IBAC hearing: Ex-homicide cop Charlie Bezzina says he did not know of dying officer’s last words
A former homicide detective whose signature appeared on a falsified statement has told an anti-corruption inquiry he has “no excuse” for it, saying he was unaware of a “dying declaration” made by slain officer Rodney Miller until almost two decades later.
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A former homicide detective whose signature appeared on a falsified statement has told an anti-corruption inquiry he has “no excuse” for it.
Charlie Bezzina, a veteran detective who attended the crime scene on the morning of the Silk-Miller murders in 1998, said he would have never knowingly signed a statement that had additional information added and backdated to appear as the original.
“I wouldn’t have had a bar of that,” he told the Independant Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission on Tuesday.
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“I would’ve understood the enormity of that … and the potential to pervert the course of justice,” he said.
Mr Bezzina said while he had no recollection of how nor why he signed officer Glenn Pullin’s second statement dated as the original — August 16, 1998 — almost two years later, he agreed he had “unwittingly” done so.
Mr Bezzina told the hearing he would have only signed the statement if he believed it was a “genuine” reformatted copy of the original, but admitted he did so without reading its contents.
Commissioner Robert Redlich QC, who is overseeing the IBAC hearings, questioned Mr Bezzina’s conduct.
“On what basis do you think it is OK to sign something that is false?” Commissioner Redlich said.
Mr Bezzina said: “I didn’t believe it to be false because it was the time and date from when I took the (original) statement.”
He said he would have had “complete trust” in the person who asked him to sign the statement years later and “didn’t turn his mind it”.
Mr Bezzina said he believed, given the information he had received in a meeting with detective Ron Iddles and a Herald Sun reporter, that Lorimer detective George Buchhorn had asked him to sign the second statement.
When asked if he had spoken to Mr Buchhorn about it, Mr Bezzina said: “I didn’t see it as my role, I was quite angry about it … that I’d been put in this position by Buchhorn.”
On Monday, former top homicide detective Ron Iddles gave evidence that in a conversation with Mr Pullin in 2015 he detailed how Mr Buchhorn had approached him to change his statement, saying “for all this to work we need you to make another statement.”
Mr Bezzina admitted he had knowledge of a general practice in the police force of descriptions being excluded from statements, but only in “broad terms”.
He said it was not the instruction he gave his crew or how he operated.
But it emerged in one of his crew members, detective Grant Kelly, had allegedly “ripped to shreds” the statement of another officer who attended the Silk-Miller crime scene.
Mr Bezzina also revealed he was not aware of Sen-Constable Miller’s “dying declaration” until almost two decades later when he was approached by the Herald Sun, who unearthed the original buried statement.
The original statement makes no reference to a wounded Mr Miller’s last words describing two offenders.
A private IBAC hearing was held to hear police officer Glenn Pullin’s evidence on Tuesday afternoon.
Mr Pullin was among the first officers on scene at the Silk-Miller murders.
His statements — the original and an alleged falsified second statement made two years later to replace it — are the central focus of the anti-corruption probe in alleged police misconduct.
The public hearings will resume Wednesday morning.