The day when fugitive Rodney Clavell’s siege caused Adelaide’s CBD to be ruled by guns
ADELAIDE will long remember how a siege in front of a city massage parlour altered a mundane weekday morning for hundreds of police officers, thousands of workers and students.
IT stands just 700m from the very heart of South Australia’s criminal justice system — a massage parlour with a red door.
It was this modest entry to the most discreet of businesses that dramatically altered a mundane weekday morning for hundreds of police officers and thousands of city workers and school students.
Police lay siege to Marilyn’s Studio at 1am yesterday, but officers had begun their search for fugitive Rodney Ian Clavell even earlier.
Passersby told The Advertiser that another massage parlour, on nearby Halifax St, was searched before police moved to Marilyn’s and cordoned off a section of King William St.
At 1am, this posed little concern — businesses were empty, apartment-dwellers were asleep — but, by 6am, the unprecedented situation choked off the city.
“I turned up for work at 6am intending to get an early start, only to find police had blocked off my chambers,” a senior barrister said.
“I’ve got a client entering a guilty plea today and I’m going to have to appear before the court without a jacket and without my files ... it’s going to be a very short, very succinct plea.”
As the city grew busier with morning commuters, police widened their cordon to cover Angas, Gilles, Carrington and Sturt streets.
Buses ferried stranded tram passengers into the CBD as pedestrians gathered by the police tape, holding up mobile phones and trying to catch a glimpse of the action.
The usually thriving centre of Adelaide ground to a halt and resembled an eerie scene from The Walking Dead.
Uniformed police took up posts along Frew St — guarding apartment-dwellers as they made their way out of the cordon — while black-clad STAR Group officers gathered on Wright St.
Just before 10am, the armoured Bearcat tactical vehicle rolled into the alleyway at the back of Marilyn’s.
Weapons at the ready, officers used the Bearcat’s reinforced doors as cover while they spread out and took positions.
Another STAR Group team flanked the parlour’s front entrance while, on the building next door, an officer took up a sniper-style position and focused on the roof.
Between six and 14 officers kept watch over the next hour — two even climbed onto the parlour’s roof for a stealthy tactical assessment.
At 11.14am, STAR Group officers massed on the corner of Wright St and the alleyway, taking cover behind a squad car and the Bearcat while training their weapons on the parlour.
Ten minutes later, the first of the women inside the building — whom police were loathe to call “hostages” — was released.
Clad in a dark grey raincoat, she walked to the corner with her hands in the air and was quickly escorted down Wright St by police.
A second woman — clad in jeans and a T-shirt, her hands also in the air — soon followed, as did a third woman wrapped in a winter coat and lugging a blue suitcase.
It took just 15 minutes for the three women to leave Marilyn’s and, in the minds of many watching the incident, the hostage crisis seemed to have passed.
To everyone’s surprise, a fourth woman emerged from the dark under-roof garage at 11.40am, her steps faltering and her demeanour very different from her colleagues.
She was near hysterics by the time she reached police and, when negotiators came to lead her away, she collapsed in their arms.
The negotiators half-walked, half-carried the distraught woman away as she cried and shook from the trauma of her ordeal.
With the women free, and STAR Group withdrawing to assess their next move, an uncomfortably tense silence descended.
Officers took a riot shield from the Bearcat and mounted a small video camera to a pole in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to peer through the parlour’s windows.
In the scrap of Parklands opposite the siege, police negotiators and detectives spoke into radios and mobile phones, then spoke to Clavell through a megaphone.
“I’m still here, we’re together, I’ll keep checking on you,” the negotiator said.
“Just walk outside, we’re worried about you.
“Thank you for letting the hostages out, it would have been very frightening ... it’s been a long day, a long night.
“You may feel a bit down but, don’t forget, there are people to help you.”
It was, by all accounts, the last contact between police and Clavell — and what happened next was surreal.
Though the public’s attention was focused on Marilyn’s, the final word on Clavell’s fate came from a more stately building almost 2km away.
At 2pm, Police Minister Tony Piccolo stood up in State Parliament and announced that officers had just found Clavell’s body inside the massage parlour.
Over the following minutes, it emerged police had used a robot to search inside the building soon after the release of the women.
Less than 15 minutes after Mr Piccolo’s announcement, police lifted the cordons and traffic flowed back into the city for the first time in 13 hours.
The return of cars, buses and trams was, in its own way, as disconcerting as the hours of desolation.
Four women had endured a terrifying ordeal, a city had been brought to a standstill and a wanted fugitive had died, but normal life resumed so quickly it was almost as if nothing had happened at all.
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