The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  Despite these circumstances Kathy refuses to give her daughter the benefit of the doubt.

  The last time I saw her she was standing in that witness box. I don’t want to ever see her again, because I saw the looks of hate she gave her brothers when she was standing there, and I knew she was lying her eyes out. She looked at the boys with hate, pure hate, because of what the cops told her about Victor and Trevor having Jason knocked. They told her we would do it. They said: ‘It means you’ve got to choose between your son and your brothers. Your brothers are going to have him knocked.’ And don’t forget we knew where Jason was at times. Taxi drivers told us, they know everything. We knew the street and all that he was in, in Fitzroy. Vicki knew that. We could have gone there any time and got him. I never forgave Vicki. She’s old enough, she could have stuck by her guns. She had a mind of her own, whether to believe the police or not. She knew we wouldn’t touch Jason, we wouldn’t kill Jason. Her own commonsense would have told her that.

  The most damning items of evidence Vicki provided to police were an alleged confession to her from Peter McEvoy, and her refusal to confirm the alibis of McEvoy and Farrell that they spent the night of the murder at her flat. Kathy says Vicki had told her long before going into protection that the alibis were truthful, and she would back them up. It wasn’t until the day Vicki moved into the protection scheme that Kathy realised something was terribly wrong.

  This day I rang from Venus Bay and I said: ‘Vicki, you’ve won the jackpot, we’re all coming to stay.’ We [Kathy and other family members] pulled up at the back of her house in Davies Street, Brunswick, and we’re sitting there waiting for her. We look through the window at the back, and the furniture’s all there. A couple of hours later we look through again and they’ve moved her out the front. There was no furniture. If I never see her again I don’t want to.

  Going into protection cannot have been easy for Vicki. Even more so than Wendy and Jason, she had spent years within the bosom of the family, and had clocked up a number of convictions for crimes including theft, forgery and uttering, assault on police, driving offences, and drug offences including possession of heroin.

  Even after she went into protection, Vicki clearly had doubts about what she had done and, like Wendy, more than once attempted suicide.

  When she was in the scheme she rang me at Venus Bay and said she was dying, she’d taken an overdose. I didn’t know whether she was telling the truth. The only thing I could think of was phoning Noonan at the TyEyre taskforce. I said: ‘I don’t know where she is, but somehow she’s rung me and told me she’s OD’d.’ And then he goes straight and gets her, and takes her to the hospital, and saves her.

  Kathy’s memories of the Walsh Street committal and trial are understandably vivid. She was allowed by Magistrate Hugh Adams to pass notes between the accused and their counsel at the committal, despite police objections. This gave her a unique insight into the tensions and interplay that went on between police and the accused during the fifty-nine days of the hearing. She did not miss a single day of either the committal or subsequent trial, earning the grudging respect of court officials and even the odd policeman. She remembers more than one officer asking her how she was bearing up under the strain.

  One unpleasant incident from the trial has remained in her mind:

  Justice Vincent had just got up to leave the bench for lunch, right? Well there was a sergeant in charge upstairs in the public gallery in case anything happened. So before the boys were led away from the dock a policeman come in in plain clothes, and he had two girlfriends with him. And he leaned over the balcony and he said to the boys, ‘I ought to piss on you,’ like that, showing off to his girlfriends. The sergeant said: ‘Get out of my court. Get out.’

  Not surprisingly most police were anything but supportive. Kathy remembers, particularly, one exchange with Inspector Noonan which upset her greatly, immediately after her daughter Vicki had given evidence at the trial. But she was determined not to let him know this.

  When Vicki gave her look of hatred at her brothers that’s when I went down the stairs from the gallery crying. And Noonan laughed at me. The boys’ barrister had his arms around me. I’m coming down the gallery stairs and I’m crying. I’d never seen that look of Vicki’s before. Noonan walks out of this room at the bottom of the stairs and sees me crying, and does a double take and smirks at me. Didn’t say anything, but he’s got me. I went to Anthony Farrell’s mum and said: ‘Listen, I broke down a bit downstairs. Noonan saw me crying. When we go downstairs at the lunchbreak will you walk past with me and we’ll just laugh our heads off?’ And we did, and Noonan saw us. We made it obvious. It was important to me that he didn’t think he’d got me. I hate Noonan because he’s an arrogant son of a bitch, and won’t be told the truth. Why does he hate my family? Ask him. He’s in Frankston now. I won’t go near Frankston. Noonan at the committal said I was sitting around the table when the pact was made about killing two coppers for one of ours. I go outside the court and I said: ‘If I was sitting around that table and said that, why haven’t you charged me with the murder?’ And he said: ‘I’m seriously thinking about it.’ And I said: ‘Don’t think about it, fucking do it.’

  Living under the strain of the court hearings for months on end took its toll on Kathy, and was not helped by the emergence, in the middle of the committal, of two of her lost children (see Chapter Two). An important factor that helped her survive, sanity intact, was her ocean-side cottage in the remote Gippsland township of Venus Bay, two hours drive from Melbourne. By no means the type of retirement home one would expect for a major crime figure associated with the massive profit-making of Dennis’s Richmond days, Kathy’s hideaway cost her only $70,000. It was worth its weight in gold, however, as a peaceful sanctuary from the turmoil of Walsh Street.

  The other factor that kept her going during the committal was her certainty of Victor’s innocence, and her need to provide him with moral support. Each morning as the prison van approached the court Kathy would wait until it came into view and run into the road shouting Victor’s name.

  He couldn’t see me, but he could fucking hear me. I made sure. Every morning I did it. But when they went to the Supreme Court they put ’em in a white van like a baker’s van. They’d take ’em to the remand centre, which was only a few yards away, so you know what I used to do? Wait until the van nearly got to the lights and hit the pedestrian stop light and shout: ‘How you goin’ Victor, Trevor, how you goin’, hoo roo roo.’ I needed to show them I was there.

  When Kathy first began to feel, at the trial, that her sons were going to be acquitted, she was sitting upstairs in the public gallery next to Anthony Farrell’s grandmother, Patsy. She motioned to where Trevor was sitting in the dock, closest of the four accused to the door.

  I said: ‘How’s Trevor’s foot?’ And she said: ‘How the fucking hell would I know how Trevor’s foot is?’ And I said: ‘Well, one foot’s out the door now.’

  When the time came for the four accused to make their unsworn statements from the dock, Kathy claims the police were determined to make things as hard as possible for them. Chris Dane QC, counsel for Trevor, requested that police not crowd behind the accused during their testimony.

  Here they are facing the jury and all the jacks that have charged them are right behind them saying things to them like ‘You maggots’, and that while they’re trying to give their evidence. By the time it got to Trevor’s turn Chris Dane said to Justice Vincent: ‘Your honour, could you make them stop saying things behind the prisoners’ backs.’

  During the six days the jury deliberated over their verdict Kathy and Wendy, both broke and in an uneasy alliance, were living with Wendy’s three children in a halfway house provided by a charity organisation. ‘When I went to bed the wallpaper was hitting me in the head, it was a terrible place. Wendy used to lock me out at night if I got back late,’ she says.

  The verdicts came at 10.35 on the morning of 26 March, the day before Kathy’s fi
fty-sixth birthday.

  Hugh Rimminton, a journalist covering the case, was sitting next to me. He was wonderful, ‘cos they were pulling faces at me, the police, as the jury come in, they thought it was going to be guilty. I asked Hugh to come and sit with me, just to make ’em stop, and they did.

  Eight times I hear not guilty. The first one must have been Victor. Not guilty, not guilty. Then Macca, not guilty, not guilty. Trevor’s crying his eyes out, right? It gets to Anthony, not guilty, not guilty. Then Trevor tells me [later] I’m crying me eyes out, and they haven’t got to me yet, and I’m thinking oh, fuck, what if it’s me?

  I was too emotional, me head’s ringing with eight not guilties, and I hear all this clapping downstairs, and I think: ‘Who’s clapping who?’ It’s the boys clapping the jury.

  Immediately after the verdicts Kathy called out in open court: ‘I knew they were innocent. I’ll see you downstairs, Victor!’ and raced down to the corridor below crying. ‘Hip hip hooray, three cheers for the boys.’ As the various defence counsel filed past in the corridor, Kathy and other relatives of the four accused thanked them. Kathy then turned to the media: ‘I didn’t hear the press say hip hip hooray for the boys. You’re very biased, you’re very biased.’

  Well they were, weren’t they? If you’d have seen them crawling all over me for those six days when we were waiting for the jury—’Can I get you a cup of coffee?’ ‘Are you warm enough?’ And one girl she come up to me and she had shoes on and the heels were all split, and I said: ‘I wouldn’t even let you work in my parlour if I had one now.’ I said to her: ‘Who do you work for?’ She said: ‘Derryn Hinch.’ I said: ‘Well, if he was laying in the gutter on fire I wouldn’t even piss on him.’ And she said: ‘Well, I don’t like him either, I’m going to tell him.’ I had the whole crowd around me, and they wanted my family history, and I’m thinking: ‘No, you’re not, you’re not getting it.’

  Kathy, despite her position in the underworld, is not privy to any information on who could have committed the murders of the two police officers. Her theories include someone avenging the death of Joshua Yap, a Chinese armed robber who died seven months after Steven Tynan shot him during a TAB robbery in South Yarra, only ten days before Tynan’s death. (The police have effectively ruled out this possibility.) Her other theory is a widely and understandably discredited story involving a rogue New South Wales policeman who wanted Victor out of the way and killed two police officers knowing Victor would be a suspect.

  Then a detective was supposed to have come down from Sydney and done it. I don’t know what the motive was. I don’t know what happened, but I hope to God one day that pistol is found, and then we’ll know for sure who did it.

  Kathy believes it was this gun that was the subject of a bizarre episode, shortly after the murders, involving a police search of her home at Venus Bay.

  I wasn’t home. I reckon they were looking for the gun. But the thing was I bought a bug catcher at the hardware in Brunswick and I left it on the table at Venus Bay. And I hear about a raid. I was sitting in the kitchen at Wendy’s at 86 Chestnut Street, so she rings up the TyEyre taskforce and that Brendon Cole said: ‘Yeah, we turned her house over.’ The kids got in the car and they came down with me. There was an inspector sitting here in his car, and he was going to secure the house and I said: ‘Who the fuck are you?’ And he said: ‘Well, who the fuck are you?’ ‘I happen to be the owner of this place.’ So he helped me put the toilet lid back on. They didn’t get anything, but they stole the bug catcher. You know why the bug catcher was taken? They told me later on it was because they put a bug on the phone, that was the cryptic hint . . . that was their bloody sense of humour.

  At the conclusion of the trial Victor made his own gesture from the dock. ‘Standing bolt upright and looking straight ahead,’ according to the Herald-Sun, he asked Mr Justice Vincent if he could speak. Granted permission, he said: ‘Now we have been proved not guilty I would like to demand an inquiry into Mr Noonan’s investigation and the way he conducted the police investigation.’

  Victor remained in gaol for three weeks after the acquittal, waiting trial on another armed robbery charge which had been adjourned pending determination of the Walsh Street case. (The charges involving Dominik Hefti had already been dropped.) On 16 April 1991 he was granted $100,000 bail on charges involving the theft of $212,000 from an ANZ bank in Ringwood in January 1988. The case came to trial in August 1991, with the two main prosecution witnesses being Lindsay Rountree (whose evidence against Victor had already failed to secure a conviction during the Walsh Street trial) and a Paul Anthony Prideaux.

  Rountree refused to sign his statement to police, and was not called to give evidence. Prideaux told the court his statement to police was untrue, and was ‘all part of a conspiracy. I am not guilty alone of putting this document together. I am as guilty as those two detectives who signed the statement.’

  At this stage Victor’s counsel, Geoff Flatman, successfully applied for the charges to be dropped. As Victor walked out of court a free man with no charges hanging over his head, a policeman approached him and shook his hand.

  I couldn’t believe it. He must have been close to retirement or very game. As he walked away Victor said to me: ‘Mum, I’ve got to convince 9,000 other policemen I didn’t do it.’

  Victor then gave a statement to the waiting media, saying he feared for his life. ‘All of the offences I have been charged with, three murders and six armed robberies, I have beat them all. I was an innocent man from the start. I knew my innocence would be proven in the end. It was a matter of time. But to this day I still fear certain members of the Victorian Police Force. All I want is to live a family life. I have got children and a wife, and I just want to be left alone to work and to prove to the community that I am not as bad as police and the press have made me out to be. I wish they would catch the real killers of the Walsh Street policemen, because that would help clear our names.’

  Victor then called for an inquiry into ‘a handful of corrupt police’. Senior Sergeant Paul Mullett responded immediately on behalf of the force, describing Victor’s allegations of corruption as ‘absolutely preposterous. If Peirce just lives a life of an honest citizen he will have no problems from us.’

  But that was perhaps easier said than done. Not long after Victor and Wendy moved with their children to Wheelers Hill, an outer suburb, during the period Victor was awaiting trial on the ANZ Bank charges, they became the victims of harassment stemming from Walsh Street. The couple told the Age they were ostracised by neighbours, that children walked past their house screaming ‘cop killer’, and that police surveillance stopped only after Wendy complained to her local Member of Parliament. Victor spoke of leaving his home every morning in overalls pretending to go to work to satisfy neighbours’ curiosity about his movements. In reality he had found his background made it impossible for him to obtain work.

  In the years following Walsh Street, Victor failed to stay out of gaol (in addition to the sentence he received for his role in Peter’s prison drug cartel [see Chapter Ten]). He also received convictions for stealing a jar of coffee from a supermarket, and for trafficking in a drug of dependence. During the latter trial his counsel, Mark Rochford, spoke of the legacy of Walsh Street. ‘He was notorious for something that he legally hadn’t done.’

  Victor brought civil charges against police involving an episode which allegedly took place in 1989, while he was awaiting trial on the Walsh Street charges. Victor claimed that eight plainclothes policemen removed him from Pentridge on a legal warrant and drove him around the city to different locations including a Walsh Street in Coburg (there are around a dozen listed in the Melbourne street directory). Wendy claimed during her evidence at the committal that Victor was bashed and spat upon during this episode. The allegations were the subject of an internal police inquiry. Victor was dissatisfied with the results and began his civil action.

  Trevor has fared little better since his acquittal. He already had t
hirty-two convictions at the time of Walsh Street for a wide range of offences, and since the trial he has been before the courts on drug and burglary charges. In March 1995, he was gaoled for five years and three months, with a minimum of three years and nine months, on charges of trafficking in cannabis and amphetamines.

  The three brothers: Peter, Victor and Trevor, were all released from gaol in 1998 and 1999, managing to stay out of serious trouble—at least initially. Victor obtained employment in the Footscray fruit and vegetable market, and later on the Melbourne docks as a stevedore. His four children remained the focus of his life up to the day of 1 May 2002, when he was gunned down in the streets of Port Melbourne. Typically he had been with Katie, then aged 16, and Vinnie, aged nine, minutes before his killers pulled up beside the parked car in which he was sitting, and fired the fatal shots.

  Everybody had their own theory over the identity of the two assassins. Kathy had always predicted the police would one day take Victor and Trevor’s lives in revenge for Walsh Street. And there was an eerie similarity between the car used by Victor’s killers and the abandoned vehicle which lured officers Tynan and Eyre to their deaths. But Kathy quickly abandoned this line of thought, preferring instead the ‘word’ she received that a young up-and-comer was responsible, keen to make a name for himself as the man who knocked off Victor Peirce.

  Predictably, no tears were shed by police. Detective Inspector John Noonan, who had led the Walsh Street inquiries, commented: ‘It’s just nice that people pay for their sins. Certainly I don’t view it [Victor’s death] with any sadness.’ However, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon vowed Victor’s killers would be pursued with the same vigour as in any normal murder hunt. Encouraged by this, Kathy wrote to thank her, and to complain about Noonan’s comments.

  The funeral was in many ways a graphic illustration of the extent to which Kathy’s life and outlook has changed in recent years. As she stood outside the Church of St Peter and St Paul in South Melbourne on a grey and blustery afternoon at the end of the service, the cream of Melbourne’s underworld lined up to pay homage. A series of shaven headed men in dark glasses and sharp suits embraced her in turn, murmuring their condolences into her ear.