By Tammy Mills
Willi Koeppen.
It was a Saturday night in the summer of 1976 and celebrated chef Willi Koeppen turns up to the restaurant in a foul mood. He’d been drinking, and after sacking one of the hostesses, he accuses his wife of having affairs and threatens to throw himself off the restaurant’s balcony.
Later in the night, Mr Koeppen disappears. And so begins a four-decade long mystery involving one of Australia’s first celebrity chefs, set high in the hills of the Dandenong Ranges in a kitsch German restaurant called the Cuckoo.
The Cuckoo restaurant on the Mount Dandenong Tourist Road in Olinda, pictured in 2004.Credit: Andrew De La Rue
The persistent assumption is the 46-year-old simply walked off into the dense mountain ash forest that surrounds Olinda and took his own life. But there have been many other rumours about Willi Koeppen. One involves escaping to an island off the coast of Queensland with escorts. There have also been two supposed murder confessions – one from a dangerous underworld figure, and another, more recent allegation, that came from a wildly jealous love rival.
In the coroner’s court in Melbourne this week, it was apparent the mystery is no closer to being solved. The court heard that despite police investigations over the past 42 years, Mr Koeppen has disappeared without a trace. Police believe he was murdered, but his cause of death may never be established because his body has never been found.
When he opened the Cuckoo with his wife Karin in 1958, Willi Koeppen was a big deal in Melbourne. He’d migrated from Germany after completing an apprenticeship at Berlin institution, the Hotel Adlon, and in Melbourne, he became executive chef at the glitzy Chevron Hotel. He hosted a popular German radio show before he introduced cookery to Australian television with his own black-and-white show The Chef Presents.
Willi Koeppen featured in the 1957 book Recipes from the Stars.
The Koeppens were driving around the Dandenong Ranges when they passed the Quamby tea rooms in Olinda. They bought it, relaunching the venue as the Cuckoo Restaurant, and introduced Melburnians to the smorgasboard. It was a brash German sensation, playing host to prime ministers and rock stars. The red and white check tables heaved under ice sculptures and beer steins, with the raucous feasting supported by a floor show featuring cowbells and yodelling.
But, by 1976, Mr Koeppen had fallen out of love with the restaurant. The Cuckoo had ensnared him and, as one relative described, started to sap his creativity. He was also drinking too much and his marriage to Karin was breaking down, with both knowing the other was having affairs.
His eldest child Andrei was 17 and boarding at a school in Adelaide when his father disappeared.
He remembers the phone call from his mother, and thinking his father had gone to his island in the Whitsundays, one of Mr Koeppen's several investments.
Andrei flew up to the island with the restaurant’s manager to search for his father, but nobody had been there.
“We just didn’t know and if you don’t know, you can’t grieve. You can’t express anything,” he said.
“He may well have taken off somewhere, that was certainly the theory of the police – that he’d nicked off – so you started to think, well, maybe he had.”
Now Andrei is certain foul play was involved.
“I believe somebody else was involved … and in my mind, and in my heart, I don’t think that he is alive. I think that he probably perished that night in February 1976.”
Pictured left to right: Mr Koeppen's youngest child Daniela, wife Karin, Andrei's wife Roz, son Andrei and middle child Sabina in 2014.
When Mr Koeppen turned up at the restaurant drunk, depressed and abusive on the night of February 28, 1976, local doctor Bernard Butler went to the Cuckoo to help quieten him down.
In typed statements found within the original police brief, it’s apparent Dr Butler and Mr Koeppen had a rocky relationship. The police investigator at the time, Brian McCarthy, who went on to become a respected homicide detective, wrote that Mr Koeppen had apparently blamed the doctor for introducing his wife to her lover, a local lawyer.
Willi's first Kombi van parked outside the restaurant back in the 1960s.
But Andrei believes the doctor, who was a friend of the family’s, was more like a counsellor to his father.
Mr Koeppen and Dr Butler were seen drinking and talking quietly on the restaurant’s balcony into the night. Karin had left the restaurant and gone to a friend’s house and, in the early hours of Sunday, February 29, Dr Butler said he and Mr Koeppen went to his home, which doubled as his clinic, less than a kilometre down the road.
"I was trying to help Willi," Dr Butler told police at the time.
He said Mr Koeppen left in his Volkswagen Kombi between 3am and 4am after talking about going away to Poole Island.
Dr Butler had posted a medical report to Mr Koeppen’s insurance company the day before. He claimed Mr Koeppen had “attacks” of manic-depressive psychosis, that he had become violent and he may have to be institutionalised.
Dr Butler would not comment for this story, except to say in a text message that the medical board advised him he couldn’t talk about the case to “anyone other than Victoria Police”.
One of the restaurant’s cleaners found Mr Koeppen’s van parked at the Cuckoo when he arrived for work about 4.30am. The side door of the van was open and there was no sign of Mr Koeppen.
Mr Koeppen’s youngest daughter, Daniela Koeppen Rosenfeld, was 10 years old then. She remembers constantly asking where her father was and no one being able to explain it to her. She thought no one was looking hard enough for her dad.
“Even up until I was 21, I remember thinking maybe he’d just turn up on my 21st birthday. That he would walk through the door. I would wait for that moment,” she said.
Chopper Read's book From the inside.
The case would lie dormant for decades, with the original investigator concluding it was likely Mr Koeppen was alive. But something would happen that took the case down a bizarre path.
In 1991, standover man and underworld executioner Mark “Chopper” Read released a book. In it, he wrote that ruthless serial killer Alex Tsakmakis boasted to him in prison about his involvement in Mr Koeppen’s demise.
“I remember Tsakmakis said the bloke owed him money, and there was a falling out,” Chopper wrote.
“Alex was into that murder up to his neck. He was proud as a peacock over that one.”
By then Tsakmakis was dead, bludgeoned to death with gym weights by Russell Street bomber Craig Minogue.
On the Sunday of Mr Koeppen's disappearance, four escorts and their boss turned up for lunch at the Cuckoo. The brothel madam told police Mr Koeppen invited them for lunch three days earlier so he could choose one of the girls to take away with him to the island.
Some searched for a connection between the escorts and Tsakmakis, but a link has never been established. Police have also never confirmed Mr Koeppen owed Tsakmakis money, nor that any relationship existed between the pair.
But Chopper’s book, and the publicity around it, would leave a mark on Mr Koeppen’s family. Elke, the daughter of his middle child Sabina, grew up believing her grandfather was an underworld figure.
“It made it kind of glamorous and it tied all the loose ends up so we never interrogated what happened,” 29-year-old Elke said.
It was only when she read the original police evidence that she realised her grandfather’s legacy had been distorted.
“He was talented, charismatic, good looking and entrepreneurial; bringing this slice of European charm and European cuisine to Melbourne. But at the same he was flawed and sad ... a broken man,” Elke said.
She believes the answer lies in the original police brief.
“It tells a story and it’s not Tsakmakis,” she said.
“There has been a massive injustice here and someone has gotten away with murder.”
Willi Koeppen. Credit: Source unknown
A second apparent confession to Mr Koeppen's murder has also emerged in the last four years.
The Age has learnt that police interviewed a man in South Australia who they were told claimed to have killed Mr Koeppen and dumped his body. He was wildly jealous of Mr Koeppen, detectives were told, and Mr Koeppen’s relationship with a woman the man was obsessed with.
There is a thread of it in the police file, a mention of the same woman. But, as police wrote, Mr Koeppen ended the relationship after finding her in bed with someone else six months before he disappeared.
Just how much weight detectives gave this claim isn’t known, though it is the theory that Andrei likes the most.
“It was a bit of a lightbulb moment. It was like, of course, why hasn’t anyone looked at that before? Forty years of searching, looking, interviewing and they didn’t look at the girlfriend,” he said.
“My hope is this will lead to the offering of a reward. If the police did offer a reward, we might actually get some information we don’t already have.”
But Daniela doesn’t believe it, nor the other so-called confession.
“They are stories. They’re all hearsay and there is no evidence. We haven’t actually had anybody say, ‘I was there, I was a part of it’. We’ve got this Chopper story and well, is that legitimate? People lie.”
Daniela Koeppen Rosenfeld now runs the Cuckoo.Credit: Eddie Jim
Daniela is sitting in the Cuckoo restaurant of today. The tables, filled with busloads of tourists, are still covered in red and white check cloth. The wooden walls are adorned with cuckoo clocks, flags of the world, deer antlers and pictures of Bavarian landscapes.
Lunch service today – a buffet of schnitzel, sausages and sauerkraut – came complete with an accordion-playing Russian who easily convinced a stein-laden table to participate in a clapping song.
Daniela runs the restaurant, now in its 60th year, after taking over from her mother Karin.
Both Andrei and Sabina say it’s hard to get Karin, now deeply religious, to talk about what she thinks happened to her husband. Daniela said her mother, who left war-torn East Germany for Australia, likes to focus on the “good times”.
“She remembers that he was the love of her life. She really did love him,” she said.
His disappearance is still so entwined in the restaurant. Customers will ask about what happened and Daniela says his presence is everywhere.
“I’m still walking his steps, downstairs to the kitchen, up here. It’s exactly where he was,” she said.
The Cuckoo restaurant today.Credit: Eddie Jim
All three children say their father was dedicated to them. Daniela believes something accidental happened the night he disappeared and it was covered up.
“Something happened that night. I don’t think he took off or left us because he loved his children, he did,” Daniela said.
She said it was important, now more than ever, for information to come to light.
“We need more evidence than just a story or hearsay,” she said.
“Time is of the essence because it has already been so long. It would be a year of redemption if someone came forward and said something now, to give the family some resolution.”