Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  He was put in charge of a small team of investigators, some returned veterans and former police like himself – the best of the state forces – and his brief was to locate the organiser of a wartime Russian spy ring based in Australia. The counter-espionage team was named B2. Whitrod’s men were keen, enthusiastic, and patriotic in the aftermath of victory in Europe. In a pre–Cold War environment, they rightly assessed that Australia’s next enemy would be the Soviet Union.

  B2 worked with a British MI5 liaison officer and they charted a dozen or so members of the supposed spy ring, shadowing local members of the Communist Party (controversially banned by Prime Minister Robert Menzies in October 1950) and its leadership tier. Whitrod used his own family car for these subterfuge missions.

  One of the team’s primary targets was journalist Fedor Nosov, the Sydney-based correspondent for Soviet news agency TASS. He had a flat in Kings Cross and came under intense surveillance. Whitrod even arranged a crude bug to be installed in the flat, without the permission of the director-general. A team member and his wife rented the apartment above Nossov and had drilled a hole down through the floorboards and into Nossov’s plaster ceiling to secure the listening device. At one point, in a comedy of errors, Whitrod had to get the caretaker to open Nossov’s flat to clean the plaster crumbs off the carpet.

  The brief was not met – years later it was proved that Nossov was indeed a Soviet spy – but the experience was Whitrod’s first in a managerial capacity. He liked being in charge and absorbed the lessons it taught him.

  Despite failing to expose the spy ring, Whitrod’s work was noticed by his superiors, and he was transferred to Melbourne.

  Debutante

  Lewis and Murphy were working together in the CIB; Hallahan was about to enter the police depot on Petrie Terrace for police training, physically hardened from a season cutting cane; and up in the little town of Atherton, Far North Queensland, young Shirley Emerson was about to make her debut in the region’s hectic ball season.

  She was one of thirteen children, had many friends and loved to socialise. While her brothers – timber workers and labourers – were in and out of court on minor charges of theft and public drunkenness, Shirley left behind her squalid life, if only for a few hours, dancing at balls and functions across the tableland and as far away as Cairns.

  The Emersons were prone to accidents. Shirley’s tumble from a bicycle earned a line in the local newspaper. In 1940, a brother, Vic, lacerated his foot with a saw and was treated in hospital.

  The eldest Emerson child, Horace, twenty-five, was seriously injured after being crushed by a log at Danbulla, north-east of Atherton, and spent nine months in the local hospital. However, one leg healed shorter than the other and Horace was soon back in hospital, this time in Brisbane, for corrective surgery. He died following the operation, and his case was subject to a government inquiry. It was a big working-class family, well versed in hard luck and misfortune.

  Shirley, however, maintained a sunny outlook: ‘I was so active. I was never at home,’ she would later describe her youth in a newspaper report. ‘I would travel sixty or seventy miles a night to a dance and I would go dancing six nights a week. My girlhood was one of the happiest imaginable. I wish I could have it all over again. I wouldn’t change it – or only a few things.’

  What would become, with time, one of the highlights of her life was the military debutante ball in Atherton on Thursday 3 July 1952.

  On that night little Shirley led the debutantes, partnered by a Private Bourke. According to the Cairns Post, she wore ‘an exquisite frock of broderie anglais over ice-white satin. The fitted bodice had puffed sleeves and a portrait neckline with a wide shawl collar and her skirt featured voluminous fullness. Short mittens of matching material with a deep frill at the wrist had the edge of the frill cut to show the broderie pattern. She wore a cape of fur fabric.’

  Later in life she would tell a newspaper reporter, ‘The military ball at Atherton was the one I remember best. I was the littlest deb there and I was chosen Queen of the Debs and Belle of the Ball.

  ‘I was so scared I couldn’t believe it when the brigadier who received the debs congratulated me. Life is what you make it. You can have plenty of happy moments, and you can have bad ones too.’

  The Ascent of Detective Lewis

  It was a quiet Sunday night on 23 March 1952, when Detective Lewis, now stationed at the Woolloongabba CIB, and Detective Merv ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood made a routine patrol of the back streets of South Brisbane.

  In less than four weeks Lewis would marry his one and only sweetheart, Hazel Gould. She had secured a job as an usherette at the Tivoli Theatre, opposite the Brisbane City Hall, with its pitched roof and broad balcony facing Albert Street, when Lewis was training at the police depot, and then she was poached by the Metro, further down Albert, as Lewis was doing traffic point duty through the CBD. The Metro reputedly had the prettiest usherettes in the city, and the most fetching uniforms.

  Their courtship, since meeting at the Fuel Board, had not been the stuff of high romance. They went to the cinema. If his Traffic Branch shift allowed it, he met her after her own shift at the Tivoli or Metro, accompanied her to the ferry near Petrie Bight, travelled with her the short trip across the Brisbane River to Kangaroo Point, where she lived, and walked her to her door.

  It was Hazel who was keen to marry. Lewis, though exasperated he had attracted the attention of such a pretty young woman, was completely consumed by his police work and the prospects of promotion. If it had been up to him, he would have waited a couple of years for the greater financial security that promotion would have brought them.

  They married on Saturday 19 April, at the St Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Bulimba (Lewis had spent 1939 – his final year of schooling – at St Peter and Paul School). His father did not attend the ceremony.

  The couple then held their reception at the popular Eton Private Hotel – hot and cold water in every room, elevator, roof garden – on the corner of Wharf and Adelaide streets. The Lewises stayed the night at the Eton then honeymooned at Coolangatta on the South Coast – a trip organised by Lewis’s more worldly partner, Hoppy Hopgood.

  On patrol that Sunday, however, having had a pie at Barnes Auto Co. (the ‘We Never Sleep’ twenty-four-hour garage) at the corner of Queen Street and North Quay, Lewis may have been fantasising about his nuptials as he and Hopgood headed over the Victoria Bridge and turned into Cordelia Street, South Brisbane.

  They were met by a woman’s high-pitched scream. They noticed a man fleeing into Merivale Street and made chase. Hopgood overtook the man, who stopped, raised his hands, and said, ‘Don’t shoot. I stop.’ He then said, ‘I just kill my girl. I stab her.’ He was Josef Dvorac, thirty-two, labourer.

  Back in Cordelia Street, Lewis attended to Pompea Lengo, twenty, stabbed in the back, and her father, Sergio, also stabbed in the back and lower leg after a struggle with Dvorac. Although an ambulance was on its way, a passing taxi was hailed and Pompea was rushed to the Mater hospital, an action that probably saved her life.

  Pompea, a factory worker, had, as it turned out, rejected Dvorac’s proposal of marriage and he had threatened to kill the entire Lengo family. He later confirmed to police: ‘She my girl friend and she no marry me, so I kill her and go to South America. She promised to marry me and then she say she no want, so I kill her.’ When told that Pompea was gravely ill in hospital, he replied: ‘I don’t care. It all finished with now. I die soon.’

  Dvorac was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour. In December 1955 he would be found hanging by his belt from his cell bars in Boggo Road gaol.

  It was Lewis’s last major job before his wedding. On the big day, he wore a dark suit and tie, and the couple was photographed, for a local newspaper, standing in front of a two-tier wedding cake. In the picture he is beaming – unusual for the young man – and a weight appears
to have been lifted from him.

  After the honeymoon the couple rented a small room in Abingdon Street, Woolloongabba. The house was owned by two spinsters who had a habit of entering tenants’ rooms to check on electricity use. Lewis fetched wood for the chip heater so his bride could enjoy a warm bath. The room, too, was close to Lewis’s work.

  He was back at his desk by late May, apprehending purse snatchers, burglars and Australian army deserters.

  Detective Tony Murphy, married the year before to Maureen, was already an unofficial apprentice to Detective Inspector Bischof. Murphy looked up to him and the Big Fella kept an eye on his protégé, encouraging him, pushing him onto cases that should have been the province of more senior detectives. As with Lewis, Bischof became a father figure.

  Murphy, a keen rower and cyclist in his youth, was physically imposing and was fearless in calling a spade a spade. He was the spoilt youngest child of six boys to elderly parents, and from the outset he understood that whatever he wanted was his. Robin Gibson, who would later become one of Queensland’s most famous architects and design the Queensland Art Gallery, was a boyhood friend of Murphy. He recalled that after a game of summer street cricket with Murphy, Gibson’s bat went missing and was never seen again. He laughingly remembers that Murphy probably nicked it.

  Meanwhile, over at Roma Street police station, the newly inducted Constable Glen Hallahan was serving his apprenticeship at the Traffic Branch, just as Lewis had done before him. Hallahan, as exemplified by his days working the timber forests north of Brisbane, and cane cutting up and down the coast, preferred his own company.

  Hallahan was sworn in on 18 February 1952. He probably didn’t have the time or the inclination to notice, let alone befriend, a new cadet by the name of Donald Lane, from Warwick, who had joined exactly a week earlier. Lane, sixteen, was so appalled at the behaviour of some of his fellow cadets in the dormitory at night that his father rushed down from Warwick and installed the teenage boy in the Church of England–administered St Oswald’s Hostel at North Quay. It housed fifty country boys who were either studying at university or embarking on a professional life in the big smoke. Only a handful, Lane included, were not educated in private schools, and he felt conspicuous.

  As for Hallahan, he exuded a preternatural confidence, had a taste for the latest fashionable clothing and wore palmfuls of cologne – his distinctive scent led workmates to jokingly question his sexuality. He was a strapping young man, but friends and acquaintances remember that he spoke so softly you had to draw yourself close to even hear him. In the city bars of the day where police gathered after work – the Treasury, the Belfast, the National, the Grosvenor – Hallahan stood out. He was the only man not wearing a hat.

  Miss Shanks

  On Saturday 20 September 1952, Brisbane woke to a local murder so shocking that it was later viewed as a sociological turning point for the city and its inhabitants. The victim was Betty Thompson Shanks, twenty, a Commonwealth Government public servant.

  At 9.35 p.m. the day before, Shanks had disembarked from her tram at the Grange Terminus in the city’s north-west and was heading to her home in Montpelier Street, having attended a late lecture in the CBD. As she passed the corner of Thomas and Carberry streets – just a few blocks north of Montpelier – she was surprised by her attacker, thrown into a nearby yard, then sexually assaulted, bashed and kicked in the head before being strangled.

  Despite several nearby residents hearing her moaning, nobody investigated. Her body was found the next morning by an off-duty policeman – who lived next door to the scene of the murder – fetching his morning newspaper.

  It was an epochal killing for Brisbane. A young woman is snatched, brutalised, molested, and murdered within sight of her suburban home. Attendances at theatres like the Metro plummeted immediately following Shanks’s death. The city restaurant trade slowed. People stayed at home and, for the first time for many, locked their doors. Over at the Cloudland Ballroom in Bowen Hills, five hundred women were given a self-defence class by the Brisbane Judo Club. The only men present were the instructors, and the women pledged not to reveal what they had learned.

  Dozens of police, including the bulk of the CIB, converged on the suburb of Grange and the scene of the crime.

  Lewis was on duty that Saturday morning at 6 a.m. His shift was due to finish at 2 p.m. His police diary entry for Saturday 20 September 1952 read: ‘In Car 18 to 1 Dean Street, Toowong and conveyed Dr. O’Reilly [deputy director of the Laboratory of Microbiology and Pathology in Brisbane] to Thomas Street, Wilston where Betty Thomson [sic] Shanks had been murdered during night. Returned Dr. O’Reilly to the morgue.

  ‘To CIB and drove men to scene of the crime and handed car to Det. Snr. Sgt. Bauer. Then with P.C. Constable C.J. McDonald and interviewed all the residents of Grange Road re a possible suspect. To Wilston Police Station at 1:00pm. Then to Evelyn Street and interviewed all residents. To Station. Then with Det. Const. Hopgood, P.C. Consts. Skanlon and Harvey in Car 22 on patrol of Grange and Wilston areas until 11:pm. To Station and then to C.I. Branch. Off duty at 12:m.night.’

  Bischof was repeatedly photographed by the press, addressing senior field investigators at the crime scene in his pale dustcoat and expensive tie, or raking out a drain looking for clues.

  The murder investigation on that Saturday morning quietly revealed the distinctive cliques within the Queensland police. The CIB was the glamour squad. It possessed a sense of entitlement in small-town Brisbane. CIB detectives galloped in en masse and took over investigations, and their standard-bearer was Frank Bischof.

  Edwin (Ted) Chandler, of the Fortitude Valley police precinct, was the first non-commissioned officer on the Shanks scene that day. It was correct police procedure, as he understood it, for the first officer on the scene of a killing to take possession, per se, of the body and any personal effects.

  Then Detective Sub-inspector Jack Buggy from the CIB turned up.

  ‘You can knock off duty now, there’s no need for you to work on,’ Buggy told Chandler.

  ‘I was the first police officer on the scene here, so it’s incumbent on me to take charge of this body, have it transported to the city morgue and take possession of the dead woman’s belongings,’ Chandler replied.

  Buggy said: ‘I am taking charge here, and I am telling you to return to the office and cease duty – there is no need for you to perform any overtime.’

  Chandler knew that the Brisbane CIB chief, Inspector Jim Donovan, was on his way and held off to seek his opinion. Donovan told him to continue with his duties. ‘I am in charge of the CIB, not Mr Buggy,’ Donovan told him. ‘I will tell you when to knock off duty.’

  The retort from Donovan, a Catholic, may have exposed his enmity towards Bischof, a Mason, and his acolytes. There was no love lost between the men.

  Decades later in a memoir, Chandler recalled that ‘the CIB arrived at the scene, obviously expecting a quick kill and they rode roughshod over those who were painstakingly checking on available clues at the scene. If ever a murderer was protected, this was one.’

  After an eighteen-hour shift, Lewis had a day off on the Sunday following the murder. On the Monday he patrolled the streets of Wilston, Newmarket, Windsor and Herston in Car 27 with Detective Sergeant Wex. It was to be his last Shanks-related duty. On the Tuesday he arrested Leslie Michael Wells for stealing ‘3 gents athletic singlets, 1 two piece pyjama suit and one gents shirt’, the property of the Mater hospital.

  Just six days after the Shanks death, there was debate in the press about offering a reward to help catch the killer. Premier Vince Gair, who had replaced Ned Hanlon earlier in the year following Hanlon’s death in office on 15 January, said the matter of a reward was up to the police commissioner. By 30 September an official one-thousand-pound reward was posted for the crime, which was already predicted to go down in history as one of the state’s unsolved mys
teries.

  Ladies Lounging in Cane Grass Chairs

  On 22 April 1953, seven months after the Shanks horror, the Courier-Mail published a special investigation into vice, SP betting, and prostitution in Brisbane.

  The paper had recently treated its readers to a racy exposé on Brisbane’s ‘sly-grog’ dens. Now it was tearing back the ‘vice-curtain’ and presenting ‘a sordid picture of gambling, drink and sex’. And it held no punches in what it thought of the Queensland government’s responsibility for the city’s new-found loucheness: ‘It is obvious that police condoning of vice in Brisbane is based on Government policy,’ the report said. ‘Court prosecutions prove that the Licensing Branch vice-squad is doing its job – as far as Government policy allows.’

  Brisbane, since Shanks’s death, had finally become a city big enough for its seamy underworld to be worth investigating by the press.

  The report underlined the government’s so-called obsession with gambling, by citing the findings of the previous year’s SP Betting Royal Commission and its conclusion that millions of pounds were being funnelled through off-the-course bookmakers. In the aftermath of the commission and its revelations, Premier Gair’s government proposed that some of its recommendations – maintaining SP bookmaking as an offence but permitting lawful business with customers who lived beyond the reach of actual race meetings – be put to a referendum. The idea was met with widespread ridicule.

  The newspaper investigation also dared to venture into the state of the city’s prostitution rackets.