Deadline: Cuckoo restaurant houses one of Australia’s most enduring crime mysteries
It was once one of Melbourne’s most popular restaurants — and remains the topic of an enduring crime mystery — but the Cuckoo has suffered another false start.
Victoria
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Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest crime buzz.
It’s hard to keep up with the sales, or attempted sales, of the Cuckoo restaurant at Olinda in the Dandenongs. It seems to have been hawked around at least three times since 2019.
The fact it appears not to have sold yet is not as interesting as what happened to its founder in 1976.
The sinister disappearance of Willi Koeppen that year is one of the most enduring mysteries of Australian crime history. Although no evidence has been established to court standard, there’s little doubt that Koeppen met foul play.
Whodunit and why they dunnit are the unanswered questions.
Willi Koeppen and his wife Karin were energetic and charismatic German migrants who established the Cuckoo on the site of an old tearooms opened in the 1920s.
Willi became a pioneer TV celebrity chef with regular appearances on Channel 7 and the Cuckoo was jammed with diners and day trippers back when a weekend drive to the Dandenongs was the height of suburban fashion.
Willi and Karin’s joint was Australia’s first smorgasbord “all-you-can-eat” venue and it went gangbusters.
Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, Willi Koeppen was a troubled and troublesome soul.
This might be expected of a man who was a teenage waiter in Berlin’s grandest hotel during World War II, serving meals to one Adolf Hitler, before becoming a displaced person in war-torn Europe.
Many theories have been advanced about his disappearance late one night, including one that cold-blooded killer Alex Tzakmakis murdered him, if not for his own reasons then because someone else paid him.
It seems likely the truth died in 2022 with Koeppen’s wife Karin, who was known to have opposed her increasingly erratic husband’s decision to try to sell their restaurant at the height of its popularity in the 1970s.
The restaurant and its surrounding buildings on several acres of land would cost a buyer around the $4m mark. The “Where’s Willi?” mystery is thrown in.
A private detective who combed through the case a few years ago favours the theory that Willi’s body might have ended up feeding the yabbies in a deep farm dam nearby.
Rotten Ronnie capable of cowardly killing
The late Gavin “Capable” Preston was supposedly capable of anything but perhaps not the cowardly crime committed by his one-time prison buddy Robert “Ronnie” Sloan.
By the time Preston was shot dead at Keilor last year, the pair had fallen out and Sloan was back behind bars awaiting justice for the brutal killing of 33-year-old Sydney woman Najma Carroll in 2020.
Career criminal Sloan and his drug-dealing associate Benjamin Troy Parkes murdered Ms Carroll at Sandy Point, in Sydney’s southwest, then sent fire to her corpse.
Her remains were found 15 days later by a bushwalker. She’d been killed because she knew too much about the drug trafficking Parkes and Sloan were doing out of a western Sydney motel.
Sloan, who was using ice at the time of the murder, was acting as a “runner” for Parkes, a former Rebels bikie.
They apparently bashed the woman to death with a baseball bat before cutting out a tattoo to conceal her identity.
Preston and “Ronnie” Sloan had once got along well at Barwon Prison, where Preston was locked up for the defensive homicide of drug dealer Adam Khoury at North Melbourne in 2012.
A former Preston associate said Sloan liked to think of himself as a hard man but what happened to Ms Carroll exposed his true nature.
“That’s not old school,” the associate said.
Sloan, who pleaded guilty to murder, had only months earlier been released from a Victorian prison after serving time for violent crimes.
New South Wales judge Natalie Adams said in sentencing Sloan that he had been shot about 25 years ago and subjected to a series of assaults in prison.
He had been associated with a gang called The Heathens and it was unclear whether this led to the assaults, the judge said.
Sloan will not be freed before 2047, by which time he will be aged 86 and perhaps no longer a threat to anyone.
His history of violent crime in three states stretched back to his teenage years, and seemed at odds with his claim in court that he was a devout Buddhist.
It was reported in 2021 that Sloan had sued the State of Victoria, alleging he was bullied and tortured by a Muslim inmate.
Sloan said he was harassed for 11 months and called a “Buddhist dog.”
No cause for celebration
There was much jubilation last month when Collingwood champ Scott Pendlebury reached the 400-game mark — but less enthusiasm a bit earlier about a 14-year-old who sped past a shameful milestone of 400 charges.
He’s one of Victoria’s legion of youth offenders carrying out aggravated burglaries to steal high-powered cars used to tear around roads and streets at lethal speeds.
Those in the know say he’s now well on the way to 500 and frustrated observers fear he’ll reach 1000 before he’s an adult. Cynics might even suggest that’s his ambition.
One alleged youth offender building his own record is the teenage genius who rolled a stolen Mercedes sedan in Hawthorn last week with an accomplice and was immediately lumbered by Carlton coach Michael Voss.
Former gun detective Paul Mullett later got on the blower and said Voss had the perfect pedigree to grab speeding drivers because his father was a traffic cop at Orbost in East Gippsland, where the Voss boys learned their footy skills while Dad booked a swag of motorists.
Crime wave
Organised crime investigators play a long game.
An example emerged this week when a third man was charged, more than a year after he allegedly collected a big drug shipment found hidden in imported surfboards.
Police have alleged a Melbourne-based Chinese-Taiwanese transnational crime syndicate was behind the shipment of 78kg of methamphetamine inside 12 surfboards sent from Los Angeles.
The boards arrived in Melbourne via air cargo from Los Angeles on August 11 last year.
Australian Border Force officers allegedly found “anomalies” during X-ray screening and replaced the drugs with a dummy substance.
The boards were forwarded to a Dandenong South storage facility and collected a fortnight later before being driven to the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl.
Detectives from the Victorian joint organised crime taskforce made their move late last week, arresting a 36-year-old Punchbowl man, who has been extradited to Melbourne.
He was charged with the Commonwealth offence of possessing a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug and remanded to appear in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on October 18.
Police say the charges relate to a Melbourne-based crime gang.
Two Melbourne men, both aged 33 and from Burwood and Ferntree Gully, have previously been charged over the surfboard bust.
Police frame wrong man
The public can be critical about the failure to crack cases such as Willi Koeppen’s. Regrettably, there are plenty of unsolved cases for armchair critics to aim at.
One such is the shooting of colourful racing identity Les Samba in Middle Park in 2011.
Another is the fatal bashing of harmless Geelong concreter Salvatore “Sam” Rotiroti on September 5, 1988 — exactly 36 years ago last week.
Samba and Rotiroti: two very different victims in two very different places killed 23 years apart in very different circumstances by entirely different means and clearly different killers.
And yet here’s a problem: open the Victoria Police murder rewards website page to check Sam Rotiroti’s murder profile and you can read all about the $1m reward posted six years ago — but the accompanying photograph is not of him.
The picture is of Les Samba, who was shot to death in Beaconsfield Parade in Middle Park on the night of February 27, 2011.
The Rotiroti family say the Samba picture has been on the Rotiroti reward page for years,
The only similarity between the cases is that the Samba murder also carries a $1m reward for information that results in conviction.
Police firmly believe that the Rotiroti killer was someone close to home. Any chance that Sam’s widow Giuseppina would reveal her suspicions (or knowledge) of who killed her husband with a metal stake in their Manifold Heights driveway vanished when she died last month.
The tight-lipped Giuseppina never confirmed to detectives the identity of the man she and others in the tight-lipped Calabrian community all suspected of killing her husband. “Knew” might be a better word than “suspected.”
This bizarre secretiveness extended to Giuseppina’s own death, which was not advertised at all and not relayed to her estranged son, Vince Rotiroti, who was the only family member to help police to seek the truth.
Vince lives and works near Geelong, carrying on his beloved father’s concreting business. But he has hardly spoken to any member of his immediate family, nor several cousins, since charges were withdrawn against a man just weeks after the murder because witnesses refused to testify.
Sadly, Vince found out about his mother’s death only by chance last month when he went to see his father’s grave in Geelong and saw a fresh nameplate had just been added to the headstone.
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