Nobody cops the blame

RON Iddles believes police corruption was involved in the ‘vampire’ killing.

Ron Iddles speaking at the Police Rally in Geelong. Johnson Park Picture: Mitch Bear

IT was a drive Ron Iddles had made many times. This time, as he headed towards the prison that housed one of Australia’s most notorious inmates, the recently retired homicide cop mused whether it would be his last.

The prisoner, the star witness in the vampire gigolo murder trial, was refusing to give evidence. Operation Briars, a seven-year investigation into whether police were involved in murder, was on the brink of collapse.

Since March 2007, when Iddles was chosen to be lead investigator of the newly formed Briars taskforce, he had spent many hours with the prisoner, known by the pseudonym Jack Price.

Iddles knew Price from his days as a beat cop in Melbourne. He knew many of the standover men, armed robbers and waterfront thugs with whom Price associated. They talked mostly about the old days, old crooks, old crimes.

When he was called back from retirement by crown prosecutor Andrew Tinney to try to salvage a long anticipated murder trial that had already begun in the Victorian Supreme Court, Iddles knew Price well enough not to cajole or threaten.

“I said to him, ‘You know what? If you don’t want to give evidence, don’t give evidence.’ ’’

Price was ranting. He was complaining that newspapers had breached suppression orders protecting his identity. He first began talking to police about the “vampire’’ case in 2006, and in 2008 pleaded guilty to murdering Shane Chartres-Abbott, a male prostitute who once claimed to be a vampire older than the city of Melbourne.

In exchange for promising to testify against police, he received no jail time for the crime. Now he was worried that Briars had gone on for too long, that he wasn’t being looked after. He was fearful that after so many appearances in court in this and other cases, defence lawyers had too much ammunition stockpiled against him.

Iddles sat quietly listening, nodding. The longer Price ranted, the more his anger dissipated. Slowly, he began talking himself around. All right, he finally agreed, he would give evidence. But he wanted something in return. And he would leave everyone wondering, not for the first time, whether they had just been played.

“How does he suck people in?’’ defence counsel Jane Dixon mused in her closing address near the end of a two-month murder trial. “Who would have thought that a person with Price’s history could walk into the Supreme Court of Victoria, plead guilty to a public execution like this one, Chartres-Abbott, and get off scot-free? We suggest to you that only a genius in the art of manipulation could pull that one off.’’

Iddles is the newly elected secretary of the Police Association Victoria. As he talks to T he Australian, the irony is not lost on him that he is sitting behind the same desk once occupied by Paul Mullett, a police union boss whose reputation was destroyed, along with the career of police assistant commissioner Noel Ashby, by unproved allegations that they leaked information about Briars.

Iddles has his own theory about why the investigation leaked and it has nothing to do with Mullett and Ashby. Having worked on more than 300 homicide cases, he is satisfied he investigated the 2003 murder of Chartres-Abbott thoroughly and properly. Yet he remains troubled by the police politics and, at times, ineptitude at senior levels of the force that plagued the most contentious and expensive investigation in Victoria Police history. “There was a political side to it which I never entered into,’’ he says.

Speaking for the first time about his experiences on the case — which ended yesterday with the acquittal of three men charged with killing Chartres-Abbott — Iddles revealed he threatened to quit the taskforce in response to pressure from future chief commissioner Simon Overland to charge Peter Lalor, then a serving police detective, and David Waters, a former detective retired from the force, with murder.

Iddles recalls a blunt conversation he had on a morning in September 2007 with the super­intendent in charge of the taskforce, Rod Wilson. “Simon is coming over and he wants them charged,’’ Wilson told Iddles.

“I said, ‘You can tell him to go and get f..ked,’ ’’ Iddles says. “It ain’t going to happen.’’

When Overland arrived at the Office of Police Integrity building where the Briars taskforce had set up its operations, he assured Iddles it was “blue skies and green grass’’ — cop-speak for having an open mind. He asked the experienced investigator why Lalor and Waters couldn’t be charged. Iddles’s response was simple: there wasn’t enough evidence.

Iddles added something else for Overland to consider. If he insisted on Lalor and Waters being charged, when Iddles was called to give evidence he would tell it straight: Why did you charge these two men, Detective Senior Sergeant Iddles? Because Simon Overland told me to. The pair weren’t charged.

The next flashpoint came two years later. Iddles, having exhausted all avenues of inquiry about the involvement of Lalor and Waters, was back at his old desk at homicide. Geoff Horgan, the Office of Public Prosecutions’ most senior prosecutor, had reviewed the brief of evidence gathered by the Briars taskforce. His assessment of its strength did nothing to change Iddles’s opinion but the boss took a different view.

“Simon Overland had a view that they should be charged because publicly we need to rid the organisation of corruption and we should be seen to be doing something,’’ Iddles says. “Charge them and let the court decide.

“My argument was, is there a competing hypothesis consistent with innocence? Yes there is, and it is Bernie Balmer.’’

Balmer was a boxing enthusiast, former clerk of courts and a lawyer. For many years he was Price’s lawyer. The most damaging evidence against Lalor was that, knowing of Price’s plan to kill Chartres-Abbott, he arranged to execute an outstanding search warrant against him on the day of the murder. The purpose, according to Price, was to prove a “quasi alibi”. Balmer told the OPI in September 2007 and reiterated to the court during this trial that he was the one who organised the warrant to be executed.

Crown prosecutor Tinney, in his closing remarks to the vampire gigolo trial, said Lalor’s involvement in the warrant “stinks to high heaven’’. Balmer, the only defence witness called, suggested the bad smell had more to do with Price.

“If (Price) tells you it’s dark outside, go and have a look,’’ he advised Tinney during a fierce cross-examination.

Iddles believes the Briars investigation, a saga estimated to have cost the force about $30 million, was hampered by several bad calls by police command. The first, he says, was the decision to put detectives from homicide and the Ethical Standards Department together at an off-site location, a move that invited speculation police were being investigated for murder. No sooner than Briars was formed, word of it leaked.

Iddles also opposed the decision to subject Waters and Lalor to coercive examinations before the OPI in September 2007. The Briars taskforce was overseen by a high-ranking steering committee that bridged the Victoria Police crime department, Ethical Standards and the OPI, a police watchdog disbanded after the election of the Baillieu government. Its three members were Overland, Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius from ESD and Graham Ashton, then deputy director of the OPI. All three men previously had worked for the Australian Federal Police, fuelling a perception among the ranks that Briars was on a cultural crusade rather than a corruption-busting mission.

Iddles’s objection to the OPI hearings had nothing to do with politics. He was concerned that his investigating team didn’t have the full picture of what had happened. A hearing would tell their suspects what the police knew and, just as important, what they didn’t.

The final folly of Briars was a desperate decision to turn to Lawyer X, a legal practitioner whose conduct is the subject of a formal complaint being prepared for Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission.

Throughout 10 gruelling days in the witness box, Price kept returning, unsolicited, to the subject of Lawyer X. “Why don’t you ask Lawyer X?’’ he mocked defence council. In his final involvement in the case, Iddles was instructed to take a statement from Lawyer X. “I rang back to the office here and said, ‘Do you realise what you are asking me to do?’ I said, ‘You’d better tell Simon this is a bad, bad move.’ ’’ Iddles believes that if Lawyer X had become a witness in the case, Briars would have ended in a royal commission.

A year or so later, when Lawyer X was angry at police command, the lawyer sent an ominous text message to an associate. “I’m looking forward to cross-examining … his band of dishonest, perjuring clowns. They’ve picked the wrong person to f..k over, that much I promise.’’

Briars was an investigation in two parts. In its early years, during Iddles’s involvement, it focused on the evidence of Price and suspected involvement of Waters and Lalor. In latter years, led by detectives Steve Cuxson and Stephen Abrehart, it shifted focus to the case against the three men who were yesterday acquitted of murder: Mark Perry, Warren Shea and Evangelos Goussis.

The crown case cast Perry as a man with clear motive — Chartres-Abbott was murdered while on trial for the rape of Perry’s ex-girlfriend; Goussis as Price’s faithful companion willing to assist in murder; and Shea as the conduit between the two. The jury verdict, after four days’ deliberation, represented an emphatic repudiation of this story and the jailhouse witness who provided it.

Iddles still believes Price. He believes police corruption was involved in the killing of Chartres-Abbott. He is convinced by little things that Price told investigators that checked out: a blank spot on the arrest warrant where Lalor neg­lected to record the time of day it was executed; a phone call from Prahran police station to Price’s home number the day before the murder. He also believes Lalor and Waters are innocent until proven guilty.

“It should be finished,’’ he says.

“Stash’’ Lalor and “Docket’’ Waters were never charged with the murder of Chartres-Abbott. They remain suspects in a case that will be boxed up, stored and, most likely, never opened again. Lalor has moved on with his life. He has remarried and established a new career as a building surveyor. He says he has tried not to become bitter and twisted by his experience but remains “very, very disappointed in the conduct of Victoria Police’’.

Lalor and Waters took no part in the trial, yet for both of them it was a bruising affair. In Tinney’s closing address he repeatedly described Lalor as a crook and a mate of Price, despite Lalor being neither. Waters copped it from Tinney and also from Perry’s defence counsel Michael Tovey QC, who latched on to fragments of Price’s evidence that hinted at a darker, deeper murder conspiracy between Price and Waters that had nothing to do with his client.

During a jailhouse interview in February 2007, Price promised to put in a “truckload of corrupt police’’. Price put in plenty of police; none of them has been found guilty of corruption.

On a Friday night in Melbourne during the vampire gigolo trial, many of them gathered at a city pub. All are retired from the force.

There were Waters and Peter Alexander, a former detective Price nominated as being involved in disposing of the murder weapon, until phone records proved he was working on a country farm at the time. There were Peter Spence and Bob Hynninen, two former police detectives and Australian Taxation Office investigators suspected of accessing Chartres-Abbott’s home address from an ATO computer in Albury until last year, when a 60-year-old Wodonga cleaner admitted he searched the file out of curiosity.

There was “Happy’’ Bob Hodgkin, who after 46 years on the force was denied a National Police Service Medal and certificate of service because he was the subject of an “ongoing internal investigation’’. Hodgkin was accused of being at a lunch at a Carlton pub where Waters, Lalor and Price allegedly planned the murder. Hodgkin later learned his principal crime was continuing to associate with Waters and Lalor.

All are incredulous a case built on the word of Price was allowed to get this far.