Hells Angels bikie Christopher Hudson fuelled by drugs, anger before shooting three in Melbourne CBD
HELLS Angels bikie Christopher Hudson was fuelled by drugs and anger the morning he went on a terrifying shooting rampage in Melbourne’s CBD, just days after a wild night with AFL star Alan Didak.
True Crime Scene
Don't miss out on the headlines from True Crime Scene. Followed categories will be added to My News.
CHRISTOPHER Wayne Hudson’s fearsome reputation as a Hells Angels bikie ensured he was treated like a king at Melbourne’s after-dark clubs.
The muscled and tattooed bikie’s reputation carried extra weight thanks to his involvement in a wild bikie brawl at a kick-boxing tournament at the Royal Pines Resort near the Gold Coast in March 2006.
It was his defection from the Finks bikie gang to the mighty Hells Angels group — or anger over a stolen sapphire — that sparked the vicious all-in brawl that involved fists, feet, bottles, chairs and weapons.
Hudson was shot in the back and jaw and other bikies were winged and wounded during the brawl, which the media dubbed the “Ballroom Blitz”.
Hudson was afforded VIP status at the up-market Spearmint Rhino strip club on King Street, where he was free to mingle with the girls in a private section and gifted free drinks.
“Huddo had informed me that he was part of the Hells Angels motorcycle group. He was very proud of belonging to them. He referred to them as ‘The Brotherhood’,” one of the club’s dancers, “Jazz”, would tell police.
“I know that Huddo is in the Hells Angels,” another club waitresses said in a statement. “He always used to say that we were going to get married,”
It was at the Spearmint Rhino in the early hours of Tuesday June 12, 2007, Hudson, a Collingwood supporter, noticed Magpies star Alan Didak in the club.
Didak was with then Melbourne Demons player Colin Sylvia; the two having played in the Queen’s Birthday long weekend game at the MCG.
When Sylvia left the strip club, Hudson bought Didak a drink.
Didak ended up accepting a lift from the stranger, who he thought could have been a bikie because of an arm tattoo.
The car ride turned into a hell ride for Didak.
Hudson produced a handgun and fired shots out his car window as they crossed the Bolte Bridge.
“Even though the music was blaring I could hear Huddo firing shots,” Didak would later tell detectives.
Hudson took the Collingwood player to an Angels clubhouse where they drank some more.
After leaving with Didak and a fellow bikie, Hudson fired more shots out his window as police pursued him at speed in Campbellfield.
“It appeared as if he was warning us off,” one of the police officers later said.
Hudson outran the cops and dropped Didak near the Flinders St police complex, where he unsuccessfully asked for a lift home in a divisional van.
Six days later Hudson would make headlines.
Hudson slips deeper into the drug world
Hudson, a former Gold Coast nightclub bouncer, had joined the Finks’ ranks, but defected, or “patched over”, to the Angels some time in late 2004.
“Through his association with the nightclub industry,” a forensic psychologist would later write, “he was introduced to ecstasy, cocaine and amphetamines at around age 19-20. Shortly later he was introduced to crystal amphetamine (ice).
“He said that following the shooting incident (at the Royal Pines event) in 2006, he became a very heavy and often daily user of amphetamines and crystal amphetamine.”
Hudson also started carrying a gun after the bikie ballroom brawl.
A consultant psychiatrist would note: “After being assaulted in 2006 he had increasingly used speed and ice — snorting and smoking but not injecting.
“He related to me that he would use up to two grams per day and would take this for up to a week at a time before he needed to sleep for a couple of days.
“He reported that he enjoyed feeling ‘up’, happy, drinking and socialising. However, he noted a propensity to paranoia, often thinking that someone was coming to get him.”
Hells Angel wired before attack
MELBOURNE-born travel consultant and promotions girl Kaera Douglas, an attractive and outgoing type in her mid 20s, was no stranger to the late-night party scene.
She had first met Hudson in Sydney while she was living and working there.
She entered into a casual relationship with him, despite his drug use and propensity to become a violent and “terrible drunk”.
Six days after Hudson’s crazy night with Didak, Hudson was riding on an amphetamine-fuelled flying carpet.
It was Sunday June 17; “retro disco” theme night at Spearmint Rhino.
Stripper Jazz, a backpacker, said there was a good vibe in the club’s VIP room.
“Everybody seemed happy and in party mode,” she told police.
Hudson drank with some of the strippers and staff until 5am.
The group, later described as a “human zoo”, then moved to the Bar Code venue next door to continue the party.
In the group were Hudson, a Spearmint Rhino male staffer, a female club waitress, strippers Jazz, “Brianna”, “Savannah” and Danish exotic dancing sisters Nadia and Nina.
Some were very drunk.
Two of the girls found Hudson in a disabled toilet, and suspected he’d been snorting drugs.
“Huddo appeared a little agitated and distant,” Brianna would recall.
Stripper Savannah appeared to be in a frisky and flirtatious mood and was having trouble keeping her clothes on and her hands off some in the group.
“Savannah and the (Spearmint Rhino) waitress began to kiss each other and put on a bit of a show,” Jazz told police.
About 6am, Hudson texted Kaera Douglas demanding she join the party.
Ms Douglas was staying in a room at the nearby Punthill Apartments.
She was not interested in going to Bar Code, until she realised her keys and money were missing.
She suspected Hudson was the culprit, and felt she had no choice but to head to the bar.
“My plan was to go down there and get my keys to my car, catch a cab back and get my things and leave,” Ms Douglas told police.
“(I was) seriously scared ‘cause I knew that he’d been drinking.”
About 7am, Savannah — who’d already had a verbal altercation with Hudson — was performing a drunken impromptu lap dance while taking off her clothes.
Other punters in the neon-lit bar watched on.
“The female was quite an attractive girl,” one punter said in a police statement.
“Slim build. Stripper type. She was topless but wearing her jeans. I got myself a drink and sat with my friend and enjoyed the show. She stripped down to her G-string.”
Hudson exploded into a rage, fuelled by a caustic mix of booze and methylamphetamine.
Standing on a ramp behind Savannah, he reached down and grabbed the near-naked stripper by her hair.
She screamed and Hudson let go.
Hudson confronted a bloke by the bar.
Jazz later recalled: “Huddo pulled up his sleeves and pointed to his tattoos and said: ‘Do you know who I am? I’m a Hells Angel!’”
Hudson then stormed out, bumping into a passer-by on King St.
“This guy was off his face … he was racing,” the passer-by later recalled.
“His movements and speech were extra fast. He was on edge.”
Hudson lifted his top to show off an abdomen tattoo, and revealed he had a gun down the front of his pants.
Hudson tried to force the man’s hand toward the weapon, and babbled about trouble brewing inside Bar Code.
Bikie’s brutal rage unleashed on women, innocents
BY the time Ms Douglas arrived at the bar, according to Jazz, the drunk Savannah was having difficulty putting her clothes back on.
It was nearing 8am and daylight outside now and people were making their way in for a Monday morning start to the working week.
Spent, drunk, still semi-naked and with her world spinning, Savannah made her way to the Bar Code steps and sat down.
Hudson circled her.
“I can recall brushing Chris away with an open palm manner because he was invading my space,” she later told police.
“The next thing I knew I was being beaten.”
In front of shocked witnesses, Hudson grabbed her by her hair, punched her in the face and threw her to the footpath.
As the stunned victim struggled to her knees, Hudson kicked her in the face.
“I remember clutching my nose and my face and thinking, ‘F---, that hurt’,” she would say of the vicious attack.
She ended unconscious in a pool of blood.
Hudson’s rampage had begun.
Ms Douglas, trying with others to assist the battered stripper, saw Hudson standing on the corner of Flinders Lane and King St.
He called her over.
Desperate to reclaim her keys and money, she approached him.
He showed her his gun and grabbed her.
“And that’s when it started,” she later told detectives.
“It was horrid, it was psychotic … He was just completely out of his mind. Insane. Just completely gone … He had me by the arm going, ‘Walk c---!
“I was just shaking. Absolutely beside myself.”
In an underground carpark, Hudson forced her against a wall at gunpoint.
She tried to escape streetside but Hudson grabbed her by the hair.
“That’s when Brendan stepped in and sort of said, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’” Ms Douglas told investigators.
The “Brendan” that Ms Douglas was referring to was 43-year-old father of three Brendan Keilar, a property lawyer who stopped to intervene while on his way to work.
A passing Dutch backpacker named Paul De Waard, 26, also showed courage beyond the call by stepping in to help.
“Hudson looked pretty strong and he looked like he’d had too much to drink,” De Waard would later recall.
“He had a mad look in his eyes. I remember the look in the girl’s eyes — she was totally frightened and so scared. She was saying, ‘Help! Help!’
“I thought about the recent commercials in Australia about violence against women. I felt that I had to stop him.”
In front of scores of witnesses, Hudson pulled his gun and opened fire.
He shot Ms Douglas in the stomach at point blank range, and tagged the two heroic men with several rounds.
After emptying his gun into the men, Hudson fled.
Despite the efforts of passers by and firemen and paramedics, Mr Keilar died on the corner of Williams St and Flinders Lane.
Ms Douglas and Mr De Waard survived, after emergency surgery.
“Paul was as close to death as you get without going there,” Royal Melbourne Hospital trauma surgeon Russell Gruen would later say.
Police quickly established Hudson’s identity and launched a massive manhunt.
They established Hudson was the gunman who’d fired at pursuing police in Campbellfield back on June 12.
Then police chief commissioner Christine Nixon sent a public message to the Hells Angels: “I would hope they would hand him over. I think this person’s clearly out of control.”
On June 20, Victorian president of the Hells Angels walked Hudson into Wallan police station in semirural Victoria.
Hudson had an injured wrist wrapped in a sock.
While he told police he’d tried to cut his wrist with a knife, unconfirmed later reports suggested his bikie brothers had used a blow torch to remove a Hells Angels tattoo from his arm.
On Thursday June 28, Alan Didak went public after belatedly telling his footy club and detectives about his encounter with Hudson.
“I am only now fully aware of the situation I found myself in,” Didak told the media.
Hudson ended up pleading guilty to several charges including murder and attempted murder.
His consultant psychologist wrote: “Mr Hudson reported that at the time of the offence he had been taking anabolic steroids for around a month, having been concerned that people had stated that he was looking ‘skinny’ (weighing by his account 82kg).
“In addition, he reported that for the few weeks prior he had been taking large amounts of stimulants, drinking copiously and that he was, as a consequence, much more paranoid than usual.
“He informed me that his paranoia was that he would be shot by people from other motorcycle gangs, or that he would be arrested by police and found to have a firearm.
“Although anabolic steroid abuse and the lifestyle led by Mr Hudson suggest narcissistic and anti-social features, it is more likely that he was seduced by the lifestyle offered by joining motorcycle gangs — and that his peer group and lifestyle encouraged self-centred and aggressive attitudes.”
On September 22, 2008, Supreme Court judge Justice Paul Coghlan sentenced Hudson to life imprisonment with a 35-year minimum term.
In a later interview with the Herald Sun, Ms Douglas praised Mr De Waard and said there was nothing she could ever say to express her eternal gratitude to Mr Keilar.
She issued a warning to all young women.
“I know people will be saying, ‘Who’s she to be preaching to us? She’s that stripper who got shot,’” Ms Douglas said.
“I want to say to all the young girls out there who ever think of taking a drug, who ever think of (exotic) dancing, dating a bikie — don’t do what I did. It’s not pretty. There’s nothing glamorous — nothing cool about it.”
This article was first published in May 2015 for True Crime Scene.
How this teen became a savage killer
An evil lives within killer Jamie Lee Dolheguy, but was it always there or did it manifest from the years of abuse and neglect that marred her childhood.
Overland’s stunning concession in Lawyer X Royal Commission
Former police chief Simon Overland has been grilled by the Royal Commission into the Lawyer X scandal, and revealed how he kept the use of Nicola Gobbo from the state’s top prosecutors.