I Catch Killers podcast: Gary Jubelin, Jason Evers recall highs and lows of NSW Police
Detective Jason Evers thought he had already witnessed every possible way people could die — but it was the shark attack death of a 16-year-old at a Ballina beach which was the final straw for him. In part one of new podcast I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin, the retired detective reveals the inside story.
True Crime
Don't miss out on the headlines from True Crime. Followed categories will be added to My News.
In the debut episode of the I Catch Killers podcast with Gary Jubelin, former NSW homicide detective Jason Evers recalls the many crimes the pair worked together on solving. But it was while he was off-duty that Evers thought he was about to die.
Working at the local golf club, Jason Evers was helping close up after a shift when he heard a woman — one of his colleagues — suddenly scream from the next room.
He looked at the woman’s husband, another workmate.
“She’s probably seen a mouse,” the husband said.
Evers was an off-duty cop. An off-duty homicide detective, in fact, working a second job as many police officers do, to help pay the bills.
He walked through the adjoining door and straight into a sawn-off shotgun.
“It was pointed straight at my head. He said: ‘Get on the f**king ground.’ I went into cop mode and said: ‘Mate, you’re in charge, no dramas here’. I didn’t try and look at him. I hit the ground.”
The robber couldn’t have known Evers was a policeman — and Evers desperately didn’t want him to find out.
He lay on the concrete as the robber demanded the combination to the safe, which Evers didn’t have.
“He’s telling me to f**king shut up, I said (to another colleague): ‘Open the safe, it’s not our money, just give him the money’,” Evers says.
“He came back and put the shotgun to my head. I’m just chewing concrete thinking he’s going to pull the trigger.
“I thought ‘this is me done, and I’m f**king helpless here. I’m done. I had my badge in my pocket and I thought if he goes into my wallet I’m f**king dead’.”
Evers lay still, didn’t panic, and eventually the thief left.
“A week later he did another armed holdup and he shot the person in that and killed them,” Evers says in the debut episode of new podcast I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin, a six-part series launching today.
The episode was a long way from Evers’ experience of life as a policeman, and it changed him forever.
“I knew how it felt to be a victim from a personal point of view. I didn’t like pricks being able to do that to people,” Evers says.
“He didn’t pull the trigger for whatever reason that day. I felt the homicide victims that we dealt with didn’t get the same opportunity that I did. If I could make it that at least those pricks were found, or at least give their family some closure that my family wouldn’t have got if I’d been shot …”
Evers was the long time detective partner of Gary Jubelin, and the pair spent nine years on the road together investigating murders as they rose through the homicide squad.
The pair worked on hundreds of cases including the infamous Underbelly murders involving drug-dealing brothers Anthony and Andrew Perish – at the time the biggest murder investigation in the state’s history.
The investigation began with the discovery of a dismembered body in seven plastic bags, weighted down with rocks in the Hastings River near Port Macquarie.
It led to the identification of 70 possible suspects and a criminal network of mind-blowing complexity and darkness. The victim, Terry Falconer, was a prisoner on day-release and was suspected by some of being a police informant.
The strike force, codenamed Tuno, led to the investigation of numerous murders and 140 criminal charges, as well as a television series that immortalised the detectives, their informants and the crooks.
They also worked on the famous case of model Caroline Byrne, who was found dead at the bottom of Sydney’s notorious ‘Gap’ cliff. Her boyfriend Gordon Wood was acquitted of a murder charge on appeal.
The pair also spent a decade investigating the still-unsolved murders of three Aboriginal children from Bowraville on the mid-north coast. They uncovered significant new evidence and helped the grieving families achieve law reforms aimed at bringing a person of interest for all three murders to trial, but nobody has ever been convicted.
After all the deaths he’d seen over a 20-year career in the police, it was not a crime that finally shook Evers.
It was the death of a young man on a rain-soaked beach, early one morning. Evers was first on the scene at a shark attack which took the life of a 16-year-old boy at Lighthouse Beach, Ballina.
“He bled out there on the beach and I was one of the first on the scene,” Evers says.
“I’d seen so many deaths. So many different ways, and I’d dealt with it. That’s the only way I hadn’t seen someone die. It rained while I was there. I was in a suit; I went home to get changed, I saw my wife and she said: ‘You look a bit pasty’. I said: ‘I’m having one of those days’.”
Evers decided shortly afterwards to retire from the force, each case having left its mark.
“It takes a bit of your soul, I guess. It takes a bit each time, the longer you’re there.”
Listen, subscribe or follow I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin at truecrimeaustralia.com.au, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Pre-order his book here.