Andrew Rule: Mystery of Walsh St revolver endures 33 years on
Could a retired pimp’s sob story to his favourite publican be the missing link in the 33-year mystery of the missing Walsh St revolver?
Andrew Rule
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It is 33 years this month since gunshots shattered the peace in Walsh St, South Yarra, killing two young policemen who paid with their lives for the barbaric actions of others.
Steve Tynan and Damian Eyre should be husbands and fathers in their mid-50s now. Instead, their names are on memorials to police killed in the line of duty.
Like Gary Silk and Rod Miller in August, 1998. Like the three police ambushed by the Kelly gang on October 25, 1878 at Stringybark Creek, an anniversary marked tomorrow by descendants of the murdered officers Kennedy, Lonigan and Scanlan.
Memories fade and so do scars. But the shots at Walsh St still echo.
The men charged with the shooting were acquitted by a jury, not because they were innocent but because the combined efforts of the Victoria Police could not nail a watertight case against them.
In the end, the accused killers and their lawyers out-manoeuvred investigators in a ghastly poker game with no winners.
Some claim that one side of a bitterly-divided police task force mishandled their key witness, Wendy Peirce, wife of suspected ringleader Victor Peirce.
Others say Wendy sabotaged the police case from inside by conning the prosecution to rely on her so heavily that when she “flipped” at the eleventh hour, they were sunk.
A jury sniffed the smelly farrago of falsehoods and selective facts paraded in court, rejected the police’s patchy version of events and let the accused killers walk.
Of course, all but one of the main suspects were destined to die violently — or already had.
Gary Abdallah had been shot dead with seven shots from two police pistols in a Carlton flat, the trigger pulled by a crazed cop who would lose his career and then his freedom, serving time on serious drug charges.
One of the Walsh St “trigger men”, a brooding young crook named Jedd Houghton, was shot at point blank range with shotguns by SOG members in a cabin at a Bendigo caravan park.
There were similarities between Houghton’s exit and what Graeme Jensen’s family still label as the execution of their brother at Narre Warren by a posse of detectives in a recklessly lethal action that prompted the senseless “payback” killing of the two innocents at Walsh St next day.
Houghton had it coming, as the saying goes. He was heavily armed and dangerous. But Jensen’s death, like Abdallah’s, still troubles the dead men’s families and friends.
Not to mention some sceptical lawyers and journalists, even a few uneasy former police.
Despite subsequent legal proceedings clearing those who pulled the triggers at Narre Warren and in Abdallah’s flat, those two police shootings don’t pass the sniff test of public opinion.
Walsh St has left some other loose ends. Such as, what happened to the service revolver one of the killers snatched from Damian Eyre’s holster to execute the already terribly injured constable?
Eyre’s revolver vanished and has never been found. Unlike the sawn-off KTG shotgun also used that night, a rare model clearly identified in the gang’s earlier robberies and later unearthed by a gardener near Melbourne Zoo.
The logical thing to do with a gun used to murder a policeman is to get rid of it so it won’t ever be found — to throw it off the Westgate Bridge, say, as the pistol used to shoot Alphonse Gangitano in 1998 apparently was.
But even habitual crooks, cunning as jailhouse rats in other ways, can do dumb things with guns.
The Walsh St crew buried their KTG shotgun in a shallow hole, making it likely to be found, rather than burning it beyond recognition and crushing it or ditching it in deep water.
The fact it was wrapped in plastic suggests that whoever buried it reckoned they might retrieve it to use again.
People assert that no “real crook” will hang onto a murder weapon, which is true except when it isn’t. The fact is, plenty do hang on to guns used in crimes.
Such as the mercenary sniper who has pleaded guilty to shooting former Rebels bikie boss Nick Martin at a Perth motorway last December.
Soldier boy was a good shot and a lousy thinker: delighted police found his sniper rifle more or less under his bed.
A better example is the cagey career criminal James “Iceman” Bazley, who kept his favourite French-made Unique .22 pistol after killing Kiwi drug mules Douglas and Isabel Wilson in Melbourne in 1979.
That was the same pistol that left the empty shells found in the Griffith hotel carpark from which Donald Mackay was snatched and killed in 1977.
Bazley was as fond of the lethal little handgun as he was of cute little dogs. A poodle fancier, he refused a direct order from his Mafia paymasters to kill the Wilsons’ pet dog and instead turned it loose — which provided proof that the couple had met foul play, as they would never flee without the dog.
If the cold-blooded “Iceman” saved his favourite “hit gun” and a dog, both of which provided evidence against him, let’s not bet that the drug-addled Walsh St lunatics couldn’t make the same mistake.
Eyre’s revolver would be a macabre trophy appealing to the twisted tastes of a murderous sexual deviate like Peter “Bubblebrain” McEvoy, or to the young and reckless Jedd Houghton.
McEvoy, an ugly rapist convicted for a series of gang attacks of Heidelberg schoolgirls in the 1970s, was regarded as a pervert and a psychopath even in criminal circles.
Gangster molls hated and feared him because he demanded “jail sex”. Guns titillated his sick fetishes.
Unlike Houghton, Abdallah and Victor Peirce (shot dead by Andrew Veniamin in 2002), the repulsive “Bubblebrain” survived to boast about killing the young policeman, Damian Eyre. But what did he and his co-offenders do with the pistol?
In the absence of provable facts, there are some intriguing possibilities — and stories to go with them.
Story one. A few years ago, an old “knockabout” (call him Mac) told me a story he’d kept dark since November 1988. The night before Jedd Houghton fled Melbourne with his new girlfriend, he’d asked Mac to drive him to a spot in Strathmore near a school on the south side of the Tullamarine Freeway.
They parked. It was late evening and freeway traffic was light. Mac watched Houghton cross the Moonee Ponds reserve then the freeway, carrying something in a plastic shopping bag. Houghton stooped next to a small tree and appeared to bury the bag.
Mac didn’t ask Houghton what it was but he guessed it had to be either cash or a “hot” gun, or both.
Next day, Houghton fled Melbourne — not knowing that lawmen would trace his movements, ambush him and fill him full of buckshot.
The freeway and its surrounds have been modified and landscaped since 1988. Who knows if some surprised worker found a gun or money and took it … or just left it?
Story two. Around 2004, a hard, tattooed man and his quiet girlfriend turned up in a remote district near Cooktown in far north Queensland.
The couple were in a fast blue Ford utility. The woman called the driver “Nev” and he called her “Julie”. They were from Melbourne. Not fugitives, exactly, but running from their past. His as a standover man and pimp; hers as an addict and prostitute.
The couple rented one of the empty workers’ houses abandoned when a local mine closed. They drank at the local pub, where “Nev” gradually took the publican into his confidence.
He implied he had been a criminal since his teens, involved in bringing in heroin from boats in Port Phillip Bay and selling it to sex workers in brothels where he acted as a debt collector, bouncer — and occasional gunman.
He said he sometimes drove a drum of hash oil to Adelaide for an unnamed syndicate. One time he couldn’t do it, and a mate filled in as a favour. The consignment disappeared along with his friend — whose body turned up later.
“Nev” cried when he told this story, which made the publican believe him. Which, in turn, made him believe Nev’s story that he knew someone in Melbourne who “leased” out pistols for crimes. Pay the money then return the weapon.
One afternoon when Nev was drunk, he told the publican that one pistol he had used was nicknamed “the Redback”, and that it was a police weapon taken from a scene where police had been shot.
The publican did not know which police shooting Nev was referring to. But he never forgot the story, which was relayed to me this week.
He says he believed Nev’s nervous girlfriend, who returned to the district a year later and confirmed that Nev was involved in five underworld deaths.
But was “the Redback” the missing Walsh St revolver? It’s possible. But maybe not the way to bet.
A former detective has a different slant on the missing pistol.
He says he negotiated a $300,000 deal between a commercial television station and Wendy Peirce for her to reveal, on camera, exactly where the Walsh St weapon was buried.
It was, the gangster’s widow told him before reneging on the deal, buried on a friend’s property near the home of her mother-in-law Kath Pettingill at Venus Bay in South Gippsland.
Wendy Peirce was and is quite capable of lying.
But whether she was lying this time is impossible to know. The ex-detective believes she knows where the hot gun is but got cold feet when a lawyer pointed out she could still be charged with being an accessory to murder.
A charge that plenty of people would like to see stick under a law that’s not written on the statute books. It’s known as “What goes around, comes around.”
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