Andrew Rule: Prue Bird’s death and the Russell St bomber link

THE abduction and murder of Melbourne teenager Prue Bird was a mother’s worst nightmare. But as the sinister clues started to fall in place, the mystery was linked to one of Melbourne’s worst crimes. NEW PODCAST — LISTEN NOW.

JENNY Bird never really thought her daughter Prue had run away. She hoped so with all her heart but that was a mother’s love and hope. Mother’s intuition screamed that the worst had happened.

Years before, Jenny’s mother Julie Finlay had left Jenny’s father and started befriending prisoners.

It had started when Julie, then 40, started visiting Kevin Taylor, a young tearaway jailed for shooting Painter and Dockers union boss Pat Shannon in 1972. The family had known Taylor as a teenager in Brunswick.

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A prison social worker who’d had an affair with another prisoner, Paul Kurt Hetzel, introduced him to Julie.

Hetzel was a decade younger than the mother-of-four and he charmed her effortlessly. She’d gone looking for love in the wrong places and been unlucky enough to find it.

Hetzel was intelligent, articulate and had shown a taste for violence and theft at a young age. He was lucky to be alive, as he had wounded a police officer.

It was a classic jailhouse romance: a manipulative crook grooming a “cleanskin” woman so she would front for him to obtain guns, cars and rental properties.

Even other prisoners shook their heads. Kevin Taylor got a message to Jenny saying “that man is going to bring you nothing but trouble and tragedy”.

Prue Bird with her grandmother Julie.

Prue was a toddler and her sister Amanda a baby when their gullible grandmother brought Hetzel home from jail.

He was wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase and driving a Ford LTD Julie had bought. He looked like a businessman but all he had in the briefcase was a pistol. He had set up his crime comeback before he left prison.

Hetzel had cultivated serious criminals inside, including Stan Taylor, a friend of Peter Walker, who had escaped from Pentridge with Ronald Ryan in 1965 and murdered a man while on the run.

Now Taylor and Walker were pals with Hetzel — the man little Prue called “Pop”.

Taylor introduced Hetzel to younger crooks: Peter Reed and the Minogue brothers, Craig and Rodney, who would be notorious after the Russell Street bombing on Easter Thursday, 1986.

A young Prue with Paul Hetzel.

When 60 sticks of gelignite packed in a stolen car detonated, burning a young policewoman who died 24 days later, police “turned over” the underworld. And the underworld turned on itself.

Hetzel dumped anything linking him with the bombing and cut a deal with police before Taylor could beat him to it.

The Russell St bombing.

Front page of The Herald on March 27, 1986. Picture: Photo File

For giving Crown evidence, Hetzel would get bail on robbery charges and buy immunity and fake identities for him and Julie to hide under interstate.

Taylor, Reed and Craig Minogue got life but Rodney Minogue beat the bomb charge and was jailed for robbery only.

Craig Minogue.

During the bombers’ trial in 1987, Julie Finlay would claim Craig Minogue had once threatened that if they ever informed, he would take revenge. “How would you like something to happen to your precious little Prue,” he had allegedly said.

Five years later, Prue vanished, and Jenny remembered Minogue’s threat.

At first, she clung to the hope Prue had been abducted but not killed.

Prue on top of the world near Yarck in northeast Victoria. Picture: Supplied

It seemed as if someone high in the police hierarchy also wanted to duck the probability a child had been killed to punish Crown witnesses. Easier to dismiss it as a runaway, a domestic or a random opportunistic crime.

But the evidence suggested otherwise.

A week after Prue vanished, Jenny was on the street outside her house when a white car slowly drove past. The man in the passenger seat fixed her with what she calls a death stare.

“I thought, what do you know about my daughter.”

She told police but it wasn’t until Sen Sgt Chris Jones took over Missing Persons in April that she was shown photographs to see if she recognised the man who had spooked her. She pointed at one.

“Oh my God,” a policewoman whispered. “She’s picked Rodney Minogue.”

If there was any doubt the case was a job for homicide investigators, it should have evaporated then. But someone high in the crime department disagreed.

For the final part of the Prue Bird story, listen to next week’s Life and Crimes podcast.

Listen to part one here.

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