By Steve Butcher
Matthew Johnson once wanted to turn over a new leaf, but he seemed destined to remain one of Victoria's most dangerous criminals and feared prisoners. Steve Butcher reports.
IN 1994, WHEN he was 21, Matthew Johnson finally admitted he had behaved too badly for too long. Locked up in Pentridge prison, he had reached a crossroads, and told his barrister Duncan Allen that he never wanted to see the inside of a cell or a police station again.
A young Matthew Johnson.
For Johnson, authority was only ever there to be defied. Since he was 15 he had been in and out of youth training centres and jail for stealing cars, burglary and illegal possession of weapons. As a teenager he'd done three stretches in Pentridge. But he'd had enough.
He also felt deeply ashamed that he'd let down his mother, Carol Hogg. ''He has now realised that whatever sentence he does, we do, which is what I have been trying to get through to him,'' she once said.
Johnson with his mother.
But Johnson never did turn over that new leaf, and today, after he was found guilty yesterday of murdering gangland boss Carl Williams, he is in familiar surroundings - solitary confinement in the ''supermax'' Melaleuca unit at Victoria's top maximum security facility, in Barwon Prison. At 38, he is back where he once said he never wanted to be again.
Yesterday's verdict consolidates his already rock-hard reputation as one of Victoria's most dangerous criminals and feared prisoners - a psychopath to some - whose treatment of so many people has been as atrocious and uncontrollable inside jail as outside it.
He can now look back on his life and see how he has destroyed the lives of many of his victims and turned people's dreams into nightmares.
The jury rejected Johnson's claim that he acted in self-defence, that it was a case of either he kill Williams or he would be killed by him, deciding instead that he pulverised Williams's skull with eight blows from the stem of an exercise bike seat without lawful justification or excuse.
Johnson as a boy.
Could his life have turned out any other way? Could a man who was once assessed by a psychologist as having a personality disorder, who couldn't control his anger, mistrusted others and had a ''presentation of coldness'', have been saved from himself?
It was never going to be easy. After Johnson's natural father died, his mother married Wayne Johnson. She spent all but the first six weeks of her second pregnancy in hospital, so eight year-old Matthew was temporarily placed in foster care because his stepfather had a job to go to.
Matthew Johnson in 2002.
Matthew's brother Brett was born 14 weeks premature, and with cerebral palsy. The family struggled and Carol Hogg's second marriage broke down. In 1994, Hogg (now known as Carol Newman after a fourth marriage) told a County Court judge about her own difficult life and that of her troubled son Matthew.
As a young boy he loved sport and was a ''bright'' student. He would unleash his frustrations at school rather than at home, but she never knew ''that he was ever cruel to anybody''. But his stepfather Wayne Johnson was described as an ''aggressive alcoholic'' and a cruel drunk who would abuse his stepson.
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In the Pentridge remand yard at 17 … what hope did the bloke have?
He also ''used to instil into Mat, you know, you have got to be tough, you have got to be strong, type of thing'', she recalled. Wayne had promised to get him an apprenticeship but ''like everything else, that never eventuated''.
Matthew attended Lyndale Secondary College until year 7, when he was expelled after unruly behaviour.
Johnson in CCTV footage of the murder.
''The teacher used to say they would get frustrated with him because if he misbehaved in class they would put him outside the classroom, and even if they brought him back in he would always pass whatever they had learned that day,'' Hogg told the judge. ''The only form of discipline they could use really wasn't working.''
She managed to get him into the St Kilda Community High School, which helped manage other students from troubled backgrounds. He would travel there every day from his mother's Housing Commission flat in Dandenong.
Matthew Johnson.
After successfully completing year 10, he left school for good when he was 16 and took to the streets, where he got involved with other like-minded youths in carrying out minor offences, drinking and taking drugs. But never at his mother's place. Absolutely no one mucked up at mum's.
Hogg told the judge: ''His friends sort of know that once you hit that front door there is a rule that, you know, they all treat me with the utmost respect, and Matt has all his life, too.''
Carl Williams in 2004.Credit: Paul Harris
When's Hogg's third husband ran off with her niece, Johnson was devastated and ''just broke down crying''. Hogg's evidence was partly corroborated by a psychologist who interviewed Johnson - the first time he had been professionally assessed - and reported his ''somewhat surly presentation'' and repressed anger that contrasted with some positive aspects of his life and recent attempts to improve himself.
Johnson felt let down and frustrated by past ''male figures'', the psychologist said, and ''abused and violated by not being worked with and assisted as a child''. The psychologist noted that instead of youth detention and prison being rehabilitative ''they have indeed had the opposite effect''.
Carl Williams' father, George Williams.Credit: Joe Armao
Geoffrey Steward, one of Johnson's former barristers, agreed: ''In the Pentridge remand yard at 17 … what hope did the bloke have?''
During one of his first stints in Pentridge, Johnson became a skinhead, more to make friends than anything else as he had no neo-Nazi sympathies. He also played football, and more than likely would have been a formidable competitor.
Carl Williams' funeral in 2010.Credit: Jason South
From about 1995, after he was released from Pentridge, life picked up for Johnson. He found a job as a concreter and kept out of trouble. Then he injured himself at work. Things went downhill from there and in January 1998 he carried out five armed robberies with another man.
In one incident, Johnson wielded a knife when they attacked an elderly couple in their Safety Beach home. Having expected to find drugs and money Johnson soon realised they had the wrong place. They then attacked four people in another house. Johnson held his knife to one man's throat, threatening to poke his eyes out and to ''start cutting'' the occupants unless they produced cash.
''This was the behaviour of lawless thugs,'' Judge Michael Strong later said. He jailed Johnson for six years with a minimum of four.
In May 1999, Johnson was given a 20-month sentence for an aggravated burglary after he and two others attacked a protected inmate in Barwon Prison. He was then 25 with more than 100 convictions from 19 court appearances and, as one judge was told, ''firmly institutionalised''.
While Johnson was well known within the criminal justice system, it wasn't until the ''trial from hell'' before Judge Warren Fagan in September 2000 that he first gained public notoriety. As this reporter then wrote in The Age, the trial gave a ''glimpse into the grim, unforgiving culture of real hatred among inmates of a maximum-security unit in a Victorian prison.
''Aired in detail was that uncomfortably warm bond between bad men serving long sentences together for the worst crimes, and prisoners' indifference to authority, their menacing frivolity and black, mindless humour.''
Johnson and his four co-defendants continually abused Judge Fagan; one threw a bag of excrement at a juror and two bared their buttocks from the dock. The jury convicted Johnson and two others of seriously injuring Gregory Brazel, a contract killer, in Barwon Prison's Acacia unit with, among other weapons, the stem of a bike seat. Brazel had provoked the defendants and their barristers in evidence.
Johnson had spent 45 minutes kicking a reinforced glass security window to get at Brazel, who he believed was a ''dog'' yapping to prison authorities.
Judge Fagan refused 13 applications from the defence to discharge the jury and later ordered Johnson and the two others to serve a minimum of six years cumulative with their existing sentences.
An appeal court later granted them a retrial, which infuriated Judge Fagan. They pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received concurrent 12-month sentences. Later, all five were jailed for multiple counts of contempt.
ON MAY 22, 2007, 18-year-old Bryan Conyers was shot dead with a nine-millimetre Luger semi-automatic pistol in a garage in Berwick. His body was then mutilated, doused with petrol and set ablaze.
Two days later, the same gun fell from Johnson's trousers when he and childhood friend Mark Morgan were searched by police at a railway station car park in Glen Iris.
In the time between the shooting and their arrests, Johnson - who had been released from prison just months earlier - had put the weapon to a woman's head as she and her 15-year-old daughter and a neighbour, also 15, sat in a parked car eating a midnight snack outside a McDonald's restaurant in Doveton.
Johnson threatened to kill the woman unless she got out, and Morgan punched her daughter and dragged her out of the car. After the carjacking, they drove to Craigieburn to ''roll'' a drug dealer. They broke into the bedroom of a house where a couple were asleep. Johnson pointed the loaded gun at the man but, as before, the drugged-up pair had hit the wrong place. They ransacked the house anyway and stole goods worth $25,000.
Three months after Conyers was shot, Johnson was charged with his murder and Morgan with accessory to murder. At the trial in 2009, both men were found not guilty, after the jury deliberated for 27 hours.
The Crown's case was that Johnson shot Conyers, then cut open his stomach and poured in petrol, because he was angry the teenager had disappeared after taking Johnson's $50 to buy marijuana.
Johnson's defence was that Timothy Ian Prentice, who had pleaded guilty to, and was jailed for, being an accessory to murder and had turned prosecution witness, had killed Conyers.
Another witness claimed Johnson confessed to the crime. Police murderer Peter Allen Reid also testified he overheard Johnson admitting to the murder while in Barwon Prison.
Johnson's take on Prentice and Reid, a repeat prison informer, was: ''A dog is someone who gives somebody up. A lying dog is someone who makes up lies about someone when they give them up.''
He told the court Prentice was only interested in drugs and money and had shot Conyers after an argument. Cross-examined by prosecutor Andrew Tinney over three days, Johnson admitted lying to the jury but said: ''These lies aren't about who pulled the trigger.''
There was no reason why he had lied, he said, and when asked if he lied for fun, Johnson replied: ''Just you were giving me the shits.''
Then last November he and Morgan pleaded guilty to the incidents at Doveton and Craigieburn. Through his barrister, Robert Thyssen, Johnson asked Judge Geoffrey Chettle that his sentence not crush all hope as he was ''not without some''. Thyssen said Johnson's plan was to start his life over interstate when ''all his commitments are over and he is released''.
Tellingly, no psychological evidence or reports were presented, possibly because Johnson has never wanted to be diagnosed as mentally unbalanced lest that diminish his standing.
Chettle pronounced Johnson - then with 158 convictions imposed between 1991 and 2006 - a ''real menace to society'' who was not deterred by incarceration and whose prospects of rehabilitation were ''nil''. Johnson was given a 13-year minimum term, and was later heard to mutter that he had ''bigger fish to fry''. He was referring to the pending trial over the murder of Carl Williams.
ONLY a few minutes after Carl Williams was found dead on the floor of his cell, Barwon Prison echoed with the howls and barks of inmates proclaiming a ''dog'' had been put down.
At Johnson's trial this month, the Crown did not have to prove a motive, but prosecutor Mark Rochford, SC, told the jury there was evidence that suggested Williams was killed because he had co-operated with police.
With Johnson's professed motive rejected by the jury, there are other suggestions that he silenced Williams by request or because of the kudos he would get from his peers. Another theory is that he heard that some inmates felt he was too ''aligned'' to Williams, which was damaging his reputation - a reputation that was vital to Johnson's status and influence in Barwon Prison's hierarchy.
Another motive may have been his declared hatred for those who help police, particularly Williams, who was promised lucrative benefits in return for his co-operation.
Yet Johnson told his barrister Bill Stuart, who had represented him in the 2009 murder trial, that Williams wasn't a dog, just a dangerous, threatening liar who planned later to ''shaft'' police and kill him.
Williams wasn't stupid. He knew Johnson loathed ''laggers''. As he told a policeman: ''I need to let Matty know what I'm doing. I want Matty to understand what I'm doing with you and I want him to realise that it is really just to do with corrupt cops. I need to let him know.''
Authorities allowed the pair - who would spend 16 months together in Barwon, partly with Williams's father, George, and murderer Tommy Ivanovic, who was present when Johnson killed Williams - to meet and discuss sharing a cell.
AFTER his release from prison George Williams, who had been convicted of drug offences, seemed to take some pity on Johnson - or felt it wise to - depositing $190 a month into Johnson's prison spending account for every-day needs as a ''gesture'', he told the court. ''He didn't have much in the way of income or family to look after him,'' George Williams said.
But with Carl Williams being crucial to the police investigation of former detective Paul Dale and the alleged hitman over the murders of underworld figure Terence Hodson and Hodson's wife, Christine, why would the risk be taken of his doing time with the likes of Johnson?
Peter Hutchinson, a senior manager with Corrections Victoria, said in evidence that close consideration had been given whether Williams and Johnson should share a cell and that a senior policeman who was briefed on the situation had expressed no concerns.
Yet that officer told the court that ''we weren't involved in the decision to place them there''.
Some may have even thought that given Johnson's position in the jail's hierarchy no one would dare touch Williams with him alongside. Or maybe he just snapped that April afternoon.
During the trial, Johnson was led to the witness box flanked by four minders and was later seated before the jury entered the courtroom.
He often answered ''yep'' and ''nup'' and kept other answers to a minimum in a delivery that reflected decades of jail time.
One of the best-briefed inmates in the system, Johnson has always liked to read biographies and inmates' police briefs, including copies of statements by gangland killers and drug dealers.
To some he is Matty ''Hot Pies'' Johnson because of his love for Collingwood.
To others he is ''The General'' of Barwon's ''Prisoners of War'', an old-guard group with entrenched values: his letters to and from penpal inmates speak of loyalty, strength, honour and love.
Today, Matthew Johnson begins another day in Barwon Prison, and as usual he will probably work out in the gym and keep close tabs on events in Barwon and beyond.
''I am the true General so I must keep things in good order true,'' he once wrote. ''I love this shit.''
What does life hold in store for him now? It will be more of the same -a life behind bars. Certainly, there will be no move to another state to start over again. He once told Tommy Ivanovic that they were another year closer to ''being able to kick back outside one day on a yacht laughing about these bullshit times of our past''.
Given that Johnson will be about 70 if he is ever paroled, that ship is never likely to sail.
Steve Butcher is chief court reporter.