Rockhampton barrister Ross Lo Monaco talks about Peter Dutney’s death and his role in the Natasha Ryan case
From ghosts in the barristers’ chambers to being thrust into international headlines over one of Australia’s most notorious cases, a semi-retired Rockhampton barrister has reflected on his colourful career. Read the special feature here.
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A semi-retired barrister who worked in Central Queensland for the past 41 years has reflected on his colourful career, including the time he was thrust into international headlines over Rockhampton’s notorious ‘the girl in the cupboard’ case.
Ross Lo Monaco, who hails from the small town of Silkwood in Far North Queensland, departed Rockhampton last month after 31 years based in the town and 10 previously in Gladstone.
The Morning Bulletin sat down with Mr Lo Monaco ahead of his departure for Tasmania to talk through some of the most memorable cases, clients and adventures during his time in Central Queensland.
From ghosts in the barristers’ chambers to holding back the hungry journalists who wanted photographs and the tell-all exclusive interview the world wanted to see, Mr Lo Monaco’s story telling ability – which is evident to anyone who has watched him defend clients in trials – led to some witty tales and insight into how the longstanding barrister thinks.
In a rather roundabout way of answering the question ‘how did you end up in a photograph in the back of a car with Rockhampton’s Natasha Ryan and celebrity agent Max Markson’, Mr Lo Monaco detailed a saga starting with a colleague calling him to assist advising Scott Black – the man who had helped Ms Ryan stay hidden for five years.
It was before the infamous ‘girl in the cupboard’ event that Mr Lo Monaco’s involvement in the case began.
He said his colleague, Joanne Madden, had asked him to assist her with Mr Black as he signed a sworn affidavit that he did not know where the Rockhampton teenager was.
Then, during the much publicised 2003 trial of Leonard John Fraser, who was accused of murdering Ms Ryan along with three other women, Mr Lo Monaco met Ms Ryan.
He said she told him she had seen on the television Fraser was being accused of murdering her and contacted her friend to ask for advice about what to do.
Mr Lo Monaco said the friend then asked an adult, massage therapist Leonard Edward John Bauer, who contacted police via an anonymous letter and told them where to find Ms Ryan.
Ms Ryan had been in hiding since August 1998 when she was 14 and Mr Black 21.
Mr Lo Monaco described the media reaction to Ms Ryan’s discovery akin to hungry vultures.
He said he was contacted to assist Ms Ryan deal with the media frenzy.
Mr Lo Monaco said his phone and fax machine went off at all hours of the day and night with requests for interviews and photographs.
He said he arranged to escort Ms Ryan out of her house and to his car for the media to get photographs and video footage of her for their stories, on the proviso they did not ask her any questions.
Mr Lo Monaco said he then drove her around and returned her home, escorting her to the door in front of cameras.
He said once, he answered a call not knowing who was calling and it turned out to be the BBC in London live on air.
Mr Lo Monaco said his father, who had immigrated to Australia from Sicily, received a phone call from a friend in Spain saying the Rockhampton barrister was in the media in Spain.
He said one guy in Philadelphia offered to take him bear hunting.
Mr Lo Monaco said a CQUniversity lecturer he went to for advice told him the story was the biggest in the world at the time.
He said that was when he was advised to contact celebrity agent Max Markson to assist Ms Ryan.
But it won’t be the Natasha Ryan story that Mr Lo Monaco will be remembered for by the Central Queensland legal fraternity, and former Rockhampton-based Judge Michael Burnett.
“Mr Lo Monaco was a fierce advocate who let no question go unanswered and advanced every submission in the unrelenting pursuit of the defence of his client’s interests,” Judge Burnett told The Morning Bulletin.
One of the was skin doctor Dr Elamurugan Arumugam who was found not guilty by a jury in 2018 for some sexual assault allegations made by patients and not guilty by a second jury for remaining sexual assault allegations against patients in 2019.
Then there was the time the court was halfway through sentencing proceedings for a man when Mr Lo Monaco decided his client wasn’t guilty of one of the charges.
The client, who had a severe criminal history, was being sentenced in the Rockhampton District Court on March 31, 2017, when Mr Lo Monaco threw the spanner in the works.
The man, who can’t be named, was facing a charge of burglary by breaking, choking another person and assault occasioning bodily harm.
The defendant had entered his house through an unlocked window and the victim locked herself in a bedroom and stood against the door.
The man left his residence, he went next door to drink for a few hours, and returned home to find he had been locked out of the house.
After the prosecution finished presenting its case, Mr Lo Monaco raised technicalities around the issue of burglary by breaking.
He submitted that charge referred to someone breaking into the dwelling of another person, but the defendant was living at the residence at the time of the incident.
Gory eye-gouging case
Mr Lo Monaco recalled one case where his client instructed they contested the charges and when the trial started, he did not know what the defence case was.
This was the case where his client had been accused of gouging out someone’s eye while at a pub on the Capricorn Coast.
“The eyeball landed on the floor of the hotel,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
“And somebody saw it, actually picked it up and wrapped it in tissue paper and followed the ambulance up to the hospital.
“It was a long trial because it (alleged assault) was at a pub and a lot of people were there.”
He said it was the eye surgeon specialist witness he cross examined that revealed what his client’s defence was.
Mr Lo Monaco said he established with the specialist there was no injury to the eye socket or orbit in the incident.
He said he asked the doctor to explain how this eyeball could have popped out in the pub where it wasn’t subjected to surgery.
Mr Lo Monaco said the doctor explained if one was to press a particular spot near the eyeball, he said ‘if you can get the finger in there and hook it behind the eyeball, you can actually pull it out, pop it out with no injury to anything’.
He said he put a scenario to the doctor whereby his client was at the pub at a party and someone has come up from behind, put him in a headlock, was choking him so he couldn’t breath and he has reached back to the assailant to try and force him off, but has hit this spot near the eyeball and the assailant would automatically react by pulling backwards.
Mr Lo Monaco said the doctor told the jury yes, the person whose eye socket was touched in that spot would react by pulling back.
That was the defendant’s defence – self defence.
Mr Lo Monaco said he recalled sometime after that, he was getting a taxi home after drinking in town and the taxi driver wouldn’t let him pay the fare.
He said a conversation with the taxi driver revealed he had recognised Mr Lo Monaco as the man who got his son acquitted for the eye gouging alleged assault.
Balancing wins and losses
Mr Lo Monaco, who accepted the comment made by his colleagues at the barristers’ chambers that he had probably defended more people in trials in the district court than any other barrister in Queensland, said it was the defendants who you think “should never get convicted of this” which are the ones he worried about.
“The funny thing is that when you’ve got a difficult trial, in other words, it’s hopeless, you often feel as though you do a better job,” he said.
One of the people who has watched Mr Lo Monaco in trials a lot said the longest closing address he gave went for six hours and 22 minutes.
However, Mr Lo Monaco said there was one closing address that went for two days, but to be fair, it was for a five-week long trial in Cairns about extortion.
Mr Lo Monaco said he once had three trials running at the same time with the first one having the jury go out for deliberation and the presiding judge wanted to start the next one while the jury was out.
“The most common question you get as a criminal barrister is ‘how do you feel getting a guilty person off’,” he said.
Mr Lo Monaco said there was a United Kingdom decision handed down when capital punishment was still a sentence whereby it was said: “It’s better to let nine guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man”.
He said in America, since DNA had been used in criminal cases, a lot of innocent men had been taken off death row.
Mr Lo Monaco said one night at a pub, a prison officer shocked him by asking this: “How do you feel when you lose a trial and you know the guy was innocent, you really genuinely believe he was innocent?”
He said he replied he was “pretty lucky that it’s only happened to him a few times” in his career and “you feel like s---”.
Ghosts in the barristers’ chambers
While Mr Lo Monaco is quick in the mind while defending his clients and may appear tough, looking at the horrible photographs and videos included in evidence in cases, he did have one tiny problem which led him to refusing to work in the barristers’ chambers at night – he fears ghosts.
“I’m not saying there’s a presence there, but I think there’s something in there,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
He said the barristers’ chambers used to be the Supreme Court with cells downstairs.
“Apparently people were convicted and sentenced to death in that courthouse,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
He said somebody had an exorcist, or whatever you call them, come in from a church and reported weird sounds and visions.
“Mostly women crying and carrying on … he’s assuming they might be the mothers of the people who were executed,” he said.
Mr Lo Monaco said this person also claimed there was a manacled person downstairs who refused to leave as they knew they were going to hell.
He said there was a passage between his office and the registry that passed the cell where this alleged manacled spirit was squatting.
Mr Lo Monaco said he blocked it off with a bookcase.
He said there were other historical elements still in the chambers, such as writing on walls and a portrait of a trooper, that the government should invest in preserving and possibly use the building as a tourist attraction.
Mr Lo Monaco said a former colleague, who was a very serious person, told him a story once of when they were in the legal library one night and “books started falling off the shelf for no apparent reason”.
He said the colleague told him he left immediately and never went back.
Mr Lo Monaco said even clients had seen spirits in the chambers with one asking his secretary who was sitting in a chair that appeared to the secretary to be empty.
He said there was a story that some guy took photographs of orbs inside the building once, but he wasn’t sure how true that was.
Tragic death of legal colleague
All ghost stories aside, there is one memory that will forever haunt the Italian Catholic barrister – the moment one of his friends died before his eyes.
Mr Lo Monaco was friends with Supreme Court judge Justice Peter Dutney who died during an outback bike-riding holiday Mr Dutney arranged for himself and Mr Lo Monaco.
For the first time ever, Mr Lo Monaco has revealed to the media what took place in the lead up to one of the most heartbreaking experiences in his life.
“Peter loved marathons and riding pushbikes,” he said.
“It got to a stage where half a dozen of us would meet up with him at six in the morning and, you know, do a 30-40 kilometre ride and then have coffee.
“We sort of gelled right from the beginning.
“He was an all-round nice guy. I’ve never met anyone that’s had a bad word to say about him.”
He said after Justice Dutney relocated to Brisbane, he called Mr Lo Monaco up and suggested they go on a riding holiday. The problem was, they couldn’t agree on a European destination.
“So it never ever eventuated,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
“One day he phoned me up out of the blue and said ‘I found it’.”
The trip was called Desert Dreaming.
“I was pretty good at geography,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
“I didn’t recall a desert in Europe. I said where’s this f---ing desert?’”
He said Justice Dutney told him they left from Alice Springs and would ride through the desert.
Mr Lo Monaco said he did some research about this trip and it was “horrendous looking at it”.
Despite Mr Lo Monaco’s reluctance at a riding holiday through the Australian outback, Justice Dutney talked him into it.
Mr Lo Monaco stressed an important part to the story was that he wasn’t a reliable person and had not paid his deposit on this holiday when Justice Dutney was asked to return to Brisbane to take on an additional role in the Supreme Court in Brisbane
“So I’m not the most reliable person,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
He said Justice Dutney told him if he committed to this riding holiday, he would put the offer on hold, risking losing the offer.
Justice Dutney left one of his bikes under Mr Lo Monaco’s house and would travel up to Rockhampton from time to time to ride with Mr Lo Monaco – a heavy smoker and lover of alcohol – to get him into shape for the holiday.
And then there was a last minute emergency that could have seen Justice Dutney riding with strangers instead of having at least one friend.
The night before the trip in 2009, Mr Lo Monaco got a phone call from his sister – a close friend of the family’s wife had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was about to go under the knife but the outlook was fatal.
Mr Lo Monaco said this family friend – Michael – was like family and whenever he (Mr Lo Monaco) returned to Far North Queensland, “we were sort of inseparable. We were very, very close friends”.
He said he was unsure what to do as he had made this big (for him) commitment to Justice Dutney but felt like he should be at Michael’s side during this horrible ordeal.
Mr Lo Monaco said his father told him to go on the riding trip and support his friend afterwards.
He said he phoned Michael from Alice Springs and told him he would be on this riding trip for two weeks and after he had a trial or two he had to get through back in Rockhampton, but would be straight up to the Far North as soon as he possibly could.
Mr Lo Monaco said there was a 10-day period where he didn’t see any news due to being in the middle of the desert and the first time he saw news on this trip, he found out another mate of his had died – Dr Alister Rodgers who had contracted Hendra from an infected horse at a Cawarral horse stud.
“Peter died the next night,” he said.
“The next day, we leave the Pink Roadhouse (at Oodnadatta in South Australia).
“It was a f---ing long road, you know; probably about 80 kilometres … not a sealed bitumen highway, we’re talking about a rough, rough desert track.
“At one stage we rode into the wind.”
Mr Lo Monaco said when they stopped for morning tea, they ran into some people they had met in Oodnadatta and got talking, but afterwards “we go like f---ing bats out of hell to make up time”.
Mr Lo Monaco said despite photos taken about 11 days into the ride showing him looking fit, he was exhausted from riding into the wind most of the day.
“You know, you’re pedalling and pedalling; and you’re actually moving slower than you could walk,” he said.
“It was really hard work.
“We got to the point where we were about 10kms from the Painted Desert (Coober Pedy in South Australia), which was about five kilometres from this station where we were staying for that night.”
Mr Lo Monaco said the other person on this holiday – a stranger to both he and Justice Dutney – was a woman who was “amazing” and could “ride forever”.
He said she decided she had ridden enough for the day and had her bike put on top of the support car with the group.
Mr Lo Monaco said he decided he too would stop riding for the day.
He said he told Justice Dutney he too should stop riding for the day but he said “no, no” and took off riding the last 15 kilometres of the day’s trip.
“We drove onwards to the Painted Desert and took photos,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
“And he (Justice Dutney) looked f---ed.”
He said he again tried to get Justice Dutney to call it quits with riding for the day, but he wouldn’t stop.
Mr Lo Monaco said they arrived at the camp about 6.30pm, built a fire, ate some cabanossi and cheese, opened up a bottle of wine and relaxed.
He said they had showers, took some medication to help deal with the strain the ride was putting on their bodies and went for dinner.
Mr Lo Monaco recalled Justice Dutney telling him, after looking around the area, that it reminded him of Charleville – where he grew up – and he found solace in that.
Mr Lo Monaco said about 7.30pm, they decided it was bedtime.
He said he stopped to have a cigarette
“You know when you are around a campfire, you look at the coals?,” he said.
“No one was talking. They were waiting for me to finish my smoke.
“Then I heard this loud gasping sound.
“I just looked up at Peter. He just flew off the back of his stool and hit the ground.”
Mr Lo Monaco said he at first thought Justice Dutney was mucking around in a way of teasing him about his smoking habit, but once he realised it wasn’t a joke, he freaked out.
Mr Lo Monaco said there was a doctor from Brisbane at the camp who came to Justice Dutney’s side, quickly surveyed the scene and said ‘who knows him best to get to the homestead quick’, explaining when they called for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, they would want to know details like age, health conditions, etc.
“I’m embarrassed to say it now but I remember feeling relieved,” he said.
“You know? I didn’t want to see what I was seeing.”
He said he recalled others at the station rummaging through medical supplies that could have equipped an outback hospital, grabbing a shot of adrenaline and other supplies to help Justice Dutney.
Mr Lo Monaco said they worked on Justice Dutney for about an hour.
He said later, when emergency services arrived, he was interviewed by a police officer they had come across during their trip that day.
Mr Lo Monaco said the officer told him he needed him to identify the body.
“I said ‘I know who it is. It’s Peter Dutney. ‘He’s a Supreme Court justice. There’s going to be a lot of news when this breaks in Queensland,” he said.
“I felt really weird leaving him in the desert.”
Mr Lo Monaco said they were in a no phone zone and it wasn’t until about 2pm the next day that he got reception.
“The news had broken in Queensland and my daughter had woken up, gone onto Facebook and spotted a post by (one of Justice Dutney’s children), saying how much he loved his dad … she thought we’d both died,” he said.
“As soon as we got into range, my phone just f---ing came alive.
“It was a bit like the Natasha Ryan situation.”
Mr Lo Monaco said he had messages from his now wife, then partner, Zoe Craven about something unrelated to the death of Justice Dutney, and his daughter was frantically trying to reach him.
He said things were a bit of a haze after leaving the station, but he recalled going with Justice Dutney’s body to Coober Pedy, then Adelaide.
“I’d arranged a flight the next day and I couldn’t stay in the room,” Mr Lo Monaco said.
“You know, I just couldn’t be alone.”
He said it took a few weeks for Justice Dutney’s body to get back to Queensland.
Meanwhile, he had phoned Michael to get an update on his wife’s cancer battle and explained it would be a few weeks before he could return to Far North Queensland.
Mr Lo Monaco said Michael was normally really nice but on this occasion, he screamed down the phone, saying “I’m f---ing sick of this. Everyone’s telling me what to do. I can’t handle this anymore.”
He said he tried to calm Michael down and said he had to go but would talk with him again soon.
Mr Lo Monaco said it was after Justice Dutney’s funeral when he got a call from his father telling him Michael had died by suicide.
He said the year (2008) before all of this, his (Mr Lo Monaco’s) mother died from pancreatic cancer.
Mr Lo Monaco said the time after these three deaths felt like “a dream”.
“I just didn’t feel right,” he said.
“Eventually, you know, you get over it, but yeah, that affected me.”
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