‘Just doesn’t sit right with me’: The unsolved murders this top cop wants to crack

Interviewing NSW’s top homicide detective over lunch is a task not for those with a weak stomach.

Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty, commander of the homicide squad, is the police officer seen most often on TV news packages and quoted in stories. It’s his job to face tough media questioning when police investigate the worst of the worst.

So, naturally, our conversation traverses some dark episodes.

Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty at Arc Cafe.Credit: Janie Barrett

“I remember my first suspicious death I went to was a kid and that always sticks with me,” he said. “I remember because it was around ’86 – I would have been 24, and I was the senior police officer at the scene, believe it or not.”

“It was a toddler at Easter time who was assaulted and died; she was in the cot deceased. The two things that stick with me was the horrendous crime scene, but also the smell of Easter eggs. I couldn’t eat Easter eggs for two or three years after; it was just stuck in my head.”

Arc Cafe’s chicken schnitzel with mushroom sauce. Credit: Janie Barrett

Doherty credits the way the senior officers worked on that case, the forensic detective work that kept the mourning family constantly at the front of their minds, as the catalyst for wanting to become an investigator in the police force.

Doherty has suggested we meet at Arc Cafe, the local coffee spot downstairs from police headquarters in Parramatta, rather than a more upmarket restaurant. I suspect the career cop wants to avoid the perception of being wined and dined. The staff know Doherty well, and anticipate his coffee – a large long black. (It’s such a cop order I resist the urge to ask if he wants a doughnut with that cuppa Joe.)

For lunch, he opts for a chicken schnitzel with mushroom sauce, and I go for the salmon bowl. There’s no quiet table at this busy cafe (it’s full of tradies, and a deafening blender or coffee grinder interrupts our conversation a few times), but the setting seems to put the detective at ease.

‘An indelible impression’

The path from being a boy in the 1970s inner west to homicide squad commander at NSW Police started for Doherty with early interactions with police as a child.

He grew up in a loving and musical household, but one marred by violence. His father would lash out, and Doherty grew to see police officers as positive influences who protected his mum.

‘There’s a perception from young wannabe gangsters … they see the bling. That comes crashing down when they end up in a gutter with a bullet in their head’.

Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty

“It left an indelible impression, but I also only have happy thoughts about home … I know that’s mixed messaging, but I felt safe because my family made me feel safe, then those interactions with police were positive.”

After a brief stint as a teacher, Doherty headed to Goulburn and joined the police academy in 1985.

The following decades saw him rise quickly through the ranks, becoming an investigator in 1994. In 2018, he was promoted to robbery and serious crime squad commander before taking on the homicide squad role a year later. Homicide is one of the branches of the NSW Police state crime command and includes historical unsolved murders.

The homicide squad has had an extraordinary year. Multiple career-defining cases have come in quick succession: the same team that investigated the Bondi Junction Westfield stabbing murders was assigned to investigate an apparently deliberately lit house fire in Lalor Park that claimed the lives of three children. Add to that a family allegedly murdered by a taekwondo instructor in Parramatta. And, while we are having lunch, the bodies of two children are found in their Blue Mountains home, allegedly killed by their mother.

At the start of the year, the murders of TV presenter Jesse Baird and his partner Luke Davies rocked the city when it became clear the No. 1 suspect was a serving police officer.

“We had the somewhat unprecedented double murder of Jesse Baird and Luke Davies [allegedly] by a certain police officer,” Doherty said. “That was pretty strange, and that was a very challenging time for investigators.”

Not in his “wildest dreams” did Doherty think one of his leading investigators would be tasked with interrogating a serving police officer. “That was pretty daunting and obviously that pressure just multiplied.”

Doherty was among the senior police officers, including Commissioner Karen Webb, who faced the media almost daily with updates about the case as public scrutiny piled on. Webb, Doherty’s boss, made headlines for all the wrong reasons when she called the incident a “crime of passion”.

But as tough as that time was, in Doherty’s mind it pales in comparison with the pressure the police were under during the height of Sydney’s gang wars just a few years ago.

‘It doesn’t sit right’

That has something to do with the double murder he nominates when I ask him which is the unsolved case he would love to crack the most. He talks about Amneh “Amy” al-Hazouri and Lametta Fadlallah, two women who were gunned down in what police suspect was a premeditated shooting in Panania in 2022. No arrests have been made. Police allege that Fadlallah had underworld connections.

“It was a difficult time for police because we had just been through all the organised crime murders and, right at the tail end of all that, two women get shot dead in a targeted attack, which is just abhorrent,” Doherty said. “Amy was a hairdresser there to visit Lametta with two kids, a 16 and 20-year-old in front, it just doesn’t sit right with me.”

Doherty addresses the media after the alleged underworld-connected murders of two women. Credit: Dean Sewell

The press conference that came after those murders was one of the most difficult of Doherty’s life, and a rare instance where he says he lost his cool. The police force was facing sustained criticism as the bodies kept piling up in Sydney’s cocaine fuelled gang wars, prompting the question – had police lost control of the streets?

What those watching at home didn’t know was that the police force had just days earlier farewelled one of their own. One of Doherty’s colleagues, Detective Sergeant Adam Child, took his own life at Ermington police station while on duty.

“We were getting all this criticism at the same time [as] we lost one of our own … and then the double murder happened. That was a tough weekend. It was so sad, and it really knocked us for six. It was one of the few times I’ve been a bit more cranky.”

Doherty believes one of the greatest challenges in policing is trying to steer young people away from crime gangs involved in the drug trade, as Sydney’s love of cocaine shows no sign of slowing.

“There’s a perception from young wannabe gangsters … they see the bling, they say ‘I want to be that person’ and we do see them drawn into that area from an early age, and they get attracted by the money, the cash, the power and the identity of it all,” he said. “That comes crashing down when they end up in a gutter with a bullet in their head.”

Unsolved cases

Throughout his career, Doherty has stayed in touch with several victims of crime, mostly in connection with unsolved cases. Paul White, who found his wife Lynette’s body in their Coogee apartment in 1973, has remained hopeful that police will one day solve his wife’s murder.

The case is one that weighs on Doherty. White was a key advocate in getting the unsolved homicide playing cards program off the ground; a unique initiative which involves printing the names and pictures of homicide victims on playing cards distributed in prisons with the aim of triggering a memory in those behind bars. Lynette White is the Queen of Hearts.

“We had a lot of things against us,” Doherty says of the White murder. “Because of the age and issues around witnesses and exhibits, and he [Paul] was quite understandably upset with things that had happened … so that’s one I’d really love to solve, we got to know him and he’s actually a really decent man, a really tremendous fellow.”

So how does Sydney’s top homicide detective relax with decades worth of unsolved murders on his mind? For Doherty, ideally, the shop talk finishes at the end of his commute home with his wife from the Curtis Cheng Police Centre. His wife just happens to be Detective Superintendent Jayne Doherty, commander of the NSW sex crimes squad.

The pair have been together for around 30 years after meeting at, you guessed it, a horrific crime. A woman was abducted and sexually assaulted, and the pair clicked as fellow investigators on the case.

The bill for lunch at Arc Cafe.Credit:

“When we drive back, we do all our exhaling then and then venting, and then when we get home it’s back to being husband and wife, mum and dad being just normal.”

It’s not a hard and fast rule, however: “I think you need to vent anytime you need to vent, especially as our jobs are quite high stress.”

Another way Doherty deals with the pressure is through music.

The detective plays guitar and sings in a band – think the great Aussie classics like AC/DC and The Angels.

He tries to get out to as many live gigs as he can; a recent favourite was James Reyne at Anita’s Theatre in Thirroul.

While there’s little time for pub gigs these days, Doherty says he brings the same values of empathy and teamwork he learnt in his musical, loving family into his role – which he describes as the “biggest privilege” of his life. He even leaves the interview with a song quote. “To borrow a line from The Wallflowers, ‘I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same’.”

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