by Jim Eames
Unknown to TAA the four crates each contained a man surrounded by telephone books, and each was consigned to a fictitious person at the destination airport. Even the most minute details had been taken into account by the thieves, with the weight of each man, combined with the telephone books, carefully calculated to equal the weight of the money in each of the Reserve Bank boxes so those responsible for offloading at the destination ports would be unaware of any change.
The crates with the men inside had air holes in the form of slits to allow them to breathe, the slits themselves partly hidden by delicately placed tape and strapping. Once in flight and at altitude the plan called for each perpetrator to climb out of his crate, open the Reserve Bank one and replace the cash with the telephone books and transfer the money into his own box, leaving enough space for him to return. It might have worked but for Neville Cantrell’s eagle-eye at Rockhampton, which set off a chain of events that caused the whole plan to fall apart.
Woolcock, assigned to Rockhampton, had in fact achieved the transfer and the money was in his crate when police unloaded it and arrested him, but unfortunately an accomplice in the Rockhampton saga managed to avoid arrest. The crate had been addressed to a J.L. Ryan Pty Ltd, C/O Rockhampton airport, but a police check revealed no such person or organisation. Later they did receive a report from witnesses that a grey-haired man in his fifties, of medium build, wearing shorts, a red flannel shirt, white towelling sun hat and sun glasses had been waiting at the airport but had driven away in a brown XD Falcon station wagon when police arrived. They suspected he might have been a ‘Mr J.L. Ryan’.
Meanwhile, only a short time later, federal and CIB police at Townsville had better luck as they watched their flight arrive and a quick arrest was made of the man in the box, along with an accomplice who had come to collect the ‘package’. Not that the ‘package’ would have been worth much as unknown to the gang the Reserve Bank funds had been consigned to a separate hold on the DC-9. And while the two were taken into custody a second shipment of $200 000, this one consigned to an Ansett DC-9, was being securely offloaded at the airport.
But an even bigger drama was yet to take place at Mt Isa, where Detective Sergeant Ken Morris and a colleague awaited the arrival of the TAA Boeing 727 from Brisbane. Briefed on the two boxes, Morris had already planned a special Mt Isa ‘welcome’ and as the aircraft taxied to a standstill, TAA porter Ross Bayles went to the aircraft and allocated the two boxes to their own cargo trolley. While Morris and his colleagues stood by in the shade and watched as the passengers disembarked, Bayles was told to park the trolley out in the burning Mt Isa sun, well away from the aircraft and the terminal.
‘We were prepared to leave him there for some time,’ Morris recounted years later, with a wry smile.
Although Morris and his police contingent were armed, they still had no idea who they were dealing with.
‘I had tried to find out from Brisbane, but we couldn’t get anything from them. Whoever it was could have had a machine gun for all we knew.’
Morris is still reluctant to admit how long they left the boxes in the sun, merely to describe it as a ‘considerable time’, until, finally, they approached the box and, in Morris’ words: ‘After a brief “conversation” with my partner he agreed to come out!’
And come out he did. ‘Like a wild animal,’ is Morris’ description, confirming his original decision to exercise caution.
‘He said something like: “You’ll be horrified when you find out who I am”, and I replied that would probably be something of a challenge for us.’
Morris was soon to learn that their captive wasn’t exaggerating. In fact, he was Bertram Douglas Kidd, one of the country’s most notorious criminals, with a long list of crimes, including possession of forged currency, safe breaking and robbery on his record. Like his Townsville colleague, Kidd would suffer the misfortune of being stowed in a separate hold to that of the Reserve Bank money. What’s more, Ross Bayles says it would not have made much difference. Kidd had had so much other cargo loaded on top of him in the hold he’d never have been able to escape to get to the money anyway.
But while the Kidd arrest was a success, a police error allowed a woman accomplice tasked with receiving the Mt Isa box to slip away. Although police subsequently found out her identity, all later attempts to locate her failed.
While the various arrests were taking place across Queensland there had been something of a humorous twist to the opening of the crate which had missed the Cairns flight and was still in the Brisbane freight terminal. The story goes that one of the porters, now aware of what had taken place at Rockhampton, Townsville and Mt Isa, was walking past the crate and decided to give it a healthy kick as he went by, at the same time exclaiming light-heartedly:
‘C’mon, you bugger. You can come out now.’
To his eternal surprise the lid sprang open and out came another gang member, who was promptly apprehended.
Within 24 hours the five arrested had appeared in courts in Townsville, Rockhampton, Brisbane and Mt Isa and the intricacies of the plot would become apparent to police. The painstaking attention to detail relating to the weight of the Reserve Bank money, and the realisation that a high degree of inside knowledge was needed sent state and federal police on an intensive inquiry within both TAA and the Reserve Bank, but no arrests were ever made.
While all would receive sentences, Kidd, believed to be the ringleader, would serve time in Queensland, but it appears his release after four years allowed him to continue a life of crime. In the late 1990s he was involved in a shootout with police after an armed hold-up in Brisbane when a bullet from Kidd’s revolver hit a policeman’s arm.
Writing in the Melbourne Age in 2007, journalist Paul Heinrichs described Kidd, committed when aged 65 and then still in Goulburn gaol, as one of the oldest prisoners incarcerated in Australia. Heinrichs quoted veteran Victorian crime barrister Brian Burke, who had frequently represented Kidd, as ‘one of the most complete criminals I ever knew.’
Ken Morris, who retired from the force as a chief superintendent, would probably agree. Some years later he heard that Kidd had tried to organise a ‘contract’ on him.
12
Aerial suicide and murder at Alice
It might have been more than 30 years ago, but Brian Cairns remembers it like it was yesterday. It was 5 January 1977 and the Connair engineering manager and his fifteen-year-old son, Mark, were walking towards the Connair DC-3 parked outside the airline’s hangar complex at Alice Springs airport.
Mark was on work experience and they were on their way to replace several radio-navigation components they had taken from the aircraft when Brian Cairns first saw the twin-engine aeroplane approaching from the far side of the runway. In an instant he realised the abnormality of the aircraft’s approach, well out of line from the direction of the airport’s runway. Then he heard the sound of the aircraft’s engines rise to the maximum as the throttles were opened, with the aircraft still heading in his direction.
Shouting for Mark to run, he dropped the radio parts and they both ran in separate directions as he caught a glimpse of the Beechcraft Baron’s wing tilt, as if it wanted to avoid the high nose of the DC-3. Cairns recalls:
I thought he was going to hit the nose with the wing. You don’t know how things go through your mind at times like that, but by then I could tell he was fair dinkum. That aircraft was under control and he knew what he was doing.
A split second later the Baron crashed at more than 320 kilometres an hour into the Connair hangar and administration building in a burst of flaming fuel and shattering aircraft debris, killing the renegade pilot, Colin Forman, and three people inside the hangar instantly. One of them would be 32-year-old Roger Connellan, the son of the airline’s founder, Eddie Connellan, and two engineers, Swiss immigrant Markus Chittoni, 31, and 48-year-old Ron Dymock. Nineteen-year-old Liana Nappi would be critically injured.
In the minutes that followed, those there would recall bot
h shock and an eerie silence. Nothing seemed to move, then people began to converge on the hangar from all directions.
Another Connair employee, 60-year-old Leo Butler, ran to the aid of the badly burned Nappi and managed to pull her from the building, but it was too late to help some of the others. Nappi would not survive her burns and would die in an Adelaide hospital five days later.
Roger Connellan, in an upstairs office, is believed to have stood up just before the aircraft hit and one of Baron’s engines broke away and carried him through the back of the building. Chittoni and Dymock were incinerated standing at their benches as the Baron’s fuel tank exploded.
Two other engineers, Kym Hansen and Tony Byrnes, managed to stagger out of the hangar. Hansen appears to have been fortunate as a flying brick smashed into his head and he hit the floor facedown, a position he believed would have saved him from the deathly inhalation of fuel-filled air. At first neither had any idea what had happened but would manage to survive despite burns to 50 per cent of their bodies after months in the Burns Unit of Adelaide hospital.
Probably the luckiest person in the hangar that day was Connair engineer Kelvin Hawthorn, who had been working on the autopilot of a Connair Heron aircraft in another part of the complex. Hawthorn needed a cable wire brush to finish off the autopilot task but couldn’t find his own and headed off towards the workshop’s lathe to create a new one. It was then the Baron hit. Hawthorn estimated later that it took eight seconds to walk from the Heron into the workshop. Had he arrived those eight seconds earlier he would have been killed.
Eddie Connellan was on his property, Narwietooma Station, when he received a phone call to tell him, without any precise details, that something serious had happened and he immediately flew into Alice Springs to be met by Connair board director and old friend, Reg Harris. Harris later wrote that the first question Eddie asked as he sat in his plane was: ‘Is any of those dead Roger?’
‘Oh, I can’t tell you, Eddie. I’ll let the policeman talk to you,’ Harris replied.
After a police sergeant had told him what had happened and that Roger had been one of those killed, Harris said Connellan remained sitting in the plane for around 25 minutes before telling Harris he was going to the office in town. Harris talked him out of driving and took him in his own car, then back to the Harris home for a coffee.
We sat him in our lounge and he just stared out at the hills for about an hour or so. He wouldn’t have anything to drink other than coffee and then he eventually went home.
The incident shocked Alice Springs, particularly when it was confirmed it was a premeditated revenge attack by a former Connair employee. Englishman Colin Forman had worked as a pilot for Connair for a short time in 1979, but the relationship had proved to be an unhappy one. According to Reg Harris and others, Forman was something of a flying fanatic, but also a type of misfit who would occasionally suffer at the expense of jokes by his work colleagues. Harris records that one of his idiosyncrasies was immediately telling those who got in his car with him, ‘Fasten your seat belts and extinguish your cigarette.’ In Alice Springs in the 1970s, where seat belts were rarely worn and most people smoked, such directions were treated with either mirth or disdain so frequent opportunities were taken to take a rise out of him.
Harris records one instance when Forman approached the mechanics working in his aircraft and asked them how long his aeroplane was going to be.
‘Not long,’ was the reply. ‘We’re just waiting on a long stand.’
‘Well, can I help you?’ said Forman.
Yes, they said, telling him to go over to a chap in the next hangar and ask him if he could have a long stand. When he got there he was told to go stand in the corner, doing so until he realised the ‘long stand’ was him standing there.
Forman first flew as a type of traffic officer on Connair’s Heron aircraft, a role which mainly involved looking after the passengers while watching how the flying was done. After a falling-out with Connair operations management he was sent to Darwin from where he sent several threatening letters to operations in Alice Springs.
It was in Darwin that part of his past caught up with him when authorities discovered he had forged a Qantas airline ticket to visit his family in England in the early 1970s and, partly due to the fact that Darwin airport was under the control of the RAAF, a conviction for such an offence created a security issue which cost him his job.
In the months after that he flew for a charter company in Western Australia where he fell foul of his employer after complaints from his passengers about his flying. In the meantime he sent threatening letters to a Connair manager who he claimed had primary responsibility for him losing his job. He then moved to Mt Isa where he flew for a local aero club, but his bitterness towards Connair apparently continued through his subsequent employment misfortunes.
Police later revealed that Forman had driven his car from Mt Isa to Wyndham and on the morning of 5 January, stole a Beechcraft Baron from Wyndham airport and set out for Alice Springs. Investigators subsequently found a letter in his log book stating his intention was to ‘kill and maim as many employees of Connair Pty Ltd as possible’, and since Alice Springs was four hours’ flying time from Wyndham, his aim was to hit the building at around 10 a.m. while all staff were having morning tea.
However, he failed to account for the time difference between Wyndham and Central Australia and hit at 11 a.m. Ironically, the addressee he had directed his threatening letters to was not there anyway. He had left Connair a short time before.
Several times as he flew towards Alice Springs that morning, the airport’s air-traffic controllers reported hearing various garbled transmissions from his aircraft, one unconfirmed report suggesting he said at one stage: ‘It is better to die with honour than to live with dishonour.’
The tapes of any recordings were not released, although air investigators were at pains to point out that by the time any messages from Forman were heard it would have been too late to warn anyone.
Alice Springs in January 1977 was a much smaller town than it is today, but even with the distance of years it would be difficult to estimate the impact the tragic event would have had on this outback community.
Connair had its origins in Survey and Inland Transport in the late 1930s, a company formed by Eddie Connellan to undertake land surveys and later mail runs. One of its primary mail runs would be between Wyndham and Alice Springs, the same route Colin Forman would fly on his suicide mission. It became Connellan Airways in 1943 and gradually expanded its route structure in the postwar years, at the same time becoming a valuable training ground for many young pilots keen on a career in aviation.
John Myers, a former Connellan captain, remembers an airline with an excellent safety record and an ideal environment in which to learn. Budding pilots were, like the case of Forman, first assigned to office and traffic duties, handling passengers on the ground and in the air, the latter while they watched more experienced pilots fly the vast, featureless stretches of the outback.
Myers says, because of the lack of navigation aids and little help from the normal aviation aeronautical charts, part of any pilot’s training was to develop his or her own ‘mud map’ for each route, identifying ground features which could be used as defined navigation points. A pilot was not permitted to fly the route until they, and their ‘mud map’, had been checked out by a more senior pilot.
By the time it was renamed Connair in 1970, the airline and its founder had carved a unique place in the hearts of Australians living in the outback, often providing the only reliable link between remote stations, missions and settlements. The hangar tragedy of January 1977, however, was a shattering blow not only to its founder but to an airline which was struggling to survive against increasing competition from other larger Australian domestic airlines which were moving in on its territory. Eventually sold to East West Airlines in 1983, Connair went into liquidation soon after.
Of those others impacted by the hangar crash
, Kym Hansen and Tony Byrnes fought for months to overcome their injuries, finally both returning to the aviation industry. For Brian Cairns, who with his son, Mark, had seen the Baron roaring towards them that morning, the hangar incident was another awful benchmark in a life marked by tragedy. Five years before he had lost a son, daughter-in-law and grandson when a Connair Queenair taking them from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock crashed within sight of the Alice Springs airport soon after take-off. Four others, including the pilot, also died.
Early on a March morning in 1983 an intoxicated, disgruntled patron, Douglas John Crabbe, drove his 25-tonne Mack truck at high speed into the bar of a motel at the foot of Ayers Rock, killing five and seriously injuring another sixteen. Brian Cairns, along with around 40 others, was in the bar at the time, but escaped injury. After all these years he’s managed to remain philosophical about it all: ‘It’s been a rough old trip at times, mate, but all you do is look ahead. Just don’t look over your shoulder.’
Kelvin Hawthorn, too, suffered in his own way. He returned to work the next morning, despite witnessing the loss of life and the damage as Connair was now short of engineers. He recalls silver soldering on a bench outside the complex that next morning when a helicopter flew low over his head. His hands shook so much he had to temporarily abandon the job. Later, in the darkened hangar, he went to take the landing pins out of the undercarriage of the Heron when a feral cat, presumably driven out of its hiding place by the accident, gave a wail and jumped past him out of the wheel well.
‘I was so unravelled I chased the cat along the tarmac, caught it and killed it. I guess that was the only trauma counselling I had but it helped a lot.’
As for Alice Springs, the silent pain remains, perhaps evidenced by the fact that there are few signs in the town that the tragedy ever took place, beyond a memorial in the local Rotary Park, a water fountain at an arts centre and an annual drama award in Liana Nappi’s name. There’s little reference in Alice Springs’ museums. Locals will tell you that’s the way they wanted it.
