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David Graham Fleming, 31 years old at the time of Johanne’s murder, had been one of a number of suspects in the original 1984 police investigation. Fleming had recently moved to Sydney and was living in a boarding house about 700 metres from the reserve where Johanne’s body was found. Three months after Johanne’s murder, Fleming was charged over the alleged bashing and robbery of a 26-year-old woman. He had taken the Waterloo woman back to the boarding house where he lived, attacked her with a hockey stick and robbed her of $100, threatening to kill her if she told police. Released on bail, Fleming absconded. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Fleming was born in Mackay, Queensland, and grew up in Cairns. He had two daughters and one son from various relationships in Queensland. In 1971 he was diagnosed as having a personality disorder and reactive depression following a car accident. A year later he was rediagnosed as having a personality disorder and suffering a depressive illness. In 1974 he was admitted to Cairns Hospital after being shot in the left leg. The same year Fleming’s parents expressed concerns about his violent behaviour at home and he was admitted to hospital for a drug overdose. In 1975 he was admitted to Cairns Hospital for the amputation of a finger on his right hand. The next year he was convicted and sentenced to eight years’ gaol for rape. After his release from gaol, Fleming moved to Sydney.
Having fled Sydney in 1984, where he was still wanted for skipping bail, Fleming returned to Queensland. Again he was in and out of hospital, having his left leg removed at the knee and being treated after an overdose of barbiturates and narcotics. About eight months after Johanne Hatty’s murder, Fleming met the woman who became his wife.
In 2004 Fleming, by then a wheelchair-bound invalid pensioner, was living at Willatook in south-west Victoria. The New South Wales Unsolved Homicide Unit discussed with the Victoria Police the possible surveillance of Fleming, but the remoteness of the house made it impracticable. Another strategy was needed. Sergeant Vick of the Victoria Police knew Fleming as the result of a complaint, twelve months earlier, about a drover and Fleming’s subsequent allegation that the police had been rude to him. Sergeant Vick visited Fleming at home and asked him to sketch the location where he had seen the drover. While making the sketch, Fleming dribbled onto the paper. The sketch was sent to the Division of Analytical Laboratories, which recovered a DNA profile that matched a partial profile developed from swabs taken from Johanne’s body. The partial profile could be expected to occur in one in 52,000 people in the general population. On 19 January 2005 Fleming was arrested and extradited to New South Wales.
In Sydney police took a cheek swab from Fleming, which matched the DNA profile from the sketch and the DNA profile obtained from swabs taken from Johanne’s body in 1984. There was a one in 8.6 billion probability that anyone else in the general population shared that profile. Fleming insisted he had been in Queensland on the day of Johanne’s murder, and claimed that two soiled condoms had disappeared from his room in 1984. The police might have taken them, he suggested, in order to plant his DNA.
On 26 April 2007 it took the Supreme Court jury only two hours to find 54-year-old Fleming guilty of Johanne’s murder 23 years earlier. DNA evidence was central to the prosecution case. Sentencing Fleming to 21 years’ gaol, Justice Studdert said of the murder: ‘It is the crime of a predator who took advantage, under cover of darkness, of a vulnerable and unsuspecting young woman . . . A high degree of violence was employed and the crime was motivated by the desire for sexual gratification.’
In June 1998 I established Strike Force Lincoln to draw together several strike forces investigating the unsolved killings of three gay men in Sydney and Wollongong. The strike force, led by Detective Inspector Paul Mayger, was also to identify and investigate any similar unsolved murders. On 29 December 1997, 36-year-old Trevor John Parkin, a known sex offender, was murdered in his inner Sydney Glebe unit. He had been bashed to death and his body mutilated. Seven months later, on the afternoon of 12 June 1998, 59-year-old David John O’Hearn, a shopkeeper of Albion Park in the Wollongong metropolitan area, was murdered in his home. His head had been smashed in with a wine decanter and severed from his body, and he had been partially disembowelled. One of his hands had been cut off and used to draw satanic pictures on the living room walls. Knives used to dismember the body were found on the floor. Fourteen days later, on 26 June, the body of 63-year-old Francis Neville ‘Frank’ Arkell, a former member of the New South Wales Parliament and former Lord Mayor of Wollongong, was found dead at his Wollongong home. His head had been smashed in with a bedside lamp and the lamp cord had been wrapped around his neck. Tie pins had been stuck in Arkell’s eyes and cheeks. Both O’Hearn and Arkell were gay and there were rumours they had been involved in paedophile activities.
Nineteen-year-old Mark Mala Valera, also known as Van Krevel, surrendered himself to the Wollongong Police three months after Arkell’s murder. He admitted to killing both O’Hearn and Arkell. Valera told police he did not know O’Hearn, but on the day of the killing he just wanted to kill someone and the choice of O’Hearn’s house was ‘just random’. He described Arkell as ‘a very, very horrible man’ because of ‘all the nasty things he has done to kids’. He had made up his mind to kill Arkell and had gone to his home on the pretext of being gay and needing somewhere to live. Valera pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter. His pleas were not accepted and the murder trial proceeded in mid-2000. After being found guilty of both murders, Valera was gaoled for life for each one.
On 22 January 1999, while Valera was awaiting his committal hearing, Christopher Andrew Robinson was arrested and charged with murdering Parkin. Robinson, who had been seventeen years old when he killed Parkin, pleaded guilty to the murder. In the Supreme Court on 19 October 2000, Justice Adams sentenced him to 45 years’ gaol. Robinson claimed to have killed Parkin because of unwanted homosexual advances, but Justice Adams rejected this explanation. Robinson, who had previously mutilated a cat and burnt another, had calmly confessed to a friend, saying ‘killing someone is liberating’.
In the course of solving the murders of O’Hearn, Arkell and Parkin, Strike Force Lincoln identified several characteristics reminiscent of the ten-year-old unsolved murder of Leo Press. Within Strike Force Lincoln, the Press investigation was led by Detective Sergeant Stuart Wilkins, with whom I had worked years earlier on Task Force Air, and who had played a significant role in the investigation of the attempted abduction of Paul Onions by Ivan Milat.
In the early hours of Saturday, 13 February 1988, Kenneth Press arrived at the home he jointly owned with his brother Leo at Harbord in Sydney’s northern beaches, after completing a shift at their Chatswood bakery. He opened the front door to find 62-year-old Leo lying in the hallway in a pool of blood, the result of multiple head wounds—a post-mortem examination found massive fractures to the skull caused by seven separate blows. A stonemason’s mallet, which belonged to Leo and was usually kept in his toolbox, was lying beside the body. There were more blood stains in his upstairs bedroom. Leo was taken by ambulance to Royal North Shore Hospital, where he died at 9 a.m. that morning.
A forensic examination of the crime scene revealed only two clues to the identity of the killer: two unidentified fingerprints on two of four empty or partially drunk beer cans in the upstairs office of the house, and several cigarette butts. Neither Leo nor Kenneth drank alcohol or smoked. A check of police records failed to find a match for the fingerprints.
Detectives soon established that Leo was an active homosexual who had casual relationships with numerous young men in the Manly, Chatswood, Ryde and Kings Cross areas where the brothers’ bakery business operated. A former employee told police that Leo would bring young men to the bakery and take them to the basement, where he had sex with them and gave them ‘gifts’ of money. Leo was also in the habit of going out around midnight and driving around in an attempt to pick up young male hitchhikers. On occasions he would bring a man home for sex before giving him cash. Leo was widely known
to keep large amounts of cash and had been the victim of several armed robberies in the few years before his murder. His homosexual activities also made him a target for extortion. Police investigating his murder believed it was either a result of his homosexual activities, or the result of a robbery gone wrong, but without new leads the investigation came to a halt, and by the end of 1988 it was officially wound up.
In the Press case it was not new technology that provided a lead, but the re-examination of existing evidence and a bit of luck. Analysis of the fingerprints found on beer cans at the scene of Leo Press’s murder identified these as belonging to Barrie Alan Hodge, who was eighteen years old at the time of the murder and had only minor convictions as a juvenile. Juvenile records had not been checked when the fingerprints on the beer cans were originally compared with those on the police database. However, in the ten years since the killing, Hodge had been convicted of several minor offences, including being in a stolen vehicle and drink driving, as a result of which his fingerprints were now on record. This was the breakthrough the investigators needed.
On 9 October 1998, based on the fingerprint identification, Hodge was charged with the murder of Leo Press. Two months later, following committal proceedings in the Manly Local Court, the magistrate dismissed the charge, essentially on the basis that, by themselves, the fingerprints were not sufficient to connect Hodge to the murder. Police immediately resumed their investigation. A flurry of newspaper coverage followed, which was seen by Hodge’s former girlfriend, who was then living in England. She contacted New South Wales Police and, when spoken to by the Homicide Squad, said that on the night of 12 February 1988 she and Hodge had gone to a party at a friend’s house in Chatswood, and that afterwards Hodge had dropped her at her home at Manly. A few hours later, in the early hours of the morning of 13 February, Hodge had returned to her house shaking and crying, with blood on his clothes. He told her he thought he had killed someone. During several lengthy phone calls to England, a detailed statement was obtained by police.
The information provided by the former girlfriend led detectives to another friend, who said that on leaving his girlfriend’s residence, Hodge had caught a taxi to his home at Beacon Hill, where he changed his clothes before returning to the friend’s house in Chatswood where the party had been held. Hodge told his friend that while hitchhiking home from his girlfriend’s place, he had met a man who invited him to his house for a few beers. Hodge drank a few beers and fell asleep, but woke suddenly to find the man grabbing him ‘in a sexual sort of way’. Hodge told his friend he had hit the man and was worried that he had killed him.
Inquiries led to a third friend who said that a few weeks after the murder of Leo Press, he had seen Hodge distressed and crying at a party. When asked what the matter was, Hodge said that he had gone to a man’s place to have a couple of beers and had then ‘crashed out’. The man had fondled him while he was asleep and Hodge had hit him and left the house. Hodge claimed not to know whether he had hurt the man badly or not.
On 22 January 1999, just five weeks after the dismissal of the charge at Manly Court, Hodge was rearrested. When interviewed by police, he confirmed the stories told by his friends: he had gone to a party at Chatswood on the night of Friday, 12 February, where he had drunk some beer and inhaled a line of what he believed to be speed or amphetamines. After getting a lift with a friend to Manly, he dropped off his then girlfriend at her home, intending to hitch a ride to his home in Beacon Hill. As he walked along the road trying to thumb a lift, a male driver stopped and offered him a lift, which Hodge accepted. The man then invited Hodge back to his house at Harbord. Hodge said he couldn’t remember arriving at Leo’s house or getting out of the car, but remembered being in the house, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Hodge said he was drunk, ‘crashed out’ on a bed and awoke to find Leo groping him. He lashed out and went downstairs. When Leo approached him again, Hodge picked up the mallet and hit him. According to Hodge, the next thing he remembered was being outside the house, disposing of the keys, hailing a taxi and going to his girlfriend’s place, where he told her he thought he had killed somebody. Following the interview Hodge was, for the second time, charged with the murder of Press.
Hodge’s trial for murder began in the Supreme Court on 4 July 2000. He pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter. While not disputing the substance of the Crown case, he relied on the defence that he was provoked into his actions by an unwanted homosexual approach by Press. Hodge’s defence was rejected by the jury, which found him guilty of murder. While agreeing with the verdict, Justice John Dunford said the case was also ‘a tragedy for the prisoner and for his family’.
Acknowledging what he called ‘the well-known trait of the Australian character not to “dob” on another person’, Justice Dunford said he was ‘shocked and amazed that none of the persons to whom the accused confided that he believed he had killed someone reported such matters to the police’.
Dunford noted that at the time of the killing Hodge was eighteen years old, but that he was now almost 31 years old, and that he had generally been in regular employment, was married and running two businesses with his wife, and had a two-year-old son, with another child on the way. All the referees spoke of Hodge’s non-aggressive nature, trustworthiness and devotion to his wife and child. Dunford said that he considered the killing to have been unpremeditated and out of character. He also considered what he called the ‘staleness’ of the case. Given all the circumstances, he considered ‘rehabilitation is hardly an issue’. What he did consider relevant was that Hodge ‘was a young man when the offence was committed and since then has built a life for himself which must now be disrupted many years later whilst he serves his sentence’. Taking all these factors into account, Dunford sentenced Hodge to fifteen years’ gaol with a non-parole period of seven years for the murder of Press.
For Strike Force Lincoln it was a success rate of four out of four, one of which had resulted from a cold case review. It was a great result for Detective Inspector Paul Mayger, leader of the strike force, and his team.
Stacey Lee Kirk was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl when she was last seen, around 9.30 p.m. on 16 February 1984, walking away from the shooting gallery in Side Show Alley towards the toilets at the Maitland Show. Two days later her body was found under a tarpaulin behind the toilet block. Stacey’s jeans were around her knees, her black T-shirt was pulled up and a pair of men’s floral underpants were tied around her neck. She had been sexually assaulted before being strangled. There were numerous traces of another person’s blood on her body. Swabs were also obtained as a result of the sexual assault.
The investigation had been conducted by local detectives. From the outset the case was difficult because of the nomadic lifestyle of show workers, but within weeks four were identified as suspects. All four were known as ‘sniffers’ and ‘prodders’, show people who sought ‘sexual favours [from young girls] for free rides on the amusement machines’. One of the four was 25-year-old Richard Stevens. Interviewed by police, Stevens denied any involvement in or knowledge of the murder, and gave an alibi for the night it occurred. While it was true that Stevens had been treated for a lacerated wrist at the Mater Hospital in Newcastle earlier that day, his claim not to have been at the show in the evening did not hold up: there were several ‘possible sightings’ of him at the showground around the time Stacey disappeared.
To the police, Stevens was a prime suspect, but they had no evidence to charge him with any criminal offence. Blood tests were carried out on a number of suspects, including Stevens, but they failed to detect any link with the blood found on Stacey’s body.
In April 1988 a three-day inquest was held into Stacey’s death at Maitland Coroners Court. Assisting the Coroner, Mr Stent, was Sergeant Bell, who told the hearing: ‘It has become patently obvious . . . that there is a great amount of information that witnesses who have been called to this hearing are aware of and has not been disclosed to this Court . . . There
is little doubt . . . that there are witnesses who have given evidence in this Court who have either been involved or are aware of persons who have committed this crime, but are not prepared to disclose it to Your Worship.’ The coroner agreed, finding that the evidence contained a number of inconsistencies, particularly:
in relation to evidence given throughout the hearing by members of whom I shall call showmen. I am left with a distinct impression that not all witnesses have been entirely truthful. My inescapable conclusion would be that not everyone has co-operated fully and in some cases not at all with the police in their investigations . . . I am quite satisfied on the evidence before me and the conclusions one can draw from it that more than one person knows of the perpetration of this offence.
The coroner found that Stacey died of strangulation, but that there was no evidence to establish a prima facie case against any person.
Inquiries into the murder continued for another two years. In May 1990 Crime Stoppers sought information from the public about the murder, and a week later The Daily Telegraph published an article under the headline ‘Murder at the local showground’. As a result of this publicity, police received information from someone who claimed to have heard Richard Stevens admit to his involvement in the murder. Police flew to Queensland, where they interviewed and obtained signed statements from brothers Tony and Mark Midgley, and from Mere Faith Marshall. Tony claimed that Stevens had told him about Stacey’s murder the day before her body was found. According to Tony, Stevens had said Stacey ‘was raped and thrown out of a caravan, thought to be unconscious and found there the next morning deceased, when she was moved behind the toilet block’. Mere, who said she was present during the conversation, corroborated Tony’s version of events. Mark told police of a conversation he had with Stevens in a hotel five months after the murder, during which Stevens admitted to killing Stacey.