The sheep farmer who hunted down a gangster

Kelly Slater Regan has never stopped asking questions about her famous relative, mobster Johnny Regan; as co-host of The Australian’s new true crime podcast, she has found some answers | NEW EPISODE

Kelly Slater Regan in the lane in Marrickville in inner Sydney where John Regan was shot dead. Picture: Ryan Osland/ The Australian

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Kelly Regan, a sporty and bright young woman from country Young on the southwestern slopes of NSW, was just 19 when she was called in for her official police interview.

She had signed up for the NSW Police Force on a girlfriend’s dare. In 1988, when she entered the interview room in police headquarters in the heart of the Sydney CBD, she sat opposite five senior officers.

“It was intimidating,” Kelly said. “They all had pips on their shoulders.”

Rather than find out about Kelly, her life in Young, her pioneering relatives, her heroic World War I uncles or the family’s long and deep connection to the land, they wanted to know something else.

So you’re Kelly Regan from Young, they said. What was her connection to Stewart John Regan from Young, as in the reputed gangster, psychopath and child killer who had teased and terrorised police from the mid-1960s until he was killed by up to four gunmen on a Sydney side street in 1974?

Why were the top brass so interested in the dead gangster? Were they assessing whether Kelly Regan just might carry the same murderous, destructive genes?

“That’s all they wanted to know about,” she said. “I told them he was my second cousin. That I never met him. That I was just a child when he died. But they kept asking questions.”

Kelly, too, has never stopped asking questions about her ­famous relative and now, as co-host of The Australian’s new true crime podcast, The Gangster’s Ghost – an investigation into Regan’s crazed life and horrific death – she has found, at long last, some answers.

“I think I feel more at ease now that I know more about him,” she reflected. “But there are some disappointments, too, in him and in the Regan family, my own family.”

She was ultimately accepted into the Police Force and as a young constable was posted to Forbes in central western NSW before working back in her hometown of Young.

“I loved everything about the job,” she said. “When you help people. I loved that every day was different. I loved the camaraderie. It was challenging so there were things you had to sit and work out. The variety of everything. Back then in the police, you were fairly well appreciated. It was a good, stable job.”

Kelly Slater Regan as a NSW police officer. Picture: supplied

The irony of a Regan in the NSW Police Force did not escape Kelly – here was a woman who had one of Australia’s most psychotic and violent gangsters sitting firmly in her family tree while she swore, a generation later, to serve and protect.

“I only ever knew the stories passed down through the family,” she said. “All I heard was that he was some big-time gangster and that he had a hand in the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing.”

In March 1973, the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Brisbane was firebombed as part of a criminal extortion racket. Fifteen innocent people lost their lives. Two men were charged and convicted of the mass murder, but the story persisted that “southern criminals” had a hand in the atrocity.

A renewed coronial inquest into the fire was held in 2021-22. State Coroner Terry Ryan is expected to hand down his report soon.

Regan and his previously unknown role in the Whiskey Au Go Go is examined in The Gangster’s Ghost.

Kelly would ultimately leave the police and now works the family sheep farm with her husband, Rodney Slater, also a Young local and former rugby league first grade player for the Parramatta Eels (1987-89, prop forward and kicker). They have four children – Bradley, 33, Daniel, 31, Hayden, 29, and Karlee, 24.

The sheep, wheat, canola and barley farm – Maidi – is in Thuddungra, a village just northwest of Young. Both the Slater and Regan family lines reach back to settlement in the region. Two Slaters perished in WWI, one in Gallipoli and another in Bullecourt in northern France.

It wasn’t until Kelly, 56, recently found herself with “time on my hands” that she began to seriously ponder Stewart John Regan, the dark stain he had left on the family name, and the veracity of many of the myths that had grown up around him over decades.

She wanted to know how bad a human being he actually was, and whether, as claimed, he actually murdered three-year-old toddler Karlos Scott-Huie – the son of one of his then girlfriends – back in May 1974, just months before he himself was gunned down.

“I always had an interest in Regan,” she said, not the least because her father, Lindsay Regan, when younger, looked almost like an identical twin of the gangster.

“I thought I might do a podcast, even though I didn’t know anything about them. I got my kids to show me how to use the app.

“I listened to a lot of true crime podcasts trying to find the right person to help me.”

Kelly Slater Regan, above, has called on her investigative training as a police officer to bring new information to the table. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

In 2021, Kelly emailed me and we talked on the phone. The Gangster’s Ghost was born. Kelly was keen to find out the truth about her second cousin once and for all, and she was prepared to find an even bigger monster than anyone imagined.

She called on her investigative training as a police officer to bring new information to the table, including the first public glimpse of Regan’s lengthy official police record. She also brokered meetings between Margaret Yates Regan – Johnny’s de facto partner and widow – and the NSW Unsolved Homicide Squad.

It was the first time Marg had spoken in person to police about her husband’s murder since the day after he was shot dead in September 1974. Regan’s murder remains an active cold case.

Regan was born in Young in 1945, an only child to parents Alf Regan and wife Clare. The marriage quickly fell apart, and Clare took Regan to Sydney when he was about 12. Kelly, in examining Regan’s life in Young, found a child that just might have been saved from his violent future.

“The family never talked about Johnny Regan, not unless someone brought it up,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in the family, the Regans, that they didn’t accept this little boy at the time he was in Young. Regan was viciously ­abused by his own mother, who was nicknamed The Colonel.

“He was highly intelligent and could have really done well for himself if he’d just been accepted,” she said. “Being a male in such a male-oriented family, I’m still surprised today he wasn’t accepted. The Regans didn’t do anything.

“I wonder what his life would have been like if he’d been out on the farm for Christmas, if he’d been taken in and looked after. Then he went to Sydney and everything changed for the worse.”

Kelly said the discovery of old tapes Regan made of himself on the phone back in the late 1960s, which The Australian had cleaned up using AI technology, was astonishing. “It’s actually the gangster’s ghost, isn’t it?” she said. “Just to hear his actual voice after all this time … it’s amazing.”

As for her ambition to find out who ambushed Regan in that side street in Sydney's inner-west Marrickville in September 1974, his body hit with eight bullets, for the sake of Marg, 78, and his oldest daughter, Helen, she didn’t hold out much hope, “but you never know”.

Kelly said she was prepared to do what it takes to find out as much as she could. Only then could the Regan family find some peace.

They make them tough out in Young. “Country towns aren’t for snowflakes, mate,” Kelly said.

Subscribers hear new episodes of The Gangster’s Ghost first. Listen to Episode 3: Holystoning now at thegangstersghost.com.au