Was The Magician assassinated in Karlos Scott-Huie revenge plot?
Stewart John Regan insisted he had never hurt a child, but he’s been branded a child killer for more than 50 years.
Former detectives and old-time criminals are in universal agreement – the motive for the unsolved murder of notorious Sydney gangster Stewart John Regan came down to one name: toddler Karlos Scott-Huie.
Regan was shot to death by up to four assassins in a Marrickville side street on September 22, 1974, but four months earlier he’d been babysitting his girlfriend’s only son, little Karlos, 3, when the child inexplicably went missing. The boy, presumed murdered, has never been seen or heard of since.
At the time, Regan denied he harmed Karlos. He even posted a cash reward for information about the child’s whereabouts.
But it was this horrific crime that marked Regan as a dead man walking. Regan – unarmed and without his usual bulletproof vest or bodyguard – was struck with eight bullets on that Sunday evening in Chapel Street. He was also shot twice in the head at close range. His murder remains a cold case.
Observers then and now agree that it was the presumed killing of Karlos that signed Regan’s death warrant in an underworld that went by its unbreakable credo – no harm to children.
Decorated detective and former undercover agent Michael Drury said the disappearance of Karlos was the “talk of the police” in May 1974, and he was convinced that shocking event evolved into the motive for Regan’s murder.
“Regan walked into a well-planned ambush,” Drury said. “And it all goes back to the murder of the little boy, Karlos. It’s retribution. He’d stepped way over the line, and he paid the price.”
There was no shortage of motives to kill Regan, 29. He had trodden on countless toes in his furious and violent march to the top of the Sydney and Brisbane underworld, including those of fellow gangsters and corrupt police. It was speculated upon his death that he may have been murdered by some of the many victims of his money-making scams down the years.
Regan’s own de facto wife, Margaret Yates Regan, told The Australian’s The Gangster’s Ghost podcast that the suspect list was infinite.
“Did you ever watch that show Pick-a-Box with Bob Dyer?” she said. “It’s like throwing all different names at you, all different situations at you. Who could have done this? So we pull a name out of a box and we go ‘that’s possible that person could have done it’. And then you think about it and you think you’ve got an answer to it but then you pull another name out of the box.
“You can go through the same theory of saying ‘well, maybe he could have done it, they could have done it’. Among those names we’ve got hitmen, we’ve got gangsters that he was associated with, we’ve got police, we have high people in high jobs, we’re got all those people that can go into that box.”
On the night Karlos vanished in late May 1974, several weeks before Regan’s killing, the gangster had been minding the child while his girlfriend and the boy’s mother, Helen Scott-Huie, was working as a croupier at the Goulburn Club casino in Sydney’s CBD.
Regan said that around 2am he bundled the boy in his car and drove to the early-morning newsstand in Taylor Square on Oxford Street. It was Regan’s habit to pick up the first editions of that day’s newspapers.
He said when he returned to the car with his newspapers Karlos was gone.
Drury told the podcast: “For him (Regan) to walk up there to get a newspaper and come back to the car, it does not ring true. If there was any truth in the rumour that the child was kidnapped and he was genuine, whether it be Stewart John Regan or not, I would expect Regan not to leave that location but to walk 50 metres at the very most across the road to Darlinghurst police station in a fit of great depression. To call upon the police to investigate the so-called disappearance, or kidnapping, of this child from his car. And I believe I’m correct in saying that never took place.”
Marg Regan said she was shocked to learn of Karlos’s disappearance and put it directly on Regan: Did he have anything to do with this appalling crime?
“He would say, ‘I didn’t do this. I never would do this kind of thing, I would never’,” Marg told The Gangster’s Ghost. “And I believe that. To this day – and I’m 74 years of age – I believe that he did not have anything to do with Karlos.”
Marg said she developed a friendship with Helen Scott-Huie after the boy’s disappearance and said the child’s own mother said she didn’t believe Regan was responsible either.
She conceded that Scott-Huie might have just been “just telling me that” and it might not have been what she truly believed.
Marg said nobody knew definitively what happened to Karlos.
“Was it an accident that happened with the mother and the child or with John and the child?” she said. “I don’t know. You see it all the time in the news today. You know, some kid hits his head on the wall. What happened to Karlos? It’s just like someone told them, don’t bother to investigate. If someone told me not to investigate the death of any of my children or my family, I’d be there. I’d be there opening the doors. So I can’t understand that.”
An inquest was never held into Karlos’s disappearance and presumed murder.
But police, criminals and acquaintances of the Scott-Huie family had no doubt Regan was killed because of the toddler.
One of Scott-Huie’s neighbours at the time of the disappearance said: “How could you murder a three-year-old kid? (His mother) … wasn’t real happy the way he was treating the kid. It’s one of the lowest things you could ever do, in my opinion. I think he was just a low bloke and he got what he deserved.”
Helen Scott-Huie’s family spent years trying to find the little boy, to no avail. After a short inquest into Regan’s murder in 1977, she too disappeared from sight. Marg and her children, who had grown fond of “Big Helen”, never saw her again. Rumours swirled that she had changed her name and moved to Melbourne, or that she’d returned to her family homeland of Greek Macedonia.
In the end Regan had added “child killer” to his curriculum vitae, and in death that tag has remained steadfast, even after 50 years.
Subscribers get Episode 9 exclusively at gangstersghost.com.au. Or hear Episode 7 of The Gangster’s Ghost on Apple and Spotify now.
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