Life & Crimes with Andrew Rule: The downward spiral of underworld widow Wendy Peirce
She was once one of Victoria’s most colourful ladies, but life has faded underworld widow Wendy Peirce, with a downward spiral seeing the formerly hardened gangland lioness jailed, widowed, destitute and grieving a lost daughter. NEW PODCAST — LISTEN NOW.
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She was once one of Victoria’s most colourful ladies. But life has faded underworld widow Wendy Peirce.
She’s a shadow of the defiant woman she once was, a hardened lioness trying to protect her pride.
There was a time that Peirce might have been considered the most important woman in town.
As the star witness in the 1988 Walsh St shooting case of constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, Peirce was set to give explosive evidence against her own husband and family.
But her backflip on that promise to testify against husband Victor and others over the murders was the beginning of a downward spiral for Peirce, who would eventually find herself jailed, widowed, destitute and grieving a lost daughter.
THE WALSH ST MURDERS
Sympathy is thin on the ground for Peirce among police, and those who knew and loved Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre.
There are those who she say could rediscover some lost sunshine if she chose to tell the truth about the Walsh St police murders — by taking an oath at an inquest into the constables’ deaths.
Constables Tynan and Eyre were shot in cold blood in Walsh St, South Yarra after being sent there to check out an abandoned car on the night of October 12, 1988.
Both were shot at close range.
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There was little doubt that the pair were murdered as payback, 13 hours after armed robbery squad detectives shot dead career bandit Graeme Jensen, an associate of the infamous Pettingill crime clan.
Peirce’s defacto husband Victor was the son of Pettingill matriarch Kath Pettingill, and he was charged along with sibling Trevor Pettingill and associates Anthony Farrell and Peter McEvoy over the police murders.
She agreed to be a star prosecution witness againt the men, kept safe by moving from state to state and even staying put up north for a bit, “soaking up the sun in Townsville, all expenses paid”, as a Herald Sun report in 1991 stated.
She would then go on to deny her original version of events in the Supreme Court before a jury was empanelled, and her evidence was never heard at trial.
After a jury acquitted the four charged men, Peirce told the Herald Sun she was pressured into giving her original Walsh St version.
“I was not going to put my husband in for something he hadn’t done,” she said at the time.
Her tune would later change.
Peirce says she has never regretted hooking up with career criminal Victor Peirce, even though she herself was a young cleanskin with no run-ins with the law.
Victor was born into one of Victoria’s worst criminal families and proudly maintained its mean traditions.
As the Pettingill family were cemented by their harsh loyalty, Peirce remained equally staunch when it came to her own clan.
“My kids are my top priority,” she told the Herald Sun in 1991.
It was a fierce standard she would maintain, even as her life sank into a quagmire and her family and finances crumbled around her.
Not long after the Walsh St acquittal, Ms Peirce was charged with perjury.
At age 35 she did a prison stretch for her decision to reneg on her promise to give evidence.
‘ THE GANGLAND SLAYING OF VICTOR PEIRCE
Ten years later, in May 2002, Victor, aged 43, was gunned down in his car in Port Melbourne during Melbourne’s gangland war.
Hitman Andrew Veniamin, himself to later become a victim of the underworld conflict, pulled the trigger.
While it had been carefully planned for some time, it was over in moments: A getaway driver pulled up beside Victor’s car, Veniamin got out and fired a few shots through Victor’s window, and was gone.
As it happened, Peirce had been by Bay St not long before the shooting, stopping to speak to her then-estranged husband with their son and daughter. They lived nearby.
Peirce would later reveal that among Victor’s possessions, after his death, she found a note in his card holder with details of Veniamin’s home address, and car registration number.
Victor had wanted Veniamin dead, but Veniamin got there first.
Peirce’s farewell message to her partner was: “My life will be so empty now. You will always be my everything.”
She sparked public outrage when she applied for compensation over Victor’s murder, but claimed their four children were the true victims.
“I’m a secondary victim,” she said.
It would later be reported she and her four children received $153,000 in compensation.
TRAGEDY, COURT AND HARD TIMES
In June 2003 she pleaded guilty to hindering police and criminal damage.
When handing her a good behaviour bond, Magistrate Jelena Popovic said Peirce had become infamous “whether she wanted to be or not”.
When police announced a $100,000 reward for information about her husband’s murder, there was further outrage.
During a radio interview, outspoken broadcaster Derryn Hinch called her a “gangster’s moll” and said he would not pee on her if her “teeth were on fire”.
In July 2004, Peirce pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon and producing fraudulent documents in a spat over car ownership.
In October 2005 she went public over Walsh St, saying her late husband organised the killing of constables Tynan and Eyre as payback.
She said she lied to protect him.
In July 2008 she pleaded guilty to threatening and stalking two of Victor’s former mistresses.
In a message to one she wrote: “Don’t think for one moment that I haven’t forgotten you and will hunt you down like a mangy maggot that you are.”
She appealed a prison term.
The following year she copped a two-year 500-hour community-based order over $14,000 worth of unpaid driving and parking fines.
The magistrate was told Peirce often cared for her daughter’s baby. That daughter, Katie, was battling depression.
Detectives arrested Peirce in April 2009, and charged her in connection to a meat-cleaver attack on a man inside a Port Melbourne pub.
In what would be revealed as a case of mistaken identity, an armed man hacked the victim across the face.
Peirce, 53, and her daughter, 22, were charged with attempted murder and intentionally causing serious injury, with the allegation being that they ordered the attack over a bitter love triangle involving Katie and another young woman.
The man who hacked the wrong victim for a $100 payment pleaded guilty. He later reneged on his promise to give evidence, and the charges against Peirce and Katie were dropped.
Not long after, Katie was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose in a Greensborough house.
Family and friends believed she was killed with a potent “hot-shot” injection.
At the funeral Peirce wailed: “Katie, I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t bury my only daughter.”
Living in public housing, she was charged in January 2011 with shoplifting and later convicted and fined $600.
The court was told she stole out of “need rather than want”.
By 2014 she had become a struggling pensioner, unable to pay her traffic fines and fighting to keep her head above water.
She was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after Katie’s death and had been seeing a psychiatrist.
She was living on a $650 fortnightly disability support pension in public housing.
Originally published as Life & Crimes with Andrew Rule: The downward spiral of underworld widow Wendy Peirce
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