Deadline: Melbourne’s latest crime buzz with Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler
It’s a dubious title to hold, but this AFL club may boast the most alleged killers on board their bandwagon.
Police & Courts
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Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.
BANG, BANG. MUST BE A BOMBERS FAN
They are a broad church, the Essendon fan base, but not overly religious. In fact, members of the Essendonians coterie group joke that you don’t have to kill somebody to join, but it helps.
At least three Essendonians have allegedly been linked to homicides in the past. Of course Deadline is not necessarily saying these three have committed homicide, just that some have made allegations they were linked to them.
There’s one the other club donors call “Bang Bang” because he has been publicly linked (by a coroner) to the shooting of his former business partner, Kevin Pearce, at the Bendigo suburb of Golden Square in 1985.
“Bang Bang” is, of course, William Matthews, a prosperous transport operator still around Bendigo and once (some police now suspect) one of two SP bookmakers who operated in that city without hindrance from local law enforcement in the 1980s.
Kevin Pearce was a family man with Mildura and Echuca mail runs and a taste for the punt. Pearce was shot with a .308 rifle around midnight as he loaded his truck at the depot in April, 1985.
If he’d died on the spot, homicide detectives might have solved the crime quickly. But he did not die for weeks, and until then the shooting was left to local police who knew more about burglars than murders. A coroner found that Matthews either pulled the trigger himself or arranged for someone else to do it, but prosecutors decided there wasn’t enough admissible evidence to put to a jury.
Arranging for someone else to do the dirty work is only a good idea if you’re sure the dirty worker won’t turn on you. According to police, that’s what happened to colourful Essendon chemist Ronald William Edward Crawford, whose wife Anne was found dead in eerily suspicious circumstances underneath the family Fairlane in the driveway of their Strathmore Heights house in 1988.
The claim was that the impeccably dressed and unmechanical Mrs Crawford had crawled under the car because it had a flat tyre, and that it fell off the jack and crushed her. A scenario about as likely as her climbing a telephone pole or train surfing.
Somehow, despite some unease, the flat tyre yarn passed muster until a career criminal and one-time “mate” of Crawford offered to trade police the information that he’d killed the chemist’s wife and staged the whole charade. All because her husband was already deeply involved with other women and didn’t want to split his assets in a divorce.
Incidentally, a former lover (and employee) of Crawford’s has recently spoken at length to Deadline about her frightening affair with him, but that’s a story for another day.
Crawford was ultimately found not guilty of murder by a jury 18 years after Anne’s death.
They found themselves unable to believe the words of the convicted rapist and armed robber beyond reasonable doubt.
Crawford’s lawyers had claimed the informer had killed Anne during a bungled robbery and their client had recently made amends with his wife over their marriage troubles.
The third killer yarn from the Essendonians is that of the female footy fan who fatally stabbed the violent man she was romantically involved with. This, by contrast with the other two, was a clear cut case of self defence. Matthews and Crawford had better watch their manners around the lady in question.
Some readers, of course, might reckon their own AFL club has more alleged killers on board their bandwagon than Essendon. Surely Carlton and Collingwood can do better than three. But we suspect Richmond has the most famous convicted murderer.
CERTAIN ADMISSIONS IN TIGERLAND
The Essendonians don’t have it all on their own. One of the most controversial convicted murderers in Australian history, a radio announcer and champion debater named John Bryan Kerr, was for many years a member of a Richmond coterie group.
By that time, Kerr had changed his name to Wallace and fabricated a CV to cover the missing years, when he was in prison. He had a series of sales jobs, a successful marriage to a much younger woman, and shared a devotion to the Tigers that was slightly unusual given his background as a Toorak toff educated at Scotch College.
Some people around the club knew his secret. As a young man, he had been arrested for the murder of a 20-year-old woman, Beth Williams, whose body was found on the beach at Albert Park on December 28, 1949.
As happened routinely in those days, detectives “verballed” Kerr with what was an obviously fabricated “confession”. The trouble for three successive juries was that police malpractice was then so common that it was often used to convict guilty people. In other words, the guilt of lazy police in building their case dishonestly did not prove Kerr was innocent — but perhaps only that he was too clever and confident to confess.
The damning fact was that Kerr had taken Beth Williams out that night, had gone back to Albert Park with her and was the last to see her alive. It made him the prime suspect until a better one came along, and a better one never did.
In Kerr’s favour was that his account never wavered in any detail over many tellings, something barristers tend to associate with truthful (or well-schooled) witnesses. On the other hand, there was Kerr’s proven propensity for flying into terrible rages, which was highlighted by a psychiatric report.
After three trials attended by hundreds of starstruck young women, the celebrity prisoner was sentenced to death, later commuted to 20 years. He was, in fact, out of jail at the age of 36, a poster boy for rehabilitation. That is when he reinvented himself under a new name — the one he used in the Tigers coterie group where his previous identity was an open secret.
The whole strange and disturbing story is told in Gideon Haigh’s masterful account, Certain Admissions.
THIRD TIME UNLUCKY
The kid from Noble Park was the life of a wild Southbank party last week but he can lace himself into his walking shoes for a long, long time.
The P-plater knocked up a .174 blood alcohol reading when picked up by Prahran highway patrol members in Queens Way, Windsor, not long after sunrise.
The teenager was begging for trouble, doing 23km/h over the limit and not displaying his probationary plates.
Of course, honesty is always the best policy. But it remains unclear why he admitted to making his third bottle shop run of the night to replenish the thirsty mob’s grog supply.
Not surprisingly, his VW is impounded.
SLOW LEARNER
Crooks don’t come much thicker than a bloke busted breaking into a country police station last week.
The young man had allegedly been involved in a series of aggravated burglaries in the state’s northwest using a stolen black Volkswagen SUV.
The VW was recovered by police who locked it away in the secure yard of their station.
But our hero decided he wanted it back and was caught early one morning trying to sneak it from the cop shop on the back of a tow truck.
Legal reasons prevent us saying too much but this fellow probably should have pulled his head in a long time ago. He was on parole over the horrific death of a young girl because of another of his stupid decisions.
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