Rodney Collins dead: Carl Williams’ go-to killer butchered without care or mercy

RODNEY Collins’ career of hits was marked by their indiscriminate brutality. The go-to man for Carl Williams, who went to school with his daughter, butchered and bloodied without care or mercy, write Patrick Carlyon and Anthony Dowsley.

WHEN Rodney Collins impersonated a police officer to enter the West Heidelberg home of Ray Abbey in 1987, he shut the kids in their bedrooms before shooting the drug dealer and slitting his wife’s throat.

Sparing the kids was an unusual touch. Collins’ career of hits, thought to number nine, was marked by their indiscriminate brutality. He butchered and bloodied without care or mercy. Always looking for work, he generally killed whoever got in the way.

Collins is thought to have tied up and slit the throat of drug dealer Michael Schievella in 1990. Schievella’s wife Heather, whose throat was also cut, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

RODNEY COLLINS DIES IN JAIL, TAKING SECRETS TO THE GRAVE

$1M TO FIND MELBOURNE GANGLAND MURDER HITMEN

ANDREW RULE: THE ESKY MURDER CARL GOT AWAY WITH

He remains the chief suspect in the shootings of Terry and Christine Hodson in Kew East in 2004. This killing, like the others, was cunning and calculated — and featured a bullet casing perched on the back of Terry Hodson’s head.

Years later, Carl Williams claimed he had hired Collins, now dead at 72, for that hit, on the request of a then suspended detective, Paul Dale. Williams said he had asked Collins about the needless killing of Christine.

“What happened with the sheila?” Williams asked.

“That’s not for you to worry about,” Collins replied.

Collins is not a household name. Few people recognised the short man with the scowl. His best-known photo features his pants around his ankles. In it, his eyes are hooded and his hair is greasy.

He lacked the same notoriety as his nearest counterpart, Victoria’s Christopher Dale Flannery.

Terence and Christine Hodson were found dead in their Kew East home.

Collins was called The Duke, Cherokee or Uncle. He was a go-to man for Carl Williams, who went to school with his daughter. He was a kind of father-in-law to Tony Mokbel, who partnered Danielle McGuire, the daughter of Collins’ girlfriend Joan Madin.

He grew up in Richmond, in a world of alcoholism and cruelty. Violence came easily and young, and rape was a natural graduation. Collins first killed at a boozy Reservoir party in 1983.

A witness later said that he did not know why Collins pulled something “small and black” from his pocket and shot Patrick Brendan Coughlan. He beat the murder charge, then killed the Abbeys two years later. He threatened his co-killer — and his co-killer’s family — with the guns he always kept close.

Collins was interviewed at length about the Hodsons after his 2008 arrest for the Abbey murders. Police at the time searched Collins’ Northcote home and seized a loaded handgun, cannabis, night vision equipment, a ballistic vest, articles of disguise and “highly protected” police documents.

Collins said he would co-operate with the Hodson investigators — in return for the dropping of charges and the payment of a $1 million reward to his then girlfriend.

Collins spoke in riddles. With reptilian cunning, he sought to tap the long-held frustrations of investigators who could not figure out how the shooter had gained entry to the Hodsons’ property.

He spoke in hypotheticals and suggested that more than one person was at the Hodson executions. Perhaps Collins was making mischief when he asked: “But who was the person that was behind that known or trusted person, that followed him in?”

The Hodsons’ daughter Nikki Komiazyk, her sister Mandy and brother Andrew still need the truth. Each is haunted by images from the period. Among those, for Komiazyk, was a chance encounter at a Lilydale supermarket with Collins soon after her parents’ deaths. He asked if the police were leaving her alone.

“That’s good news,” she said last night of his passing. “He was a creep. He made my skin crawl.”

[e-mail]

MORE LAW AND ORDER NEWS:

‘LITTLE’ TOMMY RELEASED FROM PRISON

MAFIA MEN WEREN’T INVINCIBLE

HEAVY HITTERS IN THE CRIME WORLD