Slain model ‘buried in killing fields’
ON one side was a “wannabe gangster” lawyer and his associate the infamous Neddy Smith. On the other a loved up male model trying to reclaim his cash. The lawyer’s main concern? Not to get blood on his wife’s carpet.
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The motive for a male model’s murder and why police are ready to return to where Neddy Smith is believed to have disposed of his victims can now be revealed
DIANA Devitt-Dawson recalls the telephone call as if it was yesterday.
The then 37-year-old was in nursing school in England in August 1986 when her brother Mark Johnston called her out of the blue from Rome.
“I am in love, I finally know what love is and I have found it with Simone and I am just so happy it’s all I want just being with her, I don’t want anything else; love is not about sex, it’s more than that, I know that now, I’m just so happy,” he gushed as he then briefly detailed his time spent in the elegant seaside town of Biarritz in the south west of France and the local love of his life Simone-Maree.
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Mark told his sister he was rushing back to Australia to pack up and settle affairs and move permanently to Biarritz where the couple had spied a block of land on which they were going to build their new life together.
He spoke loosely of possibly meeting his sister in transit at London Airport before his flight back but he said he would call again when he had organised things.
“I didn’t even know he was in Europe, it was a surprise but it was a lovely call, he sounded so happy, I had never heard him speak like that before,” Diana said of that call.
“It was so sweet, he really grew up, he sounded so mature. The woman was waiting for him, I felt really bad because none of us knew her, Simone Maree her name … I was always thinking that maybe the poor woman never knew what happened, no-one ever told her.”
It was the last time Diana or anyone from their family would ever speak with Mark again.
New revelations
Days later Diana received another unexpected call at her UK home, this time at 2am and from a relative in Australia to tell her Mark had disappeared and most likely met with foul play.
But what was also not known then by anyone was that former Gold Coast model Mark had become a victim of foul play, allegedly murdered by notorious Sydney gangster Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith who police believe garrotted him on the orders of high profile Sydney lawyer and prominent Eastern suburbs identity Graham Valentine ‘Val’ Bellamy.
Mark’s body would never be found and the DPP could never make a case against either Smith nor Bellamy or a third man (who today cannot be named for legal reasons) and never proceeded a police report to arrest or charges.
But now with Bellamy recently dying, True Crime Australia can reveal the police theory the trio were involved in the murder and now just hope a fresh search to be formally conducted by homicide detectives in coming weeks for Johnston’s body will prove successful and provide the forensic evidence they need to convict.
According to police, Smith knows where the body is buried but although he is set to see his days out behind bars in Long Bay Goal Hospital for an unrelated slaying, he is refusing to say where. At least, not publicly.
Mrs Devitt-Dawson has not spoken publicly about her brother for a long time. It unearths many emotions, the effects his disappearance had on their family and her father going to his grave with the belief that he knew who ordered the kill and why but unable to do anything about it.
But the family hope now those who do know about the slaying will finally come forward and ease their consciences and a fresh search yield a body.
Schoolboy to playboy
Mark Johnston had dreams of becoming a pharmacist when he was at school at St Joseph’s Nudgee College in suburban Brisbane in the 1970s. Born in 1948, he had a stable family life and was the kid with the golden smile, a little shy and reserved and something of a loner, but with that enigmatic smile he was a popular figure.
His family was relatively wealthy after his father Arthur, an accomplished World War II pilot who flew 73 sorties over Europe and the Western Desert, moved his family to the Gold Coast from Tasmania, where he had given up his job as manager of Hobart Airport because of ill health.
It was supposed to be a temporary shift but Arthur, who refused to convalesce, walked into a then small LJ Hooker outlet, pointed out the Gold Coast had barely only two high rises and with his pilot’s license offered to fly prospective investors from all over to change the face of the sunshine city. With that the whole family decided to permanently settle on the Gold Coast. Mark finished school but after the death of his mother, lost some direction and never pursued a career, instead taking odd jobs then taking to modelling.
He moved to Sydney, began moving in affluent circles and seduced by a new lifestyle became something of a playboy, trafficking drugs to Sydney’s elite, including lawyers and medicos of the Northern Beaches. He never lost that charm and enigmatic smile and the 1980s were heady days for him. He bought and sold drugs, gambled, travelled and attended the best parties in Sydney’s east with his high society friends.
As well as various fashion shoots, he starred in a Coca Cola advertisement broadcast on all the major TV network channels to the delight of family and friends.
The last known photos of him feature him having a drink with friends in Greece. But his life of trafficking drugs brought him in contact with questionable characters, notably a once hardworking, eastern suburbs pillar of the community, the prominent solicitor Val Bellamy.
Motive for murder
The London-born Bellamy, as police would later recall, was a wannabe gangster. Through his work, the Dover Heights father of three girls, prominent Jewish community member and P & C president and tireless volunteer of the prestige selective Sydney Girls High, met all walks of life but enjoyed representing the seedy side of crime.
Here he befriended corrupt cop, now convicted killer, Roger Rogerson and gangster Neddy Smith, whom he would visit brothels with and enjoy a punt and a drink and considered a friend. He represented Smith and Rogerson, who was booted from the force in 1986, in their stoushes with the judiciary and also Sally Anne Huckstepp, a Dover Heights local who was murdered that same year, with her body dumped in a pond in Centennial Park. Smith was charged with her murder but was acquitted. Bellamy also dined and drank with other notorious standover men, corrupt police and drug traffickers. He would say he compartmentalised his business associates from his family life.
But that was not necessarily true, as during an ICAC inquiry evidence was heard he allegedly tried to stage a bag snatch with tens of thousands of dollars in it and also take a bribe. He was charged with the former, but the case was dropped at committal. A lot about Bellamy could not be written while he was alive that could have potentially prejudiced a case against him, but his death through ill health has allowed police to speak out publicly about their suspicions.
“He wanted to be a gangster, he hung around Neddy back in the day and doing brothel trips and he was the gangsters’ lawyer at the time but he was B-grade rather than A-grade,” former NSW Police detective and assistant commissioner John Laycock said of Bellamy.
“He wanted to be known like the American gangster lawyers, you know like those working for Al Capone so he would ingratiate himself with these people.”
Three months before he died, Johnston who was around the same age as Bellamy at the time, gave the solicitor $60,000 for safekeeping, which Bellamy wrote up a receipt for in the false name of Vincent A. Sequeira. The money may have been from drugs or gambling and the false name could have been to clean the funds or a plot by Bellamy who already had other plans for it. Whichever, Bellamy’s falsifying that name and receipt was a damning piece of evidence which he would later plead guilty to during a police record of interview. He gave Johnston a receipt and that receipt was kept.
When Johnston returned from Europe in 1986 he asked Bellamy for the money back and made arrangements to collect, but on two occasions the plans fell through because of Bellamy. Finally Bellamy told him to come to his Dover Heights house on September 1, a night his wife and daughters were to be away, and he promised the money would be there waiting.
On that evening, Johnston had arranged his farewell drinks with friends at the Bellevue Hotel in Sydney’s trendy inner city suburb of Paddington as he spoke about the new life in France he planned. He told them he had some business to collect some money first but would join them later. One friend offered to go with him but he declined and said he would only be a few minutes. They would never see him again.
When he turned up at Bellamy’s $3.5 million Dover Heights mansion, there was no money but instead, police allege, Smith and an associate and a ute they were going to use to dump his body.
“Bellamy had lost the money at the races and $60,000 in 1986 was a lot of money, and instead of not paying it back and getting hassled (that) was when Bellamy got Neddy Smith and one other to murder him,” Laycock revealed this week.
Neddy’s tapes
Laycock, a no nonsense officer, was head of Task Force Snowy that was set up to solve 14 murders, including the suspected death of Johnston, after a court authorised listening device was placed in the Long Bay jail cell of Neddy Smith almost eight years later in July 1994 as he mused to his cellmate about numerous murders he had done over the years.
“In my mind he (Johnston) is one of Neddy Smith’s victims, there is no dispute on that, and no doubt in my mind that he was murdered at Val Bellamy’s house. This is what convicted (Smith), stuff on tapes and was corroborated one way or another.
“It wasn’t just what he told the cellmate, it was recorded on an authorised listening device tape. We had a legal recording of it and everything on that tape was corroborated to the nth degree that you couldn’t disagree with it.
“The only reason he was not charged with Mark Johnston was he never mentioned Mark on the tapes by name. But everything else he referred to on those tapes was corroborated, but because he was not positively identified as he had with other victims, they (DPP) decided not to proceed.
“But we decided to call it quits anyway (on Smith) after the Harvey Jones conviction. We didn’t want to proceed for a number of reasons and he got ‘life meaning life’, and the family was not keen to go ahead and the DPP was not keen to go ahead at that stage.”
Smith has been linked by police to seven drug-related murders in the 1970s and 1980s, with Smith himself having boasted to the slayings in those secret cellmate recordings.
He was cleared at committal of killing heroin dealers Danny Chubb, Barry McCann, Barry Croft and Bruce Sandery and acquitted of killing Huckstepp in 1986.
But he was found guilty of two killings including tow truck driver Ronnie Flavell and brothel owner Harvey Jones.
Jones’s body was found in the Foreshore Road dunes in 1995 about 200m away from where in 1988 Sandery’s remains were found.
But Smith has also been named in numerous other contract killing cases as late as last year, of brothel madam Shirley Finn, and also of Johnston during his coronial inquest in 1999.
The inquest
In May 1999 a coronial inquest was held into the disappearance of Mark dubbed in the press as the “Playboy Punter” because of his perceived life of largesse. Both Smith and Bellamy were called to Glebe Coroners Court to give evidence.
Both denied any knowledge of Johnston’s whereabouts, Bellamy just confirming Johnston was at his house on that night, the money was handed over and after 15 minutes he left in a taxi.
After two days the then deputy coroner John Abernethy terminated the inquest after finding that Johnston was indeed murdered most likely at Bellamy’s house by Neddy Smith around about 8pm. Bellamy, according to the Smith secret recordings, had apparently asked Smith to not use a gun as he did not want to get blood on his wife’s new carpet, so Smith instead garotted him with a cord after handcuffing him. He was allegedly paid $60,000 for the crime.
“You’ve done a brilliant job,” Bellamy was alleged to have told Smith after the murder. The body was carried to a ute and covered over with strips of corrugated galvanised iron. Smith and a young associate, now a well-known old-school crook, drove the ute and Johnston’s rented Holden Commodore that he had arrived at Bellamy’s house in, to sand hills along Botany Bay off Foreshore Road and buried the body.
The Commodore was then dumped in nearby Beauchamp Street in Matraville about 4km away. In it was a briefcase with a small amount of cash and 465 grams of cocaine then worth about $100,000. Another 52 grams of coke were in the glove box. It was untouched by the killers which led police to suspect this was no ordinary missing person case. The car was found a day after Johnston was reported missing.
The coroner’s “grave suspicion” about Bellamy’s involvement in the murder was immediately sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions for potential charging as police were also instructed to create a brief of evidence to charge Smith with murder but neither case against the men proceeded.
Police continued to watch Ballamy and noted how after a storm he lodged a development application with the council to demolish and reconstruct a new lounge-living room due to alleged storm damage. At the time of the murder, DNA gathering and studying of crime scenes using Polilight technology to reveal otherwise invisible mopped blood stains or bodily fluids, did not yet really exist. By the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s it did but no lounge room existed and that continued avenue of investigation was closed off.
According to Johnston’s sister, Diana Devitt-Dawson, justice for the family came only in a small way when their father Arthur, then 76, was offered a chance to make a statement in court. He directed his vitriol not at Smith, who he regarded as just “an implement”, but at Bellamy who hired him to “remove the evidence of his misdemeanours”.
“As to Bellamy, I feel total repugnance,” he said. “He betrayed my son’s trust and it appears to me that he was motivated by greed and avarice and because of his long association with Mr Neddy Smith, perhaps he thought he could get away with murder to suit his own ends. Mr Bellamy should be brought to account and somehow I should be afforded the opportunity to participate in that process.”
Mrs Devitt-Dawson, who was in court, said it was disappointing a case was never made and the body of her brother not found.
“It was terrible,” she said. “He was such a personality, he had charisma to him which was quiet and peaceful and he had this great smile and people would just think ‘what a lovely guy’. He didn’t use bad language, was not rough, he was well spoken and it was odd what he was doing selling cocaine. He wasn’t really like that, but he was alone in Sydney and so no under anyone’s thumb to watch out for him. He had a group of friends and was a sociable guy, but on the whole was a loner. The drugs, somebody would have approached him to do it.”
Mrs Devitt-Dawson said it was insulting to have to walk passed Bellamy and Smith at the inquest and that neither man would ever publicly admit what they did.
“Miracles can happen, but he (Smith) is an unfortunate despicable psychopath. It’s pathetic the man can do what he did, he’s disgraceful, there are no words to describe … I hold hope there will be a break in the case. It’s sad not to have a little funeral, not that I’m big on funerals and I know they call it closure but we’ve got our heads around that one. But it would be nice to have a nice little remembrance and such a ceremony would bring our family together.”
Bellamy was jailed for two years in 2000 for the 1994 defrauding of the Broadway Credit Union of $340,000 and keeping $362,000 of another client. His family stuck by him publicly and refused to believe he was anything other than upstanding and kind.
‘The Killing Fields’
John Laycock says he knows where the body is buried but countless attempts to find it have failed. At one stage, Laycock even hired an Australian Defence Force Black Hawk helicopter to conduct thermal imaging runs over the area but all to no avail.
“I am convinced that Mark Johnston is out at Botany Bay somewhere and I’ve got a reasonable idea where and I’m still looking. I’ve no doubt he is at Botany Bay.
“I go out there, I’ve not been out there for 18 months now, but I go out there every 18 months or so, definitely every two years, with the Homicide Squad so I’m due out there again. I’ve been consistent for 23 years.”
Laycock said one known and one previously alleged Smith victim were found buried in the dunes along Foreshore Road he calls “the killing fields”. In 1995 the remains of brothel keeper Jones were found and eight years earlier the remains of Bruce Douglas Sandery, a South Australian drug dealer last seen alive in April 1988 leaving a pub in nearby Zetland.
After Jones was found and positively identified, Laycock had a wild idea.
Cadaver dogs were not really in existence at that time and some thought was given to shipping dogs out from Belgium where the police there had trained dogs but it was costly, there was quarantine and there was no guarantee it could work. They asked the NSW Police dog squad whether it could train dogs to hunt bones to which they replied they probably could.
So Laycock approached Jones’ mother and asked whether one of her son’s bones could be kept to help train dogs to search for human remains. She agreed and after a while a dog was sent on the sniff. Nothing was found. It was discovered sometime later that the Jones bone had been kept in formaldehyde so that was the scent the dogs had inadvertently been sent to search for.
Over the years several greyhound dog remains were found, all missing their ears where they had been barcoded for racing; they had obviously lost their races and their owners killed them and dumped them also in the dunes.
It was possible those greyhound trainers were dumping their dogs as Smith was dumping his bodies.
“Neddy Smith was from the eastern suburbs, not driving bodies to Kurnell or anywhere else, he was too lazy,” Laycock said. “Botany Bay was his area and he was happy out there, it was then isolated and dark and you go for a drive and you can imagine it then. You’d see a car coming from a mile away and you’d just have to duck down and no-one would see you.
“I’ve spent a lot of years on this brief and I’d love to find the bones, I haven’t given up yet.
“I think it was a promise I made to Arthur, his father, who I had a lot of rapport with that I would do everything I possibly can to locate his son’s remains. That’s the driving force and I’d like to adhere to that promise and I have. I have done a mountain of scientific stuff out there over the years, absolutely cost a squillion dollars to the department for what we have tried and we haven’t given up.”
Standing at the site yesterday, Laycock looked around and conceded the landscape had changed a lot since those early days of searching. The tides had changed due to construction of the port which had created new beach heads and destroyed others. Harvey Jones was found by a dog walker only because the sand embankment had eroded.
It could that sort of natural shift in sands that change the fortune of this case or someone coming out with a vital clue.
“You never know what could happen,” Laycock said.
Finding Mark
Mark’s other sister Joanne Melville was 12-years-old when her brother disappeared.
“I remember him as a playboy, he was on TV for the Coke ads so we just thought ‘wow our brother is on the commercial TV for a big drink’ and when we saw him he would chuck me and my brother $50 notes and think nothing of it. At that age and back then that was a lot of money, ‘here haven’t seen you for a while here’s $50’.”
She said the disappearance of her brother haunted the family for years.
Ms Melville said her promise to her dad on his deathbed was a resolution to the case.
“He said to me ‘don’t give up’ and I said “I promise I won’t’ and if we find the body we will lay him to rest properly and do the right thing for him.
“Dad lived his whole life after his death fighting for what happened, it was like a permanent job for my father … I know it was a long time ago but someone out there must know something, hopefully they can come forward now.”
Originally published as Slain model ‘buried in killing fields’
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