Lindsey Rose — the affable drinking buddy who turned out to be a multiple murderer
WHEN Lindsey Rose walked into his local, a young Campbell McConachie welcomed the company of a man who was always good for a chat and a laugh — then a mugshot was shown on the TV news.
Book extract
Don't miss out on the headlines from Book extract. Followed categories will be added to My News.
LINDSEY Rose is one of Australia’s most infamous killers — guilty of five murders in the 1980s and 90s — but for years Campbell McConachie knew him only as a charming drinking buddy.
Once he learned of his mate’s crimes, he had to know more and went on to interview Rose in jail more than 25 times.
The result was his first book, The Fatalist — now one of five short-listed in the Best True Crime category at this year’s Ned Kelly Awards.
This is an edited extract:
Chapter 2
When I first drank beer with Lindsey he’d already killed three people. Oh, we had no idea.
He’d walk into the front bar of the Burwood Hotel and he’d scan the room. To the eyes he met and knew he’d nod a hello, or perhaps he’d bellow it if it was late-night noisy, and if I’d looked up from the form guide or the pool table I’d look away and hope it was me he came to talk to. He was ebullient and he would give you his full attention. It was 1988 and, it turned out, we barely knew him at all.
The stagecoach began running from Sydney to Parramatta in 1814 and — if it survived the muddy track and the prolific bushrangers — it would stop and change horses at Burwood, about halfway. When I moved to Burwood in 1988 the muddy track had long since been transformed into Parramatta Road and those bushrangers … well, they’d long died out, of course, but their presence echoed through the decades, living on in subsequent generations of desperate, broken men.
Burwood was a staging area for me too: a twenty-minute train ride to my city office job and a bit longer the other way to Macquarie University, where I studied three nights a week. I suppose Burwood must have been a fairly sleepy suburb overall, but my ant-trails only took me along two busy streets — Burwood Road (the train station and the Burwood Hotel) and Belmore Street (past the shopping centre car park to our block of flats) — so it was always a bustling hive of activity to me.
The Burwood Hotel had a saloon bar with two pool tables and a linoleum floor and a lounge bar at the back. We drank in the saloon bar, the ‘front bar’. At the end of every night the barmaid, Jean, would call last drinks and we’d get in another round and stay put until she was screaming at us to F--- off and go home the lot of youse because, unlike us, she had somewhere better to be. They may have actually hosed down the floor after we left each night, though I couldn’t say for sure.
I was there with my flatmates Eric and Steve most nights. If you’ve ever done it, you’ll know — spend twenty hours a week in your suburban hotel and you soon get to know the other regulars, the ‘locals’.
There were maybe twenty hard-core locals at the Burwood Hotel. I didn’t know their last names, their phone numbers; we didn’t send each other Christmas cards. But I’d got to know some of them well enough that after work I’d cross Burwood Road from the train station and walk straight in and there’d always be someone I knew to have a chat with, or a game of pool. And often that someone was Lindsey.
True crime book extract: How tiny clue led to Suitcase Baby’s killer
His attendance pattern was patchy — a few times a week for long periods then we wouldn’t see him for months. He had no issue telling us about the brothel he was involved in out west in Campbelltown. The girls were all looked after properly and the local cops got their cut and it was spread around so all the wheels were oiled. Occasionally a green copper would come in and start hassling them and Lindsey would just make a phone call and the problem would go away. I’d heard of prostitution being sanctioned by the cops but it was still an eye-opener to meet someone who would tell you all about it.
Lindsey was good for a chat and a laugh and I remember having drunken one-to-one conversations with him late at night around the pool tables about matters of great philosophical weight — matters so weighty that I remember not a single detail.
And he tended to be the ringleader for extracurricular activities including a series of ‘Burwood Boys’ Nights Out’. I only attended one: a night on the Sydney Showboat. Seventeen of us sat at a long table watching the leggy burlesque show and the boys were getting a bit rowdy but watching each other like schoolkids to see how far we were going to push it (which wasn’t very far).
Another night, a few of us ended up back at Lindsey’s place and Chinese Phil cooked us squid, melt-in-your-mouth, the best I have tasted to this day. And then months would go by before we saw Lindsey again.
As soon as I’d moved in with Eric and Steve I’d joined the fortnightly low-stakes poker game that they’d been playing for years with these older blokes. Chinese Phil eventually became a regular player and one night Lindsey tagged along with Phil. By then I was living in Summer Hill with my girlfriend and more than a dozen of us crammed into our two-bedroom, rented semi. Lindsey rolled up blind drunk with a few grand stuffed down his sock — from a Trifecta win that day, he said — and became the life and rowdy soul of the party. As far as I recall, that poker game was the last time I saw Lindsey as a free man. That was 1994. He’d killed another two by then. Still we knew none of it.
Three years later the late-night TV news showed a police mug shot. The face looked familiar. According to the report, one Lindsey Robert Rose was a person of interest in relation to the murder of two prostitutes at a brothel in the Sydney suburb of Gladesville on Valentine’s Day in 1994. I looked at the face and I heard them say Lindsey Rose and I thought of the Lindsey from the Burwood whose last name I hadn’t known and then I remembered that I’d heard, a few times, people call him Rosie. Even though I’d recognised his face in the mug shot I needed this last clue — Rose, Rosie — to defeat my disbelief. It was him.
I called out to my girlfriend — she’d met him at the poker game — and all she could say was ‘F---ing hell.’
My mind was racing because I’d known him well enough, enjoyed his company, and even though he’d run a brothel nothing like this had even crossed my mind. When Steve heard the news he reacted with a kind of bemused exasperation: ‘Oh mate, what did he think he was doing?’ Eric couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it — to this day he thinks Lindsey must be taking the fall for someone else.
Two weeks later my insides were still churning.
Plotting with a serial killer: The man who tried to break out of jail with Milat
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. One day I’d found a bullet on the floor beside the pool table at the Burwood. I trousered it, kept it for a few months for no good reason and eventually threw it out with the rubbish. And here was a man who hung about in that same hotel — a pub where you could find a bullet on the floor — and he ran a business of dubious legality, claimed to have paid off corrupt police and knew how to handle himself. But young (nineteen when I met him), naïve and self-absorbed as I was, still no alarm bells had rung.
I’d never seen him lose his temper, let alone get into a fight, but twice I’d seen him avoid fights by menace. Both times the same thing: some drunk guy arguing about the game of pool, whose coin was up next, and Lindsey stepped in and the guy kept arguing and Lindsey — I can picture him clearly in my mind’s eye — would hunch down a little with his head pushed forward, look him right in the eye, point a finger in his face and say: ‘Mate, I’m telling you, I am not the guy you want to f--- with. Let me do you a favour, you do not want to mess with me.’ And he said it with such vehemence that the other guy would back away. After seeing his face on the TV news I thought back to those moments, and the subtext of his threats, and immediately knew that he’d done these things that the police on TV alleged that he had.
Two women lost their lives to Lindsey Rose at Gladesville in 1994 and three other people before that.
The walls of their families’ lives came crashing down and so did those of Lindsey’s ex-wife and teenage daughter when police told them some of the history of this man — former lover, loving father — the history of a stranger.
My life carried on as before, but occasionally I’d think about Lindsey and every time it did my head in all over again. Eventually I went to the State Library and read the newspaper articles. The women at Gladesville had both been shot, though one also had her throat cut. In 1984 it was a man and a woman — both shot. And in 1987 he stabbed a woman to death during a break-in. He was sometimes labelled a former ambulance officer and other times a hitman.
A few phone calls revealed that a copy of the judgment from his trial could be obtained from the relevant court house in the city. When I arrived to collect it I stood at the window; the registrar was out but had left the whole court file for me. The adjacent window was used for receiving bail applications and the man next to me looked uncomfortable in the suit which didn’t hide all of his tattoos. The clerk let me in the side door, into the office, to take a photocopy of the judgment. I was left on my own and I had this fat file with more than two hundred pages and the judgment was only thirty. The other pages were copies of documents produced at trial and I looked over my shoulder and didn’t ask in case the answer was no and kept on copying. I escaped with the first hundred pages and I felt like a super-sleuth.
Those pages contained detailed accounts of three murders. Years later Lindsey signed an authority form and I was given legitimate access to the whole file and I copied the rest.
But after that initial foray I took those ill-gotten pages home and read for the first time a forensic examiner’s report of injuries sustained by a murder victim. The reality, the horror, of the violent extinguishment of a human life by another struck me in a way that television murder mysteries do not.
As I turned those pages I imagined a ruinous despair haunting the victims’ loved ones for the rest of their lives.
And then I thought back to the Lindsey Rose I’d last drunk with ten years earlier — a relaxed, confident, sociable individual by all outward appearances. How could I reconcile the man I knew with this so-called hitman who had willingly killed five people?
His inner life, his dark side, was hidden from me and I wasn’t the only one. I’ve since spoken to a number of people who knew Lindsey well and that includes his ex-wife, Lydia, who once wrote to me that Lindsey’s choices remained a mystery to her. She had married a different bloke to the one who presented himself as a killer.
But, back in 2004, the visit to the court house had only intensified my curiosity and I wrote to Lindsey, asked if I could visit him in prison.
• This is an edited extract from The Fatalist by Campbell McConachie published by Hachette Australia, RRP $32.99
• This year’s Ned Kelly Awards ceremony is on August 26
MY FATHER WAS A MULTIPLE MURDERER
LAST year lawyer Elisha Rose unburdened herself of a dark secret — her father was serial killer Lindsey Rose.
“The only thing that made sense to me for a long time was that my father had created an imbalance in this world by killing innocent people; my duty was to balance the scales. No matter that the debt was not mine, I knew I had to right his wrongs,” she said.