Opinion: Rat Pack haunted honest cop until the end

THE spectre of the “rat pack” of corrupt Queensland cops haunted a fine policewoman until her death.

IN NURSING homes across the city of Brisbane there are men and women quietly seeing out their lives, their achievements often lost with the passage of time, until they slip away, noticed just by close family and surviving friends.

One such quiet death occurred last week. She was Clare Therese Conaty, in her late 80s, and her life was one of great honesty and dignity. Her contribution to the state of Queensland should not just be noted, but loudly applauded.

Clare joined the Queensland Police Force in 1958, when females were a novelty in the ranks. Her working conditions at the time, in a force ripe with misogyny, simply defy imagination.

Still, her father Francis had been a police officer, and she followed in his footsteps. Her work from the outset involved a lot of undercover operations.

Shirley Brifman was found dead of a suspected drug overdose just weeks before she was due to be the chief witness against a senior Queensland detective in a perjury case.

In an interview with me years ago, on condition of anonymity, Clare told me of those early years, tracking prostitutes like Shirley Brifman through the seedy clubs and bars of Brisbane in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“She was a tough bird. I quite liked her,” Clare said of Brifman.

“I had to follow people she was associating with. She’d sit in the old Grand Central and I’d follow the fellow she was with.”

In March 1965, Clare and seven other women were the first to be sworn into the ranks as plainclothes officers and given sworn powers, the same as the men. They would not achieve equal pay for another five years.

For Clare and her contemporaries, there were as many dangers within the force as there were outside on the streets.

Under the commissionership of the corrupt Frank Bischof (1958-69), and working with his so-called Rat Pack of trusted boys – Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan – she had to keep on her guard.

“I really kept away from them,” she told me.

“The Rat Pack. Everyone knew about it then. That was the joke. I knew Murphy was on the take.

“I used to say things to Tony, to let him know I knew. But he’d just laugh. They were that bad. They used to laugh about taking the oath and telling lies in court.”

Frank Bischof

Terry Lewis

In the early 1970s Clare married top detective Don “Buck” Buchanan. Honest Ray Whitrod had become commissioner, and the force was fiercely divided in its loyalty.

Clare’s stepson David Buchanan said yesterday from Perth: “She initially did a lot of undercover work which was dangerous and stressful. She was very honest and very capable, and brilliant intellectually.

“But I do think she suffered a certain amount of intimidation and it took a fair bit out of her. It was a pretty hazardous kind of business. She had to be careful... you didn’t know who might put a contract out on you if you were on Whitrod’s side.”

Her funeral was held yesterday at Kangaroo Point, and a representative of Police Commissioner Ian Stewart’s office attended.

When I interviewed Clare several years ago to talk about Bischof and his boys, she refused to meet me in person.

She was still terrified, in her early 80s, that someone might find out she’d spoken about the past, and that she may come to physical harm.

What a tragedy that this good and honest police officer, who pledged an oath to the Queensland people and kept that oath, should have still felt intimidated by corrupt thugs in her twilight years, half a century after she’d been sworn into the force, and decades after she’d retired.

Here’s to Clare Conaty. PW5. Rest in peace after a job well done.