by Denis Ryan
By the time I got off the phone teeing all that up, Barritt was standing in front of me.
‘You’d better know what you’re talking about this time,’ he warned before marching back to his office. ‘If you bugger this up, you’ll be in more muck than a Werribee duck.’
The following morning, Search and Rescue had their scuba team in the water. The two detectives from New South Wales rowed a four-metre boat out on the river, while the scuba divers rummaged around below in the silty brown water.
Like a cork in a bottle, a bleached, bloated body bobbed up to the surface next to the little rowboat. The two detectives nearly shat themselves. Hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and methane, produced in the body after death, had swelled the corpse to almost twice its usual size. The divers had found the station wagon on the bottom of the river, then levered the tailgate open, and the body had rushed out as if keen to escape its murky wet grave.
The body was brought onto the riverbank further downstream, where Jack Thomas identified it as Illario Geracitano, a local market gardener. Geracitano had a long history of mental illness and was known to the Merbein police as a man who had been violent towards his wife and son on numerous occasions.
I had done some training as a police photographer so I drew the short straw and grabbed an old Rolleicord camera out of the car, took a deep breath and took some snaps of the body before getting away from the stench as fast as I could.
I had taken just long enough over the body to see that Geracitano’s hands and feet had been bound. I snapped away at the ligatures. There was a small hole in the centre of his head. I photographed this, too. It may have been a gunshot wound. I couldn’t be sure. That was something that would be examined during the post-mortem.
The following day, the headlines in the Melbourne papers screamed that Geracitano had been shot in the head. Barritt was quoted at length, saying Geracitano had been shot, a big call prior to the post-mortem, although he’d had bugger all to do with the case at that time. He was big-noting again.
It turned out that Barritt was way off the mark. Geracitano hadn’t been shot. The autopsy report revealed that Geracitano had been beaten to death with a blunt object. The hole in his forehead had occurred after death. Geracitano’s head injuries had been so significant, and his skull had been fractured so many times, that gases had built up in his head to a point where the pressure had blown a hole through the skin.
It wasn’t just the circumstances of Geracitano’s death that Barritt had got wrong. He thought he knew who’d committed the murder, too. Not specifically, of course. He didn’t have a name or a face. Barritt, in full J. Edgar Hoover mode, became convinced that the murder was a Mafia contract killing, no doubt committed by a hit man with a violin case and perhaps a scar across his cheek from some youthful street brawl.
The following day, Barritt took one of the Homicide Squad detectives, Sergeant Noel Murphy, out on a crusade. Barritt hit all his fizzes in the Italian community, demanding information. From there, he barged into the homes, farms and factories in and outside Mildura, targeting the Italians he suspected were Mafia men.
These poor blokes were bailed up against walls and read the riot act by Barritt. He was on to them, he said. Their day of reckoning was at hand. It would be better for them to fess up and throw themselves on the mercy of the courts. They had nothing to tell him, of course. Rather than acknowledge that he was climbing up the wrong tree, Barritt took their stunned faces as a sure sign that the Mafia’s reach was greater than even he had suspected. ‘Omerta’ was the problem, but he, and only he, would break down the code of silence.
Meanwhile, I took the other homicide officer, Detective Senior Constable John Bates, out to Geracitano’s home. His widow, Teresa, wasn’t home but their 17-year-old son was. We took him back to the station and interviewed him. Within ten minutes he broke down and confessed that he and his mother had killed his father. The old man had had one of his violent rages and as usual had taken it out on the boy and his mother. The three had wrestled each other to the ground, and Teresa had grabbed a block of firewood and bounced it off her husband’s head a few times. Teresa and the boy hadn’t been sure their tormentor was dead, so they bound his hands and feet, put him in the old station wagon and pushed it into the drink at Cowanna Bend.
Later that day I had a beer with Noel Murphy and John Bates. I had to ask.
‘How was your day?’ I asked Noel.
‘What a fucking embarrassment that bastard Barritt is,’ Noel replied. ‘He dragged me all over Mildura looking for the bloody Mafia. He was banging on doors and threatening people all day with murder blues. Jesus, the poor buggers didn’t have a clue what was going on.’
Bates and I couldn’t stop laughing. Noel had copped Barritt in full flight. I was just glad it was someone else on the receiving end for a change.
‘There’s something very, very wrong with that man,’ Noel said, downing his beer.
On another occasion, Barritt let a murderer walk free. It wasn’t corruption. Not in the traditional sense. It was a matter of sheer investigative ineptitude, tinged with Barritt’s view that ethnic families should not be afforded the same investigative rigour as good Anglo-Saxon families in the area.
Barritt had a strong association with a prominent Croatian family in Mildura. He was using one of the family members to get information for his reports to ASIO. The Croats were the good guys in the post-war period and the Serbs the objects of suspicion—the reds under the beds in Mildura. Barritt would thump out his reports based on some scurrilous piece of information he’d picked up around the traps.
This particular family operated an illegal still and made its own grappa. They sold a few bottles on the sly to their former countrymen around Mildura and drank the rest. They were known to be heavy drinkers, guzzling away on the almost pure spirit of the home-made grog.
The mother of this Croatian family was elderly, in her eighties, but still spritely, and she could belt down the grappa as well as men half her age.
One day she was found dead in her home wearing her nightgown. A lounge room window had been forced open and a television set next to the window had been knocked over. Despite evidence pointing to a murder and aggravated burglary, Barritt decided the woman had died of natural causes. He didn’t bother with the burglary either. He didn’t demand a post-mortem, so there was none. A death certificate was hastily issued and that was that.
I found this out only two years later when a fizz told me he’d been at the house the night the woman died. He told me he had been part of a group of five pickers who’d been out drinking at the bottom bar of the Wintersun Hotel in town, pissing their money up against a wall. One of the group told the others that he knew of a house nearby where an old lady lived. The son was never home. He’d just break in and knock off some money.
The informer told me that this bloke did break in, jemmied the window open while the rest of the group looked on. So drunk was he that the moment his foot was on the floor, he knocked over the television set. The old lady was roused from her slumber and made her way down to the lounge room to see what the racket was. She saw the bloke and screamed. He grabbed the woman, threw her to the ground and suffocated her by holding the palm of his hand over her mouth while pinching her nostrils shut.
He came out of the house a few moments later.
‘She won’t be screaming anymore,’ he told the group.
In the end we hunted down the witnesses, who by then had spread all over the country, before arresting the murderer, Mustafa Kulenovic. As Barritt had buggered the initial investigation, there was no medical evidence to prove a cause of death. There was no point in exhuming the body. Too much time had elapsed since the woman had been murdered.
The best we could do was charge him with aggravated burglary. Kulenovic pleaded guilty and got ten years.
When I told Barritt what the informer had told me, he denied any involvement in the first investigation, but he could not sustain it. The records were
there for all to see.
I’d learnt to keep my distance with Barritt but on this occasion I couldn’t help myself.
‘Jim, what were you thinking?’ I said, more incredulous than anything. ‘This was a stone cold break and enter gone wrong.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Bloody pisspot wog. She just fell over. Bloody pizzles.’
Of course, Barritt might have thought, what’s two bungled murder investigations when three will do?
The Stock Squad detective from Deniliquin, a town in New South Wales about 400 kilometres east of Mildura, regularly paid us a visit. Early in 1965, he called in with news of a murder up Forbes way. A young farm labourer had grabbed a shotgun, shot the farmer’s wife dead and stolen some cash from the property. He gave us a circular with the labourer’s description, so we pinned it up on the noticeboard at the CIB office and at the front of the station for the uniform boys.
One morning I was sitting in the CIB office. Barritt’s office door was closed, and I knew he had a couple of young blokes in there with him, itinerant farm labourers in their early twenties. They’d been picked up by the uniform boys after being spotted hitchhiking in town.
‘You’re a pair of pooftah bastards,’ Barritt thundered from his office. ‘What have you been stealing, you bastards?’ Bang! Crash!
The sounds of the two young men whimpering in reply confirmed that Barritt was giving them his version of the third degree. A thumping.
The interview went on for about twenty minutes, interspersed with more crashing sounds, with Barritt trying to beat a confession out of them. Finally, the door swung open and out marched the monstrous Barritt with two forlorn young blokes in tow. Not a mark on them. I had to give Barritt his due there.
‘Put these two pooftahs in the interview book,’ Barritt told me before he marched back to his office.
I looked over at these two young blokes. One of them was nuggety and solidly built, almost as tall as Barritt. The other was shorter, and scrawny but muscular and wiry. He fitted the description of the Forbes murder suspect to a tee.
I walked gingerly into Barritt’s office.
‘Jim,’ I said, ‘do you mind if I have a word with these two?’
Barritt didn’t answer directly. No doubt the cogs were grinding in his suet pudding of a mind.
‘All right. But you won’t get anything out of them.’ Barritt clearly thought that if these two blokes had survived one of his thumpings they had to be innocent.
I interviewed the taller one first. He didn’t have much to say. I wrote him up in the interview book and said he could go.
The scrawny bloke was next. I asked where he’d been, and he told me he’d been a jackaroo all over New South Wales and Victoria. I told him I’d been a rouseabout before I’d joined the force. I’d worked at a pastoral station on the Narrandera Run almost twenty years before. He knew the property. He’d worked there.
I waited until he finished describing the station as it was when he’d worked on it, then let the silence hang.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. His head went down straight away.
‘Your description is on every police noticeboard in New South Wales and Victoria. You’re wanted for murder. You can’t run away from this.’
The tears flowed. He looked up at me and blurted it all out. He was broke and only wanted to rob the place. He couldn’t explain why he’d shot the woman. It was just a stupid and pointless crime.
I took down the details of confession and left him to ponder his fate. I walked into Barritt’s office.
‘Jim, one of these young blokes has just put his hand up for the murder in Forbes. You know the one? On the noticeboard.’
I was enjoying this. A good detective doesn’t let details slip. I had memorised the description of the suspect. Barritt hadn’t even noticed the flyer on the noticeboard and had forgotten the briefing the Deniliquin Stock Squad detective had given us less than a month before. He rose from his chair and made his way out the door. He could move quickly for a big man when he was motivated. He brushed past me, grabbed the remorseful young killer by the scruff of his neck and dragged him back into his office.
‘I’ll handle this!’ Barritt roared, and slammed the door in my face.
He tried to take the pinch as his own. He did it routinely to advance his reputation with the senior blokes at Russell Street. He must have taken thirty or forty arrests off me over the years. He did the same with the uniform boys. Helped himself to any other arrest that caught his eye and left the officer who’d done the hard work empty-handed. That was the way Barritt was—a terrible detective who wouldn’t know shit from clay if he’d eaten a mouthful of it.
I just thought he was a clod—an overgrown version of Inspector Clouseau, a bumbling fool, but with a nasty streak that he used to keep his fellow officers under his control. I didn’t think he was corrupt. Not at that stage anyway. But he was worse than any copper who took a backhander to look the other way. And he was protecting Day.
Had Trippy or Mick O’Donnell told me that Barritt was standing over parents, forcing them to drop complaints that Day had raped and assaulted their children, I would have been right on to him from the outset. But it was all a deep secret. Anything that came into Mildura station involving Day went straight to Barritt. And from there the complaints would disappear, leaving kids tormented, their lives suspended in a dim purgatory.
Strangely, it didn’t seem odd to me that Barritt, Day and Joe Kearney dined together at the presbytery every other day. I didn’t like any of them so I kept my distance. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn’t question it. I knew the three of them would be there together, boozing up. That didn’t bother me. It just seemed like three strange men acting out their small-town fantasies behind closed doors.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. They would fill their bellies in the presbytery, and plot and scheme. Kearney would produce the books, and Day and he would scour through them, item by item, looking for anything they could swipe. If money was short, Barritt would know what to do. There were always the local villains to shake down—the SP bookies, the sly groggers, the bludgers and anyone else Barritt could stand over.
This unholy trinity controlled Mildura. Barritt warded off or intimidated troublemakers. Kearney controlled the courts and Day, a man who purported to be chosen by God to manage all His concerns and interests on earth, would suit himself.
Trippy had been driving back from Renmark along the Sturt Highway. It was a ninety-minute trip, almost two hours if you took it easy. It could be a lonely drive, especially at night. The odd truck laden with produce from Mildura might have passed him by, but for the most part Trippy was on his own, flashing past the hop bush, the native pines and the mallee gums that pockmarked the wheat and sheep farms along the highway.
Trippy fell asleep at the wheel of his old FC Holden and slammed into a mallee gum. The old car was built to take the impact, but without a seatbelt, Trippy slammed into the steering wheel. He had been stuck out there in his wreck of a car, injured and near death for close to an hour, before help arrived.
He spent a month in hospital with chest injuries. He made a full recovery but the steering wheel had bruised his heart, weakening it and making Trippy susceptible to heart failure. The accident had effectively given him a shortened use-by date.
He didn’t talk about it much to me. I can’t remember him even talking about the accident. Perhaps he did in passing. The uniform boys had told me how serious it had been, but even they didn’t know that Trippy’s heart had copped such a colossal wallop that it would take decades off his life.
Not long after the accident, Trippy took sick leave. His heart had been giving him problems again. I’d call on him at his home a couple of times a week. He was losing weight and his usual swarthy complexion was fading. He began to deteriorate before my eyes. He still managed to come into the CIB office from time to time for a chat, but his visits had become less frequent as time wore on.
O
ne morning I looked up from my desk and there was Trippy standing in front of me. He looked terrible, like he could collapse at any time. I leapt out of my chair and encouraged him to take a seat but Trippy was having none of that.
‘I need to have a word with you outside,’ he said, nodding towards the old bitumen tennis court at the back of the station. I followed, keeping an eye on him as he struggled down the corridor. He stood still for a moment, looking at me carefully.
‘I’m fucked,’ he told me. ‘I’ve had it. I’ve only got a couple of days to live.’
I was shocked. I knew he was crook but I didn’t know he was this bad.
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Yes,’ Trippy said. ‘Keep an eye on Addy and the kids.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after them, mate.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get going.’
I didn’t know what to say. In the end there was nothing I could say and Trippy knew it. He turned and walked off slowly around to Madden Avenue. I imagine his wife, Adrianna, was there, waiting for him in the car.
It was just like Trippy. He didn’t want a fuss. He was an all-round good bloke and copper. A bit of a loner, like me. He didn’t stand for any bullshit, even from mugs of higher rank like Barritt. Maybe that’s why we gravitated towards each other. And here he was, at just 37 years of age, shuffling off home to wait for the executioner.
Two days later, Adrianna called me at home, just after nine o’clock in the evening. Trippy was gone. She’d been sitting on the lounge and Trippy was on his feet, standing by the mantelpiece. He just collapsed in front of her without a word. And that was that. Dead before he hit the ground.