Cold case feeling the heat

Forty years on, a battle still rages over a prostitute’s mysterious death.

‘Confession late in life compared to eternity is the challenge Mrs M will soon face! Question is, will she choose heaven or hell?’ - Tweet by Mary Anne Brifman, April 15, 2015.

Maureen Murphy believes she knows where her determined accuser Mary Anne Brifman’s racy story of Queensland police corruption, an unlawful killing and deep intrigue is going.

The 87-year-old sees a modern Brisbane courtroom and a distressing, dramatic appearance for herself: being grilled about a fateful night near the city’s Eagle Farm racecourse in 1972.

The great-grandmother pictures a gallery of journalists, members of the public fascinated by the recycled scandal, Murphy family members, Mary Anne Brifman, and the State’s Coroner.

In Murphy’s mind’s eye, they study her carefully as a tenacious lawyer tests her recollections of Shirley Brifman, the notorious prostitute and informant for senior police. She died alone in her bed from a drug overdose 43 years ago.

Inevitably, Murphy dreads, she will be asked to confront what she describes as “despicable” questions: “Did you, Mrs Murphy, help kill Mary Anne’s mother, the prostitute Shirley Brifman? Did you go to her flat on the night of March 3, 1972, and hand her a bottle of pills? Did you tell her to take the pills, knowing they would cause a fatal overdose? Did you do these things to ensure Shirley Brifman could not give evidence against your husband, senior detective Tony Murphy, in a trial for perjury?”

“It is despicable. It is disgusting. I’m being accused of something close to murder,’’ Murphy tells The Australian.

“Mary Anne Brifman has said that I took the tablets for her mother to take to end her life. I think that is a shocking thing to have said; it is absolutely untrue and terrible and I want the public to know the true story that it never, ever happened.

“I have never met Shirley Brifman in my life, never. I have never been to that house; it was not me. I was not there that night. It has been horrible for the whole family to live through this story, and none of it is true. It never happened. I didn’t know the woman at all.

“I just didn’t do it, Mary Anne, it was not me. These are terrible things to say about me. I didn’t go to her place that night or at any time, and I played absolutely no part in her death. I will speak the truth about everything. There is nothing to hide.”

Her daughter, Christine, asks: “How would Dad feel about what you are going through now? That’s what cuts me up.”

Maureen: “He would have gone stark raving mad. The more I think about it, the angrier I become. It is ridiculous. But I do believe that the new government will go ahead with a coronial inquiry.”

Over the past two months, senior lawyers and advisers in the Queensland government and in the office of the State’s Attorney-General, Yvette D’Ath, have been weighing a formal request by Mary Anne Brifman and her Sydney barrister for a ‘cold case’ coronial inquiry into the 1972 death of her mother.

“It has begun. Justice for my beloved, sorely missed mother,’’ Brifman tells The Australian.

“Witnesses no one has ever heard about will be called. I am appalled and sickened to a whole new level at how bold Mrs Maureen Murphy is. For the first time ever, it makes my blood boil that she can utter such complete lies. Tony Murphy has accomplices still living and in public denial about everything, but most importantly, in my case, these perpetrators were definitely fully involved in a plot of murder …”

Senior sources tell The Australian it will ultimately be a decision for the coroner. But some key Labor government figures have warmed to the prospect of a forensic examination of a tawdry chapter in Queensland’s criminal-justice history. It is a chapter that always turns out badly for the Liberal National Party, which promoted Murphy to assistant commissioner and elevated his close friend, Terry Lewis, into the top job of commissioner of police.

It took the Fitzgerald inquiry of the late 1980s to expose the corruption of Lewis, a loyal servant of then premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and usher in a raft of prosecutions and an era of Labor-led reforms. Murphy, however, was never called by the inquiry to give evidence before Tony Fitzgerald, QC, who made no adverse findings against him.

But Murphy was never truly cleared, either, and a fierce battle has been joined since his death in 2010 as his family, and old police mates who proclaim his innocence, rail against true-crime authors and their police and criminal sources, some of whom implicate him in graft and murder.

The most infamous case concerning Murphy revolves around the vivacious Shirley Brifman, who ran brothels in Sydney and Brisbane, consorted with criminals, and bought a measure of protection from police by passing on gangland intelligence.

The author and journalist Matt Condon, who has been digging into these stories for his best-selling trilogy, says Shirley’s story “has never gone away … it has haunted this state for 40 years and there is a good reason for that — it is a very dark part of Queensland’s history that has never been resolved.

“She had started blowing the whistle on corrupt police and was a nervous wreck. She had fled Sydney to return to Brisbane and she was receiving death threats. She was in fear of her life when she died, apparently from a drug overdose. Shirley was one of a handful of people who changed sides to take on corruption. I believe she paid for it with her life”.

The idea that Shirley’s death resulted from foul play interested detectives when her body was carried out of the flat at Bonney Avenue, Clayfield. Shortly before Brifman died, Murphy’s career and freedom hung in the balance. He was suspended from his police job and preparing for trial, having been accused by his star informant, Brifman, of corruption and perjury.

“She had helped Tony catch so many criminals, knowing where the criminals were moving around interstate. She was a big help to Tony in those days,’’ says Maureen Murphy.

“The whole reason that they fell out was on account of Shirley Brifman putting her 13-year-old daughter (Mary Anne) into prostitution in NSW. I believe she was in quite a lot of trouble over that — to be charged — and she appealed to Tony to do something about it with the authorities in NSW, to see if they could drop everything. Tony absolutely refused to do anything for her. He said he couldn’t do it, and he wouldn’t do it. She swore at Tony at the time. And from then on, they were never friends.”

Brifman’s death meant the collapse of the case against Murphy. Police investigation files obtained by The Australian from official archives show that Crime Intelligence Unit officers gunning for Murphy ended up satisfied there was no foul play. A post-mortem report identified “Barbiturate Intoxication”.

The investigating sergeant’s report from April 1972 states: “The husband of deceased informed me that his wife had, on numerous occasions over the past few years, tried to take her life by way of overdose of tablets … I am satisfied that the deceased did in fact take her own life by way of overdose of sleeping tablets and that there is nothing suspicious surrounding this death.”

The report states Brifman’s husband said his wife “had been in a very morbid state of mind as a good friend of hers, a Lilly Ryan, had died that day”. He had given Shirley two Valium tablets and two sleeping tablets shortly before she went to bed. An empty pill bottle marked ‘Mogadon’ was found under her body between two mattresses. Another bottle was found nearby. There were no signs of violence in the flat or on her body.

Three weeks after the sergeant’s report was submitted, inspector Don Becker, a reputedly incorruptible senior officer, wrote to his superiors: “I have the honour to report that an investigation under my supervision has revealed there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Shirley Margaret Brifman … the investigation has failed to disclose evidence of foul play”.

Since 1988, however, Mary Anne Brifman, herself a current brothel operator and former prostitute, has insisted the investigation was incompetent or corrupt. She says she was 15 and at the flat with her mother when Maureen Murphy arrived with Peggy Lewis, the wife (now deceased) of the future police chief, on the night of March 3, 1972.

Mary Anne’s claims were first made to a Fitzgerald inquiry investigator, Ross Martin, who visited her in Sydney in August 1988 in Silverwater Prison where she was serving 16 years after a drug importation conviction.

Martin wrote a memo in 1988 setting out Mary Anne’s version of the events of March 1972: “During the evening, there was a visitor. Mrs Murphy was wearing a scarf around her hair and had a big coat on. Shirley then took Mrs Murphy into a bedroom and spoke to her privately for more than half an hour. When Mrs Murphy was going through the flat to leave, Mary Anne came and joined her and Shirley. Other family members were present. Mrs Murphy was insisting that Shirley take something from her and Shirley said no, she didn’t want it and was definitely going to court. She said: ‘Well Shirley, you know what we’ve spoken about. I think I should leave this with you because you know what’ll happen’. The conversation went on for a few minutes and then Shirley accepted the small item that Mrs Murphy gave her. Mary Anne didn’t see it but it was too small to be much other than tablets and her mother’s history of abuse of tablets continued to that conclusion. Mary Anne remembers that later that night there was a big fight between her father and Shirley about what had been given to her … Shirley’s denials that she had been given pills did not convince the family … Mary Anne says she and her sister stayed up as late as they could to keep an eye on their mother but eventually they went to bed.”

Martin recorded that Mary Anne suggested her father “may not have mentioned Mrs Murphy’s visit to the police out of astuteness — he rapidly returned to crime to get money after the death, prostituting his daughter and trafficking in drugs. He also had wanted Shirley to give up the idea of testifying against Murphy”.

Martin, who went on to head the Crime and Misconduct Commission in Queensland, also interviewed Mary Anne’s boyfriend and her two siblings, and his memo concluded: “Mary Anne gives considerable detail in relation to the story which is not backed by other family members whose accounts show a marked lack of detail. Her story is not backed up in detail by the police reports. There seems to be an attempt to create the impression that the investigation was crooked.

“This is difficult to reconcile with what we know to have been the motives of the investigators. It may be that Mary Anne is simply an opportunist, hoping that by telling us what she imagines we want to hear she can gain some advantage, however, she does not present as such. She does not take opportunities obviously available to enhance the story and sometimes the things she says and the way they are remembered have the ring of truth.

“Prostitutes are, of course, notoriously good liars and the divergence between the various witnesses’ stories as presently related and between those stories and the historical record makes the matter evidentially close to valueless.”

For her interview with The Australian, Maureen Murphy is supported by her three daughters, Kathryn, Colleen and Christine, and her late husband’s long-retired friend, the former criminal defence lawyer and director of public prosecutions, Des Sturgess, QC. Earlier this year, Sturgess helped the Murphy clan publish a book, Tony Murphy — An Honest Cop, to put their side of the story.

Sturgess has been retired for some 20 years but he relishes the opportunity to cross-examine Mary Anne Brifman in any formal inquiry that the Queensland government might establish.

The Murphy daughters, appalled at the public slurs against their elderly mother, are monitoring and collecting Mary Anne’s writings on social media: “I have nothing to hide. Thrillingly, though, I have plenty to share!

“I rode in the sky with Halley’s comet in a Lear jet. I was sold into sin. My soul needed to languish in disguise so that I learnt to understand the language of the evil permeated into the world.”

The Murphy daughters see Mary Anne differently: as a troubled and destructive fantasist bent on continuing the campaign begun by her mother, Shirley, against their father four decades ago.

Their father told investigators in 1972: “I find myself charged because of the untrue, malicious statements of Shirley Brifman, a drug addict, a self-confessed perjurer, prostitute and police informer, who so obviously has fabricated certain statements about me, hoping somehow to evade the consequences of the law with respect to her in NSW introducing her 13-year-old daughter to the sordid life of a prostitute.”