Book reveals how killing of vampire gigolo Shane Chartres-Abbott rocked police and state government

SIMON Overland had been Assistant Commissioner for just four months when vampire gigolo Shane Chartres-Abbott was murdered. The aftershocks rocked his police force, and two governments.

Behind vampire killing that rocked Victoria

A NEW book tells how top brass came to believe police were involved in the plot to kill self-described vampire gigolo Shane Chartres-Abbott.

Once Upon A Time In Melbourne, by Liam Houlihan, reveals how the aftershocks of the vampire’s murder — and the murder of a state witness and his wife inside their fortress home — rocked the police force.

It details how efforts to avoid a royal commission pitted senior officers against each other, bled into the political halls of power and ultimately vanquished one government and brought the next to its knees.

SIMON Overland had been the Assistant Commissioner for Crime in his adopted state for just four months when Shane Chartres-Abbott was gunned down outside his Reservoir home.

Word of the gigolo’s demise quickly moved up the chain. There’s been another killing. That vampire bloke in today’s paper has been shot.

Two men had walked up Chartres-Abbott’s driveway and shot him dead as he left his house with his pregnant girlfriend and her father to attend court. Nothing says You’re not in Canberra anymore quite like a vampire gigolo murder.

The strange, short life of Shane Chartres-Abbott was marked at several turns by a tension between clean country living and the necessary evils of the city. Shane was born a city boy in Brisbane to mum Nancy and an ageing dad, William, who was nearly 60 when Shane came into the world. William reportedly had 10 children to three women. He ran an introduction agency in Brisbane that some said was little more than a brothel.

Some of Shane’s siblings would later allege they were victims of abuse by clients there. The family went bush, with a move to hippie-haven Nimbin, before another move to a farm near Lismore.

Family photo albums show Shane and his siblings as sun-kissed kids, Shane on a BMX bike, surrounded by plenty of space and by animals, pets and family. He taught his sister, Joanne, how to play chess. He was, in the words of his mother, a sweet, caring, loving person.

When the family unit fell apart, Shane, at 14, left home to fend for himself. He was a devout Christian who would regularly read the Bible and take himself to church. He married young, had a son, then split with his wife.

When he moved to Melbourne, the big city ate his churchgoing ways. He worked in sales and took an interest in Satanism and the occult. He said he hated the city and yearned for the countryside. He slid into sex work. He started going out with a nurse called Kathleen. They shared a house in Reservoir. She fell pregnant.

Neighbours in Howard St, Reservoir, thought Shane was a clean-cut night owl, but his unseen life was far from wholesome. Shane was a high-end escort, a rent boy working out of Cloud Nine Escorts in the private school belt of Balwyn.

Shane was a popular pick and serviced about a dozen clients a week. Some would fly from interstate and hire him for a night.

Shane would sell himself to all-comers — men and women — for up to $300 an hour or a one-off flat fee
of $1000.

He wore a long black coat with pinstriped lining and worked under the trade name Simon. Some of the clients seeking his particular line of service were not very savoury. Not all were completely safe.

Like most hookers, Shane lived in secret fear of the fatal freak — that one freak who proved to be more of a freak than all the others.

Like other male sex workers, Shane would sometimes hire muscle at a rate of about $40 an hour to drive him to jobs and park nearby to help out in an emergency. Sometimes, in addition to providing muscle, the minders were left playing amateur shrink for their distressed rent-boy clients.

It is a pretty mind intensive job, one minder said. Usually they … have got to have someone to talk to, and I’m usually it.

Some close to Shane said that his tawdry night-life as a gigolo was simply a means to an end, that he wanted to grow a fat bankroll and then beat a path to a quiet country life with Kathleen.

Wholesome country living to cleanse the stains of the dirty city. Shane would tell people: I’m not going to do this much longer.

JENNY considered herself a friend of Shane Chartres-Abbott until the night he sank his teeth into her. Jenny was a 30-year-old Thai woman, living in Melbourne and working as a prostitute.

Both Jenny and Shane had the seemingly unusual hobby of hiring prostitutes for their own pleasure in their time off work. In mid-July 2002 Jenny hired Shane through his escort agency.

They had sex at her home in Richmond on several occasions and then later moved their hanky panky to hotels. The sex got kinkier over time. Shane would bind Jenny’s wrists and ankles to corners of the bed, then smother her face with a pillow.

It is good isn’t it, he would say, as they pushed things further and further in the boudoir, that you don’t know what’s going to happen to you.

During their sessions, Shane told Jenny that he was an ancient vampire who drank blood to live, to stay young. Shane told Jenny he was older than the city of Melbourne, older than its buildings. Shane told Jenny that his girlfriend knew he was a vampire. Shane told her how you could suck blood from a person’s arm. Shane told Jenny that she, too, could become a creature of the night. Jenny seemed to take it all in her stride.

The pair had been meeting for sex for a little over a year when, on August 16, 2002, Jenny rang Shane from her mobile and arranged a rendezvous with him around midnight at the Hotel Saville in leafy South Yarra. Jenny expected a night of steamy passion with the gigolo but instead it became an evening of terror.

On previous occasions both parties had willingly engaged in sex play that was on the fringes, but on that August night kinky gave way to criminal. In the confines of the rented suite they drank red wine together, Shane spoke of money troubles and then he attacked her.

Shane raped Jenny twice, blackened her eyes, sunk his teeth into her thigh, bruised her neck and jaw, and tore out part of her tongue.

Shane then dumped Jenny’s unconscious, bleeding body in the suite’s shower and fled into the night, Jenny’s mobile in his black work bag, her blood still on his jacket.

At 11.20 the next morning the hotel manager found Jenny naked, bruised, bloodied and still not completely conscious.

Jenny only remembered having a drink with Shane, a chat, and then coming to in a bath of my own blood.

It was not hard for police to connect the half-dead victim in the hotel shower to the man she had hired for sex the evening prior. Her phone was in his bag. Her blood was on his jacket. Shane Chartres-Abbott was charged with two counts of rape, one count of intentionally causing serious injury and one of recklessly causing serious injury.

It was these charges that had him leaving home for court on what would have been the fifth day of his trial, when he was ambushed and murdered.

Shane had pleaded not guilty to all counts. His lawyer, Alan Hands, slammed the case against the gigolo as fantasy.

The Crown case is a story worthy of Bram Stoker and a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie. But both those were works of fiction and that is what their case is.

The defence lawyer claimed Jenny was grooming Shane to be the victim in a snuff movie, and that another man attacked Jenny after Shane had left the hotel.

“My client was being groomed to appear in one movie … at the end of it he would be killed.”

Shane’s family could not believe the case against him. His mum would say evil attracts evil.

I look at that sort of work as evil, she would say, and it got him into trouble.

And Shane would agree.

When Shane was killed by two men outside his home, he moved across the aisle of the justice system from being a defendant in a rape and assault criminal trial to the subject of a potential murder trial. The next day the prosecutors entered a nolle prosequi, withdrawing the rape and assault case against the dead man.

The eight men and four women of the jury walked from their big wooden box, and the bizarreness of the now-abandoned case, and back to their normal lives.

The shocked judge was circumspect in discharging them. Though it’s a tragic thing that this thing can occur in our state, it appears that it has in this case.

After the killing there was speculation that maybe there was a rich and powerful client out there who could not afford for his particular peccadillos to be exposed in Shane’s criminal trial.

That the gigolo was nervous someone might be out to get him seemed to bolster this theory.

During his short, aborted trial, the defence lawyer had successfully applied to have Shane’s address deleted from material handed to the jury, but that did the vampire gigolo few favours.

Former chief commissioner Simon Overland.

Senior police would come to believe a chain of interested people assisted the killers by illuminating the path to Shane’s front door.

Their killing done, the two killers fled on foot down a lane beside Shane’s house, through a car park, and then vanished.

No one saw them get into their waiting getaway car and drive away. It would take some time for the two gunshots fired in Reservoir to echo around Melbourne.

The police air wing and the dog squad respectively ascended and descended on the scene, but the killers were nowhere to be found.

Days later the trail was no warmer. It would remain cold until an unlikely figure started telling tales from behind bars.

Tales that would curl the toes of senior police and set off a series of fireworks within the force, exploding all the way to the top.

But that was a long way off. Years would pass before an unlikely prison confession would warm the trail again.

For the moment, though, it was bleak. Hopeless cases have St Jude. Hopeless homicide cases have the information caravan.

A week to the day after the killing on Howard St, the coppers rolled out their van.

AN edited extract from Once Upon a Time in Melbourne (Victory Books) by Liam Houlihan. As a special deal, Sunday Herald Sun readers can buy the book for just $26.99, including delivery. Buy online at heraldsun.com.au/shop, call 1300 306 107 or post a cheque to Book Offers, PO Box 14730, Melbourne, Vic, 8001. Please allow 14 days for delivery. It is also available at mup.com.au and all good bookstores, RRP $29.99