Why gruesome gangland murders of Terry and Christine Hodson remain unsolved
As a veteran detective stared down at the bodies of Terence and Christine Hodson laying side-by-side, he knew immediately the murder was a “clusterf***”. Sixteen years on, the mystery remains just that.
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Veteran homicide detective Charlie Bezzina braced as he stared down at the bodies of Terry and Christine Hodson, side-by-side.
As he spotted a spent cartridge on the back of Terry’s head, he already knew that this murder was a “clusterf***”.
Terry Hodson had called himself a “dead man walking” for months beforehand.
The Hodsons were under police protection when they were killed in May 2004.
Bezzina’s chief suspect for the killings was a cop.
As a witness in a burglary case against two drug squad cops, Paul Dale and David Miechel, Hodson was supposed to be under the care of the ethical standards division (ESD) of Victoria Police.
These investigators wanted him in witness protection, but Hodson had spurned the offer.
Instead, makeshift CCTV cameras were installed while Hodson trusted in his dogs, two German Shepherds, for protection.
It wasn’t enough.
It didn’t help that his police protectors had not dedicated the resources for better security arrangements – the type that sent images to an off-site hard drive.
The killer, it seems, simply ejected the CCTV videotape with ‘’Saturday’’ written on it before walking away.
Worse, perhaps, was that police did not inform Hodson that his long history of informing – written on police information reports – had been stolen from the drug squad offices and distributed to the underworld.
These failings were listed in a civil case brought by two Hodson children, Andrew and Mandy, who have belatedly received a six-figure confidential payout.
The police settlement accepts no liability, but it is unofficially accepted, both within and outside the force, that Victoria Police failed in its care of the Hodsons.
Mandy Hodson is still traumatised by her discovery of her parents. She thought her father was play acting when she saw him on the floor of the couple’s East Kew TV room.
She remembers her parents being ‘’as cold as a fridge’’.
Andrew, who heard her scream remembers the bullet holes in their heads, but tried to wake his mother regardless.
Among his first calls was to his and his father’s lawyer, Nicola Gobbo.
He wanted to make contact with anti-corruption Inspector Peter De Santo, who after speaking to Hodson, was told by superiors to stay away from the double-murder scene.
Andrew has fractured memories of his first words to De Santo as he told him his parents were lying dead in front of him.
‘’They’re dead Pete, they’re dead,’’ he recalls telling De Santo.
‘’You gotta find out who did this. I said, ‘it’s one of yours.’’
Mandy shares the pain of a missed chance to solve the murders with the detectives who strived for years to give them justice – namely homicide detective Sergeant Sol Solomon and former Senior Constable Cam Davey.
‘’I’ve got children, I’ve got grand children and what do you tell them down the track,’’ Mandy said.
‘’It’s horrific …’’
Davey quit the force after their investigation – codenamed Petra – was shut down in 2010 and rebadged with a new taskforce, Driver.
But no progress was made. Some Driver taskforce investigators have questioned why the Hodson investigation was shelved.
Solomon and Davey, in statements to the Lawyer X royal commission, believe their superiors compromised their investigation from the outset.
They echo the opinion of Bezzina, who says he was ‘window dressing’’ in the Hodson murder case. Important intelligence was kept from them by their own colleagues and superiors, including the then head of the crime department, Simon Overland.
Other avenues, however, remain open.
The Hodsons want a reopened murder investigation into their parents’ deaths. They also want another coronial inquest, given recent revelations show how limited a 2014 inquest came to be – in part because Victoria Police sought to shield lawyer and police informer, Nicola Gobbo, from scrutiny.
A royal commission into Gobbo’s use as informer 3838 has scraped away fresh details into the Hodson killings. They put Gobbo in the centre of a swirl of questionable characters. She pulled their strings and accumulated knowledge for reasons that remain unclear to this day.
It is now known that Gobbo was spared questioning at the coronial inquest after a request from then Chief Commissioner of Police, Ken Lay, transmitted through the Victoria Government Legal Office.
That same inquiry excused Paul Dale, and suspected Hodson hit man, Rod Collins, from giving evidence.
It also did not question Tony Mokbel, whose tangled relationship with Gobbo – and the Hodson tragedy – has never been properly examined.
Gobbo acted as go-between for Dale and Carl Williams, who later claimed he ordered the Hodson hit – on Dale’s request – under an agreement to slash years off Williams’ 35-year sentence for four other Gangland murders.
Some investigators have long suspected Gobbo was also a go-between for Mokbel and Dale.
Sergeant Solomon and then Senior Constable Davey were on the Petra taskforce which took over investigating the Hodson deaths in 2007, when Williams began offering his account of the killings.
But in 2010, weeks after Williams was murdered in jail, investigators were made aware of bugged phone conversations between Mokbel and Gobbo intercepted by the Australian Federal Police in the months before the Hodson killings.
Gobbo was purported to have told Mokbel that “Pauline”, a “mutual friend”, had “documents” for Mokbel to see.
Investigators believed that “Pauline” was (Paul) Dale, and that the “documents” referred to Hodson’s informing records, known as the Blue File, which disappeared from the St Kilda Rd drug squad files in the hours or days after a burglary involving corrupt police in September,
2003.
Hodson and a detective, Dave Miechel, had ripped off a Mokbel drug house while it was under the surveillance of Miechel’s police crew.
Both were arrested at the scene, and Hodson later told ESD investigators that his informer handlers, Dale and Miechel, had plotted the burglary.
The AFP-tapped phone call was cited in Victoria Police’s confidential submission to the coronial inquest. Yet the police later withdrew the claim. There was no evidence, the police now argued, that the evidence existed.
Solomon remains steadfast in his belief of the significance of the bugged calls, stating in 2019 to the Lawyer X royal commission that in 2010: ‘’We were following this information up with the AFP to verify.’’
‘’We had decided at this time that 3838 should be investigated as the conduit between Dale and the information reports being circulated to criminals.’’
Gobbo, their witness, was to be questioned as a suspect before the Petra taskforce was shut down.
Solomon’s belief in the significance of the Mokbel-Gobbo calls was countered by another detective, Detective Senior Sergeant Boris Buick, an investigator in the later taskforce, Driver, which investigated both the Hodson deaths and the killing of Carl Williams in prison in 2010.
Buick argued his belief that there was no ‘’Pauline’’ phone call.
It was a case, it seems, of careless whispers between law enforcement agencies.
But Buick acknowledges only some, not all, of the phone calls between Gobbo and Mokbel tapped by the AFP at the time were handed over to Victoria Police.
Buick had heard no calls that referred to “Pauline”, but did hear a conversation in which Gobbo referred to “mutual friends” and “documents”.
The established phone calls between Gobbo and Mokbel depict a close relationship between a lawyer and her client. Gobbo represented Mokbel from at least 2002, and police noted at the time the pair’s unusual propensity for late night meetings.
Gobbo has admitted that she ran a de facto protection racket for her client. When drug associates of Mokbel’s were arrested, she advised them not as independent counsel, but as a lawyer serving to shield Mokbel.
Her knowledge of Mokbel’s criminal empire is unquestioned. She officially informed against him from September, 2005 because, in her words, she wanted to get “the Mokbel monkey” off her back.
Their relationship shifted with time. In 2008, she told her police handlers about her strange fear that Mokbel might lie about her in court.
A police information report read: “She states he could lie about things such as: I slept with him, I took drugs with him, laundered money, passed on sensitive ESD (ethical standards department) documents, passed on certain IRs (police information reports) re Hodson to Tony. She says in reality it was the other way around. Tony showed them to her.”
Mokbel was asked by Petra investigators more than decade ago about the person who supplied him with the Blue File a couple of months before the Hodson killings. He nominated someone who had since died.
Investigators didn’t believe him. Mokbel has since passed up opportunities to explain his role, if any, in the Hodson story and whether Gobbo could be implicated in crimes, even though his insights could potentially sweeten his prospects of less time in jail.
Mokbel now knows the breadth of Gobbo’s betrayal as a police informer against him. His apparent reluctance to speak against her fosters a theory that Mokbel and Gobbo know too much about one another, in a kind of brittle peace shared by superpowers with nuclear weapons.
Gobbo boasted close proximity with every main character in that time – Mokbel, Williams, and her client Hodson. As for the police officer who feared Hodson’s testimony against him, Paul Dale?
She got drunk with him less than two weeks after the burglary, slept with him, and they maintained close contact on burner phones until the Hodson murders.
Her meddling was questioned by counsel assisting, Chris Winneke QC, at the royal commission. She spoke of being awed by ESD detective Peter De Santo.
Gobbo: ‘Well it was a combination I think. It was a desire to … help Mr De Santo and to, you know, I know it sounds pathetic but to live up to what his expectations were of me … I was also being pushed in the background by Tony Mokbel who wanted to find out what, as much as he could about what police did and didn’t know … Dale wanted to know if Tony wanted to kill him because he’d burgled a place that belonged to Tony. Um, so, yeah, it was all – there was – I felt pressure from all around and you’re right, I should have walked away
from all of them.”
Dale has always denied all allegations made against him.
Former chief commissioner Christine Nixon has agreed with appraisals of the time: that the Hodson killings were the “biggest stain” on Victoria Police. As Mandy Hodson says, “no amount of OMO is going to get the stain out of that one.”
Current chief commissioner Graham Ashton is about to leave the role after five years in the job. He nominated the Hodson mystery as a case the police needed to solve when he started the role.
Yet as Ashton leaves, Victoria Police seems intent on hiding unfavourable secrets from public view. Earlier this year, the force asked the courts to extend suppression orders against identifying critical people in the Hodson case.
These people have answers, Gobbo among them. Until they give them, the Hodson killings will remain, as Bezzina thought when he saw the bodies, a “clusterf***”.
Andrew Hodson, a suspect for years in the murder of his parents, now asks: ‘’Where do we go from here?’’
“The same place everybody wants to go to. To try and find a happy place.’’
All three Hodson children say they think about, and talk to, their parents every day.
But they won’t find that “happy place’’ until they have answers, and justice.
Listen to special podcast special with Mandy and Andrew Hodson on LIFE &
CRIMES with ANDREW RULE.
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