by Adrian Tame
I think it was the police down Carrum, meself. The Frankston police. They rode ’em into the ground, Dennis and Peter. They knocked ’em around. Dennis and Peter couldn’t walk up the street without the police car going past and picking ’em up. They just had a set for them. Any trouble or that, they’d come down to my place, and my boys wouldn’t be nowhere in the vicinity even. There was one time they took him down to the station, and I went down there, and I nearly got pinched meself. The police were supposed to have belted him up. Dennis told us over the counter, like. I nearly got pinched for having a go at the coppers. They give him a hiding in Frankston lock-up, and the wife and I are standing on the opposite side of the wall and we could hear Dennis screaming out. They was belting him around. We charged in, like.
By now Dennis’s good looks were earning the attentions of the opposite sex. One of his first girlfriends was Kerry, and Dennis had one of his first tattoos done in her honour. It was on his chest and read ‘The Brute’, his pet name for her. ‘He was really rapt in her,’ Harry recalls. ‘Fight like a man, she could. They went out a couple of years, he was pretty keen, and then he just brushed her aside, that was it.’
* * *
It was in October 1973, when Dennis was not quite twenty-two, that his potential for cruel and violent mayhem was first fully realised. He took young Peter, still only twenty, and two other men, Allan Rudd and Billy Webb, on a rampage that began in a flat in the bayside suburb of Sandringham and ended in a ten-year sentence for Dennis and a crushing fourteen-year term for Peter.
* * *
Born in January 1953, Peter was taken with Dennis while still a toddler to live with their grandmother Gladys and Harry Allen in Carrum. Harry believes that without Dennis’s influence Peter could have carved himself out a career in law—an opinion not as biased as it might sound.
‘Peter tried to keep up with Dennis,’ Harry says. ‘They were very close, and he started going off the rails as well. But he was a very clever boy. He would have made a good living as a lawyer. Frank Galbally [a prominent Melbourne laywer] said he was worth training as an articled clerk.’ Kathy remembers purchasing $500 worth of law books for him to study in his cell in the 1980s. ‘When he used to go into the Supreme Court his arms would be full of books, and he was handcuffed,’ she says. ‘All the screws would be carrying books for him as well. All the barristers used to go in and listen to him argue.’
It’s true that on the many occasions Peter was to defend himself in court, prosecuting counsel who treated him as a pushover have had reason to rue their caution. He is generally considered to be the most intelligent of Kathy’s children, but in the last twenty-three years has enjoyed less than twelve months of full liberty. Whether or not this appalling waste of a life is due to his older brother’s influence is a moot point. It was not mere chance that he was dealt with much more severely than Dennis over the Sandringham episode in 1973.
According to prosecution evidence, they and their two accomplices, armed with knives and a gun, had gone to the flat, where three sisters were living, after having been offered $500 by an underworld contact to shoot the operator of a well-known massage parlour who was a friend of the girls. When the four men arrived, only two of the sisters were home, but they were joined shortly afterwards by the third and her boyfriend.
The plan was to use the three girls to lure the massage parlour operator to the flat, but for some reason he never showed up. Possibly because they were primed for and committed to an act of extreme violence the four men began to take out their frustrations on the three sisters and the boyfriend. Dennis raped the eldest girl and indecently assaulted one of the other two, while Peter joined in the sexual attacks, pistol-whipped the boyfriend and fired a shot which passed through a wall and narrowly missed a baby sleeping in the next room.
Dennis’s display of violence was bad enough, but Peter’s was worse. The attackers had only one gun between them and according to the four victims Dennis and Peter were arguing throughout for possession of it. Peter finally won. This might suggest that he was the stronger personality of the two, but Kathy’s view is more realistic: ‘Dennis was more pissed than Peter, that’s all.’
The four men then split up. Dennis went to see Kathy at her Housing Commission flat in Northcote and then fled to Sydney with Billy Webb, only to be captured within a fortnight and brought back to Melbourne. Meanwhile, Peter teamed up with Allan Rudd to go on a rampage over the next two days through Melbourne’s eastern and southern suburbs, during which three people were wounded.
First they headed out to Springvale where, with Rudd at the wheel of the MG they were driving, they cut across another car and fired five shots at it, two of them hitting their target. Next they visited a pizza parlour in Glen Iris where Peter subsequently admitted firing a shot into the floor, wounding the proprietor in the foot. The same night the pair went to a flat in Port Melbourne, where witnesses claimed Peter shot a man named John Whittaker in the face.
Early the following morning Peter and Rudd attempted to gatecrash a party in Brighton. Among the guests were members of The Dingoes rock band, including Christopher Stockley and Broderick Smith. Stockley was shot in the back and spent several weeks in hospital. Finally Peter and Rudd, still in the MG, were chased by police into a dead-end street in the dormitory suburb of Dingley, where they were arrested after Rudd aimed two shots at the patrol car and was hit in the shoulder by return fire.
This was serious, big-time crime, much more significant and violent than anything Kathy had ever been involved in, and incurred suitable retribution from the courts. Dennis was given a ten-year sentence on the rape charge, with a minimum of five years, while Peter received what amounted to a total of fourteen years after being convicted of rape, shooting at police to prevent arrest and the wounding of two men. Webb and Rudd received similarly lengthy sentences for their roles in the events of October 1973.
The effect on Kathy was devastating. During the early stages of their trial she tried to deflect her fears with humour. As Peter was led up from the cells at the start of his case she shouted in open court: ‘I thought there was a bounty on dingoes. It’s two dollars an ear, isn’t it?’
By the time the jury in Dennis’s case was about to deliver its verdict Kathy suspected the worst and her mood had changed to black rage.
Me and Dennis’s girlfriend Kerry were going to bash these two policewomen in the toilet at the court, but then this other one arrived, built like a brick shithouse. That was the end of that. I would have had a go, my bloody oath. Just revenge to let my feelings out, because my temper used to get up shocking in those days.
In time, however, she channelled her grief into a determination to give the boys all the support she could muster by never missing a prison visit.
* * *
Peter began serving his sentence at Pentridge before being transferred early in 1976 to the medium-security Beechworth prison in northern Victoria. The reason for the transfer, which outraged police, was that threats had been made against his life in Pentridge. Within days of his arrival at Beechworth he was planning his escape with help from criminal connections on the outside. By that March he had broken out, in the company of a twenty-six-year-old armed robber, Donald Marshall.
While on the run, described by police as ‘the most dangerous man in Victoria’, he telephoned Truth newspaper, where I was working as news editor. During the twenty-five-minute conversation Peter spoke of his high life as a fugitive, including meetings with women and drinking sessions.
On a more serious note he claimed police were out to kill him, even though he had decided to ‘end his career as a gunman’. He was also at pains to absolve Gladys and Harry of any part in his escape. ‘My grandparents weren’t involved,’ he said emphatically. ‘There was a heap of blokes involved, crims, they don’t come from Victoria. I planned it for a few weeks. When I was first transferred up there I started planning it straightaway.’
He claimed, somewhat unconvincingly, that the main purp
ose of his escape was to raise money to finance his appeal against his conviction. He was incensed about the charge of firing at police to prevent arrest, maintaining that at the time he was alleged to have shot at the arresting officers he had already given himself up and was in custody. ‘I am not a bad man,’ he protested. ‘These people [police] are just trying to paint a bad picture of me because I’ve just showed them too much contempt in my younger years.’
Peter’s freedom was short-lived. He was recaptured in Sydney only days after his escape, but managed to cause more headaches for the police during his extradition to Victoria. Two Melbourne detectives had flown up to accompany him on a commercial flight from Sydney. As the plane prepared to take off Peter began shouting that a bomb had been placed on board. He so terrified the other passengers that he and his escorts were put off the plane and were flown down to Melbourne the following day on a specially chartered flight.
Apart from a quickly revoked period of parole, Peter served eleven years of his fourteen-year stretch, and was finally released in August 1985. He remained at large for only eight months before receiving a thirteen-year sentence on drug-related charges and conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
As for Dennis, the five years from his release in 1977 after serving four years of his ten-year sentence to 1982, when he moved to Richmond, were marked by a further decline into violence and lawlessness. In December 1978 he received three months for harbouring his fourteen-year-old brother Jamie, who had escaped from Turana boys’ home, where he was awaiting trial for car theft. Later charges of possessing firearms were added to Dennis’s growing list of court appearances. His reputation as a street and pub brawler full of what the underworld admiringly call ‘dash’ was keeping pace with his convictions.
Typical of this was a fight in which he became involved in 1978 in a pub in Collingwood. It all began as an ordinary fist fight between Dennis and two other men, but quickly escalated. Starting with a broken billiard cue, Dermis went about his work with enthusiasm and vigour. Then he pulled a gun and fired a shot at one of his assailants, narrowly missing him. What the bullet failed to achieve the gun-butt did, as Dennis viciously pistol-whipped the man around the head, condemning him to a considerable period in hospital.
A second bar fight six months later saw Dennis for once on the receiving end. But the kudos he earned in underworld circles, both for his ‘dash’ and for his perceived victimisation, almost made the experience worthwhile.
He had been called to a hotel in Frankston, forty kilometres south of Melbourne, where a former girlfriend was reportedly in trouble. Armed with a length of lead piping, he strolled into the bar. Within minutes the place erupted and shots were fired in his direction, then he was clubbed around the head with a rifle. Further shots followed as he lurched outside, bleeding profusely from pellets embedded in his chest. The police arrived shortly afterwards and promptly arrested him for carrying an offensive weapon—the lead piping. No action was taken against whoever had shot and bashed him.
He was later gaoled for six months, but at his successful appeal before Judge Spence in Melbourne County Court he explained: ‘I got to the hotel, and was only there for about two or three minutes when this man fired three shots at my table. I was then bashed over the head with the butt of the rifle, which caused me to have stitches later on.’ For good measure, he said, he was also shot with a twelve-gauge shotgun outside the hotel.
Allowing the appeal, Judge Spence said: ‘Mr Allen has a side to his nature that he takes the law into his own hands, which leads to problems . . .’
* * *
One of Dennis’s friends throughout the 1970s and ‘80s was John Grant, chief crime reporter for Truth when I was working on the paper.I He had known Dennis since his teens and remembers him as a good mate and drinking partner.
I first knew him through some friends down in St Kilda. A mate of mine, Billy, worked in the same panel shop Dennis was at when he was a little fellow down at Carrum. By the time he got to Richmond there were changes in him, but only on the outside. He’d become more wealthy, more cunning, more paranoid. The speed—he was addicted to amphetamines—made him spend more freely, I suppose. He promised me a diamond as big as his fingernail. But he died before he delivered.
He bought one bloke a car, did heaps of things for people. He had a fleet of cars at one stage that he used to let everyone drive, mates and associates. He offered me the choice of the fleet one day, all I had to do was come to the police station at Richmond with him. He was going to introduce me as his publicity man. He used to put petrol in my car all the time if I drove him anywhere. That’s when he was Mr D—short for his nickname, Mr Death—with all the gold chains, and Freddy Cook the football star in his pocket, one of his closest mates.
One thing John Grant and Dennis had in common was that they’d both been bashed by police in their younger days. The pair would meet in a pub opposite Brunswick Courthouse, and it was not unusual for Dennis to reel across the street half-drunk to make an appearance before the bench. In the late 1970s Dennis joined the rest of the family in Ross Street, Northcote, where he and Grant would enjoy weekend-long drinking binges, consuming dozens of cans of beer.
There was a sheila there sometimes—Heather Hill, I think, the one he married—Sissy, they used to call her. He used to do silly things to her. He used to tell her, ‘Clean up, you sloppy moll,’ and all that. He’d cook the food. One weekend there was no food, just beer. So he said, ‘Come on down the butcher’s, we’ll rob it.’
You’d get close on a weekend like that. He’d come across as quite fair, open, good company, quite intelligent in his own way. Always thinking of the easy way to get something, though. The simple way, usually the unlawful way. Early on he was quite macho the way he talked, but there was a warm side to him as well.
Even when, unknown to Grant, Dennis had begun his murderous spree, they remained good friends. According to Grant, Dennis never talked about killing people.
I can remember him referring to Victor Gouroff, one of his alleged murder victims, I think it was, as Vic the prick. It sounded like he disliked him from a long way back. He could be a hard man, to his enemies, to those that’d crossed him. He wasn’t a big, awesome person, not at all, but he had a lot of heart. There was a time down in Frankston when there was a bit of a fracas. Someone called someone a moll and he took offence. There was a fight, and another fight. He went back to abuse them some more and the blokes pulled guns on him. He ended up getting shot, and he kept fighting on after he’d been shot.
Immediately after this incident Grant brought Dermis into the editorial offices of Truth to display the pellet wounds in his chest.
John believes that Dennis would have found a way to justify to himself the escalating violence, and finally the murders: ‘He’d probably think he was looking after his friends who were now part of his criminal empire. He wasn’t killing people, he was furthering his support from the fellow criminals that were with him. He was a proud man, the old school. I think the drugs got to him in the end.’
When Grant first got to know him, Dennis was opposed to drugs and wouldn’t even have a marijuana joint. But in the end his drug abuse—especially his addiction to speed—was his undoing.
He got so distorted on his own power trip—Dennis the menace, that’s what he was, a menace to himself. Comparing Dennis with people like Russell Cox, or ‘Jockey’ Smith . . . Dermis wasn’t in their league, but a terror among his own. That business of Mr D, that was Mr Drugs, not Mr Death. He wasn’t Mr Death. He didn’t look like a Mr Death. He didn’t instil fear. He was a charmer with women. Shy at first but quite old-fashioned in his way. He did have a weird respect for them—chivalry. He aimed to please. I remember going to The Cherry Tree with him. They loved him in there.
When Dennis turned police informer Grant knew one of his first victims, a heroin dealer who had arranged to supply him with $45,000 worth of the drug.
This bloke brought all this shit back from Thailand. He organised
to see Dennis down at the Riverside Hotel. Dennis had set it up with the coppers, and they arrived and took all the drugs and the money Dennis had with him to buy the smack. They had to make it look as if they were into Dennis as well. He was capable of that sort of thing, especially with someone he didn’t know. It was an easy quid, but it wouldn’t have gone down well with Kath.
Grant had a lot of time for Kathy. ‘You can’t blame her for what happened to the boys,’ he says, ‘She was a good Mum, did her best. Loved them.’
But given the opportunity people will be criminals—an easy buck. People don’t even realise they’re being criminals till they’re caught, and then they’re branded. Once they’re branded they act like they’re expected to. Without the speed Dennis would probably have chugged along, got into armed robberies and things.
As Dennis rose through the ranks of Melbourne’s underworld he gradually lost a lot of his physical attractiveness. The baby Dennis of early photographs was a show stopper, but by early adolescence he had acquired that look of sullen defiance which characterised Kathy’s early portraits. By the time he moved into Stephenson Street in Richmond in 1982 he still had enough of the good looks he had inherited from Kathy’s side of the family to be presentable, even handsome. But there was a hardness around his mouth and eyes, born no doubt of his experiences both of the street and inside the ‘bluestone college’ of Pentridge Prison. There was also his voice—unusually gruff and gravelly. Dennis rarely raised his voice, but as with Kathy today, there was a quality of menace that had more to do with the way the words were delivered than with their volume. There is little doubt of the chilling effect he would convey. Like his mother, Dennis knew how to make himself understood and obeyed.
Completing the physical portrait were the tattoos, the clothes and the jewellery. Dennis acquired his first tattoo at the age of fourteen, more for bravado than aesthetic considerations. It was important to show his peers that the pain of the needle could be handled. By the time of his death he looked like the main character in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. Dragons, bulldogs, tigers, peacocks, swallows, sharks, panthers, scorpions and other representations of the animal kingdom competed for space on his body. Kathy remembers a time when Dennis was comatose with drink and a policeman was making notes of his various tattoos. ‘You’ll be there a week,’ she told him.
