Andrew Rule: Thirty years on, the mystery of who set Gordon Turner’s stables on fire still burns
The mystery of who burned down Gordon Turner’s stables outlasted the great man himself, but he wasn’t the only victim of dark manoeuvres in a dangerous game, writes Andrew Rule.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Horses can’t talk but they can scream. It is a terrible sound.
When the mafia sent a goon to burn down Gordon Turner’s stables, the “torch” must have heard the horses trapped inside screaming in terror and agony as he left the scene of a sickening crime.
The screams should haunt him but probably don’t. But they did haunt Gordon Turner for 30 years, until he died three weeks ago.
It happened on a Monday in spring about 9.30pm. Turner had left his stables after a last check on his harness racing horses and was preparing for bed in the nearby farmhouse. The gruff old-timer, then 54, was going through a purple patch, winning races with his stable star Hilarious Gift and others.
Family and friends of the farrier, boilermaker and lifetime horseman were delighted. But some dangerous people were furious.
Turner, his own man in a tough game, had dared to defeat horses backed for big money by people who rigged races with bribes, blackmail and intimidation. They decided to make an example of him.
There were 12 horses in the barn Turner had built on his property in Bayview Rd, Officer. Nine horses in training and three yearlings.
The intruder had forced a padlocked door, poured petrol on each horse then sloshed it along the central breezeway. When he lit it, the vapour exploded like shotgun blasts.
By the time the trainer ran across from the house, his horses were fireballs. His wife, June, called their son Graham, living nearby, and daughter Debbie, who lived up the highway at Drouin with her fiance, Gary Quinlan. Debbie and Gary got there in 18 minutes, half the time it took at normal speed.
When she arrived just after the fire trucks, Debbie jumped into the family horse truck and reversed it away from the burning building. But nothing could save the horses.
Eleven were dead. They rescued one, an unnamed filly.
Next day, a neighbour brought a front-end loader and dug a mass grave. Before they buried the charred carcasses, they took off the horses’ shoes as keepsakes.
The fire distressed Turner so much he had to be sedated. His family was shocked, angry and worried. Whoever had done this was capable of anything.
It happened on October 16, 1989. Police and racing authorities are no closer to solving it now than they were then.
Turner was a battling trainer-driver in a harness racing scene dominated by star driver Vinnie Knight, whose connection with the Mildura branch of the Calabrian mafia was notorious but by no means exclusive.
Knight, once described as “the Ayrton Senna” of reinsmen, sold himself to the highest bidder: anyone with a pile of black money they wanted to launder by betting on rigged races.
One of Knight’s “patrons” was the feared figure known as “the Black Diamond”; another ran Chinatown’s illegal gambling dens and escort services. Both were reputed heroin dealers. Then there was John William Samuel Higgs, a foundation member of the Black Uhlans outlaw motorcycle gang, massive amphetamines producer and convicted killer.
Vinnie Knight and his father Bob weren’t the only racing identities in bed with crooks. They know who they are, so do most people in harness racing. They were the ones who weren’t welcome at Gordon Turner’s big funeral at the Warragul harness racing track 10 days ago.
For the Turners, feelings are still raw. When Debbie spoke at the funeral, she described the fire as the worst episode of her father’s long life. She did not dwell on the details in public. She didn’t have to. She has made her feelings clear to friends over 30 years.
Her mother, June, is now too ill to talk. But the diaries she kept before and after the fire speak for her.
Friends who have read the diaries say she saw a “strange-looking” stranger wearing “a woolly hat and overalls” standing near the boundary fence as the fire took hold.
She also noted that of their (horse) owners, one was oddly silent after the catastrophe. Antonio “Tony” Giampaolo and his wife had often driven across Melbourne from Clarkfield to see their horse, The Navigator, when Turner trained it. But whereas real friends had rushed to help after the fire, Giampaolo didn’t call until two months later.
It did not surprise the Turners when, much later, Giampaolo was jailed with Higgs and more than 30 co-conspirators in the 2008 “tomato tins” ecstasy import case — recently back in the headlines because Nicola “Lawyer X” Gobbo has been named for selling out her clients to police and prosecutors.
Other people whom police suspected of having inside knowledge of the fire never faced justice. In fact, they seemed to be way ahead of investigators who ran into dead ends for years.
A policeman attached to the investigating team in the early 1990s recalls going to Mildura with other police. The plan was to interview a man suspected to be a mafia boss who “fixed” harness races.
When they got to the don’s luxurious house, he seemed to be expecting them. He calmly greeted each police officer by first name. Then, in a scene that could be straight from The Godfather, he calmly offered each officer his or her favourite coffee without having to ask what they wanted.
The message was chilling: his sources were so good that he knew that this sergeant drank flat whites, that detective preferred short black, this one drank latte. And so on.
The Turners fronted several inquiries to answer questions alongside Knight and other leading drivers of the time, such as John “Bulldog” Nicholson, Ted Demmler and Tom Maher to answer questions about the abuse Turner received.
Stewards and police asked why Knight and another driver had abused Turner on the track after he had beaten hot favourites.
Turner never actually spelled it out, but the reason seemed obvious: he had been told to “hand up the lead” but had stood his ground.
The investigation petered out. Apart from the obvious implication that the crooks were leaked inside information, there was another reason for Turner’s family to worry.
In 1990, they were warned their house would be burned down. Then, one day in mid-1993, Debbie Turner (by then married to Gary Quinlan), was home with her six-month-old baby son when she took an anonymous telephone call.
The caller threatened if she or her husband helped with the investigation, her baby would be “hung out of a helicopter”.
By then, Vinnie Knight was dead. His body was found with a shotgun in his car just outside Kilmore on April 9, 1991. It seemed he had blown his brains out in a fit of depression. Or maybe remorse.
Dozens of mafia figures came to Knight’s funeral. Some “kicked in” to put up a tacky statue of him driving his champion Popular Alm.
Meanwhile, there are a string of unsolved crimes all the way back to the abduction and murder of Donald Mackay in Griffith in 1977. The latest is the murder of suburban fruiterer Paul Virgona, shot dead on the EastLink tollway a month ago.
Regardless of who was paid to pull the trigger, or whether Virgona was the right target, the betting is that the market garden mafia are behind it. Just like the Gordon Turner fire.