Bauer, on learning of the news, was furious, and demanded to know the whereabouts of the ledgers. Lane recalled: ‘Before I could answer him, Sergeant Becker appeared from around the building and confronted Bauer. A violent row took place, in which Inspector Bauer made it plain to Becker that the SP shops were to be left alone. Becker stood his ground and proceeded with the summonses.’
Lane said that he and Becker were offered bribes for the safe return of the ledgers, but the court case went ahead.
On Tuesday 21 January 1958, just over a week before Bischof was crowned Queensland police commissioner in Brisbane, the industrious Detective Hallahan was on duty in Miles Street, Mount Isa, with his partner, Detective Bob Pfingst, when he noticed a black DeSoto.
The day before, police nationwide were told to be on the lookout for a similar car towing a caravan, and that it may be linked to a triple homicide committed in early December near Sundown Station, south of Kulgera, across the Northern Territory–South Australia border.
The dead were Thyra Bowman, in her early forties – wife of Peter Bowman, manager of Glen Helen Station, two hundred kilometres from Alice Springs – their daughter Wendy, fourteen, and visiting family friend Thomas Whelan, twenty-six. All three – along with Wendy’s two dogs – were driving to Adelaide to see friends and family. Peter Bowman and their other daughter, Marian, flew to Adelaide and were waiting for their arrival.
When they hadn’t turned up by 8 December, Peter contacted roadhouses on the vehicle’s planned road route, then alerted police. The story of the missing car and its occupants was reported in the Adelaide press two days later. Witnesses claimed the car was last sighted at a petrol station in Kulgera.
The police and the flying doctor service turned up nothing, so the RAAF was called in. Then, on Friday 13 December, the captain of an air force Lincoln was banking his aircraft just over the South Australian border when he spotted the car hidden in scrub off the dirt highway.
The case immediately became known as the Sundown Murders.
Thomas Whelan had been shot four times, once in the back of the head. Thyra Bowman had been bludgeoned and received one bullet to the head. Wendy had been similarly bashed, and had a bullet wound to the temple. The two dogs had also been shot to death.
Over the next month witnesses emerged, telling police they had either seen or personally spoken to the driver of a black DeSoto towing a cream-coloured caravan in the vicinity of and around the time of the murders. The man was travelling with his wife and three-year-old son. One witness reported the man had introduced himself as Bailey and said that he and his family were travelling to Mount Isa. The witness had spotted a rifle on the front seat of the DeSoto.
Armed with this information, police sent out a national notification for the vehicle and van, and the next day it came into the sights of Glen Hallahan.
He and his partner kept the car under observation until they saw a small-framed man approach the vehicle at about 6.20 p.m. Both officers approached the DeSoto.
‘I’m Detective Hallahan and this is Detective Pfingst,’ Hallahan said. ‘What is your name?’
‘Ray Carter,’ the man replied. He later claimed to be Ray Bailey, having used a pseudonym for ‘tax purposes’. He had been working as a carpenter on the new Mount Isa hospital since before Christmas.
Hallahan accompanied Bailey, twenty-six, to the police station, and on inspecting the vehicle allegedly found a .32 calibre revolver and leather holster concealed in the front seat. Hallahan, Pfingst and other police then went with Bailey to a camping reserve outside town to check out the suspect’s pale blue and grey caravan.
There they talked with Bailey’s wife, Patricia. Hallahan discovered .22 calibre rifle bullets in the van. The Baileys and police then returned to the station with the caravan in tow.
At 9.30 p.m., Bailey, a carpenter of no fixed address, was charged with possessing an unlicensed firearm and with obtaining a car under false pretences.
Incredibly, the arrest was the page-one lead in the Courier-Mail the next morning. Either District Inspector Bauer or the increasingly publicity-conscious Detective Hallahan, or someone else, phoned the newspaper offices in Brisbane or sat down with a stringer in Mount Isa itself and provided lengthy and exacting details of the dramatic arrest and formal charges in time to make deadline.
The story involved some creative licence – times wrong, incorrect details of who was where and when – but it was a huge coup for the Queensland police, potentially capturing a triple murderer after a nationwide alert.
All this action, just as Cabinet in Brisbane was debating who would be the next police commissioner.
The next day, the Courier-Mail followed the drama, saying an arrest for the triple murder was imminent. Bauer had secured an eight-day remand on Bailey so he could be interrogated by Adelaide police.
Two days later, a photograph of the diminutive Raymond John Bailey, charged with murder, graced the front page of the Courier-Mail. He was pictured with Pfingst on his left and Hallahan on his right. In the photograph the officers are staring at the camera with half-smiles on their faces. Hallahan, in dark suit, tie, and hat, is holding some paperwork in his right hand.
After his court hearing, Bailey asked for a Church of England clergyman. Patricia Bailey collapsed on the verandah of the police station and was carried into the recreation room, where she recovered. She collapsed again some time later, and was ‘given an injection by a doctor’.
She and her son, Michael, lived in the caravan on the grounds of the police station while Bailey was on remand nearby.
At Bailey’s trial in May 1958, Hallahan claimed he knew nothing of the connection between Bailey and the Sundown Murders when he apprehended him in Miles Street. He just knew about a suspect car. He stated he wasn’t aware of the Bailey–Sundown link until the next day, when the Courier-Mail splashed the story on page one.
If he knew nothing, who gave the newspaper the information of the arrest? And if Bauer leaked it, why wouldn’t he confide in his star Mount Isa detective on such a crucial matter?
Why, too, was Bailey placed on an eight-day remand, sought by Bauer, over insignificant firearm and vehicle offences?
Hallahan also told the trial he began interviewing Bailey in the presence of Bauer – who ‘happened to be passing through Mount Isa on another matter’ – from 10 a.m. on Wednesday 22 January. Detectives Moran and Hopkins from Adelaide were due in Mount Isa at about 3.30 p.m. that day. By the time they arrived, Hallahan and Bauer had secured a confession.
Bailey would reveal at his trial that on the night before his interrogation by Hallahan and Bauer he was locked in a padded cell and ‘woken every half hour by a torch being flashed in the trap and if I did not move they came in and woke me’.
‘During the next morning, I could hear my wife crying downstairs. I told them where I had been and what I had been doing, but they just kept on questioning me and didn’t seem to believe me. By midday I was in such a state I didn’t know what I was saying.
‘I also asked to see a lawyer but Hallahan said I was not allowed to speak to anybody . . . even my wife . . . my wife was about six weeks’ pregnant and she had a miscarriage while she was at Mount Isa.’
Hallahan would tell the court that Bailey had confessed to his own father-in-law that he had committed the murders. Bailey said this was untrue. Hallahan said he had no notes recording the confession.
As Hallahan gave evidence, Bailey reacted from the dock: ‘He’s telling lies. Tell the truth, that’s all I want.’ He cried as he remonstrated.
Despite Bailey’s claims of innocence, legal doubt lingering over his alleged confession, and allegations in court that police mistreated Patricia Bailey in order to get to her husband, he was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to death. A subsequent appeal was heard and dismissed.
Bailey was hanged on the
morning of 17 June 1958, the last man to suffer such a fate in South Australia.
Author Peter James, who analyses the trial evidence in his book The Sundown Murders, concludes: ‘If it is only a partly accurate record of Bailey’s time in the Mount Isa watchhouse, it could represent the first occasion that brainwashing techniques were successfully used in the state of Queensland to get a murder confession.’
A few weeks later, the new Queensland police commissioner, Frank Bischof, arrived in Mount Isa as part of his statewide campaign to familiarise himself with the troops.
Bischof clearly had his eye on Hallahan, the stellar detective who had arrested a potential triple murderer. Hallahan, he must have realised, was a ‘solid’ policeman, the type that Minister Thomas Hiley warned of. He was a ‘worker’ and he got his ‘kills’.
Unsurprisingly, Hallahan was transferred to the Brisbane CIB the following month. (He would be replaced at the Mount Isa CIB by Don Lane.) So too was Bauer, Bischof’s Mason mate. Bauer would take charge of the Licensing Branch, and would soon be overseeing a young officer by the name of Jack Herbert.
Hallahan and Bauer. The young detective and his Cloncurry district superior. Hallahan and Bauer. The two men alone in that interview room at the Mount Isa CIB when Bailey made his confession to multiple murders. Hallahan and Bauer, shifted together back to Brisbane, each knowing what went on in that stifling room and the role each played in prising the confession from Bailey.
Did Bischof transfer them together because of their exceptional work on the Sundown Murders? Or was it safer for the new police commissioner to keep them in the same orbit if, indeed, they had concocted a false confession from Bailey?
Says Lewis: ‘Bauer possibly corroborated [Hallahan] on some of the [Sundown Murders case] things. He and Bauer were always close. They were mates. It’s not something they’d talk about.’
Was Bailey framed by Bauer and Hallahan?
‘The two of them would have done it,’ Lewis says.
In The Sundown Murders, Peter James surmised that Bauer’s potential involvement in a conspiracy that led to the hanging of an innocent man would have made him vulnerable now Hallahan ‘had the wood on the top Mason in the state’.
‘If this outline of the situation is even partially correct,’ James wrote, ‘then it is not difficult to see how it would be impossible for Inspector Bauer ever to discipline Detective Hallahan again.’
At the end of 1958, just as Hallahan was settling in to the big smoke, Lewis was partnered with Murphy for several weeks leading up to Christmas.
They may have discussed the police interchange program – a system that saw Queensland police serve for a period of weeks in Sydney, and vice versa, to gain experience in interstate police practice and to meet up-and-coming young detectives.
Lewis’s last interchange had been earlier in the year. He caught the train from Brisbane to Sydney on Saturday 22 March, arriving the next day. According to his police diary, on Monday he reported for duty at the Sydney CIB and was partnered with ‘Dets. Curtis (South Aust.) and [Eric] Pratt (Vict.)’, who was his roommate for the next four weeks and would become a lifelong friend.
It was through the interchange program that Murphy and Lewis would meet the biggest southern coppers of their day.
‘That’s when I probably met fellows like Fred Krahe and [Ray ‘Gunner’] Kelly,’ says Lewis. ‘They were leading young detectives, they were workers.’
While in Sydney, Lewis was caught up in the investigation of a horrendous murder. In the early hours of Friday 11 April 1958, labourer John (Jack) Smith, drunk, broke into the dormitories of the Methodist Ladies College, Burwood, and abducted at knifepoint fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Margaret Thomas.
He took her to Queen Elizabeth Park in the neighbouring suburb of Concord, where he raped and stabbed her to death. An autopsy would reveal fifteen puncture wounds.
Within hours, following a tip-off from a taxi driver, Smith was arrested and taken to Burwood police station. That morning, Lewis viewed the suspect then acted on a hunch – the murder bore similarities to that of Betty Shanks years earlier in Brisbane, and a savage attack on another Brisbane woman, Beverley Mackenzie, in early 1957.
While Lewis investigated Smith’s background, another Queensland detective from Brisbane CIB flew to Sydney to assist. Together they interviewed Smith, who initially admitted to break and enters in the Brisbane suburbs of Inala and Ascot, then to the rape and attempted murder of Mackenzie.
It was a fruitful month-long secondment to Sydney for Lewis.
Back in Brisbane on Friday 5 December, Lewis and Murphy were working the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, questioning petty thieves and suspected prostitutes across the city when, having returned to CIB headquarters, they bumped into Inspector Voigt.
Lewis noted in his police diary: ‘Saw Insp. Voigt re: Albert St brothel and he stated that Mr Bischof had instructed that we were not to tell any inmates to leave brothels and were not to arrest any inmates unless they were committing a Crime, such as stealing. We are not to charge any with vagrancy or to arrest any keepers. Off duty at 4pm.’
On Tuesday 16 December at exactly 3 p.m., Lewis recorded for the first time working with ‘Det. Hallahan’.
Three days later, early on that Friday morning, he was on duty with both Hallahan and Murphy in Car 12. It was an eventful day. He registered several arrests: drunk in Musgrave Park; insufficient lawful means; break and enter.
In Car 12, on a Brisbane summer morning in 1958, the future Rat Pack had come together.
Shirley’s New Life
In 1954, Colin Emerson of Atherton may have been searching for the whereabouts of his young sister Shirley through the classified advertisements of the Cairns Post, but if he’d wandered into the Court House Hotel on Abbott Street, not far from the police station in downtown Cairns, he would have found her pulling beers behind the bar.
Shirley had left her family behind in Atherton sometime early in the year, determined to set out on her own. She had a much older sister, Marge Chapple, living in Cairns, but sought from her no help with money or accommodation.
The Court House Hotel had once been salubrious. In 1939, following a renovation, it exemplified the modernisation of Cairns. The front of the building had been rebuilt and a new accommodation wing and staff quarters had been added. A private bar, described as ‘continental’ in atmosphere by the local press, consisted of jade green and cream tiling and an end wall filled with refrigerated cabinets with plate glass mirrors and shelves.
By the 1950s it had become rundown and its lower status matched its clientele. In March 1950, a Polish immigrant named Szama (Sonny)Brifman arrived in Sydney on board the passenger ship SS Otranto after a five-week voyage from Europe. He made his way up to Cairns and by 1954 was the licensee of the Court House Hotel, alongside his wife.
‘Meet Mine Host and Hostess,’ he advertised in the Cairns Post, ‘in the friendly atmosphere of this modern and up-to-date Bar and Lounge. Enjoy Your Drinks to Peter Ward’s Bright, Sparkling Music.’
According to Shirley’s family, Brifman’s adventure as a hotel proprietor was funded by his then wife, who died in 1955. They believed Shirley, after starting work as a barmaid under Brifman’s charge, was living in staff quarters at the hotel.
Very soon, though, she had moved in with Brifman himself. Back in Atherton, Shirley’s parents disapproved of the coupling. Brifman was twenty years older than Shirley, of ordinary appearance, and seemed to enjoy ‘living off women’. Whereas Shirley was young, outgoing, attractive, and just starting to live her life.
But there was a problem. The naive Shirley Emerson had fallen pregnant to Brifman. In July 1956, Shirley – four months into the pregnancy – made an extraordinary 5000-pound claim against Brifman in the Townsville Supreme Court for alleged ‘breach of promise to marry’.
She gave birth to h
er first child, Mary Anne, in December, and by June the following year, Shirley and Sonny were finally married at the Cairns courthouse and held a reception in the Court House Hotel, attended by her sister Marge Chapple and Marge’s children.
Shirley Emerson was now Shirley Brifman. And if she had a flaw, according to relatives, it was her taste for the good life. Once she’d savoured it, she refused to let it go. The family rumour was that Shirley had begun a career in prostitution from out of her husband’s hotel before, if not shortly after, their marriage.
By early 1958, the Brifmans were heading for the bright lights of Brisbane, where Shirley could make more money.
Within weeks of hitting the city and starting work at Killarney brothel alongside Ada Bahnemann near the fish cannery on the south side of the river, Brifman made a firm and fast friend in the local CIB. His name was Tony Murphy.
Murphy, in turn, introduced her to Glen Hallahan when he arrived from Mount Isa in the aftermath of the Sundown Murders case.
She also became acquainted with Terry Lewis: ‘I’ve got no idea where I met her,’ he says. ‘I might have met her in the Grand Central and Murphy would have introduced me to her.’
Brifman and her husband and child were living in Belmont, a bushy, semi-rural suburb twelve kilometres south-east of the CBD, when she met Hallahan. He was living in inner-city New Farm. Both had strong personalities and an eye on the main game.
Hallahan quickly confided in her.
‘Glen hit the pot over the Sundown murder,’ she later recalled in a police interview. ‘It was pot. I had seen the pot. I used to cop it night after night. Hallahan said that the real killer was free. It did really play on his mind and I thought he was going to go off his head over it.
‘At that stage I would say he was not crooked but after that he went bad. I never saw anything eat a man inside like that did.
‘All he used to talk about was this murder. He said: “The man walks free. We know who he is.” He said: “I will never be able to live with myself again. He should never have been hung for it.”’
Three Crooked Kings Page 7
