Andrew Rule: The model, the psychopath and the garden party

IT started as a glamorous garden party on the “Golden Mile” but turned into a psychopath’s grotesque fantasy — how did a man who made this couple dig their own grave walk away with a $100 fine?

NAMES have been changed to protect the guilty. Even after half a lifetime, that’s the safest way to tell the chilling story of a lost weekend at a bayside businessman’s country property.

What started as a garden party ended with an empty grave, loaded guns and a couple still convinced that if they had not escaped, they would have been killed as part of a rich psychopath’s grotesque fantasy.

That strange and sinister man is still alive. So are his victims, still scarred by an ordeal more disturbing than anything out of Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood.

Beauty attracts as many bad men as good ones. At 23, Jennifer H was only dimly aware of that.

She had not long arrived in Melbourne from East Gippsland to chase the dream of being a model and actor.

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Jennifer was abducted in the 70s. Picture: Tim Carrafa

Life in a country town then at a girls’ boarding school, St Margaret’s at Berwick, had not prepared her for the spiders lying in wait.

For a while it went well. She signed with an international manager, got a contract with a modelling agency, joined Actors’ Equity and landed small roles in a television serial.

Jennifer was lean and blonde with vivid blue eyes. Doors opened for her and men were drawn to her.

The latest of them, in March 1977, was a handsome young car-sales manager known as “Sam”, a short version of his Macedonian name.

When Sam’s boss — the wealthy owner of a car dealership on the Nepean Highway’s “Golden Mile” — invited him and his glamorous new girl for drinks at his bayside mansion, Jennifer was pleased. The country girl was curious to see the lavish lifestyle of the bayside set.

She felt the first twinge of misgiving that night.

“He (the host) opened the freezer and left the door open and kept staring at me with a weird look,” she recalls. “He was trying to get me to look in the freezer.”

Then the host pulled out a pair of knickers, frozen stiff. Jennifer realised they were a spare pair she kept in the modelling bag in which she carried a change of clothes. He’d obviously rifled through it. Later, she and Sam stepped onto the terrace and their host was lying on a sun bed, naked except for his thick bifocal glasses.

“He said he was ‘moonbaking’,” she says. At that stage she thought the podgy little millionaire was eccentric rather than evil and shrugged it off.

The following Saturday afternoon, she met Sam at the car yard after his shift. He borrowed a beige Valiant from the lot — a perk of the job — and they drove up the Calder Highway to the boss’s country house for the long weekend. The host had promised dinner that night and a garden party next day.

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Jennifer in the 70s. Picture: Supplied

When they arrived down the tree-lined drive, the lights were dimmed. Jennifer recalls the room layout — and a display cabinet full of guns.

A few others were also staying for dinner. Next day, more guests arrived for the garden party in the grounds around the double-storey house, but almost all had left by nightfall. Only Sam and Jennifer and another couple were to stay the second night.

Sam had noticed the host whispering with another guest, a bent cop known as Terry who was more like hired “muscle”. Terry was big and intimidating and Sam knew him by reputation. He had seen his boss pay him cash at the car yard and lend cars to him and to other police. Sam sensed he and Jennifer were the focus of attention.

His boss’s wife was noticeably absent. Sam recalled an odd telephone conversation with her and he now wondered if it had been a coded warning.

“She asked me if I was Jewish,” Sam recalls.

Given what happened that night, it seems the wife had been hinting at her husband’s Nazi obsessions.

After the other guests had exchanged worried looks and hurried upstairs to pack, Sam whispered to Jennifer he felt “bad vibes” and that they should try to leave early, too. He said to take his car keys and put them in the ignition, which she did while pretending to look for something.

She couldn’t drive away because the host followed her outside. He put his hand between her legs as she got out of the car.

Fear turned to terror when Terry the bent cop attacked Sam, forced him into a chair and tied his hands. The chair was one of two set up in the dining room opposite a table and single chair. It had been staged as an interrogation scene, right down to the German Luger pistol on the table.

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A newspaper cutting of the former model in 1979.

Jennifer was lured to a weekend in the country.

Jennifer’s ordeal began when Terry walked up behind her and lashed her with a whip. He dragged her into the room next to Sam.

Both men screamed abuse at the terrified couple. The host grabbed a gun, pointed it at Sam and tried to force Jennifer’s hand around the trigger, ordering her to shoot Sam. She froze.

Terry was yelling at her: “Shoot the f---ing Jew in the head! Blow his brains out, you bitch!”

Sam suspects Jennifer had been drugged with a spiked drink because she cannot recall what happened for hours after that. But he does — and, four decades later, his voice breaks as he describes things that haunt him.

“They took us outside with shovels, walked us down the paddocks and made us dig a big hole near a dam. They told us it was our grave. Then they took us back into the house and stuck the Luger (pistol barrel) into my mouth. I was sure they’d kill us that night.”

But the two sadists wanted to keep their victims overnight to prolong the pleasure of inflicting pain. Jennifer recalls staggering onto a bed, unable to stand, and waking hours later. The light was on and her clothes were in disarray. She believes she was sexually assaulted while drugged unconscious.

Terry dragged Sam to an upstairs room that had crude bars bolted to the window. By this time, Sam thought Jennifer had been raped and might be dead. With the strength of “sheer fear”, he says, he forced his hands out of the ropes, burning deep welts. He freed his legs and worked on loosening the window bars.

“I climbed down a trellis with roses on it. I fell and was lying there in absolute agony but forced myself to crawl into long grass. They came out with torches looking for me then drove a car around with lights on, but I stayed still and they missed me.”

Sam could “hot-wire” a car. He crawled to a HK Holden parked nearby, hot-wired it and drove straight through fences across country to the road. Minutes later he was banging on the door of the Woodend police residence. By dawn he was back at the property with several police.

The owner was there — making threats and screaming that he knew people in high places. Terry the bent cop had gone.

Sam feared Jennifer was dead. He didn’t know until later she had also escaped. His idea of putting the keys in the Valiant saved her: when she sneaked downstairs to the back door after gaining consciousness, she could start the car immediately she got in it.

Jennifer as she is today. Picture: Tim Carrafa

As she reversed, the host came out of the house with a gun. She floored the Valiant and sped down the drive.

She was so frightened she didn’t stop until she reached Melbourne and bought petrol in Punt Rd. She booked into a motel near Dandenong and called friends and the police.

She recalls being picked up in a police car and going to Russell St police station, where she was reunited with Sam. They made sworn statements.

The police charged Sam’s boss with unlawful imprisonment, indecent assault, assault with a weapon and possession of an unlicensed pistol. No one else was charged. It appeared that Terry was written out of the case.

The first court date, at Kyneton, was adjourned for six months to the little-used court at Bulla, near Melbourne airport. Sam and Jennifer had broken up by this time but they went to Bulla together.

If they thought they were going to get justice, they were wrong.

The defence lawyer, Brian Cash, didn’t have to do much. The magistrate dismissed every charge except for the unlicensed pistol. As Sam remembers it, the man who made him dig his grave and who jammed the pistol in his mouth was fined $100.

But over the next 20 years the bayside car dealer lost his business and his apparent immunity. He was charged with several bizarre offences, from keeping military weapons and ammunition to lighting fires and indecent acts. He has become notorious to neighbours and to police for stalking and making threats.

A country police sergeant got official permission to carry a firearm 24 hours a day after receiving a death threat from the increasingly isolated figure. A judge described the disgraced car dealer as “obsessive and anti-social”.

Another worker gave evidence that Nazi material, guns and child pornography were found at a Toorak property he used.

The fact that Jennifer and Sam’s tormentor is now held in contempt has not helped them. Their lives have been blighted by what happened on that weekend 40 years ago.

“Those pigs took my career,” Jennifer says of the men who got away with it.

Sam got his own back just a little. A few days after the nightmare weekend, he went to the big bayside house with a tyre iron. When his ex-boss opened the door, Sam smashed his collarbone.

“I still have nightmares,” he said last week. “I wish I’d caved his head in.”

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