What his friend’s killer did in court set Peter on a new life mission

This story is part of the March 30 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

The 24-year-old baby-faced killer, Richard Leonard, had the undivided attention of the packed courtroom as he stood awaiting sentencing for the crossbow slaying of landscape gardener Stephen Dempsey at Deep Creek Reserve, a gay beat in northern Sydney’s Narrabeen, and for the frenzied stabbing murder of taxi driver Ezzedine Bahmad at the nearby Collaroy Plateau. Leonard stood and stared blankly at the judge as the sentence – life imprisonment without parole – was read out. No wild outburst. Not even a flash of frozen shock. But as he was led from the courtroom in handcuffs, Leonard turned and smiled at Dempsey’s mother, Lulu, before winking at her as he passed out the door. It was a cruel new low for Leonard, recalls Peter Rolfe, Dempsey’s former partner.

Rolfe says that earlier in the October 1997 trial, Leonard had pulled “the ugliest face” at him in court, seemingly determined to exact this final gouge on his victim’s loved ones. It proved to be a life-changing moment for Rolfe, one that would set him on a near-30-year mission. “Leonard was evil,” says Rolfe firmly. “After he pulled that face at me, I decided I was going to channel my grief into helping people.”

Stephen Dempsey had meant the world to Rolfe. The pair had been in a relationship for about three years, after which they remained close friends; they went on to run a landscaping business together for more than 12 years. Rolfe remembers the last time he saw the then-34-year-old Dempsey, sitting behind the wheel of his car at lunchtime during a work job. Dempsey mentioned his plans to go to the closing-down party of the legendary Rex Hotel in Kings Cross that night. But at some point on that cloudless Tuesday afternoon in August 1994, Dempsey pulled into Deep Creek Reserve, a beat in Sydney’s North Narrabeen, on his way home to Palm Beach, where he shared a house with his sister, Lisa.

Richard Leonard had occasionally been spotted prowling the reserve with his high-powered compound bow, ostensibly to shoot fish, but once menacing a couple of men on a pathway and at another time, a kayaker.

Richard Leonard, whose behaviour at his 1997 trial prompted Peter Rolfe’s quest to support those affected by murder.Credit: Dean Sewell

We don’t know exactly what happened between Leonard and Dempsey that day – the killer’s defence lawyers claimed sexual provocation, which the jury rejected – but Leonard fired an arrow straight into Dempsey’s heart. He then dragged the body down to a creek bed and left it there for some hours while he attended his mother’s birthday party. When he returned, he dismembered the body with the precision of someone who’d once worked in an abattoir, and ferried the parts on his motorbike back to his flat in Warriewood, where he stored them in his refrigerator.

Months later, Leonard took LSD with his 19-year-old girlfriend, Denise Shipley, who sat beside him in the back seat of a taxi at Collaroy Plateau, as he stabbed the driver, Ezzedine Bahmad, 37 times in a rage after Bahmad had fought back over a fare dispute. Shipley already knew that Leonard had killed someone else (“there’s a man in the fridge,” he’d told her) and had she alerted police at that point, she could have saved Bahmad, a father of seven. Instead, Shipley was with Leonard when he removed Dempsey’s remains from the freezer, wrapped them in chicken wire, weighed them down with rocks and dumped them at Pittwater.

Only days before Christmas that year, Dempsey’s torso washed up on the shores of Towlers Bay in Sydney’s northern beaches area, more than four months after his mysterious disappearance from the reserve. At first, detectives didn’t link the torso to Dempsey; refrigerated for so long, it was too well-preserved to be one that could have been floating in the sea since August. But a DNA test – among the first in Australia – confirmed it was Dempsey. Peter Rolfe finally had a gruesome part-answer to the mystery that had been torturing him for months.

Rolfe has no criticism of the investigation into Dempsey’s murder – the police were already connecting the dots between the two murders when Leonard and Shipley confessed their crimes to a pastor at the Christian City Church at Brookvale in May 1995. In fact, the investigation’s high calibre was an outlier at a time when gay men across Sydney were being killed, and their deaths summarily dismissed by police as suicides or deaths by misadventure. In the first series of the true-crime podcast Bondi Badlands, which highlighted the murders of newsreader Ross Warren and barman John Russell in 1989 at Bondi, and a spate of other deaths across Sydney at the time, listeners heard how the police, time and time again, failed victims and their families.

Stephen Dempsey, Rolfe’s former partner turned friend and business associate, was murdered in 1994.Credit: SMH

But what Rolfe found the most difficult in the aftermath of Dempsey’s murder was the lack of emotional assistance on offer. “After the funeral, I got in touch with a support group. I needed to be with people who understood how I was feeling.” Once he’d gained what he thought was sufficient experience, Rolfe founded his own court support group, assisting victims’ families to pen letters to police and hone their victim impact statements, and being present for them during the often harrowing trials of those who’d killed their loved ones. Rolfe talks about this role in a new series of Bondi Badlands, produced for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and hosted by me. He estimates he’s supported victims’ families in more than 60 murder trials through his group Support After Murder, which is financed by donations.

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One of those Rolfe has assisted is Steve Johnson, older brother of American mathematician Scott Johnson, whose crumpled body was found on the rocks at Blue Fish Point at Sydney’s North Head in December 1988. For decades dismissed as a suicide by police, the case became one of the most high-profile in Australian criminal history.

Scott Johnson: his 1988 death was dismissed by police as suicide.

“I first met Steve Johnson in 2007, when he was out here with his son Reuben,” Rolfe recalls. As Rolfe was to learn later, the police didn’t contact Steve Johnson after his brother’s death: the heartbreaking news was delivered by the father of Scott’s partner, Michael Noone – when Steve called back, Noone was at the morgue identifying Scott’s body. After Steve arrived in Sydney from the US a few days later, he was told in no uncertain terms by the police that his brother had taken his own life. “A young constable … just faced me down and said, ‘This is where people go to jump, mate. Especially homosexuals,’” recalls Steve in the new episodes of the podcast. “‘Did you know your brother was homosexual?’”

Finally, in 2018, nearing the 30th anniversary of Scott’s death, the then-NSW police commissioner, Mick Fuller, having accepted the findings of the third inquest – that Scott was the victim of homicide – announced a new murder investigation, and assigned a veteran detective, Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans, to the case. The investigation, called Strike Force Welsford, stretched into the next two years. Then in May 2020, as Sydney started easing out of the first COVID-19 lockdown, a 49-year-old man, Scott Phillip White, was arrested by Yeomans and his team at a flat in Lane Cove, where White lived alone with his dog. “After Scott White was arrested, I attended every court hearing I was able to, except for one when COVID affected the court,” says Rolfe.

Steve Johnson, who spent decades lobbying for a further investigation into the death of his brother Scott.Credit: Janie Barrett

On the day in June 2023 when White was sentenced for manslaughter, in another courtroom in the NSW Supreme Court complex, 77-year-old Stanley Early was being convicted of the murder of Raymond Keam at a gay beat in Alison Park, Randwick, in 1987. Early was eventually sentenced to 22 years, which means he will almost certainly die in prison. During the trial, Rolfe offered his support to Keam’s son, Dane, who is also gay.

Rolfe was one of the key lobbyists for the world-first special commission of inquiry into the unsolved murders of LGBTIQ people between 1970 and 2010 in NSW that wrapped up last December. After many damning revelations, the inquiry revealed that the bloodstained clothes of murder victim Crispin Dye, a former manager of the rock band AC/DC, were not sent off for forensic analysis when the homicide happened in December 1993.

A DNA match last year identified one of three key suspects – alas, he’d died back in 2002. By coincidence, Rolfe knew Dye quite well. “He was a friend of mine for 10 years before he was murdered – I just get so frustrated when I hear of the stuff-ups caused by the police,” says Rolfe.

In a scathing report, NSW Supreme Court Justice John Sackar, who headed the inquiry, listed a raft of major failings in a long line of homicide investigations, including lost forensic evidence and incomplete files in a large number of cases, including the Bondi murders of Ross Warren and John Russell. In late February, Sackar spoke at a dawn service at the Rise Memorial in Bondi’s Marks Park to honour the lives lost to LGBTIQ hate crime.

Crispin Dye: the investigation into his 1993 homicide case ignored forensic evidence.

Staring out to sea as he listened to Sackar’s words, and remembering the tragic deaths that had happened on this headland, Rolfe found it a powerful moment. NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb was also in attendance, and within days she’d issued an apology for the force’s shortcomings in investigating the gay hate deaths.

While the apology was welcome, Rolfe says stronger medicine is now required: to his mind, the force needs to act on implementing the recommendations from the inquiry, which it has still not done. “I think the number of officers assigned to NSW Police’s Unsolved Homicide Team should be doubled,” Rolfe reflects. “What’s stopping retired former police officers from being employed on a contract basis to investigate these unsolved homicides?” Rolfe also believes it’s beyond time for the murders of Ross Warren and John Russell to be re-investigated (police refuse to confirm whether this might happen because “the review into the recommendations from the [inquiry] is still ongoing”).

This August marks the 30th anniversary of Stephen Dempsey’s death. Now in his early 80s, Rolfe says he still thinks about his lost friend most days, especially when taking his routine walk along Balmoral Beach in the soft light of dawn. He dislikes the word “closure”, which is often bandied about after a body is found or a killer sent to prison. There is no closure; memories and love can never be banished, nor should they. What then, other than the passage of time, has eased the pain of losing Dempsey in such horrendous circumstances? “Supporting people,” Rolfe answers simply. “No one should be alone in their grief.”

For further information on Support After Murder, contact Peter Rolfe on [e-mail].

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