Crime and chaos: Victoria’s seven most notorious women

In the underworld, it is usually the men who wear the pants, although with the recent influx of gangsters of Middle-Eastern extraction, it would be more accurate to say they wear the nylon tracksuits of the family.

Certainly, gender stereotypes that helped police separate the goodies from the baddies are long gone. The men now wear the gold jewellery while the women have the tattoos.

The men pump collagen at the cosmetic centre while the women work out at muscle gyms. The men go to detox and the women go for Botox.

The notorious women of Melbourne (from left): Nicola Gobbo, Kath Pettingill, Meshilin Marrogi, Erin Patterson, Wendy Peirce, Roberta Williams and Judy Moran.Credit: THE AGE

Yet, women are still usually on the arm of the armed offender, all recorded on their Instagram account along with the designer watch and the red Lamborghini.

More often, females are the victims of crime or loyal mothers and partners who visit their bad men in prison.

Professional killers are known as hitmen, and just about every serious crook is male. This is one of the reasons that women who go bad are a source of endless fascination.

Following the avalanche of publicity around the mushroom trial and the conviction of Erin Patterson on three counts of murder and one of attempted murder, she immediately goes to pole position on the Naked City list of the most notorious women of Victoria.

1. Erin Patterson

Has been in the headlines since her lunch in Leongatha in July 2023 when her four guests fell gravely ill. At first, police saw it as a terrible accident but once they saw she had dumped her food dehydrator in the local tip, they began to suspect foul play.

Toxicology showed the lunch guests had been poisoned with death cap mushrooms that police quickly found were laced into homemade beef Wellingtons.

Three guests, Don and Gail Patterson, plus Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, died while Heather’s husband, Ian, against all medical odds, survived. Although Erin Patterson ate the same meal, she did not suffer the same dangerous symptoms.

This was not a crime of impulse but one that was planned like a science experiment, finding the poisoned mushrooms, luring her victims to a deadly meal on the false claim she had cancer, a protracted cover-up and then performances in front of the media and the jury of a bewildered victim.

As she stood in front of her house sobbing, she told reporters she loved her in-laws. Then there was an involuntary gesture – a finger to her eye and a quick glance to see if there were real tears. There were none. She repeated the action, seemingly overwhelmed in the witness box. Clearly, the jury didn’t buy what she was selling.

Her defence team is likely to appeal on the grounds the jury got it wrong. Good luck with that. The trial judge, Justice Christopher Beale, went out of his way to thank the jurors for their exemplary behaviour.

2. Roberta Williams

Wife of gangster Carl Williams, she once tried to run him over outside a bottle shop after an argument. She was anything but the long-suffering wife.

Roberta WilliamsCredit: Eddie Jim

When Williams wanted to kill one of his many rivals, Jason Moran, Roberta was used as bait. She tried to pick a fight with Jason’s wife, Trish, outside the school their children attended to lure Moran into an ambush.

When he was finally killed – along with his friend, Pasquale Barbaro – in a van filled with kids, a listening device picked up Roberta’s reaction. “I’ll be partying tonight.”

But Roberta did have some sensible boundaries. When she complained about the workload of being a single parent while Carl was in jail (he was killed in custody in 2010), a family friend offered to babysit. It was Greg Domaszewicz, who was acquitted of murdering Moe toddler Jaidyn Leskie.

Roberta declined the offer, adding, “You are f-----g joking.”

3. Meshilin Marrogi

Probably Victoria’s only female crime boss. Her brother, George, king of the jail jungle, ran the Notorious Crime Family from behind bars, where he had spent nearly all his adult life, having first killed at the age of 17.

Hundreds of his calls to his legal team were diverted to allow him to control his crime syndicate while in maximum security.

Meshilin “Mesh” Marrogi, also known as “Mish Moshey”.

The brains behind the gang was his sister, Meshilin, who controlled the drug trafficking and the finances.

When she died, aged 30, in 2021 from COVID-19 complications, there was a procession of Rolls Royces used to ferry grieving friends and family to the funeral.

But George’s many enemies had no compassion, and long memories. In 2023, they broke into the family crypt and robbed her body of jewellery.

Without Meshlin’s guiding hand, the Notorious Crime Family collapsed.

4. Kath Pettingill

Known as Granny Evil, she reared a snake pit of sons, some of whom found no crime was too low. She had 10 children including the notorious drug dealer, informer and multiple murderer, Dennis Bruce Allen.

Two other sons, Victor Peirce and Trevor Pettingill, were charged and acquitted of the 1988 Walsh Street murders of constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre. Decades later, Peirce was ambushed in a gangland murder in Bay Street, Port Melbourne.

Family fun: Dennis Allen points a gun at his mother, Kath Pettingill.

Kath had an eye shot out in 1978. Police launched an investigation into the crime family, naturally calling it “Operation Cyclops”.

Aged 90, she lives out of the limelight at Venus Bay, lobbying for community projects including safer streets.

5. Wendy Peirce

From a law-abiding family, she fell for Victor Peirce, placing her in the Allen/Pettingill/Peirce hell-hole of violence.

The family wanted to shoot her in the foot to provide Victor grounds for a bail application so he could look after his injured wife.

After Walsh Street, police persuaded her to change sides and become the star prosecution witness against the four men charged, including her husband. At first, she liked being in witness protection but as the months dragged into years, she saw her future. A new identity, no contact with her family and a life of looking over her shoulder.

She made contact with the Pettingills and changed sides again, effectively sabotaging the case. The four walked free. Wendy was sentenced to 18 months with a minimum of nine for perjury.

For years, I kept in contact with Wendy, first at her home in the outer east while Victor was doing time, and after he was murdered in 2001, near her home in Port Melbourne.

She would speak of the most horrendous violence as if it were an everyday event. Such as the day she discovered Allen’s wife, Sissy.

“Dennis opened the boot. Sissy was in there with her throat cut. It wasn’t ear to ear, but she lay there just gurgling. He told someone to drive her somewhere and just leave her in a dump master. I got her dropped off at a railway station, so someone would find her and take her to hospital. That saved her life.”

In 2005, she admitted to me the truth about Walsh Street. “Victor was the organiser.”

While in witness protection, she insisted on browsing in an expensive South Yarra lingerie shop.

Even though her guards had a fistful of dollars, she tried to shoplift certain garments until a Special Operations Group member threatened to take his Uzi machinegun out of his backpack and shoot her.

Which meant the g-man said no to the g-string.

6. Nicola Gobbo

The dreadful irony of the Gobbo saga is the barrister-turned-informer who spent so much time seeking to be a headline act now has been reduced to living in the shadows.

Nicola Gobbo.Credit: ABC

What is lost in the Gobbo story is what could have been. She had the talent, the drive, the name (niece to the outstanding judge and governor, Sir James Gobbo), and the legal brain to become an elite barrister.

Instead, her desire for centre stage, a weakness for bad men and a flawed moral compass led her to make disastrous decisions, first by getting too close to the crooks and then much too close to the cops.

If only those in her own profession had moved early to discipline her, the results may have been different.

Instead, we have spent $300 million on inquiries, and some convictions (including against drug boss Tony Mokbel) remain in doubt.

7. Judy Moran

Like Gobbo, Judy’s fatal mistake was to believe her own publicity that she was some sort of crime matriarch.

She was a more than competent shoplifter whose family life was destroyed by murder.

The victim of repeated family violence, her husbands, Les Cole (1981) and Lewis Moran (2004), and sons, Mark Moran (2000) and Jason (2003), were killed in underworld murders. And she was a victim of savage domestic violence.

But greed and an ego as big as the Hindenburg would be her undoing and just like the giant airship, she would crash and burn (or more accurately burn and crash).

In 2009, she paid a hit-team to kill her brother-in-law, Des Moran, as he sat at his favourite Ascot Vale café.

Judy turned up and in an acting performance not often seen outside the Witches in Britches theatre restaurant, and shedding Erin Patterson-type tears, she sobbed: “It should have been me.”

Her performance was somewhat dulled when police found the getaway car in her garage.

Ill, sad and feeble, she remains in jail – a portent to convicted triple killer Erin Patterson’s future.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.