by I. J. Fenn
One possible answer was presented to Steve Page in April 2001.
ii
[In accordance with an agreement between Steve Page and the family of the victim in the following scenario, the victim’s name has been changed.]
Ricki Moore lived in the Wollongong area where he was waiting to die. His doctors had given him six months to live before he became yet another victim of AIDS. He was spending whatever time he had left working for the AIDS Council of NSW, Our Pathways Incorporated and the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation. He was a female impersonator, a ‘drag queen’ known as Barbie. He’d worked as Barbie since 1968.
Barbie grew up in Wollongong and worked in drag acts at Kennedy’s Nightclub where she met Ross Warren and other WIN TV employees who’d come to the essentially straight club to watch the shows. Ross and Barbie became friends, although not close, going to the same parties and sharing friends. Ross, Barbie said, was ‘in the closet’ at the time, hadn’t publically declared his homosexuality.
Between 1988 and 1990 Barbie lived in Sydney and went to a lot of gay beats, including Marks Park, which she’d known about since 1966 when she was 12 years old. In fact, she went to Marks Park almost every night while she lived in Sydney although not always for sex. Sometimes she went there just to sit, to talk.
Barbie smiled thinly when she talked of Marks Park, her eyes took on a far away look and her hands moved restlessly as though trying to grasp something just out of reach, something that had gone forever. Marks Park wasn’t just for gay men, she said. Bisexual men also went there to engage in sex in the honeycomb caverns and the bushes along the walkway leading from Bondi to Tamarama.
‘A lot of people think that men meet and have sex in the toilets there at the southern end of Marks Park,’ Barbie said. ‘But this isn’t necessarily the case. The toilets are too open and people can walk in on you.’ Besides which, she explained, gay men went to Marks Park to pick up men regarded as ‘straight’, closet gays. ‘In any case,’ she went on, ‘the rock area around the outside of Marks Park and the bushes on top of the flat area of the park are where people go to have sex because it isn’t as open to the public and therefore there’s a lesser chance of being accidentally discovered or disturbed.’
Sometime at the beginning of January 1990, Barbie said, she went to the bank on Bondi Road. It was around ten o’clock on a Thursday morning and the money she withdrew was for her rent. As she was about to go through the gate at the back of her house in Carlisle Street she was struck on the back of the neck and fell to the ground. Three pairs of feet came into her view. Someone took her wallet out of her pocket and the assailants ran off towards the beach. All Barbie had seen of her attackers was their feet.
A couple of weeks later Barbie was drinking at the Bondi Hotel and left sometime after midnight to go home. It was a Friday night, hot and close, and Barbie was wearing black nylon cycling shorts with a black G-string underneath, and a white Bonds singlet. With her almost waist length black hair flowing in the night breeze and weighing no more than 45 kilos, she looked waif-like and young. She was 35.
Leaving the hotel bar she headed off up Notts Avenue, walked towards the coastal walkway preparing to cut through the park to Fletcher Street and Carlisle Street. At the top of the stairs at the north end of Marks Park she rested on a seat overlooking the ocean, watching the moon rise.
‘Another man came and sat beside me,’ she later told Sergeant Page. ‘He had dark hair which was parted in the middle and came down to his shoulders. I thought he was aged between 20 and 25. At least 10 years younger than me.’ This was a white boy, she said, with no recognisable accent, an Aussie. The hair on his chest was visible at the open neck of his light cotton shirt and he was wearing jeans. He asked Barbie if she had a light. ‘As I lit his cigarette he held my hand and put it on his crotch. At this point I realised that he was “on”, that is, he was there to have sex with another man.’
The stranger led Barbie over the footpath and down the hill to the bushes at the northern side of the park. There were two openings to the vegetation where the man led Barbie but the bushes were thick enough that they were completely concealed from view. Barbie stripped naked while the stranger dropped his trousers and underwear to his ankles leaving his shirt on. Barbie fell to her knees and took the man into her mouth. As she worked on her partner, Barbie noticed that the man’s penis was circumcised and that he had a large tattoo on the outer calf of his smooth left leg. Unfortunately, she couldn’t make out what was depicted by the tattoo.
Suddenly, two other men appeared in the bushes where Barbie and her friend were. And the two newcomers were both naked. The original man slid down onto the ground, sitting with his trousers still around his ankles. He forced Barbie’s head further down so she could continue the oral sex while one of the other men sat at Barbie’s feet, put her legs over his shoulders and forced her knees apart with his feet.
‘The third guy lay on top of me and tried to put his penis into my anus,’ Barbie said. ‘I remember him saying something about being in pain and blaming me, saying I was too tight.’
This third man tried to ‘loosen’ her up by inserting all four fingers and his thumb into her, pushing his hand inside Barbie’s anus as far as the wrist. ‘I don’t think he was using his hand in a fist clench,’ Barbie said. ‘But he had forced his whole hand inside.’
Meanwhile, the first man continued to force Barbie’s head into his crotch, forced the continuation of the oral sex. Then they changed places. The rotation of positions was systematically done, Barbie said, so that they each took a turn in each act without discussing what they were doing. It was as if the whole thing had been rehearsed. And it went on. And on.
‘I lost track of who was doing what to me,’ she said. ‘At one stage, one of them burned the hair off my scrotum with a cigarette lighter. A guy then perfomed oral sex on me by raising me off the ground. I am quite well-endowed and he was able to place my penis in his mouth from between my legs behind me. I was still face down at this time and being forced to give the person at the head of me oral sex.’
Later – how much later, Barbie couldn’t say – one of the men complained that she was too loose for him. One of the others said, ‘You’ll be tight.’ He then burned one of Barbie’s nipples with the lighter before turning the flame to the inside of her thigh making her clench her buttocks. Eleven years on and Barbie still had the burn mark on her thigh.
‘The whole incident seemed to take an hour or an hour-and-a-half,’ Barbie said. ‘The three of them systematically took turns penetrating my mouth and anus. All three ejaculated more than once. They didn’t use condoms at any time. They continually abused me verbally, swearing at me and making threats. They said I was a “slut” and they’d used me for what they wanted. They said, “All poofters should be exterminated.” They said they knew who I was and where I lived and if I said anything, they’d be back. When they’d finished taking turns raping me, one of them masturbated and ejaculated over my face while another urinated on my body. The other one kicked me at the same time. They all punched and kicked me before leaving.’
Barbie was terrified, she said. ‘I thought they were going to kill me.’
They didn’t kill her but she suffered four broken ribs, a fractured arm, two cracked vertebrae in her neck and multiple lacerations and bruising to most of her body.
• • •
Steve Page listened to Barbie’s account of the attack, recognising the behaviour as that likely to have been learned in an institution, the behaviour of prison inmates. He put out a service-wide email asking for information on similar incidents, asking for names, places, dates. There were none. Was the assault on Barbie a one-off, something that happened only once, early in 1990 in Marks Park, Bondi? Absolutely not. Of that, Detective Sergeant Page was certain. No further information has ever come to light, however, and no suspects have been identified. Nevertheless, it is not without the bounds of possibility that the orchestrated attack on Ricki Moore could equally
have happened on the night of 21/22 July 1989 to Ross Warren on the rock shelf beneath the coastal walkway at Tamarama. But this time, instead of simply beating their victim into unconsciousness, the men went one step further, killing Warren after they’d committed their acts of violence against him, then disposing of his body by throwing it into the waters of the Tasman Sea.
Maybe we’ll never know for sure exactly what happened to Ross Warren but we do know that, in law, his unlawful death has been recorded.
On Wednesday, 9 March 2005, a year after the inquest was conducted, Senior Deputy State Coroner, Jacqueline Milledge, delivered her findings and recommendations at Glebe Coroner’s Court on Parramatta Road. Unlike the inquest itself, the findings hearing attracted only a handful of people: journalists who had followed the case from the beginning of Operation Taradale, Craig Ellis, Ross Warren’s friend who had given evidence the previous year, a few interested onlookers and Steve Page, the retired detective sergeant in charge of the investigation.
Ms Milledge opened the proceedings by outlining the cases at hand. The death of John Russell and the disappearance of Ross Warren were described in a few paragraphs without comment other than to say that Warren’s death was not reported to the coroner at the time: it was regarded as an accidental death. Milledge then went on to explain that the area around Marks Park, formally known as Mackenzies Point, was a gay beat which was known to ‘everyone in the community … including the police’. Moving on, she described the culture of gay-hate prevalent in Sydney in the late ’80s and early ’90s which resulted in the assaults and deaths of other homosexual men uncovered by Taradale detectives during their investigation: Johnson, Tonks, Allen, McMahon, Boxsell, Keam, Rattanajurathaporn. These attacks were, on the whole, carried out by gangs of youths operating under identifying ‘tags’, adopting names that were ‘indicative of their foul mission’.
And what, the coroner seemed to be asking, did the police do at the time in question? Not much. Even though Ross Warren was reported as being missing within 24 hours of his disappearance, the case was effectively ‘closed’ within a week concluding that Warren had died by ‘misadventure’. During the inquest, former Detective Bowditch claimed that everything had been done to determine the circumstances of Warren’s death: his brief of evidence was submitted to the coroner in 1990, he said; copies had been lodged with the Missing Persons Unit, he said; the Scientific Section had been called out, he said; the Air Wing and Water Police were called in, he said. No record of any of these events or documents was ever located. The only document that did turn up was the Occurrence Pad entry nominating three other officers as being involved in the investigation, three officers who denied any involvement, one of whom was actually on annual leave at the time. Confronted with this catalogue of dubiousness, Bowditch said he was ‘appalled’ that the department had lost the paperwork.
Milledge was appalled too, she said, appalled that no documents were ever found.
‘This state of affairs defies belief,’ she said. ‘This was a grossly inadequate and shameful investigation. Indeed, to characterise it as an ‘investigation’ is to give it a label it doesn’t deserve.’
A ‘better’ investigation was undertaken in the case of John Russell, she said, but it, too was far from adequate. Although in fairness to the police involved, Sergeant Ingleby and Constable Scanlon had always considered the possibility that Russell and Warren had met their deaths by means other than accident. Theirs, however, seemed to be voices in the desert.
Unlike the Warren case, she went on, good crime scene photos were taken at the Russell site. Unfortunately, the hair depicted in some of those photographs, the hair adhering to Russell’s hand that should have been submitted for forensic testing, had been lost. ‘Disgraceful!’ she said. ‘Not good enough!’ Milledge quoted Dr Alan Cala’s evidence referring to the hairs, emphasising how it was highly unlikely that they’d come from Russell’s own head, how the finding of those hairs should have raised serious questions in the minds of the detectives at the scene, questions which should have resulted in greater care being taken. She also paid particular attention to Cala’s opinions on the positioning of Russell’s body, on how the final position suggested at least the possibility of Russell having been pushed from the cliff. In fact, Milledge said, Cala’s evidence suggested unequivocally that Russell had been thrown to his death.
Given all of which, the police investigation at the time had been ‘very limited’. The earlier investigations into both Warren and Russell were inadequate and naive, she said. But not so the current investigation. The detectives of Operation Taradale had conducted an investigation that was not only thorough, it was impeccable, she said. Everything that could be done, was done. Detective Sergeant Stephen Page, she said, was both committed and an abundantly talented investigator. It was only a pity that, so far, no-one could be prosecuted for any crime in relation to Warren and Russell although, who knows about the future? Relationships between ‘these thugs’, she said, meaning the persons of interest who had given evidence at the inquest, don’t always remain solid: there was hope that at some future time, someone would turn on the rest, give them up and see them finally jailed for their crimes.
So, would the same things happen now? There was no doubt in the coroner’s mind that the NSW Police had made significant improvements in many areas highlighted by the inquest, improvements in case management, gay and lesbian crime, proper and timely investigation. The counsel for the commissioner of police at the inquest said as much in his closing statement. The Police, he said, despite their failings a dozen years previously, now led changes to the view of society through their own affirmative action in relation to gay crimes. That was then, he seemed to be saying, it’s different now. Nowadays, we wouldn’t let such events pass without extremely robust investigation.[2]
• • •
At the end of her summary of the previous year’s inquest Jacqueline Milledge finally delivered her findings.
I find that Ross Bradley Warren died in Sydney on or about 22 July 1989. Whilst the cause and manner of death are unknown, I am satisfied that the deceased was a victim of homicide perpetrated by person or persons unknown.
I find that John Alan Russell died at Marks Park, North Bondi [sic] between the 22 or 23 November 1989. The cause of death is multiple injuries sustained when he was thrown from the cliff onto rocks, by a person or persons unknown.
[1] If the Russell and McMahon incidents were perpetrated by the same people – sunconnected to Warren’s case – the effect of reducing the consquences of their actions to the level of ordinariness would be achieved by repeating those actions quickly. Having murdered John Russell (an act of unimaginable enormity) they would want to do the same again (with David McMahon the unfortunate victim) to halve the size of what they’d done.
[2] Two events from around the time of the inquest ‘findings’. Firstly, at around 9pm on a Saturday evening in Oxford Street, two women were sitting at a pavement table outside a cafe. They were approached by a male who accused them of being lesbians before starting to punch one of them. She fought back. No-one else helped. No-one has been apprehended. Secondly, a Friday evening on Anzac Parade not far from the SCG. Two heterosexual married men who had been out for the evening were sitting at a bus stop at around 9.30pm. A group of seven males of Maori appearance rode past on bicycles and abused them for being ‘gay’. Having passed them, they returned and attacked the two men, ripping palings from a nearby fence to beat them. No-one stopped to help until a taxi finally pulled in and took them to hospital. One suffered a fractured skull, lost teeth, broken bones. The attackers, aged around 17 years old, have not been apprehended. Plus ca change…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The facts presented in this book come from a brief of evidence compiled by Detective Sergeant Steve Page of the NSW Police and tendered to the Senior Deputy State Coroner, Jacqueline Milledge, who presided over the inquest into the deaths of Ross Warren and John Russell at Glebe Coroner’s Cour
t in 2004. These documents are in the public domain.
The summary of the inquest into the deaths of Ross Warren and John Russell, delivered by Coroner Milledge, comes from a press release handed out to the public on 9 March 2005.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After graduating in London I.J. Fenn settled in the south of France before relocating to Australia in 1998. Three years in the Whitsundays preceeded a move to Sydney where he currently lives with his partner and daughter. The Beat is his first work of nonfiction.
The Five Mile Press Pty Ltd
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Victoria 3179 Australia
www.fivemile.com.au
Copyright © I.J. Fenn, 2006
All rights reserved
The ebook edition published 2011
First published 2006
Cover design: Darian Causby
Cover photograph: Photolibrary
ePub ISBN: 9781743006450
Mobi ISBN: 9781743006467
Print ISBN: 1741782511
Title: The Beat
Subtitle: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders
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