He had been shot twice with a .38 handgun. One bullet went into the pelvis and created little damage. But the second entered the left side of the chest and went through both lungs, causing him to drown in his own blood as he crawled towards the house to get help.
He was found lying on his back in the yard with his head resting against a trellis.
In the driveway were two parked cars – a Ford Escort panel van and Carroll’s Chevrolet utility. The driver’s seat cover of the orange Escort was drenched in blood and in the back on a mattress was an Able Baby hammerless .22 revolver also covered in blood.
The front bench seat of the Chev was bloodstained, indicating someone bleeding heavily had hopped into the car from the passenger side and slipped over behind the wheel. There was an empty, black holster under the front seat that would have fitted the bloodied .22.
It was what police would find inside the house that revealed the secrets of the armed robbery team that had pulled the biggest jobs in Australia for seven years.
There was a blood-covered green towel in the bathroom and a partly-cooked meal on the stove.
The house was ‘clean’. There was not one envelope, note, address book or diary that would point to the real identity of the people renting the house.
But there was a mountain of evidence that showed the real nature of their business.
In the hallway was a bloodstained, orange stool directly under a ceiling manhole that was askew and smeared with blood.
There was a dust mark where an object had been moved. In the ceiling space was a vinyl bag containing a wig, a walkie-talkie and a police scanner. A second plastic box contained silencers, a small radio receiver, a machine gun and boxes of ammunition wrapped in a tablecloth.
It was clear police had found the command centre of the payroll gang. And there was more – much more.
They soon found three large wooden chests originally used to import and export parts for Carroll’s car business.
The boxes, about a metre tall, wide and long, were topped with tools to look like tradesmen’s boxes. But in carefully-made hidden compartments, police would find what Detective Senior Sergeant David Sprague would describe as, ‘One of the largest arrays of weaponry and associated crime equipment ever seized in this state.’
It included machine guns, military semi-automatic weapons, handguns and a pistol stolen from Ireland.
There were stick-on tradesmen signs to use on the side of vehicles during armed robbery surveillance, disguises, security guard uniforms, medical kits that included bandages, painkilling injections, antibiotics and splints.
The official police inventory listed: ‘The hidden compartment in one box contained four revolvers, two armalite rifles, magazines, ammunition, handcuffs, balaclavas, bullet resistant vests, false vehicle, personal identification signs and stolen Armaguard uniforms. The top sections of the boxes contained tools and overalls, giving the appearance of being a legitimate tradesman’s tool-box should they be searched. Other boxes included items such as liquid ammonia and tennis balls for guard dogs, first-aid kit containing pethidine, morphine, motor vehicle ignition barrels, handcuffs, bullet resistant vests, gas masks, hand-knitted balaclavas, false magnetic vehicle signs, magnetic flashing lights, stolen security company uniforms and false moustaches, hair and skin colouring. Two of the revolvers located in the residence were from an armoured vehicle robbery and an automatic pistol was stolen from a Northern Ireland Police Officer.’
In short, it proved that the gang was better equipped, better trained and better prepared than the police who were trying to catch them.
Detectives also found handwritten notes on armoured car movements in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.
The blood in the two cars and through the houses showed that Carroll had managed to shoot Cox in the gun battle.
Cox, they say, was prepared for any contingency, and although badly wounded, climbed on the stool to grab his escape kit from the ceiling that included cash, firearms, false identity papers and first aid equipment.
The blood smears in both cars indicated he had a serious wound to the upper left thigh. Police say he tried the two cars before leaving in a third that was backed into the drive just after the shooting.
A Ford panel van was later recovered in Oakleigh. The previous owner was one Santo Mercuri – an armed robber who would later turn killer.
There was a green towel saturated in blood and a pool under the driver’s pedals. Experts estimated the wounded man had lost more than two litres. He was in deep trouble.
Cox’s longtime lover Helen Deane was a nurse’s aide who could help in the short term but she would have known he needed expert medical assistance to survive.
If the injured man went to a local hospital or medical centre a doctor may have linked him to the Mt Martha killing as the news broke. So he and Deane drove to New South Wales, convincing a doctor in Gosford that the wounded man had accidentally shot himself in New Guinea. Cox told the doctor he chose to fly home for treatment rather than risk the poor medical standards there. As a self-inflicted wound sustained outside Australia, there was no need to report the ‘accident’ to authorities.
The doctor swallowed the story while Cox swallowed the painkillers. The bullet was dug out, the wound cleaned and the fitness fanatic escapee made a full recovery.
Detectives went through the Mt Martha house looking for clues. Then they returned to the backyard and to a roughly-made shed that was probably once a child’s cubby house. Inside, police found two bullets of different calibres, a pair of men’s leather sandals, blood on the floor and signs of a struggle, including broken cement sheets that made up the walls. They believed the dispute started in the shed and then spilled into the yard.
Police forensic experts carefully dismantled the shed looking for clues. They found wood, cement sheets and bricks, then a grounding of sand. They dug down – but not deep enough.
The object of the argument was just a few centimetres under their feet – a large plastic barrel designed for home brewed beer.
Six months later police returned and dug again. This time they found the barrel. It was empty. Many years later Dave Sprague, by then a Commander, said he believed the barrel had contained at least $1 million in cash and probably documents such as passports.
‘That’s what they were arguing over,’ he said.
Cox, or someone acting for him, came back to get the money after police cleared the crime scene in January.
Waste not, want not.
THE child who would eventually become known as Russell Cox was born Melville Peter Schnitzerling in Brisbane 15 September 1949, several weeks before he was due. The tiny premature baby was nicknamed ‘Tim’ by his family.
As a boy, he was in and out of Queensland youth training centres, Boystown and Westbrook, before finally being sent to an adult jail in 1966 for stealing a car in Seymour. In 1972, he started to use the name Russell Cox and began his long career as an armed robber.
In 1974 he was arrested in New South Wales over a string of armed robbery and theft charges and sentenced to eleven years. His co-offender was a Melbourne man on the make – Gregory John Workman – the Preston hoodlum shot dead by Alphonse Gangitano in 1995.
In 1975, after an unsuccessful attempt to break out of Sydney’s Long Bay Jail, Cox was sentenced to life for the attempted murder of prison officers during the escape bid. For Cox it was just a hiccup and within two years he had learned from his mistakes. Not by reforming but by refining his escape methods.
On 3 November 1977, he broke out of the supposedly escape-proof Katingal Division of Long Bay and soon teamed up with master tactician Ray Bennett in Melbourne.
How come?
Police were to find much later that the escape of some of Australia’s most dangerous prisoners were not one-off events.
The Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence completed an investigation, code-named Operation GAP, which found that a nationwide network existed to help prisoners on
the run. It found that the group provided escapees with safe houses and fake documents.
The theory was confirmed when it was found that jail breakers and armed robbers Christopher Dean ‘Badness’ Binse and James Edward ‘Jockey’ Smith used the same safe house in Daylesford at different times while on the run. Gunman Ian ‘Rabbit’ Steele was also provided with a fake passport to head to England – a novel twist that sent a convict back to the Old Dart. It did Steele no good. He was later sentenced to life there for murder.
On New Year’s Eve 1977, a notorious armed robber was arrested in Northcote in a shootout but a second man jumped from the car and escaped. Police believe it was Cox.
He used forged identity papers to successfully apply for a passport under the name of Gary Nevin, giving his address as Williams Road, Toorak.
In May 1978, prison officers found evidence of an attempt to break into Katingal. This was something different. According to police intelligence, Cox and another well-known armed robber had tried to free some mates.
They failed – proving that while you could break out of the ‘escape-proof’ jail it was too hard to break in.
Cox was to find more than a partner in crime when he teamed up with Bennett. He would find a partner for life.
In 1978 he met Helen Eva Deane, Bennett’s sister-in-law, and they became lovers.
The green-eyed, petite Deane was educated at the Prahran Technical School and had become a qualified nursing aide.
She was blood loyal to Cox, nursing him when he was shot and abandoning friends and some relatives to live life on the run.
Late in 1978 they moved to Queensland but he maintained his links with the Melbourne underworld.
He would fly in key members of the Bookie Robbery team for the jobs. But it cost to enlist the best and on one occasion he just broke even after masterminding the robbery of the Strathpine ANZ branch of $5780. He later said it cost him nearly $5000 to fly his handpicked crew (including Ray Bennett) from Melbourne and back.
Other jobs were more lucrative – including payroll jobs from the Prince Charles Hospital ($16,618), Royal Women’s Hospital ($62,446), Woodlands ($38,000), Boral Cyclone ($21,348), Queensland Railways ($327,000) and Queensland Bacon ($90,329).
Cox stayed on the run not only because he knew how to commit an armed robbery but when to walk away from one.
In November 1983, Queensland police scored a tip-off that Cox was planning to rob the Brisbane railway yards. The armed robbery squad launched a stake-out operation.
Cox walked into the yards, wandered into the canteen and bought a drink. This was his usual practice before a ‘job’. He did his own surveillance, wandering around his target dressed as a worker. He saw two men in railway uniforms but correctly picked the dog with them as a police canine.
When he left, driving an old Valiant, he was pulled over by two members of the squad, who did not know he was their suspect.
Cox was to pull a gun, disarm the two detectives steal their keys, lock the police car and drive off, leaving them unharmed.
While he would have had no compunction about killing police, he knew shots would bring back up – followed by unrelenting pursuit. He knew it was always better to slip away than shoot it out.
COX and Deane lived healthy lifestyles on the run. She was a vegetarian who used herbal toothpaste and he rarely ate red meat.
Standover man Mark ‘Chopper’ Read once remarked the most dangerous thing about Cox was the vegetarian curry he cooked in Pentridge’s high security H Division. He was a repeat offender.
Cox fancied German beer and good wine and the couple loved Japanese food. Living on the run did not thwart their international travel plans. They visited Japan and the Philippines using false passports while being hunted around Australia. He later said he also went to the UK, where he worked as a seaman.
Cox managed to stay at least one step ahead for more than a decade because he was smart enough not to play the tough guy. For a violent criminal, Cox could appear remarkably calm. He became an expert at appearing ordinary in extraordinary circumstances.
Cox and Deane would always rent moderate, furnished homes, which they would share with their black Labrador, Devil.
Cox’s brother was a champion surfer who retired in the United States, and athleticism and self-discipline ran in the family. Cox loved the beach and regularly ran fifteen kilometres a day. But he didn’t drop his guard. He always had a sub-machine gun under the front seat of his car and had a handgun concealed on his body even when running.
The chatty Deane and quiet Cox passed as perfect tenants and usually provided glowing references when renting a house.
In November 1981 they moved into a small house in Lynette Street, Nunawading, taking a six-month lease at just $75 a week. An armed robbery squad detective rented a similar home just two streets away but did not cross paths with the fugitive.
In January 1982 Cox and Deane made sixteen separate deposits for a total of $30,000 in a building society account held under false names. They travelled around Victoria to make the deposits making sure that none were big enough to raise suspicions.
In February, Cox withdrew $25,000 to buy 80 hectares at Broadford next to a property owned by the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Police reports suggest Cox and Deane used the small log cabin on their country retreat as an emergency safe house. In March 1983, two months after the Carroll murder, the cabin was found burnt out. Police believe it was either a revenge attack by friends of Carroll’s or – more likely – it was torched by Cox himself to remove any evidence he had stayed there while recovering from his gunshot wound.
Detectives say Cox tapped a phone line into a police station so that he remained up to date on the search for him.
During one raid where police narrowly missed the pair, they found theatrical books, which had chapters on make-up. They believed he used actor’s make-up, false teeth and wigs to continually change his appearance.
Cox preferred heavy, military-style weapons and kept bullet-proof vests and gas masks.
He often used the alias ‘Mr Williams’, the same name used by his favorite comic hero, The Phantom. Even Devil the dog had an alias: he was known as ‘Butch’ when they were on the run. In fact, he might not have answered to his real name at all.
After the Carroll killing, Cox moved to Queensland and joined the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland under a false name. He bought two high-powered military weapons from a Brisbane gun shop after producing fake identity papers.
He studied Australian bushrangers, including Ned Kelly and the ‘Wild Colonial Boy’. His favourite magazine was Soldier of Fortune. He also read non-fiction Australian crime books, contributing in a small way to these authors’ meagre income in those lean years.
According to ‘Chopper’ Read, Cox won $15,000 on Tattslotto while on the run. ‘I’ve shot people for less,’ he said.
Read also said Cox had once revealed he’d turned to crime when he won a raffle for a new bike when he was ten years old but because he wasn’t present at the draw the prize was withdrawn and raffled again. He was so angry ‘he stole a brand new bike and told everyone he had won it in a raffle,’ Read said.
Read said Cox was famous in the underworld for his cool head.
‘He was pulled over for licence checks and breath tests and was never fazed. Once, when there were police screaming all over the place, he just drove off. The police didn’t notice the dog running after the car. Russell just opened the door of the car and Devil jumped in, barking out the back window at the police, who were blissfully unaware.’
Cox was cool under pressure, a loving partner and would try to avoid a fight if he could but, underneath it all, he was a gunman.
IT would be the hardest job in policing: to go undercover and infiltrate the tight knit Bookie Robbery team.
The risks were enormous. This mob killed rivals and would have no hesitation in shooting nosy outsiders.
But Graeme Henderson, a detective who had just returned from
studying overseas under a Churchill fellowship, was keen to use the tactics he had learned and there was no bigger target than Ray Bennett.
Henderson recruited Rob Robertson, a Vietnam veteran, who was brave to the point of recklessness, and together they would be the first full-time undercovers in Victoria.
It was nearly two years after the robbery that police found their first way in – and that was only because the gang had no intention of retiring on the spoils from the Victoria Club.
They continued to pull off big jobs in Perth and Brisbane using methods imported from the London team known as the Wembley Mob. In February 1978 they were looking for a new target in Melbourne.
Bennett believed the heat was off them. His best friend, Norman ‘Chops’ Lee, had been acquitted of charges over the Bookie Robbery and most of the team were free and available.
Again he hand-picked the crew and this time included an armed robbery expert who would never crack under pressure – Russell Cox.
After all, Cox was near enough to family now that he was living with Bennett’s sister-in-law.
As usual, Bennett wanted an inside man and on 18 February 1978, a Queensland SP bookmaker made tentative approaches at Flemington races to a part-time worker for the Mayne Nickless security company, the same firm that handled the cash delivered on the day of the Bookie Robbery.
If the security man could provide information on cash movements and payroll deliveries there would be a handsome ‘earn’ in it for him.
But Mayne Nickless learned of the potential breach through its own security systems and contacted police, who slipped Robertson into the firm.
The operation, code named Osprey, was designed to destroy the million-dollar payroll gang.
Robertson became Brian Wilson – a security guard with a weakness for luxury cars and fast women. And he wanted cash to support his lifestyle.
Robertson (as Wilson) twice met the Queensland man – a skilled armed robber known as ‘Bikkie’ at a North Melbourne hotel to discuss possible targets.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 19