Lane dismissed Whitrod’s complaints and reflections offered to the media since his resignation. ‘His clumsy attempts to canonise himself as a saint at this particular time make me sick,’ Lane added.
In the early evening of that Tuesday, after a fiery day in parliament, the new Commissioner farewelled the old at a modest function in the restaurant and bar of the Metropolitan Motor Inn in Leichhardt Street, Spring Hill. A total of eight people, including Whitrod, attended. Among them were judge Sir Mostyn Hanger and Sir Gordon Chalk.
‘I didn’t even want to go to that,’ remembers Lewis. ‘Newbery asked me to come to keep him company. Whitty was all over me like a bloody rash. He would have been very shitty. It would have been a false smile.’
Lewis was photographed at the function with Whitrod and Police Minister Newbery. Lewis wore a dark suit with a floral tie; Whitrod a grey suit with a polka dot tie. In the picture, Whitrod’s face is creased with laughter. Lewis, holding a small beer, is also laughing, but his eyes are not. They look weary at the sight of his predecessor.
The farewell was sufficiently brief enough for Lewis to later meet up with Bill Knox and Don Lane to discuss the government’s wish to ‘suppress SP betting’, and still be home at Garfield Drive by 10 p.m.
Flight
After his humiliating farewell drinks hosted by Tom Newbery and Terry Lewis at the Metropolitan, Ray and Mavis Whitrod wasted no time in getting out of town. Between his formal resignation as Commissioner and his farewell press conference, Whitrod had been offered teaching posts at both La Trobe University in Melbourne and the Australian National University in Canberra.
Whitrod selected Canberra. A daughter still lived there, and it was the place where he’d had many happy years with his family while reforming the Commonwealth Police.
So in early December 1976 Ray and Mavis packed up their house in St Lucia (which they expediently sold to a friend who had always admired it) and headed south in the family car – a dark blue Austin 1800. The former Commissioner’s furniture and voluminous personal files and documentation would follow in a removal van.
The Whitrods took the fastest route possible – the Newell Highway, via Goondiwindi, Coonabarabran, Gilgandra then on to Yass and the Acton campus of the ANU, close to the Canberra CBD.
‘When the removalists’ van was a week overdue … I began to phone the company asking about our furniture,’ Whitrod said. ‘After three weeks, I was told that everything had been burned. On its way to Canberra, the truck had hit the side of a bridge and burst into flames.
‘This was distressing enough, but I had strong doubts that the fire was accidental. I thought of having the matter investigated, but this would have involved using the Queensland police, now under the control of Commissioner Terry Lewis. I hadn’t the heart to even try.’
The Whitrods, still without a home in the national capital, lived for several months in accommodation provided by the university. Meanwhile, Ray taught criminology within the law faculty.
‘He wasn’t bitter,’ his daughter Ruth remembers of that period. ‘People used to ask – “Why isn’t your dad more bitter?” I think his [Baptist] faith had a lot to do with it.’
His son Ian says his father only occasionally spoke to him about what went on during those almost seven years in Queensland. ‘He thought there were some pretty evil forces at work there,’ Ian says. ‘There was a time when he was sleeping with a revolver under his pillow and that upset my mother no end. I think he saw his time up there as unfinished business. He thought he had the backing of the Queensland Government. He didn’t. It was a tough time for him. He said to me that he was certain that Terry Lewis was very crooked.’
The New Boy
Things couldn’t have been better for Lewis. He was back home. He’d seen off Whitrod, his arch rival. And he had the top job.
On the evening of Thursday 2 December, just days after taking up the position of Commissioner of Police, he dropped into the Belfast Hotel to see his old mate Barry Maxwell and have a beer with his friend, Detective Sergeant John Meskell.
‘I just walked in there and saw this well-groomed bloody commissioner with all the regalia,’ recalls bar manager Les Hounslow. ‘It was Lewis. I said, “Shit, what do I call you now?” And he said, “Still Terry”.’
Apart from catching up with old mates, Lewis quickly got a taste of the rarefied life of a top public servant. He was a kid in a lolly shop.
On Sunday 5 December, he enjoyed a Christmas function at the Chinese Club. Two nights later he was back at the Belfast, this time for drinks with Bill Glasson, MP, and Inspector Tony Murphy, who regularly visited Brisbane during his time in distant Longreach, and could now celebrate his old friend’s extraordinary promotion. The day after that Lewis was up at Government House for a function hosted by the Governor, Air Marshal Sir Colin Hannah.
There were more functions at the Belfast, Tattersalls, the Grosvenor and the Park Royal, dinner with his old media pal Ron Richards, and an invitation from entrepreneur Keith Williams to visit his theme park, Sea World, on the Gold Coast and take an aerial flight over the glitter strip with Premier Bjelke-Petersen.
(Lewis would take up that invitation on Saturday 22 January 1977, when, having been in the job for just seven weeks, his family and that of Bjelke-Petersen and Keith Williams gathered together in the sunshine for happy snaps on board Williams’ boat, the MV Ulysses. They also took that promised flight in the white, yellow and orange Sea World chopper over the Broadwater and a rapidly expanding Surfers Paradise.)
But despite his delight in being elevated into the top position, Lewis was nervous about how the troops would receive him. He was particularly anxious about the reception he would receive at the regional superintendent’s conference that Whitrod had established, one of which was scheduled just weeks after he started. ‘One, of some consequence, was the one in December … and there was a swearing in, an induction ceremony … [they] were a bit daunting because everybody at that regional superintendent’s conference had been senior to me. So I was at the top of the table actually with a couple of the assistant commissioners and all the others were down the other side of it.’
Lewis told the top police officers he would do his best and hopefully they would see that and cooperate with him. ‘When I finished the conference that week and thanked them they all stood up and clapped,’ Lewis says. ‘So I thought that was very decent of them.’
On Christmas Eve in 1976 Lewis sat down in his office with Arthur Pitts, Whitrod’s fearless corruption-buster and one of the stars of the Southport Betting Case trial, and discussed Pitts’ future. Lewis advised him point blank that there was ‘little likelihood of promotion’. Pitts was assigned the ultimate humiliation – he was put in charge of Stores.
On Tuesday 18 January 1977, Lewis caught up again with Scotland Yard’s Commander Terence (Terry) O’Connell. In late 1975, O’Connell and Detective Superintendent Bruce Fothergill had been flown to Brisbane to conduct an inquiry into Queensland police corruption following the public and political clamour that stemmed from Jack Herbert’s Southport Betting Case. Their report had been submitted to the Premier, but it had never been tabled in parliament, and word was that it had been shredded. Even so, O’Connell had been asked back to Brisbane to give evidence at the Lucas Inquiry.
O’Connell had been briefed in London on 15 November – coincidentally the day of Lewis’s appointment as Assistant Commissioner – by visiting Justice Minister Bill Lickiss. The men met in Queensland House on The Strand to run through O’Connell’s investigation the previous year and the evidence he planned to give on administrative matters only.
O’Connell, despite receiving volumes of information from police and prostitutes on corruption in the Queensland Police Force during research for his initial report in 1975–76, and the repeated assertions that figures like Tony Murphy loomed as being seriously corrupt, would compile a further report to assi
st Justice Lucas. He did not want to be branded ‘a whingeing Pom’ on his return visit.
While he was in Brisbane, O’Connell dined at Lewis’s home in Garfield Drive.
On 20 January, according to Lewis’s Commissioner’s diary, O’Connell met with Police Minister Newbery and Lewis and they discussed how there would be ‘no further inquiries needed’.
They did, however, talk about O’Connell’s observations on corruption in the force. ‘One particular person that I was concerned with from the information that I had been given was a man called Murphy,’ O’Connell later said. ‘From what I was told and his name was mentioned more than anyone else by police officers who I saw [during their interviews with O’Connell in late 1975], he was obviously one they feared, a dominant man and highly intelligent.
‘They spoke of him in awe … and you got this sense of fear … you got this sense they were frightened of him.’
Lewis says he later learned that when O’Connell interviewed Basil Hicks and Jim Voigt, of Whitrod’s prized Crime Intelligence Unit, for his report, much was mentioned about Tony Murphy. ‘O’Connell didn’t want to know about Murphy,’ Lewis recalls. ‘He said he didn’t want to know anything about him. It seems that somewhere along the line people don’t want to get involved in knowing about Murphy.’
On 24 January, O’Connell called Commissioner Lewis and assured him he had shredded the hundreds of statements he had taken during the initial stages of his investigation in 1975. O’Connell may have felt the need to reassure the new Commissioner in light of their expansive hospitality towards him during his visit to the Queensland capital.
Indeed, O’Connell decided he would not burden the new Commissioner with allegations of corruption and felt Lewis had a right to put his own house ‘in order’. O’Connell later said: ‘I was not telling lies. I was supporting the new regime.’
Before he returned to London, Lewis and Newbery presented O’Connell with ‘albums’ and a ‘print’ of an old etching of Scotland Yard as souvenirs of his return trip to Brisbane.
Old friends checked in. Eric Pratt telephoned for a natter about the Lucas Inquiry. Then on Wednesday 9 March, Lewis headed out to Eagle Farm airport to meet Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in the city as a part of their 1977 Silver Jubilee tour. The Commissioner escorted the famous couple to City Hall and then on to Government House. Late that afternoon he was formally ‘presented’ to the Queen and Prince. The Royals were gone by Friday.
On that same day, Lewis met with Tony Murphy ‘re unsolved murders’.
The following Monday – 14 March 1977 – Commander O’Connell finally issued his sanitised report on corruption to the Queensland Government. It concluded: ‘No purpose would be served in pursuing our investigation any further. During the course of our enquiries we did not uncover sufficient evidence to justify a prosecution.’
The report, ring-bound and book-ended in thick, creamy cardboard, was a total of five pages long. It was filed and never made public.
Slacks
Lorelle Saunders was a police officer on the up and up. Not only was she Queensland’s first female detective, but she had been excited by former Commissioner Ray Whitrod’s reform agenda, particularly in relation to women in the police force.
She had only been in the force a little less than five years by the time Whitrod resigned and Terry Lewis took over the top job. When she had first joined, one of her first postings in late November, 1972, was to the JAB, then run by Senior Sergeant Terry Lewis. She spent only a few months there before being moved over to the Gabba CIB, then the City Police shortly after.
By April 1973 she was back in plain clothes at the JAB. While there, she said that a major disagreement occurred between Lewis and Tony Murphy towards the end of the year. The argument was over the location for the JAB’s annual Christmas party. Lewis had arranged for it to be held at the old National Hotel, epicentre of the inquiry into police misconduct in 1963. Murphy indicated they should never set foot in the hotel, owned by the Roberts brothers.
Curious, Saunders had started asking around about the National, and was told the story of Bischof, the Rat Pack – supposedly Lewis, Murphy and Glen Hallahan – and police corruption during the era.
Lewis would later deny that the argument with Murphy ever took place.
Later, Saunders was transferred to Whitrod’s new Education Department Liaison Unit (EDLU) – a body established in direct opposition to Lewis’s JAB. The EDLU would get tougher on juvenile offenders. In accepting the transfer, Saunders said Lewis went ‘crazy’ and accused her of disloyalty. If true, Lewis’s perception that you were ‘pro-Whitrod’ would be enough to seed an immovable enmity. From that moment, Saunders’ name would have been blacklisted.
Saunders later had a stint at the Inala suburban station west of the city before she was brought back in to the Metropolitan CIB, South Brisbane Area Office, in January 1977. By this stage, following his spectacular ascent, Lewis had been Commissioner for just a few weeks. One of the first notations in his Commissioner’s diary, however, would relate to Saunders. Lewis recorded: ‘Mr Riley mentioned re P/W Saunders and [P/W Janet] Makepeace soliciting signatures for petition.’
The petition that had become diary-worthy for Lewis was in fact in relation to overturning police regulations and allowing female officers to wear slacks on duty. Saunders contacted virtually every female Queensland officer seeking their signatures. Saunders and Makepeace also compiled a report on the issue.
Lewis believed policewomen should be dressed in the traditional sense – skirts, for example – and said slacks were not common practice in overseas police forces.
Saunders immediately contacted several international police forces, including Japan and the United States, to seek clarification on women wearing slacks while on active duty. The petition and research dossier were presented to Lewis for consideration.
To his credit, Lewis relented and permitted slacks to be introduced as a part of the official wardrobe of Queensland policewomen. Lewis, by and large, did not share Whitrod’s more liberated view in relation to women and policing. And he would have taken umbrage at Saunders not only stirring the pot with the petition, but correcting him on the wearing of slacks in other forces overseas.
Within weeks, reports from senior police expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of Lorelle Saunders’ work were being generated and added to her official police file.
Saunders’ odyssey had begun. She could not imagine in her wildest dreams how it would end.
A Small Target
They would have looked like any typical young family over on the Redcliffe peninsula, a suburban outpost of Brisbane, 18 kilometres north-east of the CBD.
To get to it, you had to traverse the rattly 2.68 kilometre Hornibrook Bridge. Once there, it was a great place for families, with Suttons Beach and the Redcliffe Jetty regularly swept with breezes off Moreton Bay. It was also the perfect place to live for someone who did not want to bump into anything or anyone from the past in Brisbane. Redcliffe, in the 1970s, could have been its own small town by the water. In Redcliffe you could disappear.
It was where Mary Anne Brifman settled with her husband ‘Graham’ after they had married just a few days after Mary Anne’s 16th birthday in December 1972, just nine months after her mother’s death.
It was Graham who was sleeping over in the apartment in Bonney Avenue the night that Shirley died. It was Graham who witnessed a visitor come to the door close to midnight and hand her a small amber jar of drugs. Later, in the early hours of the morning, he had also seen an anxious Shirley moving about the apartment before standing before him in the dark in her floral nightie with side pockets.
‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her quietly.
‘Nothing,’ she replied.
So Mary Anne and Graham had married, and in 1975 had their first child, Christiaan. The next year they had a daughter,
Ingrid.
‘I was working as a waitress for a while but I was still haunted by all the things that I’d gone through,’ Mary Anne says. ‘I went back to doing what I hated and what they had trained me to do [in Sydney] when I was 13.
‘He [Graham] had been sheltered in a very religious household most of his life, he didn’t have much life experience. I couldn’t get my husband to do anything. So I had to go to work. It was a repeat of my mother and father’s marriage.’
She said she deliberately made herself a small target. ‘I tried to keep a very low profile,’ she says. ‘Nobody knew who I was. I never mentioned my mother. I didn’t want to get involved in anything too organised, where the girls were bullied by the men who ran the parlours.
‘I was scared stiff of being recognised. I decided I would work as an escort.’
Confidential
Just three months into his commissionership, Lewis wasted no time drafting a confidential memo to Inspector Basil Hicks, head of Whitrod’s cherished Crime Intelligence Unit. It was time to let Whitrod’s old faithful know who was boss. And to delineate what actual intelligence the unit had on corrupt serving officers. What did they know? How much?
Lewis’s memo – dated 10 February 1977 – not only requested details of the machinations of the unit, but accused it of being disruptive to police morale and operating as some sort of unaccounted for rogue body persecuting good policemen and wantonly besmirching reputations.
Jacks and Jokers Page 8
