The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  On 31 October the committal began with complaints from the defence about treatment of the three accused. On the opening day the court was told that Anthony Farrell had been woken at dawn in the remand centre in the middle of town where he was being held five blocks from the court. He was then driven out to Pentridge and back into the city, being strip-searched four times during the process. A month later Geoff Flatman, for Victor, spoke of Victor and Peter McEvoy being brought to court via a ‘very circuitous route under very trying conditions and taken over bumpy roads in the heat.’

  For Kathy there were a number of revealing signs demonstrating the inadequacy of the prosecution case. The first of these involved long term criminal Lindsay Rountree’s evidence that Victor tried to involve him in a pact to murder two police officers the next time a member of his (Victor’s) circle was killed by police. Rountree’s evidence at the committal may have passed muster, but by the time of the trial, Victor’s counsel Geoff Flatman was able to produce recorded evidence of a conversation between Rountree and police giving the distinct impression that Rountree was prepared to testify against Victor in exchange for a more lenient sentence on armed robbery charges he was facing. In his final address at the end of the trial Flatman said Rountree had come up with his evidence against Victor only ‘after he got some sort of undertaking that he could get something said on his behalf . . .’ and had perjured himself by claiming he had never asked for favours from police.

  Then there was the farcical evidence of a pair of Pentridge inmates, Harold Martin and Michael Warner, two middle-aged conmen, with 600 convictions between them. Kathy claims they shared the same ill-fitting suit, provided by police or the witness protection scheme, for their court appearances. Both men suggested Victor had given them detailed confessions of his guilt while they were in gaol together. The court clearly preferred the defence version that Victor had barely met either man, let alone put his liberty on the line by confessing to them. After Martin admitted under cross examination during the trial that he had given evidence of similar prison cell ‘confessions’ in half a dozen cases in various states in the past, the prosecution wisely advised the jury to accept neither him nor Warner as witnesses of truth.

  Kathy argues that if the prosecution had had a half decent case they would not have needed to fall back on such transparently obvious fabrications from doubtful witnesses like Rountree, Martin and Warner, who attempted to impute motive and confessions to Victor. She has a point. The lies of Martin and Warner, particularly, must have caused considerable damage to the prosecution’s case, and it is difficult to understand why an ageing conman like Martin, with his record of regularly trotting out cellblock confessions, would have been placed on the stand during such an important trial. It is even more difficult to believe that nobody in the prosecution camp had done the same homework as the defence, and discovered details of Martin’s previous, embarrassingly similar appearances. If they had, and decided to go ahead with Martin anyway, this is indeed evidence of a certain desperation.

  Kathy has similar doubts about the South Yarra flat where, according to the prosecution, the killers of the two young police officers allegedly met and discussed tactics only hours before the slayings. Depending on whose version is believed, up to seven men met in this flat, occupied by Anthony Farrell’s girlfriend, and smoked and drank coffee before leaving. Yet no evidence of dirty cups or ashtrays was ever found. In addition a nearby neighbour, Eleonora Cundari, testified that on the night of the murders all was peace and quiet at the flat, whereas normally she was unable to sleep for the banging of doors and loud voices, causing her to complain regularly.

  Kathy was not alone in her scepticism. On 23 February the Age published an article summarising the committal hearings. It was strongly critical of the Crown case, and observed: ‘In the first fortnight the prosecution’s account of the events of 11 and 12 October started to blur with contradictory statements, allegations of police harassment and the questioning of witnesses’ credibility. Residents of Walsh Street and the surrounding area often gave conflicting stories . . . doubt was cast on the alleged motive for the killings.’

  Eleven months later the prosecution suffered its greatest setback at the voir-dire hearing where Wendy made it clear she would not be repeating her committal evidence at the trial, and opted out of the witness protection scheme. Kathy maintains Wendy had been planning this move for some considerable time, and six months earlier had informed Victor of her intentions through her mother who was visiting him in Pentridge. Wendy confirmed this in a subsequent interview with the Herald-Sun, saying she had given evidence at the committal only after pressure from taskforce members. ‘I told them months before the trial I would not give evidence against Victor. From day one I was never going to give evidence. Jason was not going to give evidence either, but he was too scared to go through with it.’ The same story quoted an unnamed ‘senior’ policeman as describing Wendy’s life expectancy as ‘limited’, and predicting she could be marked for death. Eleven years later she is still very much alive.

  The trial duly ended with the four men being acquitted, but in the process Kathy’s family was irrevocably split with no chance of a reconciliation with her daughter Vicki. Kathy believes that without Wendy, and with the unreliable Jason as their main witness, the prosecution had no hope of securing convictions, and justice was done. Mr Vernon, counsel for Peter McEvoy, summed up the prosecution’s malaise when he began his closing address at the trial by listing a number of factors which had ‘poisoned the well of justice’. These included: ‘Falsely alleged verbal confessions, harassed and frightened witnesses, courtroom rehearsed witnesses, proven liars, self-confessed liars, witnesses abandoned by the Crown—you may think because their dishonesty was shown plainly—witnesses who have changed their tack more often than the yachts in a twelve metre race, witnesses who have personal matters at stake.’

  The Age agreed in a story written by its chief court reporter, Peter Gregory, headed: ‘The fatal flaw in the Walsh Street case.’ The first paragraph read: ‘The Crown case in the Walsh Street trial was flawed from the start.’ Gregory’s story also stated the Crown’s case left the jury ‘with no other option’ than the acquittals.

  * * *

  If Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were the most tragic of all the victims of Walsh Street, and Graeme Jensen, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah made up the second group, then the third must have been the three members of Kathy’s family, Jason, Vicki and Wendy, whose evidence failed to obtain convictions for the prosecution, despite the millions of dollars spent safeguarding them.

  Jason Ryan, now twenty-five years old, is possibly the saddest figure of all in Kathy’s immediate family. By the time he was five his mother Vicki and father John Brooks, a normal law-abiding citizen, had separated. In 1983 when he was thirteen he ran away from home for the first time because his mother was getting bashed by the man with whom she was living—one of Dennis’s soldiers.

  Jason went to live in Richmond with Dennis, possibly the worst choice he could have made among all his relatives. He also first met Anthony Farrell, whose mother Susan Parkinson was having an affair with Dennis. Both mother and son were regular visitors to Richmond. But whatever kind of monster Dennis may have been to outsiders, he was loyal, at this stage, to his immediate family, and he counted Jason as one of these. According to Kathy there was a genuine bond between the two—they wore the same Japanese headbands, Dennis lavished gifts and money on Jason, and regarded him as something of a protégé. It was even said at the committal hearing that Dennis was thinking of grooming Jason to take over from him as head of the family.

  Jason was also supposed to have been in charge of the family arsenal, looking after the guns and hiding them on the nearby railway embankment. Kathy says this is an exaggeration of his role, but she does not dispute that he was entrusted with large sums of money, and regularly carried thousands of dollars on his person. He sat in on drug deals, and would ‘playfully’ point guns at some of Denni
s’s more vulnerable customers. This no doubt seemed like high adventure and an exciting kind of grown-up game to the impressionable thirteen-year-old. But the game soon turned sour.

  First a gun was found under Jason’s pillow during a police raid on Stephenson Street. Dennis was asked who owned the gun. ‘He’s old enough, he can wear it,’ he replied. Next came the nightmare of Wayne Stanhope’s death, which Jason witnessed from a few feet away. Soon afterwards it was happening again. Three months after Jason brought his uncle the gun that killed Stanhope, he brought the drugs, and then the bucket of water, that were used during Helga Wagnegg’s last minutes on earth.

  His descriptions of the two incidents, provided some years later, were masterpieces of understatement: ‘Watching people shot when I was thirteen, it was frightening,’ he said of Stanhope’s death.

  And of Helga: ‘Dennis told me to grab a bucket and get some water from the Yarra River. Dennis tipped it down her throat, and held her head in the bucket for about half an hour.’

  If nothing else these two incidents taught Jason a great deal about violence. Concerned at his behaviour police obtained a court order removing him, albeit temporarily, from Dennis’s influence, and placing him in the care of champion footballer Fred Cook and his wife, who were running the Station Hotel in Port Melbourne. But after only six weeks he fled back to Dennis after being caught stealing from behind the bar. Once back in Richmond the violence began to escalate. He sliced off the tip of the nose of the soldier who had been involved initially in kidnapping Kathy; he pulled the gun on the truck driver who parked in the wrong spot in Stephenson Street and was warned his vehicle would be blown up; and, on Dennis’s orders, he beat the captive Susan Guy with a pick handle.

  When Dennis tired of his precocious nephew, Jason lived for periods with Kathy and his other uncles, Peter (during his short spell of freedom), Victor, Jamie and Trevor. When Dennis died and everybody was thrown on their own resources, Jason was no exception. ‘I had to do drugs and burgs (burglaries) for survival.’ One of the burglaries was pulled off in company with Trevor, the occasion when Jason was tricked by police into informing on his uncle—the first sign of a talent that, had it been more credible during the Walsh Street trial, may well have put Trevor and Victor away for life. Also in 1987, when he was breaking into factories and warehouses, Jason, now a cocky sixteen-year-old, stabbed a man in the stomach with a knife in a brawl in an inner suburban hotel. He received a six-month good behaviour bond.

  So by 1988 and the early stages of the Walsh Street saga, Jason was well on the way to a career in violent crime. But however streetwise he had become by the age of seventeen, nothing could have prepared him for what was to follow. He was, after all, the first defendant to be charged with double murder in the most notorious crime in Victorian history. His constant tears and general demeanour during the weeks after his arrest were proof that even the brutal learning curve of Richmond had left him unprepared for this. His trauma must have been compounded when first Jedd Houghton, and then Gary Abdallah, both names he had provided to the taskforce, became the victims of police bullets.

  There were also the allegations that police were putting barriers between him and protection, both legal and spiritual. In July 1989 Jeff Giddings, a Fitzroy Legal Service solicitor, described as outrageous the lack of legal representation made available to Jason by police during the previous eight months. Earlier Chief Magistrate John Dugan had described the situation as ‘intolerable’. And Father Peter Norden, who officiated at the funeral of four family members, publicly protested at the same time as Giddings at having been denied access by police to Jason.

  Inspector Noonan said at the committal, in the absence of the jury, that Jason had told him he did not wish to see Father Norden, because: ‘He (Jason) said he had good grounds to believe that he (Father Norden) was a regular associate of that family.’

  But much more serious were the allegations surrounding Jason’s earlier trip to the country with four armed robbery squad officers from 24 to 27 October, less than a fortnight after the Walsh Street killings. Kathy and other members of the family have always seen it as the pivotal stage in Jason’s decision to give evidence against his uncles. In court it was described as the catalyst for the prosecution case. Kathy has charged that during those four days Jason was tortured and that he was never the same person afterwards—she even described him as a ‘robot’ in the witness box. Because of this she has forgiven him for what was to follow, and says that even now she would welcome him back into the family circle with no repercussions.

  Jason himself has never confirmed the torture allegations, and told the trial he was either not frightened of the police who were with him on the country trip, or couldn’t remember whether he was frightened. Whatever the truth of this bizarre outing, it seems odd that the officers should choose to indulge in target practice with shotguns during a barbecue with Jason near Bright on 26 October. According to Detective Col Ryan, giving evidence at the trial, it was his colleague Brendon Cole who decided on the trip. Under cross examination it emerged that one of the officers who accompanied Jason was Detective Rodney Grimshaw, who had been present when Jensen was shot, and who had been convicted for contempt of court over an attempt in 1990 to threaten a Crown witness in an unrelated case. During legal argument in the absence of the jury, Geoff Flatman, Victor’s counsel, said of the excursion: ‘The taking of (Jason) Ryan to the country for a period of time between interviews . . . is a very bizarre feature of the history of Ryan becoming a witness, and the history of this case generally, because it is really the catalyst of the Crown case getting off the ground.

  Even Mr Justice Vincent was clearly not entirely happy about it, saying on the same occasion: ‘. . . the witness was taken away by a number of police members in circumstances which are, to say the least, not commonly encountered, that all deny that there was any improper behaviour during the trip, nevertheless it wasn’t very long after the return from that trip that the witness started to provide versions of involvement of persons in a very serious ciminal offence.’

  Defence counsel at both the committal and the trial made much of Jason’s five separate versions of the murder of the two police officers, and described him variously as ‘a cunning, streetwise little urchin of no morality’, ‘a liar of epic proportions’ and ‘a dreadful witness, an unreliable witness’. Kathy especially remembers the jury watching him talk through a video of one of his visits to Walsh Street with Inspector Noonan.

  He was wearing a pinstripe shirt and trousers with a short back and sides. It was about quarter to four, and the video was on, and Jason’s there, and it’s the first day of his evidence, and the jury’s scribbling down everything he says, and the judge adjourns for the day. And the next morning Jason gets up in the box, and he says: ‘That video yesterday was a pack of lies.’ And I watch the jury. It was like he’d punched them all in the stomach. They went ‘oooh’, like that, couldn’t believe it.

  Another memory involved a man in the public gallery.

  There was old men used to come upstairs to the gallery and bring their lunch for the day. And on the video Jason’s standing in the rain in Walsh Street during one of his re-enactments for police and he’s got his spiked hair at the time, and you can see he’s scared stiff of Noonan, and he’s saying this: ‘And this is where Victor was standing.’ And Noonan’s saying: ‘Are you sure about that, Jason?’ And the old man said to me: ‘You can tell that boy’s been bashed.’ And I looked at the old man, and I thought to meself: ‘You’re just a stranger, and you’ve picked it up already.’

  Once the trial was over, and the jury had delivered their thumbs down verdict on Jason’s constantly changing versions of the events of the night of the murder, he remained within the witness protection scheme for three years. But there were disturbing reports of how he was faring.

  The only journalist to be allowed access to him, New Idea’s Bill Ayres, had a secret meeting with him late in 1991, when he learned Jason was no longe
r under protection and was desperately trying to stay out of trouble. His police minders had spoken earlier of the metamorphosis that had taken place in him. The surly, smart-mouthed punk who hadn’t known enough to clean his own teeth had begun to take on responsibility for his appearance and surroundings; had expressed a desire to learn a trade, and had taken courses in English and mathematics to supplement the education that was cut short at thirteen. But Bill Ayres picked up the first signs that all was not well. Jason told him of the near impossibility of trying to lead a normal, productive life while looking constantly over his shoulder, waiting for the bullet he knew would come one day. He also had this to say of Kathy: ‘She’s a very dangerous old lady, wicked. She was my nanna, but she certainly wasn’t the kind of nanna who’d sit around and do the knitting.’ However Kathy believes police must have encouraged or persuaded him to provide this type of comment.

  Ayres remained in intermittent contact with Jason for a year after the interview, and does not believe there will ever be a reconciliation between him and the family. ‘Because of his experiences and well-honed knowledge of the family, I doubt he would ever trust them sufficiently to renew relationships. He also seemed frightened and unhappy that his police protection had disappeared entirely.’ Ayres passed Victor’s phone number to Jason during this period, with a request from Kathy that he resume contact with the family. Kathy says Jason duly made the call and spoke to Victor, breaking down and crying during the conversation, and indicating he wanted to return to the fold.

  In April 1994, according to a somewhat critical review of the witness protection scheme, Jason was said to be unemployed and mixing in criminal circles again. He was also reportedly bitter about being abandoned by the police officers he had previously learned to trust. More recently Kathy has heard on the grapevine that Jason has become a father. She describes as rubbish the dire warnings made by police and others about the bullet waiting for Jason, if he ever does re-establish contact with the family.