'Everyman' serial killer Bandali Debs pays price for murders of officers Gary Silk and Rodney Miller, sex workers Kristy Harty and Donna Hicks
SPECIAL REPORT: PRISON life has not been kind to Australian serial killer Bandali Michael Debs, the monster who killed two policemen.
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PRISON life has not been kind to Australian serial killer Bandali Michael Debs.
Once a brooding hulk of a man who took pleasure in killing, Debs is now a grey-haired old man.
Debs - known as "Ben" - hid his demon behind an everyman facade: to most who knew him, he appeared very much the suburban dad.
A tradesman, a next door neighbour.
An unremarkable bloke stitched into the fabric of suburbia.
Even his business card had an understated tone.
"Ben", it simply said, was the man to call.
Behind the guise of a self-employed tiler and henpecked father of five lay a violent sociopath.
August this year will mark the 15 years since the deaths of Victorian policemen Sgt Gary Silk and Sen-Constable Rod Miller, slain by Debs as he and his young accomplice ran afoul of a police stake-out.
It would later come to light that Debs had also murdered two women - Sydney prostitute Donna Hicks and young Melbourne drifter Kristy Harty - in the years before.
"You are an evil, violent and dangerous man who places no value on the life of another," a Supreme Court judge would later tell the multiple killer.
Debs now stands convicted of four murders, and is serving four separate life sentences with no chance of parole.
Police believe Debs committed a series of armed robberies between October 1991 and October 1994 with the help of his nephew, Jason Ghiller.
During the hold-ups, mainly on restaurants, Debs pistol-whipped a woman and shot a man, rendering him a paraplegic.
And he opened fire on two police officers, but luckily did not harm them.
The police investigation into these offences was called Operation Pigout.
Ghiller was left in no doubt as to his uncle's propensity for violence. Debs once pointed a gun at Ghiller and told him it would be over in two seconds if he said anything about the robberies.
According to Ghiller, Debs was a Svengali-style overlord who corrupted him.
Ghiller was once heard to say, "The first few times I was like, 'f … he's mental", and I just f … ing came into the same way of thinking."
Ghiller's barrister James Montgomery told the Supreme Court that a "cult of personality" existed within Debs' immediate circle.
"He was seen as the leader of the family: a person whom, it would seem, could commit crimes and not be caught," Mr Montgomery said in October 2003.
"It seemed to him (Ghiller) that Bandali Debs was a person who got things done ... he was, in effect, his father figure."
Debs considered killing Rod Miller's wife and baby son to try to confuse the taskforce investigating the Silk and Miller police murders.
That he would even contemplate such an act spoke volumes about his sinister and remorseless character.
Ray Watson, a former Victorian armed robbery squad boss who hunted Debs, says the four-time killer was a "pure evil sociopath".
"To my mind, Debs was responsible for one of the worst crimes - if not the worst - in my service with Victoria Police when he shot dead Silk and Miller, and that includes the bombing of the Russell Street police complex (back in 1986)," Mr Watson said.
"The Russell Street bombing was hit and miss, although there was a high likelihood people would be killed.
"Debs made two evil decisions to murder police, when he had other options. The convictions for the two prostitute murders only confirm that Debs is the lowest animal on the food chain."
THE sort of material that might have offered an explanation for Deb's predilection for killing would usually be aired at his court pre-sentence hearings.
But Debs has always instructed his barristers not to divulge his personal history.
His brother may have provided the only insight in a 2003 newspaper report, when he alleged that he and Debs were tortured as children - including being whipped with copper wire.
What is known about Debs' history is that he was born Edmund Plancis on July 18, 1953 to a German mother who migrated to Australia in the late 1940s.
A wayward adolescent unhappy at home, Debs struck up a relationship with a paternal figure who ran a local boarding house.
That man formally adopted him, and as a youth he took the boarding house manager's name - Bandali Michael "Malik" Debs.
In 1988 Debs was convicted in Victoria of unlawful assault with a weapon and theft.
He appealed and had the conviction quashed, and was fined $500 on a lesser assault charge.
In 1996 he received a four-month suspended sentence for reckless conduct endangering serious injury and had his driver's licence cancelled for a period.
IT was in 1997 when Debs crossed paths with teenage prostitute Kristy Harty, a naive and vulnerable 18-year-old with scant regard for her own well-being.
"She commenced work in a brothel at the age of fifteen and became addicted to heroin," a police summary states.
A sweet girl by all accounts, Ms Harty was craving a father figure after the death of her dad in an accident.
"She went off the rails when she lost her father," her mother, Susan, told the Supreme Court.
"She really loved her father."
Several witnesses saw Ms Harty trying to flag down risky business along Princes Highway near Dandenong during the afternoon of June 17, 1997.
One of the men who stopped was Debs.
A TRADIE named Geoff Brown, with a workmate on board and a carload more behind him, drove past her just after noon.
His mates had stopped to talk to the girl, so Mr Brown pulled over too.
Mr Brown would say in court: "She said she needed some money. She offered us sex for money. First of all it was fifty, and then it was two for ninety.
"(My mate) Rick, he goes, `What do you mean?' and she goes, `Have jiggy jig.' She was mumbling a lot. You could tell she was just buzzing like she was on (drugs)."
Another car stopped on the other side of the Princes Highway near Dandenong and caught Kristy Harty's attention.
Mr Brown said: "She just bolted across the highway. I said, `She's going to get run over. She's high- tailed it across the highway!"'
About two hours later, driving instructor Paul Puissesseau saw her further along the highway, apparently hitchhiking back towards Dandenong.
"The way she was dressed was fairly provocative," Mr Puissesseau said in court.
"I said, 'That kid's looking for trouble'."
Somewhere between Heatherton Road and a remote track in the semirural suburb of Upper Beaconsfield, she encountered Bandali Debs.
Debs, aged 44 at the time, picked her up and drove her to the track.
He had unprotected sex with Ms Harty before shooting the vulnerable teen at point blank range with a .357 Magnum revolver.
"If you could ever say there's a reason for killing, there's certainly none in this case - which in itself is very troubling," Justice Stephen Kaye would later say.
"It's almost a killing for the sake of killing. `I've had what I want and you're now expendable' - that seems to be the attitude."
The crime scene revealed a partly dressed Kristy had been shot through the back of her head.
The recovered bullet was too damaged for any future comparison with a firearm.
But a DNA sample taken from Ms Harty's body was put on the police data base.
A crosscheck with existing samples did not find a match, and that was where trail went cold.
ABOUT nine months after killing Ms Harty, Debs was eyeing new opportunities in old careers.
He saw potential in Jason Joseph Roberts - his eldest daughter Nicole's new boyfriend.
A young tradesman whose father died suddenly back in 1990, Roberts was a young turk full of unearned bravado.
Debs enlisted Roberts to the wild world of armed robbery.
Their methods - which included wearing rubber US President masks - attracted the attention of Armed Robbery Squad detectives.
They recognised a link to the earlier unsolved Operation Pigout robberies.
Debs and Roberts committed ten stick ups, hitting mainly restaurants in the southeast near closing time.
During their tenth run-through, at the Green Papaya Chinese restaurant in Surrey Hills on July 18, 1998, Debs left a message for police: "Tell them Lucifer was here."
The Armed Robbery Squad devised an operation codenamed Hamada to nab the cocky bandits.
Cops were to stake out restaurants and sit in wait for "Lucifer" and his lieutenant.
Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rod Miller teamed up for Hamada stake-out duties on the night of August 15, 1998.
Silk and Miller ended up outside the Silky Emperor Chinese restaurant in Moorabbin.
Debs had once tiled the place.
He and Roberts were casing the restaurant when Silk and Miller pulled them over for a routine intercept in Cochranes Rd, Moorabbin.
"You knew that the time for stealth and cunning and bluff was over," Justice Philip Cummins would later say.
"You knew that imminently the two officers would search you and your vehicle, and would find the apparatuses of the Hamada robbers: handguns, masks or means of disguise and tape for binding your victims. You had a choice: apprehension, or murder."
Roberts shot Silk in the chest.
Debs opened fire on Miller and mortally wounded him, before shooting a helpless Silk in the pelvis and the head.
The Lorimer Taskforce was quickly assembled to begin what would be a taxing two-year investigation.
Thanks to relentless work, investigators finally nominated Debs.
Listening devices revealed Debs to be a pretty basic bloke who swore a lot, and was always surprised when his kids left him a Choc Wedge ice cream in the freezer.
Despite his other life as a killer and bandit, he was a submissive husband who criticised his "nosy" wife's cooking when out of earshot.
Debs called one of his three daughters 'Kitten' and another `Bubs'.
One of the three girls affectionately referred to him as `f--- head'.
Like most Dads of his generation, he needed help to use his mobile telephone.
Lorimer recorded damning conversations in which Debs took great delight in recollecting the fear he instilled during armed robberies.
He also described the Moorabbin police shootings in detail.
Sometimes he laughed about it.
He couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
"A few shots, it's no worries - a little thing," he said during one conversation.
In one conversation, he showed his regard for human life when considering killing Miller's widow and baby boy to confuse the Lorimer investigation.
He also talked about killing a Lorimer detective.
After his eventual arrest, a cocksure Debs denied he was involved in the shooting - but admitted to knowing the area.
"A few years ago I worked at the Silky Emperor restaurant," he told detectives.
"I did some tiling for the Chinese guy there. I haven't been back to the place since. He owes me a free meal that guy."
It was in late 2000, after Debs and Roberts were arrested, that a DNA sample taken from Debs was crosschecked with all samples on the Victoria Police database.
That check scored a hit with an unsolved job: the Kristy Harty murder.
Debs was charged and found guilty, thanks to the DNA and other evidence including the discovery of the Magnum revolver.
IT wasn't until well into his prison stretch for the Harty and Silk and Miller murders that New South Wales detectives charged Debs over the murder of prostitute Donna Anne Hicks.
Ms Hicks, a mother of three, was picked up on the Greater Western Highway in western Sydney back on the night of April 21, 1995. Like Ms Harty, she'd had sex with her killer before he shot her in the head.
In a final show of contempt, Ms Hicks - wearing nothing but a dog collar - was left dumped in a quarry ditch.
In adding another life sentence to Debs' term last year, NSW Supreme Court Justice Robert Shallcross Hulme said the killer had no prospect of rehabilitation.
He said the circumstances of Ms Hicks's execution were cold-blooded and without explanation.
"They demonstrate, particularly when combined with the circumstances of the death of Ms Harty, a complete - I emphasise that word - lack of humanity."
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