How Hungry Jacks burger with Ron Iddles led to Roberts’ freedom
A covert trip to where Bandali Debs’ guns were buried and a Hungry Jacks burger with Ron Iddles would be the start of Jason Roberts’ road to freedom.
Police & Courts
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Jason Roberts summed up his life in a letter he wrote while in jail.
“As a teenager, I was kicked out of the plane and had to learn how to fly on the way down,” he wrote.
“The best bit of advice I can give you, mate – never fall in love with the firstborn daughter of a serial killer! As falling feels like flying – until you hit the ground.”
Roberts wrote that last year from Barwon Prison’s Acacia ward – where he had been locked down for 22 hours a day for eight years, part of a total of nearly 22 years he spent behind bars.
He was referring to his relationship with the daughter of psychopath Bandali “Ben” Debs, his former partner in crime.
While behind bars in Barwon, Roberts got to know Cardinal George Pell, who, after his own release following the overturning of his convictions, publicly spoke about a man he met in jail who he believed was innocent.
Cardinal Pell was talking about Roberts.
It was also from Barwon that Roberts prepared for the fight of his life in Victoria’s Supreme Court.
Roberts was serving a life sentence over the 1998 murders of police officers Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller in Moorabbin, a crime that shocked the nation.
He had always maintained his innocence. But it would take two trials, two decades apart for a jury to agree.
His only fair trial was held this year, after the first was, as a former barrister acting for Roberts put it, “poisoned to its root”.
On Monday, Roberts was acquitted in the Supreme court.
One of the case’s many turning points involved a bizarre day out for Roberts.
No one in 2013, other than a few high-ranking prison officials, a handful of detectives, and those guarding him, knew about his trip outside prison walls.
And maybe some teenagers working at a suburban Hungry Jack’s.
The armoured truck transporting the high-security inmate was unmissable as it pulled into the fast food joint’s car park.
A detective jumped out and ordered a couple of burgers for his prisoner, who remained shackled inside the armoured rig.
Roberts, then aged 32, devoured the two bacon deluxe burgers – and they tasted as good as he remembered.
The detective who fetched them for him was homicide squad veteran Ron Iddles, who was leading a police-sanctioned operation dubbed Rainmaker into Roberts’ 2002 convictions.
On this day in July, Iddles had been granted permission to have Roberts show him where he had dug a hole for Debs.
The hole was to hide guns, Roberts told police, including those used to kill officers Silk and Miller, a crime that Roberts insisted Debs had committed alone.
The field trip took them to Tooradin, on the edge of Western Port Bay, and then inland to Noojee, specifically the nearby picturesque Toorongo Falls, where Roberts had camped and ridden his bike as a child.
Debs, Roberts said, had become “jumpy” after police began honing in on the family, especially by late 1999 when the two were prime suspects in the officers’ murders.
They had initially buried guns in sand dunes behind Cranbourne cemetery. But Debs wanted them moved.
“I remember it was dark when we dug them up at Cranbourne and by the time we got to Toorongo Falls the sun was coming up,” Roberts stated in 2013.
“Ben brought new buckets, oil and a shovel.
“I dug a hole whilst he sorted the guns out.
“Ben told me to make sure I dug a deep hole as he had had guns found before, which he had buried. It was a prick of a hole to dig.”
Roberts would later reflect in a 2016 affidavit: “When we were digging a hole in the middle of the bush, I did not know if it was the guns or me that were going to go into that hole.”
This time, he said, they buried “clean” and “dirty” guns in buckets along with clothes, duct tape and Silk’s blue police diary, which was stolen after his murder in Cochranes Rd.
Little was found on the first trip, on July 9, 2013, but nine days later detectives and a search crew dug up a roll of duct tape, a drum and a white bucket labelled Masterfoods.
Roberts was also right to suspect that Debs, the father of his girlfriend Nicole, was thinking about killing him.
A police bugging operation on the pair from late 1999 into 2000 had picked up such sentiment.
The bugs had also picked up semi-coded conversations between Debs and Roberts, who were criminal partners.
Investigators charged both with the Silk-Miller murders, for which they were convicted in 2002.
Both appealed their murder convictions all the way to the High Court, and lost.
Roberts then pulled off the unthinkable. He got Victoria Police to investigate his claims of innocence.
It would unearth an alibi, uncover police corruption, spark petitions for mercy, entangle a politician, and end with the retrial of Roberts.
It also set cop against cop.
The police “brethren” closed ranks against Iddles. Reinvestigating a solved double police murder – and worse, shedding doubt on one conviction – caused fractures within the force.
Roberts’ road back to the Supreme Court began in 2005, when he confessed to his then lawyer Marita Altman, that he had lied to her.
Roberts admitted that he had committed 10 armed robberies with Debs between March and July in 1998.
The inmate also told her he had always known about the Silk-Miller murders too, because Debs had told him about it.
But he stressed he was not present when Debs fatally shot the police officers in Moorabbin.
Ms Altman and Sydney legal eagle Sean Grant lobbied for a review.
But the initial reply from the office of Victoria Police’s then deputy commissioner Simon Overland could be summed up in two words – go away.
Four years on, in late 2012, then Director of Public Prosecutions John Champion took an interest.
Iddles, whose integrity was well known, was summoned to a meeting.
There, inside the Office of Public Prosecutions’ HQ in Lonsdale St, he met with Champion, Gavin Silbert QC, and Richard Lewis, another senior prosecutor.
The carrot being dangled was that Roberts had information on Debs’ unsolved crimes.
Debs, he said, had told him he had “lost count” of the murders he had committed.
In return for his information, Roberts wanted his Silk-Miller murder convictions re-examined.
Iddles briefed his superiors and within months, Operation Rainmaker was launched.
The first meeting Iddles had with Roberts was at the Metropolitan Remand Centre in Ravenhall on March 12, 2013. Ms Altman was also there.
Roberts wasn’t looking for a reduced sentence by co-operating with police. He wanted to clear his name.
He reiterated in the jailhouse interview that he was certainly an armed robber, but he was no killer.
Before meeting Debs, he said, his only interaction with police had been a $20 fine for failing to wear a bike helmet.
The next interaction was the inquiry into the murder of two officers.
Roberts was no angel, though. With Debs, he menaced restaurant staff and diners at gunpoint in a series of armed robberies.
The pair did so while wearing masks depicting former US presidents – a nod to the 1991 action film Point Break.
Debs remembers wearing the “funny” disguises, but there is nothing funny about him. The ease with which he kills suggests he began murdering before his early forties.
Officially, however, his first murder was that of 34-year-old Sydney sex worker Donna Hicks, a mother of three, in 1995.
Debs had picked her up on the Great Western Hwy in Sydney’s west. After having sex with her, he pulled out a handgun and shot her in the face. Her body was found dumped outside a quarry entrance, wearing just a black dog collar.
He struck again two years later. This time it was a wayward teenager he killed after sex. Kristy Harty was 18 and had been seen on Princes Hwy near Dandenong, trying to flag down cars to offer sex.
Debs, then 44, picked her up and drove her to a secluded track in Upper Beaconsfield. He had sex with her before shooting her in the back of the head with a .357 Magnum revolver.
Debs, who testified at Roberts’ retrial, was asked why he shot her. “Was it for the thrill?” defence barrister David Hallowes SC asked.
“It just happened,” Debs replied.
It wasn’t until Debs and Roberts were charged in 2000 over the Silk-Miller murders that police had a clue as to who had killed the women.
After Debs' arrest over the officers’ killings, his DNA was put through the national database. It came back with the two “hits”.
Debs, now 68, is serving four life sentences in NSW’s Goulburn Prison for the two sex killings and the execution of the two officers.
But it didn’t stop him calling the homicide squad when his old accomplice Roberts had his convictions for the Silk-Miller murders quashed by Victoria’s Appeal Court in November 2020.
In return for giving evidence against Roberts, Debs attempted to strike a deal.
The psychopathic former tiler and father of five was clear about what he wanted.
Debs asked to be moved to a Victorian jail, to be given a parole date, and for immunity from prosecution in relation to his evidence, given two months ago at Roberts’ retrial. No official promises were made pre-trial.
During his evidence, given under the protection of a “certificate” meaning he could not incriminate himself, he admitted to a life of crime.
But he also lied.
He told the Supreme Court that he shot officer Miller in self-defence, and he denied shooting officer Silk.
Although he has pleaded not guilty to every murder he has committed, he also agreed he killed Hicks and Harty.
He even admitted to shooting at two cops in an industrial street in Hallam in 1994, a bullet piercing the window of their police car.
Then there were the 30-odd stick-ups he did with his original teenage protege, his wife’s nephew Jason Ghiller, between 1991 and 1994.
That Debs was involved in these crimes is not news to police.
So, is it likely Debs began executing people in 1995?
Iddles is convinced he began killing at least by the early 1980s, maybe earlier. He detailed the cold-case murders in his Operation Rainmaker report, delivered to the DPP in December, 2013.
Roberts had bits and pieces of information that Rainmaker spent a year investigating.
None ended in a prosecution, but links were made.
Among them were the 1990 Kananook railway station murder of 23-year-old Sarah MacDiarmid, the killing of a hairdresser during a robbery, an alleged fatal shooting in Doveton and another shooting at Dandenong Police Paddocks.
Another intriguing detail given to Iddles was that Debs had boasted about “cutting a sheila’s fingers off” after abducting her because she had a “really nice ring”.
Debs also allegedly made a reference to burying bodies “side-by-side”.
Iddles suspects Debs was talking about the unsolved Tynong North murders in 1980-81, involving six murdered girls and women mostly abducted from Melbourne’s streets near public transport stops.
Iddles visited Debs in prison in August 2013, who at that point had never admitted any of his crimes.
The investigator arrived with Roberts’ detailed statement.
Iddles was also armed with the knowledge that Nicole Debs had backed Roberts’ alibi claim for the night of the Silk-Miller police murders.
Despite warming to the investigator, Debs was tight-lipped. He would not talk without a deal.
“I don’t know what he’s on about,” Debs told Iddles.
It was only when Roberts got a retrial that Debs was talkative.
He was desperate to strike that deal, including a parole date and a prison move to Victoria.
Debs, from his cell in Goulburn jail, still doesn’t know if he’s going to get it.
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