One life taken, another ruined in former cop Cliff Lockwood’s murder acquittal
CLIFF Lockwood was a big cop acquitted of murdering criminal figure Gary Abdallah, but he still paid a high price after being accused in court of executing a kneeling man like “a dog on a short leash”, writes Andrew Rule. NEW PODCAST — LISTEN NOW.
Behind the Scenes
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A FEW weeks before Gary Abdallah was shot in Carlton, detectives met to raid a house where they suspected the wanted man was hiding.
They came from the Major Crime squad and the Armed Robbery squad, which had been heavily involved in events leading to the murder of two young policemen some months earlier in Walsh St, South Yarra.
The raiding party arrived at 4am and split up to enter the house through different doors. There were no lights. They didn’t want to alert sleeping occupants before sledgehammers hit the door locks.
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Luckily, one Armed Robbery detective was carrying a baseball bat and not a shotgun as he raced in, or it might have ended in another fatality.
When he saw an arm sticking towards him in the gloom, he swung at it like Babe Ruth.
It turned out the arm was not Gary Abdallah’s nor one of his associate’s.
The bat-swinger realised his mistake as soon as his victim started swearing at him: the injured man was another detective, Rod Porter.
No bones were broken but it showed that when it comes to split-second reactions in armed raids, even seasoned crime fighters can make rookie errors. When adrenaline is pumping and nerves are jumping, anything can happen.
The events that ended in Abdallah’s death started six months earlier with the killing of Graeme Jensen at Narre Warren by a group of detectives, which prompted the horrific “payback” murder of Steve Tynan and Damian Eyre in Walsh St the next day.
Years later, a film maker made a searing fictional account inspired by those events. He called it Animal Kingdom.
In real life, the savage sequel to the Walsh St story shares the film’s themes of blind revenge, misplaced loyalty and the savagery of vigilante “justice” and vendettas.
It is the story of Abdallah and Cliff Lockwood. One killed the other — and destroyed himself in the process.
The Walsh St murders triggered an intense police operation for months, mostly out of public sight. Detectives pressured the underworld in a way hardly seen since Ryan and Walker killed a warder as they escaped from Pentridge in 1965.
Cliff Lockwood was a hulking junior detective at City West police station, keen to make his name as a hardnose cop by helping out the Ty-Eyre task force.
He was “an enthusiast”, recalls one former member of the task force.
“He was six foot three, massive across the chest and with hands like dinner plates. A strapping bloke from the bush.”
Lockwood, originally from central Victoria, had worked at Flemington and knew many of Graeme Jensen’s criminal mates such as Jedd Houghton, shot dead by police in a caravan near Bendigo a month after the murders.
Some in the task force thought Lockwood was a loose cannon. It’s possible others exploited his willingness to be an attack dog.
His target: Abdallah, a violent thief suspected of supplying the Walsh St shooters with a car.
Abdallah hardened suspicions by hiding from police — but in March 1989 made the mistake of deliberately running his car over a man in the city who turned out to be a senior policeman’s son.
He was also wanted over the arson of a Northcote disco.
Lockwood was among police who took witness statements over the car incident.
Police now had at least two strong reasons to arrest Abdallah with maximum force.
Abdallah was so spooked that detectives could not find him at his mother’s Coburg address for months after the Walsh St shootings.
Family members supposedly told police he had a gun and was prepared to use it because he feared being killed.
One day Abdallah turned up at St Kilda Rd police complex with a lawyer.
He refused to comment on the Walsh St shootings and was charged over the disco fire. To his apparent surprise and unease, he got bail. He had to report to police three times a week but that didn’t make him easy to find.
Because Lockwood was investigating Abdallah for the city hit-and-run, he got to meet the task force members. He got on well with the Armed Robbery members in it.
On March 21, detectives finally traced Abdallah to his hide-out in Drummond St, Carlton. On March 23, police “bugged” the flat.
On April 7, the bug was removed on grounds Abdallah was saying nothing relevant to Walsh St and, in any case, was moving out two days later when the lease expired.
It was time for Lockwood to interview him over the hit-and-run.
Was the “bug” removed by coincidence? Or was it a conspiracy to give “shooters” a chance to arrest him while not under surveillance?
Lockwood and his partner Dermot Avon were supposed to detain Abdallah in the street outside the flat, then notify the task force.
They spotted him on the afternoon of April 9, loading furniture on a trailer. When he drove off they followed, pulled him over and arrested him over a knife found in his pants.
It was grounds to return and search the flat with him, a move that would later raise eyebrows.
Lockwood took Abdallah upstairs to a bedroom.
He insisted later that Abdallah produced “what I believed to be a .357 Magnum revolver” and menaced him. People next door heard a series of bangs and shouts of “Put it down”.
When three task force detectives got to the scene, one spoke to Lockwood outside and the other two ran inside. They found an ashen Dermot Avon giving Abdallah mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Abdallah had a finger missing and a bullet hole in the back of his head. The room was spattered with blood and body matter. A heavy chrome replica pistol was lying on the floor.
One of the detectives, Joe Noonan, was instantly dubious about what had happened.
He didn’t believe a professional crook would wave a toy gun at two armed police. It would be suicidal.
If the shooting was deliberate, he believes, Lockwood acted alone, out of Avon’s line of sight.
“Dermot Avon was inherently a decent bloke, which was why he tried to save Abdallah. Whereas Lockwood was an a***hole,” Noonan said much later.
Abdallah died six weeks later.
Lockwood would ultimately be acquitted of murder despite having firing six shots from his own revolver and taking Avon’s pistol to fire a seventh.
Suspicious minds naturally saw this overkill as murderous intent. But the defence carefully constructed by Robert Richter QC argued the opposite: that the frenzied trigger-pulling proved just how rattled Lockwood was.
A coroner and a jury gave him the benefit of the doubt — but no one else did.
He was dogged by an accusation shouted at him in court: that he’d executed a kneeling man like “a dog on a short leash”.
Lockwood was lost. After a small business failed, he tried to make a fresh start in Darwin, but the Northern Territory Police rejected him.
He took up taxi driving and bad company.
The last time he hit the news was when he was sentenced to 15 months jail in 2010 for trafficking “speed” smuggled from Asia.
The big man was in tears as he was led away. Proof of the saying “Be careful what you wish for”.
Originally published as One life taken, another ruined in former cop Cliff Lockwood’s murder acquittal