Did gangster Regan’s lover lure him into a death trap?
Motives abound for the murder of Stewart John Regan, but few are as compelling as the idea he was set up by the mother of the child he’s rumoured to have killed.
Overlooked evidence in the cold case assassination of Sydney gangster Stewart John Regan 50 years ago shows he may have been lured to his death by an aggrieved lover.
Recently unearthed coronial documents revealed in The Australian’s investigative podcast The Gangster’s Ghost place two mystery figures at the scene of Regan’s murder in late 1974.
Their identities have never been revealed and they were not called before the coroner who examined Regan’s death.
Retired detectives who have reviewed the documents are nonplussed how two critical witnesses to the killing of arguably the most controversial criminal of his era could have been ignored.
By 1974, Regan, just 29, was rumoured to have murdered up to 12 people and had wreaked carnage across the east coast of Australia. He was raking in enormous sums of cash from dodgy land scams, vice rackets and prostitution.
On Sunday, September 22, Regan had spent the day with his daughter, Helen, 3, and his girlfriend, Helen Scott-Huie, on a picnic at Watsons Bay in Sydney’s east. Just four months earlier, Regan had been accused of murdering Scott-Huie’s son, Karlos, 3, in a fit of rage while he was babysitting the child. Karlos’s body was never found.
However, Scott-Huie, a card dealer in one of Sydney’s illegal casinos, continued to fraternise with Regan.
On that Sunday, Regan had an argument with his de facto partner Margaret – mother to little Helen – then was driven to a “meeting” in Chapel Street, Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west, about 6pm. Scott-Huie said she dropped Regan off near the Henson Park Hotel then drove to her mother’s house at Belfield in Sydney’s west.
Regan bought a stick of cabanossi sausage from the nearby Greek delicatessen then walked down Chapel Street, where he was ambushed by at least three gunmen. He was hit with eight bullets.
Two were fired within centimetres of his skull.
Delicatessen owner Anna Poulos ran from the shop on hearing gunfire and saw a body on the road near the Marrickville State School.
She said in her statement to police: “I then went across the road to where another Greek lady was standing. I spoke to her, then, together, we started to walk down Chapel Street, towards the school, and when at the beginning of the building of the school there was a car driving down Chapel Street, and in the headlights I saw that there was the body of a man laying on the roadway … and the husband of the Greek lady I was with, who was where this body was on the road, called to us to stay where we were.”
Both the mystery “Greek lady” and her “husband” were never mentioned in the police narrative presented at Regan’s coronial inquest in 1977. Their statements to police – if any were ever taken – were not present in the coronial files unearthed by The Gangster’s Ghost podcast.
Investigators said it was impossible to believe two primary witnesses – of more importance even than Anna Poulos, given they had to have been in Chapel Street when Regan was gunned down – had slipped through the cracks.
Or had it been intentional?
Strangely, Regan went to his Marrickville meeting unarmed. He also wasn’t wearing his usual bulletproof vest. Nor was he accompanied by his regular bodyguard.
Retired detective and undercover agent Michael Drury – who survived an attempt on his life by disgraced officer and later convicted murderer Roger Rogerson in the 1980s because he refused to take a bribe – said the “Greek lady” and her husband needed to be carefully examined.
“They’re at the scene of the crime,” Drury told The Gangster’s Ghost. “They’re either eyewitnesses to the crime or they’re involved in the crime, are you with me?
“We know Scott-Huie takes Regan to this alleged meeting. And from there, at this alleged meeting, when she drops him off, we then know that Scott-Huie does a statement for the police shortly thereafter, days or whatever, and she says she sees him walking off down the road in her (car’s) rear vision mirror.
“I also understand that shortly after he gets out of the vehicle, he goes into the shop and gets a cabanossi. And so he would have been out of (her) eyesight.
“To me, it’s logical that she’d wait on the footpath for him, take him down to meet her ‘husband’ to talk about something. She’s moved away. It’s an ambush. And from there … she’s been caught at the scene by Anna Poulos. I’m surprised she said that the man leaning over the body was her husband to Anna Poulos. I imagine the police would have got a statement from him.”
Did Helen Scott-Huie – who is of Greek extraction – walk Regan into a death trap as payback for the murder of her little boy Karlos? Was this why Regan was so relaxed and happy to go unarmed?
Drury believes this was “retribution” for the boy’s death.
Helen Scott-Huie had befriended Marg Regan and her family after the death of Karlos and for several years after Regan’s demise. According to the Regans, she “disappeared” at the end of the 1970s.
Margaret Regan told The Gangster’s Ghost that the friendship simply evaporated.
“It just died and I never saw her,” she recalled. “I still haven’t seen her. I don’t know where she is.”
She remained curious not only about Scott-Huie’s movements on Regan’s final day but the supposedly grieving mother’s attitude to her child Karlos’s disappearance.
“Where did she drop John?” Marg Regan asked. “Did she drop him right on the end of the lane where he was killed? Or did she just drop him up the road? Or did she drop him around the corner? Did she just drop him in the area and he didn’t want her to know who he was meeting? I don’t know.
“I struck up a friendship with Helen. I see no reasons why (but) I just can’t understand today why a mother wouldn’t have put all her strength … into finding out what happened to her son.
“I personally didn’t see it. I saw a woman that was upset, but I didn’t see it to the extent that … if I would have lost my child … I don’t know what I would have done. I would’ve been out there trying to find out what happened.”
To add to this new motive for Regan’s death, a confidential source told The Gangster’s Ghost that Sydney’s “boss of bosses”, criminal Frederick ‘Paddles’ Anderson, who mentored a young Regan early in his career, may have set him up to be killed.
The source said Paddles had told Regan he was to meet someone on that Sunday in Marrickville but he was “not to carry a piece”, or a gun. Regan implicitly trusted ‘Paddles’.
The identities of the shooters remain unknown. Speculation down the years has pointed to corrupt police, fellow gangsters fed up with Regan’s violence and ambition, or a combination of both.
The Gangster’s Ghost podcast also showed Regan was a critical player in the firebombing of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Brisbane in March 1973 that left 15 people dead.
Six people with either knowledge of or involvement in the Whiskey fire, including Regan, were murdered between January 1974 and January 1975. Given that the main players who ordered the torching of the club were never identified let alone brought to justice, the Whiskey qualifies as yet another possible motive for Regan’s killing.
A coronial inquest was never held into the disappearance and presumed murder of Karlos Scott-Huie.
The NSW Unsolved Homicide Squad has told the Regan family that given the passage of time and lack of fresh evidence, it was not prepared to reopen the murder investigation into Stewart John Regan.
Subscribers can hear all episodes of The Gangster’s Ghost right now at gangstersghost.com.au. Or hear Episode 7 of The Gangster’s Ghost on Apple and Spotify now.
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