Deadline: Locals suspect sex worker shot Korumburra Hotel owner Mike Lowry

Despite a shaky confession from a troubled woman, many locals now believe it was a dangerous sex worker who pulled the trigger on a Korumburra publican.

Many locals believe it was a sex worker who pulled the trigger on a Korumburra publican.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with your weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

Did a pro do the publican?

It’s now more than 22 years since South Gippsland publican Mike Lowry was shot in the head at close range with what police deduced was a pen pistol, inflicting a wound that put Lowry in a coma for six months before he died.

The shooting happened an hour before midnight at Lowry’s hotel in the main street of Korumburra on January 18, 2001.

The popular publican had gone upstairs while staff cleaned up as a few drinkers nursed last drinks in the bar. He and his wife, Nunta, and their two children lived in rooms above the bar and gaming room in the Korumburra Hotel.

Lowry told his nearby six-year-old stepson “Eddie” to run when he saw a female intruder coming for him. His wife heard an altercation and glimpsed the woman running towards the fire escape. She had dark hair cut a certain way.

The subsequent investigation was muddied by the fact that an erratic and unstable local woman, Vickie Whyhoon, clearly hated Lowry for banning her from the pub.

Whyhoon subsequently often claimed to have been the one to shoot the publican, a “confession” that locals always regarded sceptically, right up until Vickie took her own life years later.

Vickie’s ex-husband Len readily concedes she was a disturbed and volatile person but rejects the half-baked “theory” that she sneaked from their marital bed at 11pm, shot Lowry and returned in time that he woke up beside her the next morning.

Mike Lowry was in a coma for six months before he died.

A photo fit of woman police wanted to speak to in relation to the crime.

Only one thing is certain: that various people know more than they are saying.

That brings us to messages received from a South Gippsland source this week, suggesting that many locals suspect Lowry’s real killer is a manipulative convicted prostitute and thief who recently got out of jail.

Interestingly, her rap sheet includes setting up a sham robbery at the brothel where she worked. A judge heard that the woman had acted out a pantomime robbery with a nervous male collaborator who posed reluctantly as an armed robber.

Apart from the shaky patsy holding the knife, a teenager was also conned into acting as a getaway driver.

A lawyer appearing in the case revealed that within weeks of the sham robbery, the same woman arranged for another man to tie up her male co-accused and sexually assault him with a greased knife. What a charmer.

No wonder she was sent to jail for that — and no wonder some people who know her history are alert to the fact she often refers to the Lowry shooting at Korumburra, her original home district.

From all accounts, being around her is about as safe as juggling chainsaws.

Crime reporter didn’t get the boot

When ace crime reporter Anthony Dowsley staged his exit from the Herald Sun last week after years of nailing stories, his colleagues were delighted to hear about the ones that got away.

As Dowsley readily admitted, top of that list is the notorious Korp case.

Portuguese-born wife and mother Maria Korp was reported missing from her northern suburbs home in February 2005 and was found comatose and brain-damaged in the boot of her own car parked in St Kilda Rd … but not until four days later.

It wasn’t exactly law enforcement’s finest hour, given that police headquarters were then at 412 St Kilda Rd, a punt kick away from the most wanted car in the state.

But police reporters (then also working from a nearby St Kilda Rd office) couldn’t blame the cops because they also blindly walked past the missing woman’s missing car each day to write stories about her and her car, the description and registration number of which was widely broadcast all week by those same reporters.

The body of Maria Korp was found in a car boot on St Kilda Rd.

Dowsley was one of those unobservant reporters, as he confessed at his marathon farewell function last Thursday.

History shows that Dowsley recovered and went on to greater things, including the celebrated Lawyer X and Jason Roberts cases. Maria Korp did not recover, succumbing to her injuries after life support was withdrawn in hospital in August the same year.

Her husband, Joe Korp, managed to hang himself, possibly accidentally while staging for sympathy, on the day of poor Maria’s funeral.

Joe Korp’s sometime lover, Tania Herman, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was out of jail in less than 10 years, so was able to marry her lesbian lover and live happily ever after. Or not.

One Deadline contributor had the dubious honour of being “lent” a homicide squad tape recorder early in 2005, to record another suspected wife killer in a country town.

On the “blank” tape left in the recorder, it so happened, was Joe Korp’s sycophantic helpful tones when he was recorded talking to stonily sceptical detectives about his wife’s disappearance.

For what it’s worth, Korp sounded as guilty as sin, which might explain why he ended up climbing a ladder with a noose around his neck and a blood-alcohol content of .015, as in three times the driving limit. A just result.

Dowsley, incidentally, is heading for 60 Minutes in Tinsel Town, unless other parties make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Maria and Joe Korp in happier times.

Is the sergi winery corked?

Longtime “mafia watcher” and lifetime newspaperman Terry Jones has been compiling a giant dossier on Calabrian organised crime around Griffith since his long stint as editor of local paper The Area News.

Jones made sure that the concerns of Concerned Citizens of Griffith got a big run despite the sneaky lobbying of corrupt politicians and police by sinister mafia stooges.

The tireless Jones co-authored a book, The Griffith Wars, with Tom Gilling in 2017. Now he has decided to quit the keyboard he pounded for more than 50 years, and will donate his trove of 10,000 pages of notes, clippings and documents material to Charles Sturt University.

It was clear to Jones and others around Griffith that organised crime families — dubbed “crims in grass castles” — had enriched themselves through trafficking cannabis to Melbourne and Sydney, then used the proceeds to “re-invest” in heroin and cocaine smuggling. And buying political influence through snakes like the disgraceful federal MP Al Grassby, among others.

Jones never missed a chance to point city reporters towards the unpleasant truth, and made sure the crime cell that plotted the murder of local businessman Donald Mackay in 1977 was not swept under the carpet.

Tony Sergi died in 2017.

He is happy to have outlived alleged winemaker Tony Sergi, who died on his 82nd birthday in late 2017, and Sergi’s criminal relative Mick Sergi, who died in 2020. Not to mention the mafia’s paid assassin, James “Iceman” Bazley, who died in 2018 at 92 without confirming the fact he’d done the Mackay hit for the Calabrians via “Aussie Bob” Trimbole, alias Trimboli.

Jones is taking some parting shots. He told Deadline this week he suspects the various Sergi wine businesses have finally run short of the mysterious financial uplift that let them get away for years with naming their supermarket wines with names like “Rumours” and “Gossip”.

If Jones is right, and he often has been, the tide is turning against the “mobbed-up” elements of the Sergi clan, one of 14 interrelated family groups that police believe were connected with most of the big cannabis crops grown since the 1970s.

As bent cops and politicians from the Askin, Wran and Bjelke-Petersen eras have faded into history, the mafia (’NDrangheta in Calabrian dialect) is not as untouchable as it once was. One reason for that, maybe, is that after a century of marrying cousins, they are getting dangerously in-bred.

When police finally got around to having a hard look at the Calabrian mafia in the 1990s, they nominated a tight-knit list of clans as being linked to the biggest cannabis-growing rackets in Australia.

The surnames on the list were Sergi, Barbaro, Romeo, Trimboli, Perre, Pelle, Pochi, Cannistra, Catanzariti, Velardi, Agresta, Carbone, Zappia and Alvaro. Only the Alvaros were not related to the rest.