At any rate, Inspector Perrin doesn’t seem to have called him. Maybe he thought that Detective Inspector Sheather was too important to haul away from dinner at the family home. Maybe Perrin decided that the recruitment of Seary was his call and that he would take all the blame or all the glory.
The result is that Norm Sheather does not reappear in the archive until 22 June. It is, however, clear that he has taken the initiative to place himself back in the fray. In 1985, Sheather tells James Wood, ‘Well, I believed that in view of [Seary’s involvement] with the three gentlemen presently before this inquiry that you would expect something to be known about the Hilton Hotel bombing and I interviewed him to see what information he could convey to me that would assist me in the inquiry.’13
On 22 June Seary participates in a three and a half hour interview with Detective Inspector Sheather, the faithful Detective Sergeant Jackson and Inspector Perrin, who, after all, is the one who initially approved Seary’s recruitment. At the outset of the interview it is made clear to Seary that inquiries are being made about the Hilton bombing in relation to the Yagoona ‘incident’. He is then given his record of interview from the night of 16 June, asked to read over it and whether he has anything to add.
He does.
Seven long days after Yagoona, Seary, startlingly, produces the mother lode.
‘Have you ever seen what this stuff can do?’
It turns out Seary hasn’t just omitted a few bits and pieces. He has omitted the extraordinary revelation that on the way to bomb Cameron, Alister and Dunn made it pretty bloody clear — basically confessing to him — that they had also bombed the Hilton. Apparently they blurted all this out with little prompting:
Seary: Dunn was doing something with the explosives in the backseat and I told him to be careful. He replied that it was alright. I asked him if he had had any experience with explosives and he replied that he would rather not say. Narada then said ‘It is OK because Virata (myself ) [Seary’s Margii name] was a member of V.S.S. and was OK.’ I said to Visvamitra [sic], ‘Have you ever seen what this stuff can do?’ He replied, ‘Sure I have seen what twelve sticks can do’ I said, ‘How do you mean’ He answered, ‘Well, the Hilton’ At this point Narada said, ‘Don’t think about that just be sure that you have the timer and fuses OK we don’t want any mistakes this time.’1
In response to this astonishing pronouncement, Sheather and Perrin seem thunderstruck and reduced to the most banal kind of police-speak.
Sheather: Much of the information you have given us during the interview is not contained in that interview conducted between Detective Sergeant Jackson and yourself at the Criminal Investigation Branch on Friday the 16th June. Can you give me a reason for that?
Seary: I was under a lot of strain and I thought at the time that I had given a satisfactory answer to the questions asked by Mister Jackson at that stage.2
Years later it is revealed in court that Seary felt that Norm Sheather particularly disliked him. Personally, I’m surprised Norm is able to contain himself and doesn’t reach across the table and throttle him then and there. First the procedural problems on the night of the arrests and now this cataclysmic admission, made — preposterously — six days after the first exhaustive interview.
Then there’s more …
Towards the end of the interview on 22 June (around 11.50 pm), Seary says he’s tired and asks if he can finish the interview at a later date. Sheather agrees and picks up the trail on 26 June 1978, ten days after the first interview regarding the Yagoona incident.
At this interview Seary is even more garrulous. He remembers talk of egg timers, of how the Hilton gelignite had been wrapped like a packet of fish and chips in newspaper3 and, even more startling, that prior to the trip to Yagoona, Anderson had been gabbing on about Dunn previously having put together a bomb in the street. Furthermore, Seary asserts that ‘They [Anderson, Alister and Dunn] were always speaking of bombing jobs in plural and were always making references to a previous bombing where mistakes had been made, by Visvamitra [sic; Dunn] in the timing devices.’4
Seary is now beginning to revise things he has already told Krawczyk in the eight recorded debriefs.
Over the next month Seary’s version of what was admitted by the trio in relation to the Hilton blooms with detail, depth and breadth. He keeps feeding new intelligence to Inspector Perrin, much to the intense annoyance of both Sheather and Detective Krawczyk. Finally Sheather hauls him back in for yet a further interview on 17 July 1978. Now Seary states that in the car Alister told him:
… that he Govinda [Anderson], Vismametra [sic; Dunn] and a friend whom he did not name had placed an explosive at the Hilton. Narada said that on the afternoon of the 12th he had walked through the crowds outside the Hilton in order to, as he put it, check out the place. After checking he said ‘I signalled to Visamitra [sic] and he came up from the chocolate shop. Visamitra placed into the rubbish bin the device.5
Seary is either oblivious to the ramifications of what he has just said or utterly committed to pretending he can’t see what the big deal is. Sheather has to restrain himself:
Sheather: Do you agree that at no stage during our previous two interviews did you give any information that would identify any person as placing the explosive device in the garbage can outside the Hilton Hotel on the 13th February, 1978 or on the 12th of that month?6
This is followed by a tiny bit of dancing around by Seary when he implies that he alluded to this when he reported the conversation with Dunn about the effects of 12 sticks of gelignite.
Norm doesn’t buy this and replies, ‘Do you agree that that alone does not identify the person responsible for placing the device in the garbage bin in front of the Hilton Hotel?’7
To which Seary makes the extraordinary statement that:
Seary: I realise that now and I am sorry that I made the mistake of trying to assess your evidence for you but I didn’t want to be the one who directly put Visamitra [sic] in prison for this offence.8
Norm gazes at Seary — he’s sorry he didn’t mean to be assessing the evidence for them; he didn’t want to be the one to put Dunn away. Who does this bedraggled, scraggly bearded, self-aggrandising man think he is? Miss Marple? Inspector Poirot? Norm must be hurtled back to that day four short months ago when Seary sat across from him spinning unsubstantiated concoctions about the Hare Krishnas. What if this is more of the same? Could he just be making it up? The horror of this thought must stab Norm in the stomach. Seary does have the earmarks of a pleaser — the information that has tumbled out of his mouth post Yagoona is like a spreading infection growing more florid with each interview. It puts one in mind of those unhinged souls who were so eager to confess to the Hilton bombing. Why, why, why did Special Branch recruit and run Richard Seary? And then why withhold that information from the task force? But Norm Sheather knows the answer to that: he would have said it was an idiotic idea doomed to failure.
Yet for all the animosity and irritation, there has to be something deep within, not just Norm Sheather, but all of the team, that longs for what Seary says to be true. That finally they have the evidence they have been seeking, that their suspicions are vindicated, the case is wrapped up. That those fatherless children of the Hilton bombing victims can grow old knowing the identity of the murderers and knowing their punishment. Some of the information from Seary in the tape-recorded Special Branch debriefs before Yagoona is pretty solid, it can be corroborated. Of course there is no mention of the Hilton in them. Sheather and the team listen hard to Seary’s increasing list of excuses as to the unfathomable delays in telling them about the Hilton confession.
He didn’t have a phone. He was tired and didn’t want to unduly prolong the first interview. The police were inept and should have arrested everyone at Carillon Avenue and thus endangered everyone by waiting till Yagoona. The Weapons Squad were mean to him and hurt him yanking him out of the stolen car. My favourite? That Detective Jackson didn’t ask him the right questions
during the first interview on 16 June. He wanted to protect Ross Dunn, of whom he had grown fond, and felt that he was being used by the Ananda Marga. The information was ‘harassed’ out of him by Detective Krawczyk. That he wanted Anderson, Alister and Dunn to confess first, as it was better if this came from them and not him. He wasn’t sure if they had been telling him the truth or winding him up. He did not ‘particularly like Detective Inspector Sheather’ and thus only gave him the relevant information that would lead him to ask the correct questions.9
Does Norm feel the hope ebbing away as the excuses pile up like logs on a funeral pyre? The shaky foundations of Seary’s Hilton bombing accusations simply liquefy under the weight of them. Of course we know they gain no traction from this point on — I mean yes they are brought up again and again and again but because they are so flimsy they never make it to court.
When in 1985 James Wood comes to decipher the often inexplicable and contradictory evidence, even he admits, ‘It is impossible to reach any conclusion in relation to the accuracy and worth of the intelligence provided by Seary.’10 I can’t imagine that this statement gave him much comfort, particularly as those following the case were hoping for unequivocal conclusions. Wood added a caveat, saying perhaps one could start to determine accuracy and worth of Seary’s information but:
This would require a careful consideration and evaluation of such independently acquired information as did become available to the inquiry, and of material which may or may not exist in the hands of intelligence and police agencies other than the New South Wales Special Branch. This was neither practical, nor did it seem profitable.11
What Wood seems to be itching to say is that if you look closely enough, you can start to tease out the good from the bad. It’s obvious that the excuses for delaying the ‘confessions’ after the Yagoona arrests, and indeed the incremental embellishment of them, border on the ‘unintelligible and preposterous’. Wood responds drily to Seary’s claim that it was sympathy for Dunn that kept him silent in the first interview: ‘Why should he entertain sympathy or concern for Dunn, when if the facts were as he suggested, Dunn was an active participant in a horrifying crime in 1978, and was setting out in June 1978 to murder a family of five?’12
What happens is that these inconsistencies, like ‘verbal’ confessions, like the presence of Rogerson, create doubt. And we know what that does to a legal case. Despite all this, James Wood, perhaps thinking back on poor Sheather’s scuttled Hilton investigation, makes a bit of a play at being detective himself. Summing up the whole sorry saga he asks:
Were the Petitioners and Police carefully manoeuvred into position by Seary, and the extrinsic facts skilfully manipulated by him, so that a well forged circumstantial case might appear? Alternatively, did the events transpire in the general way that Seary described, leaving him in a position where, convinced of the Petitioners’ guilt yet fearful that the Crown case may not be watertight, he was prepared to embellish and fill in the areas where he suspected problems might arise?13
But as Wood concludes, ‘Although I incline to the latter view, I am satisfied that the first alternative cannot be excluded.’14
To be honest, I incline to the latter view myself, as I imagine Norm Sheather may have done seven years earlier. There is much to support what Seary alleges prior to Yagoona, and after that night he is gilding the lily or improvising wildly to try to ensure the charges will stick. Given his investment in the case, he wants to be seen as the hero of the day and helpfully fills in the gaps. I don’t imagine thinking this way brings much solace to Sheather at the time, faced as he is with a disintegrating investigation. It’s only a few months ago that he was going after the big game — communicating with a dozen international police agencies all intent on the same target: the upper echelons of the Ananda Marga, those within the rarefied and closed sanctum of leaders who receive direct orders from the imprisoned Baba, from whom all things within Ananda Marga and Prout emanate. The sect members who they believe have waged a campaign of terror for over a year. Instead of telexes from Interpol, Norm Sheather is stuck getting unverifiable nonsense from Seary.
Then, as if to hammer home all the failures of the investigation and underscore the unlikelihood of this crime ever being solved, the man at the middle of it all, the living god that is Mr PR (Baba) Sarkar, imprisoned in India for seven years for the murder of six treacherous Margiis, is found not guilty and is to be released.
July 1978
On 4 July 1978 the Patna High Court in Eastern India overturns Sarkar’s murder conviction. For sect members the court decision could not be sweeter or more complete. Sarkar’s four co-defendants, also accused of assassinating the six sect defectors in 1970, are likewise cleared. The ruling from the High Court is that the Indian Government failed to prove the murder charges beyond reasonable doubt, and that they had relied too heavily on the testimony of a single witness, ‘Mr Marhwanand Awadhoot [sic]’, who ‘had been proved totally unreliable’.1
An addendum to the report in the Sydney Morning Herald adds that the ‘Australian president of Ananda Marga, Mr Mark Dimelow, said last night that the sect’s members in Australia were jubilant over the acquittal of their leader.’2 I’m not sure how jubilant Tim Anderson, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister are, sitting in their prison cells as this news trickles down to them. While their guilt or innocence over the ‘Yagoona incident’ is still to be determined, either way, the timing’s appalling. If they are found guilty and the aim was to propel the release of their leader, then they have been caught in a terrorist act that has turned out to be utterly pointless. If they are innocent, then they have begun a parallel journey of unjust incarceration that coincides neatly with Baba’s exoneration. These three men will not enjoy the fruits of the sect’s victory, which marks the apex not only of their united international efforts to free Baba, but of the sect’s phenomenal growth and global spread through the 1970s, which has been so tied up with the campaign to free its leader.
What of Norm Sheather and his small band of brothers from New South Wales police, Special Branch and COMPOL? How do they react? Are they relieved that there is little chance of an ‘all-out war’ now Baba is free? Perhaps the feeling is that even if Richard Seary is a little strange, maybe these Yagoona arrests will pan out and provide the critical information needed to solve the Hilton bombing. Maybe it is time to let go and move on. Things may not be wrapped up as tightly as one might hope, but surely it’s enough to assuage the hunger of the press and the public, who clamour for closure. It might even appease the young truth-seekers and defenders of civil liberties who have long argued that the sect has been ruthlessly persecuted. After all, the Indian Government, who the Ananda Marga has accused of masterminding a vast global conspiracy to discredit them, has not interfered in the Indian court system and Baba is free to go. One can hardly find fault in that. What they or the press make of the Yagoona arrests is harder to discern at first. Most are quiet in the face of what appears to be overwhelmingly damning evidence against the Margiis.
It’s July 1978. What happens next? I’m going to tell you two things. The first you can forget about till later on, and the second I’ll interrogate throughout this chapter. The first thing that happens will remain totally hidden for the next three years, although rumours will start to circulate about it from about this time on. What happens is that on 11 July, five days after Baba’s successful appeal, someone rents a student locker at the University of New South Wales Roundhouse in the name of Melton.3 On that day, or some time between then and 16 May the following year, someone places within it a black vinyl carry bag. The bag is discovered but not opened in September 1980, when New South Wales Uni handyman Mr Harry Harvy Lees pries the locker open after the fee has not been paid. 4
Our diligent handyman ferries the unopened bag off to lost property.5 When this bag is finally opened a year later, in 1981, it is found to contain, not so much a smoking gun, but a steaming DIY bomb. While we will return to the long list of the bag’s contents at a
later date — one packet of strip solder, one clock arm, one yellow towel and so on — what should lodge in your mind for the moment is the 52 individual sticks of gelignite wrapped in a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald dated 11 February 1978, a day and a bit before the Hilton bombing.6
The second thing that happens is, if not strange, certainly intriguing. If you are examining the Hilton Bombing Records, as I have been, it looks like the main investigative trajectory of the Hilton task force comes to an abrupt halt. Yes, of course, there are reams of material regarding the trial and appeals of Anderson, Alister and Dunn, and the inquest, and on for the next 18 years, but almost nothing other than that. If you do not wish to follow the narrative line that accuses Anderson, Alister and Dunn (or, later, that just accuses Anderson) — or, conversely, exonerates them — and instead want to follow the trail of Abhiik Kumar and the like, as I do — there are literally no more pieces of paper for the rest of the year. While some important archives pertaining to Kumar exist from 1979 on, my folders for primary police sources, August through to December 1978, are completely empty.
Before invoking yet another cockamamie conspiracy theory, consider these things. While it is absolutely clear that the arrest of the three young Margiis at Yagoona, along with their purported confessions about the Hilton via Seary, have thrown Sheather’s investigation into a death spin from which it will not recover, it does provoke questions. Why would Norm Sheather, who had been so willing for so long to keep an open mind about suspects other than members of the Ananda Marga, as well as focusing on the sect’s elite, stop so abruptly? It is obvious in those interviews with Seary that Sheather is both incredulous about the Hilton ‘confessions’ and dubious that they are substantial enough to result in convictions. Furthermore, none of these three were Norm Sheather’s quarry. Would he and all the team who had pored over the intelligence from Interpol and ASIO and Special Branch, inching ever closer to the Margii elite for months, watching them swoop around the world, checking in with Baba in India then swooping out again, just drop the whole thing because three local minions had been arrested? Did they simply decide to abandon the investigative focus on Abhiik Kumar aka Jon Hoffman aka Jason Holman Alexander aka Mark Randall aka Stephen James Manly aka David Hart aka Michael Brandon?
Who bombed the Hilton? Page 18
