Underbelly

by John Silvester

  After several sitting days, the deputy state coroner John Abernathy identified Samer as the main person of interest but fell short of recommending charges.

  ‘While Mr Samer certainly had the opportunity to kill Ms Balmain, and rightly in my view is the main person of interest to police, there is no plausible motive proved,’ he said.

  Samer’s evidence could be summed up in a line. He stuck to what he had told the police from the start: that he had dropped Revelle at the pub and then gone home, watched television and fallen asleep.

  After the inquest, he was hardly seen in Sydney again.

  IN the decade since the inquest, new detectives have come and gone without making any impression on the Balmain file. It was as if the coroner’s finding had ruled a line under the investigation. Nothing new turned up to spur fresh efforts and apart from occasional anniversary coverage, the disappearance became just another cold case – one of a list of heartbreaking mysteries filed away at police headquarters.

  The families of the disappeared endure a special sort of hell. Their torment is even worse than for relatives of unsolved murder victims because they do not get to lay their dead to rest and then to grieve. When people vanish, it takes years for those left behind to accept that their loved one is dead and never coming home. Some never accept it.

  Suellen wrote to the authors in 2009: ‘Mum is still having nightmares about what may have happened to her. I am fairly matter of fact to get the information I need but I can tell you it is the saddest story, it rips the heart out of your chest – the shock, the disbelief, the anger, the pain and the not knowing. Except the fact that the murderer is still wandering our streets. Still free.’

  The family took years to accept that Revelle was gone forever. But they have never given up hope that her killer will be found and justice done.

  In July 2008 the authorities offered a $250,000 reward for any information that would help convict Revelle’s killer. The announcement was linked to a statement by the homicide squad that they had used advanced forensic testing to gather new evidence from Samer’s former house in McNair Avenue, Kingsford.

  Homicide Squad commander Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford nominated the house as the crime scene. A ‘full forensic search was carried out of the crime scene at Kingsford’ and exhibits from the original investigation had been re-tested to establish links with either of two suspects, he said.

  ‘We have fresh evidence as a result of those examinations’, he said. ‘Following that evidence, coupled with the announcement of today’s reward, we are hopeful that we will get additional information that will bring this investigation to a successful conclusion.’

  Translated, the police-speak meant they had run DNA tests on Revelle’s diary, keys, her make-up bag and one shoe – and were trying to rattle the prime suspect and maybe even lure a witness who no longer felt bound to keep an old and awful secret. The $250,000 reward – up from $100,000 – looked as if it was meant as bait for someone. Or perhaps it was just an attempt at public relations for a struggling Government. Rewards make cheap headlines because they are rarely, if ever, paid out.

  One line in the police media release stated that ‘both suspects’ still lived in Australia. One of the two, however, could hardly get any further away. When five detectives went looking for Gavin Samer to ask him some questions, they found him nearly as far south as he could go – a long way from his Sydney life in every way.

  FOR a middle-class Sydney boy who once had expensive tastes, Gavin Samer is slumming it these days.

  He first came to Cygnet in southern Tasmania some time in 2005, washed up after the apple-picking season along with other drifters. There are – or were – a million apple trees in the Huon Valley and the annual influx of pickers is part of the rise and fall of the seasons in those parts.

  Cygnet is a one-horse town with three pubs – known inevitably as the top, middle and bottom pubs, a description that relates to geographic position rather than their respective quality.

  It was to the middle pub that Samer turned up after one apple harvest. The pub needed a cook and the stranger with the dark hair, Roman nose and cheesy grin said he was one. He pulled on the check pants and started knocking out counter lunches – but it didn’t last. In a week or so, he came into the bar along the street at the bottom pub, the Commercial, where the proprietor noticed the check cook’s pants and promptly offered him a job. This time he stayed.

  He eventually acquired a local girlfriend – a big woman who also got a job in the pub. When not working, Samer drank a lot and gambled more, mostly on Keno. One week he won $3500 but kept gambling until it was all gone.

  Samer didn’t endear himself to anyone but no one took much notice of him until the five Sydney detectives came to town in the winter of 2008. As soon as they hit town, Samer bolted. But after his boss appealed to his girlfriend, he came back to be interviewed voluntarily. First he went to see local ‘bush lawyer’ Michael Munday, well-known for brushes with authority over alleged abalone poaching, a profession in which he is acknowledged as an expert.

  The police interviewed Samer and his girlfriend separately. They made it clear they were there to re-interview him about the night Revelle Balmain disappeared – and to get a DNA sample from him to check against new tests done on her property in Sydney. Samer refused to hand over a DNA sample.

  The secret was out. Within hours everyone in the district knew the pub cook was a suspect in a murder in Sydney. People started to watch him more closely – and to recall incidents and look at them in a fresh light. Those who worked with him noticed his colourful turn of phrase. When the cook mislaid his boning knife in the kitchen he would say: ‘Where’s me fuckin’ stabber?’

  This was, by all accounts, regarded as the height of good humour by his workmates and girlfriend, a robust former taxi-driver more respected around Cygnet than Samer ever has been. The locals know her pedigree and her form and it impresses them: some among her extended family were known as hard cases and she was considered the equal of any of them in a disagreement. Girls grow up tough in rural Tassie’s closeknit families. They can also be broadminded and loyal. Samer’s consort does not cramp his style when it comes to drinking his daily quota of VB stubbies and a regular ‘choof’ of the local green product.

  After a big day on the knives and hotplates, slinging parmas and mixed grills, Samer liked nothing better than to retire to the two-storey house they rented from the publican in Solley Court to have a drink and a smoke and play music so loudly it annoyed some of the neighbours. But it wasn’t always a happy home.

  One night, staff from the pub went to the house after a ‘domestic’ in which a bench top was damaged by a knife. Another time, after an argument, the woman’s Maltese cross terrier was cut in the head and had to be taken to the vet to be stitched up. Samer said later a knife had ‘fallen off the bench’ and hit the dog’s head.

  The publican treated the couple well, renting them the house at less than market rate. But since one day in late October 2009, the house in Solley Court has been quiet. Because that was the day Samer and his woman left suddenly. They gave the pub exactly nine minutes notice, threw their belongings into a borrowed van and headed down the road to Huonville. They stayed there in a sort of shed – a former panel beaters’ – but not for long. Within two weeks they had gone again. Why is hard to know.

  Samer’s former workmates wonder if it’s anything to do with a black joke the publican had made at his expense. One day in mid-September she saw on the television news that human remains had been found in bushland in Sydney. Later, walking past the kitchen, she yelled something like: ‘Hey, Gavin. You want to be careful – they’ve found a body in Sydney.’

  Her attempt at humour backfired. From that day he was agitated, she said later – and once he called her ‘a pig’. A month later, he was gone. The last they heard of him he was somewhere around the old penal colony at Port Arthur.

  At the time of writing, there was insufficient evide
nce to charge Samer and in the eyes of the law he remains entitled to the presumption of innocence. And Revelle Balmain’s family remains entitled to answers. The case remains open.

  Anyone with information on the murder of Revelle Balmain should call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. If they do not wish to claim all or part of the $250,000 reward they can remain anonymous.

  15

  MURPHY’S LORE

  The Cross was Chris Murphy’s patch because so many of his clients did business there.

  THESE days Chris Murphy is in the news again because he’s reportedly dropped more than $100 million into the financial black hole at the centre of the Opes Prime crash. Win or lose, Murphy does things in a big way. His way.

  Although he has been a millionaire stockmarket player, a huge punter who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Kerry Packer and John Singleton in betting rings and casinos, he made his name and his first fortune as a tough criminal lawyer.

  From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Cross was Chris Murphy’s patch because so many of his clients did business there. One of them, a power lifter, bouncer, prizefighter and bodyguard known as ‘The White Rhino’ killed a drug addict there one night with one punch. Murphy got the big man off the murder charge because he’s good at it and that’s what they pay him for. But he didn’t have any illusions: his client might have beaten the rap but that didn’t mean he was innocent. Not much at the Cross is.

  Once, in the mid-1980s, Murphy took a respectable brother-in-law to the Venus Room in the Cross, on a reconnaissance mission to show the in-law how the other half lived.

  ‘On stage a naked girl’s spraying a sailor with cream and licking it off,’ he recalls. ‘My brother-in-law said, “This is Sodom and Gomorrah – when does the fire start?”’ One club, he says, was closed down after a man was kicked to death there. Another had bouncers wearing tee shirts with the slogan We don’t call the police. In that place and time, the cops were just another gang, ‘the big blue gang’, taking their whack of the wages of sin. Or maybe more than their whack.

  Murphy knows how the Cross chewed people up. But like a lot of Sydneysiders, he has affection for the strip. When the Wood Royal Commission was on in the mid-1990s, he used to have coffee most mornings at the legendary Bar Coluzzi in Victoria Street, Darlinghurst, alias Goldenhurst, and once known as Razorhurst in the days when razor gangs roamed East Sydney between the wars. In recent times Murphy switched allegiances to another nearby café, but the scenery is the same: people on the make in a city on the take.

  At the height of the Cross’s reputation as Sin City central, Murphy was Sydney’s crime lawyer of choice: the playboy, punter, scourge of crooked cops, friend of people in high and low places, incorrigible performer, self-publicist and patron saint of (almost) lost causes, and champion of the downtrodden.

  He still has the shingle and works the odd case. When actor Matthew Newton (subsequently Underbelly II star) struck trouble over allegations that he struck his then soapie-starlet girlfriend Murphy agreed to handle it.

  His office has a frosted glass door that says ‘Christopher Murphy Lawyers Inc’ that looks to be straight from a Raymond Chandler novel. When the author came knocking, Australia’s most colourful legal identity was talking tactics.

  The gravel voice sounds like the prize fighter he once wanted to be, but the tongue’s as silver as his hair.

  The slightly predatory good looks – part-Romeo, part-rogue – once made him a fixture on most-eligible-bachelor lists in women’s magazines. They are no longer as chiselled as they once were. But for a long time the silver hair, dark eyebrows and piercing grey eyes made him a natural to play the part of, say, the handsome lawyer hero in a television show.

  Which, in a way, he is: star of his own real-life serial, and writer and director as well. When the author came calling while the police corruption Royal Commission was sitting, Murphy was coaching a thin teenage girl for her supporting role in this week’s episode of Murphy’s Law.

  Behind her sunglasses, her eyes were hollow and redrimmed, as if she’d been crying or sleepless, or both. Her face was drawn, lip trembling.

  Across the street at the Downing Centre local court, news cameras were waiting. Murphy said how shocking it was that the media can hound people like this. He didn’t look shocked. He borrowed a jacket from the girl’s brother to hide her face, warns her to keep it covered.

  It’s 9.40am: show time. Murphy flanks one side. The girl’s Vietnam veteran uncle takes the other. In the lift, Murphy applies the finishing touches. ‘I’m not sure the sunglasses are a good look in court,’ he says smoothly. ‘Maybe a bit sinister.’ She obediently whips them off.

  Downstairs, he checks the jacket is rigged over his client’s head, takes her arm and steers her expertly across the street and through the media scrum. A photographer brushes briefly with the clerk.

  Cut to crowded lift, then a crowded courtroom. Murphy goes through the mob like a kelpie through sheep, herding the girl to a chair. He prowls back and forth, like a pro boxer set to step into the ring. He’s not nervous, but she is. A muscle flutters in her jaw.

  When the magistrate appears, Murphy sits and studies his papers, polishing his lines for the performance ahead. It’s just after 10am. After disposing of some minor matters, the magistrate gives his cue. ‘Now, Mr Murphy,’ he says, with a meaningful glance at the crowded press seats.

  There’s an expectant hush. The sort that other Sydney larrikin, Paul Keating, commanded when standing to speak in Parliament.

  The pair share more than black Irish looks and growing up near each other in poor Catholic families in Sydney’s west. They have a devastating ability to use Australian vernacular the way streetfighters use knuckledusters. Watching them is almost a blood sport.

  Murphy rises, managing to be somehow dignified and indignant at the same time. ‘The defendant is an 18-year-old person,’ he says quietly. ‘Outside the court this morning news cameramen were less than a metre from her, sticking cameras in her face.’

  He throws the switch to outrage. ‘A few minutes ago my young clerk had a rabid, frothing photographer scream at him, “Get out of the way, you f … idiot!” This is a tragic case involving the death of a young girl but the defendant had nothing to do with that death. She is just outside the jurisdiction of the children’s court. She is sitting the Higher School Certificate. She has been terrorised in the press … terrorised by a newspaper rattling tins asking pensioners to hand over their coins to ‘fight drugs’.

  ‘Meanwhile, there are kids up and down the coast comatose from alcohol abuse and the alcohol is supplied to them by someone. But in this case we have rabid, redneck terrorism.

  ‘The incident this morning was within the court confines.

  ‘You must, Your Worship, be getting close to examining this contempt of court.’

  Angry Murphy pauses, switches into character as concerned Murphy.

  Shooting a worried glance at the girl, he confides to the magistrate and the entire press corps, scribbling furiously: ‘She’s under the care of a psychiatrist for stress, and is unable to stay at her own home.’

  Then the question. ‘I am asking Your Worship to adjourn the matter.’

  Bingo. Not only does the magistrate adjourn until February, he criticises media coverage of the case in general, and of the girl in particular.

  ‘Clearly, she is distraught,’ he says. ‘The lines of sadness are etched across her face. It would not serve the public interest for the media to hound and harass her or we may have two tragedies on our hands. This is not a hunting ground. It is a place for justice.’

  Murphy couldn’t have scripted it better himself. His client still has a long way to go, but in ten minutes he has done what he’s best at: changing perceptions, twisting opinion.

  The headline in next morning’s Sydney Morning Herald reads: ‘Ecstasy Case: Magistrate Warns Media’. It’s the first step in a classic Murphy defence. Another chapter of Murphy’s lore.

  The first case
Chris Murphy did, in 1971, made the newspapers, too. But it was the ‘Milperra Massacre’ of 1984 that made his name outside the closed world of prostitutes, thieves and drug dealers.

  A CRIME reporter, Lindsay Simpson, who co-wrote a bestselling book on the bikie gang war that ended with seven dead in a shoot-out at a hotel car park in Sydney’s wild west, quickly noticed that Murphy was no ordinary lawyer.

  In a long and tedious case, Murphy ‘always kept everyone in court awake’, Simpson recalls. It prompted her to write a profile on him early in the marathon trial. She tipped well: Murphy eventually beat murder charges against the 31 Bandido gang members he defended.

  Says Simpson: ‘He’s a genius at telling the story behind the story, at presenting the human face of crime. He bridges the gap between the law and ordinary people.’

  John Slee, a legal correspondent (and qualified lawyer) who has watched courts for 30 years, says Melbourne’s Frank Galbally in his heyday in the 1960s is the best comparison with Murphy ‘in his aggressive approach to the law and success in the law’. But Murphy, he says, is ‘quintessentially Sydney’.

  There are other ruthless courtroom tacticians, shameless grandstanders, punishing cross-examiners. But none apart from the late Galbally were loved, hated or feted like Murphy, whose reputation outstrips what he does for a living, and how well he does it.

  The highlights of a brilliant career in crime are carefully preserved in scrap-books in his office. How he represented the rugby star Johnny Raper, charged with receiving stolen goods. And Virginia Perger, the prostitute at the centre of the ‘Love Boat’ sex scandal. When Perger didn’t appear at court one day, Murphy told the judge: ‘She’s been up all night working, Your Honor!’

  Another time, representing a Melbourne man with many Victorian convictions but few in New South Wales, he told the magistrate: ‘Your Worship, he’s a state-of-origin thief.’