johnson.

  ‘But, Christ, you know, he said, oh, we’ve got some new, new information.’ French breathed heavily. ‘Like, well, how can they get new information 11 years down the track?’ It was ridiculous to even think about it.

  ‘It’s, it – it’s DNA. This is what they’re goin’ on.’ DNA, like, there’s no escaping DNA. These scientists were inventing things every day, things that were going to convict everybody … ‘They haven’t got any new information at all. But they’re just tryin’ to match things up. So, they might ask for a sample or something. I don’t know.’ It was on TV all the time: used to be fingerprints, now it was DNA. Like in the X-Files. ‘Do you think you better see a solicitor?’

  ‘Well, I, I don’t know … I don’t, I don’t think I have to.’

  ‘Well, you weren’t there. You weren’t there, were you?’ she asked. Was he there? She’d seen something, some show on TV –

  ‘No,’ French said, he wasn’t there. ‘That’s right, yeah.’

  The problem was though, she remembered writing a detective’s name in a diary, some detective who’d told her … Where was the diary now? ‘Have you got that diary there?’ she asked. ‘I can remember writing something in there … Some detective, uh, I’ve probably got his name in there where he said, um, even if it’s 10, 10 years down the track, we’ll get you for it.’

  Didn’t he know it? They didn’t give up, these D’s, didn’t stop hassling you, however long it took. Less than a week before Christmas and it was all shit. Again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Real Big Tough Boys

  i

  Christmas Eve and the word had been on the street for a month or so that the police believed Sean Cushman had been involved in the deaths of gay men in the Bondi area during the late 1980s. His name had been mentioned by some of those whose private conversations had been lawfully captured on tape, mentioned in terms of his having actually thrown at least one gay man off the cliff. No-one had implicated him directly, however, no-one had given up his name during the series of interviews conducted at police stations throughout New South Wales. On the other hand, no-one had definitively given up anyone’s name during their interview so, just because Cushman wasn’t positively nailed didn’t mean he was in the clear. In fact, the police were circling ever closer to him, moving into the lives of those nearer to him.

  At 11.30 on the morning of Christmas Eve, Cushman was talking to his girlfriend’s father, learning that his de facto father-in-law had been spoken to by the police. It had come as
a shock, he said, hearing about these three gay guys who were killed and the fact that Sean was suspected. ‘And here in Sydney,’ he said, ‘two weeks ago, they did a re-enactment. The police threw dummies off the cliff. And the guy who ran this, his name was, um, Page. Detective Sergeant Page.’

  This bloke Page, he told Cushman, could easily find Sean if he wanted to, could locate him without too much trouble. They’d probably tapped both their phones, he reckoned.

  ‘I’m not too worried,’ Cushman answered. ‘Because I didn’t, I didn’t do anything like that, so.’

  Obviously relieved to hear it, his father-in-law had presumably had his doubts otherwise he wouldn’t feel the relief he now felt on being told that Cushman wasn’t involved. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d throw gay guys off a cliff, mate … The bottom line is you’ve got to get it cleared up because you don’t want that kind of shit hung on ya. Regardless of what you did when you were a kid. That kid stuff is –’

  ‘Nothing like that.’ He cut into the older man’s words, headed him off, away from dangerous ground. If he was anxious to allay any suspicions that his past was as ugly as it seemed, he apparently succeeded. It seemed to have worked.

  ‘Well, you’ve reassured me, son, let me tell ya,’ his father-in-law said.

  Like, as if he’d do that kind of stuff. Back then when he was nothing but a kid. ‘Sixteen years old,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be doin’ that. I was probably at home doin’ my homework or something, huh?’

  Was relief pouring through the girlfriend’s father as he listened to the protested innocence of Brian Hagland’s convicted killer? He seemed happy to hear it, happy not to be the fool the detective had hinted he was, telling him that his daughter was in ‘bad hands’, telling him that Sean was some sort of evil wrongdoer, a through-and-through loser. Nobody would want their daughter to associate with someone like that, would they?