Why the Walsh Street probe was doomed from the start

The case was doomed from the start.

What should have been the high watermark of investigations ended in recriminations, acquittals and no justice for two police murdered on duty.

Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were gunned down in Walsh Street, South Yarra, in 1988.Credit: The Age

From the crime scene to the offices of senior police, a series of mistakes compounded by a raft of decisions that were plainly bizarre, left the detectives handling the case hopelessly handicapped.

This is not rearview wisdom – many of those in the middle saw the slow-motion collapse, like the implosion of a building being demolished.

Yet from within the rubble was a gold nugget – a criminal informer who left a tip that years later would lead to solving an unrelated professional hit – but more of that later.

First, the original crime: on October 12, 1988, on Walsh Street, South Yarra, two Prahran police constables, Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were checking an abandoned stolen car when they were ambushed and shot dead.

On March 26, 1991, 895 days after the murders, four men – Victor Peirce, Peter McEvoy, Anthony Farrell and Trevor Pettingill – were acquitted by a Supreme Court jury. They maintained their innocence.

It began at the crime scene. In a confidential review written by taskforce leader Detective Inspector John Noonan, and obtained by The Age, he wrote: “Crime scene was cordoned off by crime scene tape. However, this was disregarded by most police members and by members of the public.

“The crime scene was severely contaminated, understandably by police and ambulance in assisting injured members, but later by persons disregarding general crime scene instructions.”

Emotions were running high, mistakes can be made, but there was a school of thought among some senior police that would underpin a series of decisions that were dumb then and remain dumb now.

Noonan believes the initial view was that the murder of two police officers should be treated as any other double murder, failing to acknowledge that such an ambush was an attack on law and order, and by extension on society itself.

Does anyone seriously think the assassination of a prime minister would be assigned the same resources as any other murder?

It was a full two weeks before the Ty-Eyre taskforce was established, and when it was, it was sent to the 13th floor of the St Kilda Road police building where there were no phones, desks or cupboards.

For a period, calls relating to the investigation were sent to homicide. “Information was lost because of this move,” the review states.

This was not a logistical problem but an exercise in bloody-mindedness. When the taskforce requested basic office equipment, detectives were told to find it themselves, resulting in them travelling to police stations begging for spare desks and chairs.

They were provided with one computer terminal without software. Police were forced to use pirated software to start inputting information.

Melbourne business tycoon Lindsay Fox, who had learned the taskforce was hopelessly under-equipped, donated $50,000 for IT.

The police accepted the donation but had a policy that benefactors could not specify how the money was spent. Noonan says it was not used to support the taskforce.

Melbourne business tycoon Lindsay Fox, who had learned the taskforce was hopelessly under-equipped, donated $50,000 for IT.

Eventually, they were given the new ISYS system for evaluation. Pause here: this was the most important investigation in Australia, and it was provided with an untested computer system. It was down for seven days and eventually crashed without a backup, resulting in the loss of 300 statements.

In August 1989 – 10 months after the murders – a new system, valued at $12,000, was purchased.

A police surveillance photo of Graeme Jensen, Victor Peirce and Jedd Houghton at the Boronia Shopping Centre in September 1988.Credit: Victoria Police

The taskforce was also short on cars. They had a great relationship with a hire car manager that became strained when the police force didn’t pay the $40,000 account – until the company threatened to repossess the vehicles. They had to engage a cheaper and inferior provider.

The listening devices used by police proved to be cheap, nasty, constantly breaking down and easy to detect. This meant police had to break into crooks’ homes and cars to replace or fix them. Time and again police chose the cheap option rather than the right one.

One of the alleged shooters at Walsh Street was Jedd Houghton, who was often armed with four guns (two shoulder and two ankle holsters). He had told friends if he was confronted by police he intended to shoot it out.

Despite the likelihood of a fatal confrontation, in a decision that defies common sense, the use of the experts – the Special Operations Group (SOG) – was initially refused.

At the last minute that decision was revoked, and on November 17, 1988, the SOG went to arrest Houghton in a cabin at the Ascot Vale Lodge caravan park at Bendigo.

Houghton pointed a gun at police and was shot dead. A search found five loaded guns near Houghton – four revolvers and one pistol.

“I have no doubt that if we rather than the SOG had done that raid, we would have lost members who would have been shot dead,” says Noonan.

After the suspects were arrested, the taskforce was told it would be disbanded and its office closed. Noonan mutinied and changed the locks. Investigators were sent to new duties, even though the massive brief of evidence for the trial was incomplete.

Despite it being one of the most complex cases involving forensics, difficult criminal informers who had become police witnesses, and listening device material, four police – three with little experience in court hearings – were assigned the preparation.

The case involved 960 statements, 11,945 bugged telephone calls, 230 witnesses, 1700 listening device tapes and 700 physical exhibits.

Wendy and Victor Peirce in 1987.

By that stage, Noonan’s relationship with his superior officer had broken down to the extent that they needed a go-between to communicate.

It created multiple delays. Noonan says: “We worked seven-day weeks and 12-hour days to get it ready. It was only finished on the day of the committal – it was a disgrace.”

The key witness was Wendy Peirce, the wife of one of the accused, Victor Peirce. But by the time of the trial, Wendy had changed sides and her testimony was lost.

She would later be convicted of perjury and sentenced to jail.

Multiple police sources say the delay between charging the suspects and commencing the trial led their star witness to have second thoughts.

Years later, Wendy told me: “[Walsh Street] was spur of the moment, we were on the run. Victor was the organiser. He just said, ‘They deserved their whack. It could have been me’.

“Jedd was the trigger man, he had the shotgun.”

Many of Noonan’s recommendations after Walsh Street, ignored at the time, have been implemented – including a taskforce/disaster room ready to go and improved bugging capacity and training.

A couple of weeks ago we revealed that country cop Russell Anderson was approached with vital information about the Flemington Crew – the armed robbery gang that included the four men charged and acquitted of Walsh Street – a year before the murders of the two constables.

Anderson approached the armed robbery squad, but the tip was ignored for months – and by the time the information was taken seriously it was too late.

Here is the twist. The underworld informer, “Mr Jones”, told police he was offered a contract to kill a chemist’s wife in Essendon. He refused the job but handed it to another gunman who took the job.

That gunman was also connected with the Flemington Crew and became a Walsh Street witness.

On May 6, 1988, Anne Louise Crawford, a former primary school teacher and mother of two, was found dead under her 1983 brown Ford Fairlane. The hitman had arranged the crime scene to look as if the car had slipped off the jack as she reached underneath for a wheel nut while trying to change the driver’s side front tyre.

Police fell for the ruse even though the jack didn’t match the car, the victim was wearing smart clothes, she hadn’t bothered to put down a protective rug, and both tyres – the one to be replaced and the spare – were obviously flat.

If she was reaching for the nut, why would she have been found on her back, with a fingernail missing and four bruises on her left bicep that seemed to show she had been roughly grabbed? No one seemed concerned.

Homicide squad detectives, if notified, would have wondered why two framed photographs on the wall had been displaced as if there was a struggle. But they weren’t notified, the crime scene was cleaned, and the case treated as an accident, despite Mr Jones’ claim it was a hit.

That is, until a phone call to Crime Stoppers 15 years later from the ex-wife of the gunman, who was known as PS.

A cold case investigation led to PS confessing and agreeing to plead guilty if he could serve his time interstate. He was sentenced to 12 years’ jail.

Anne’s husband, chemist Ron Crawford, was charged with murder. At his trial, his legal team argued PS killed Anne when she found him burgling the family home. Crawford was acquitted by a Supreme Court jury in 2006.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.