Authors: Matthew Condon
‘[They were] nearly all young people and 90 per cent of them, if not all, would leave in the morning to supposedly go to some work, some didn’t. Some used to go and do some armed hold-ups … who got caught. But most of them were there to go out to work, come back and stay the night and … most of them could have the weekend off.’
During the week Lewis was transferred daily by mini-bus from the South Brisbane hostel to St Vinnies offices in Warry Street, Fortitude Valley, where he worked in an administrative position.
‘I was very lucky, I had my own shower and toilet that I could clean, which I did … they didn’t have cleaners and that,’ Lewis says. ‘[There was] a washing machine in a little room up there that I could do my laundry … Hazel could come in and sit down in the common area for want of a better word, outside, and there I met some really very good fellows …’
Seething
On Sunday 14 April, the
Sunday Mail
newspaper carried an extraordinary interview, brimming with venom, with former detective and assistant commissioner Tony Murphy.
Murphy had been provoked into speaking for the first time in several years courtesy of an unusual event. A criminal who had given evidence against Murphy at the Fitzgerald Inquiry had recently been involved in another trial, and been granted witness protection. At the latest trial, the criminal had been described variously as ‘an extraordinary liar’, a ‘nut’, a ‘lunatic’, ‘psychotic’ and ‘grossly unreliable’. Even the judge had described him as a person of no credibility.
Murphy had a brilliant, and a long, memory. Just as Lewis’s transfer to St Vinnies had recently been in the news, Murphy chimed in with his attack. He accused the Fitzgerald Inquiry of remaining ‘mute’ when it had evidence that could’ve cleared him and other police. ‘I had to stand by while witnesses of the calibre of the indemnified witness now under protection gave evidence about me that was false and demonstrably false,’ Murphy railed.
‘In April 1988, this man gave a lengthy statement to the Fitzgerald Inquiry making very serious allegations against senior then and past serving police. In November 1988, he was interviewed by police in the presence of his solicitor and a Fitzgerald Inquiry legal officer. He made a statutory declaration withdrawing all the allegations and, in the plainest of language, admitted that all of them had been fabricated.
‘I know that sworn document was passed on to the Fitzgerald Inquiry. Only four months later, in March 1989, the same witness again was given prominent media coverage with graphic and lurid accounts of how he had helped another criminal dispose of the bodies of the missing Brisbane woman Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters.’
It was typical Murphy. He paid enormous attention to detail and built logic through meticulously researched timelines. ‘The part of this amazing saga I find particularly galling is the fact that in October 1988, when he made a sworn document admitting all these allegations against police, including me, were a complete fabrication, he also signed a document authorising the Fitzgerald Inquiry to allow the publication of his statutory declaration,’ said Murphy.
‘In December 1989, this witness was convicted in the Southport Magistrates Court of making false complaints … I am still seething at the partisan conduct of that inquiry. While that witness, as far as I am aware, was not called at the inquiry, other persons with equally doubtful credentials were called to give evidence against me.’
He complained that a female with ‘pages of criminal history’ had sworn that she saw Murphy regularly at one of Gerry Bellino’s illegal casinos, yet Murphy could prove he was living and working in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, at the time.
‘Another witness swore he saw me drinking in a Toowoomba hotel two or three times a week with an SP bookmaker from mid-1976,’ Murphy added. ‘I took up duty at Longreach in early February.’
The reporter Peter Hansen asked Murphy if there should be an inquiry into the inquiry.
‘And give another $100 million to the legal fraternity?’ he answered rhetorically. ‘I’ll give the subject a degree of prominence in a book in the not too distant future.’
It had been almost ten years since the inquiry had been called, and yet Murphy continued to fight to restore his name.
On Tuesday 16 April, Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Tony Murphy phoned; considers [journalist] Peter Hansen 100 per cent reliable … had long talk with Lady Florence.’
Glorified
Piece by piece, there were increased attempts by the main players in the corruption saga to re-write history. Lewis did what he had always done best. He relentlessly lobbied support on the telephone. On Thursday 2 May 1996, if his diaries are accurate, he claimed to have phoned former director of prosecutions Desmond Sturgess, QC, and written down the famous legal eagle’s comments. By Lewis’s account, Sturgess told him: ‘I have said some harsh things about you and others in the past but now should look to the future. I admired the way the Drugs laws were administered when you were there [as commissioner]. The Police Force has paid a terrible penalty from the Fitzgerald Inquiry. The media make the Police a whipping post. The morale of the Force is shot.’ (Sturgess says that Lewis’s entry sounded like something he would say at the time.)
Later that month, Tony Murphy paid Lewis another visit and they discussed Lewis doing an interview with local journalist Rod Henshaw. Lewis wrote: ‘… offer very appealing’.
Lewis had sought and been granted permission to take early morning walks in the vicinity of the hostel in South Brisbane. It was an area he knew well from his days walking the beat as a young police officer in the 1950s. Just off Riverside Drive used to be the old Killarney brothel in Lanfear Street, where the likes of prostitutes Shirley Brifman and Ada Bahnemann first started out.
It was a different South Brisbane, though, to the days of Commissioner Frank Bischof and his eager disciples. A gentrification was on the march, despite the lingering presence of industry on West End’s northern reaches.
On Monday 1 July, Lewis met the journalist Rod Henshaw, and noted in his diary that he found him ‘completely trustworthy’. Three days later he recorded an interview, which took about two hours.
Lewis was back in the hurley-burley, and his diaries revealed that he was enjoying the attention. The interview went to air on Monday 8 July, and elicited a storm of protest.
Police Minister Russell Cooper – though he had given Lewis permission to speak with Henshaw – blasted the former police commissioner, saying he had ‘betrayed his position, the Queensland Police Service and the people’.
Cooper said he never had any doubts about Lewis’s guilt, and said Lewis had nothing but a fair trial. He described the interview as ‘laughable protestations of innocence’. In the interview, Lewis described Jack Herbert as ‘the great destroyer’.
It provoked the ire of Peggy Herbert. ‘We were both wondering why Terry didn’t get up and give any evidence at his trial now that he is so vocal,’ she said in a newspaper article.
Bill Gunn piped up, saying he was annoyed that Lewis was being ‘glorified’.
Lewis was also annoyed: ‘Rick Whitton phoned;
Courier-Mail
has shown the ultimate arrogance; never been such a witch hunt; John Jerrard said I would get out if admitted guilt, Rick disgusted with him and said why should I if not guilty?’
In a more detailed interview, Gunn described Lewis’s assertion that he was set up by Herbert and others as a fiction. ‘Being accused of having a vendetta by a convicted crook doesn’t worry me at all,’ Gunn said. ‘He’s just a sad and sorry old man who wanted to get some public sympathy.’ Gunn said there was plenty of evidence, apart from Herbert, that showed Lewis was corrupt, including the testimony of former assistant commissioner Graeme Parker. ‘I would also receive hundreds of calls every week from police who said Lewis was corrupt, but were too scared to be named or provide a statement for fear of losing their jobs.’
Five days after the controversial Lewis interview, colourful Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn, 89, died at his home. Rooklyn was convicted in the Brisbane District Court in May 1992 of having bribed Lewis and Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert. He was fined $350,000 and saved from gaol by virtue of his age.
As the issue died down, Lewis kept lobbying. He continued to speak to Sir Joh on the phone, as he did with Tony Murphy. In early August, the corrupt Graeme Parker paid Lewis a visit, and another former officer phoned to report that he had seen ‘[Allen] Bulger driving a Yellow Cab, two weeks ago at Coorparoo’. Bulger had been charged with perjury following the Fitzgerald Inquiry, and been sentenced to 12 years in gaol, although he was paroled after less than four years. Lewis’s source claimed to have seen Jack Herbert get into the cab and talk to Bulger for about 20 minutes. Lewis’s informant said Herbert told Bulger he’d been to see his bank manager to borrow money for the purchase of another unit. Herbert allegedly said: ‘Wish Terry would stop digging up the past as most people had forgotten.’
A couple of weeks later, journalist Rod Henshaw also dropped by and the pair discussed politics, police and the media. Lewis noted in his diary that Henshaw allegedly told him that several people believed Lewis was falsely convicted instead of the Mr Big, ‘A.M [Anthony Murphy] … given another six months they would have stitched him up.’
A week after that, the man himself, Tony Murphy, visited Lewis and dropped off a short statement signed by Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen on 20 August 1996, in relation to Bill Gunn and the details of Lewis being stood down as police commissioner.
Incredibly, Lewis was still trying to correct old records, building the point of his grievances with paperwork from players far removed from the moment. He was relentless. He phoned Des Sturgess who told him – according to Lewis’s diary – that he needed strong legal argument about inadmissible evidence allowed at his trial.
Meanwhile, Jack Reginald Herbert, The Bagman, was still living in New Farm and taking his early morning walks in New Farm Park on the Brisbane River. A group of senior citizens who also enjoyed the park of a morning made formal complaints that it was potentially unsafe to exercise at the same time as Herbert, given he might still have some powerful, and potentially deadly, enemies. It was believed his witness protection had ceased around 1990.
Occasionally, Herbert and his wife Peggy were spotted about town in various Brisbane bars. Sometimes, Jack would nip into the Queens Arms Hotel in James Street, New Farm, for a beer.
Just as Lewis’s life was beset with restrictions on one side of the river, the Herberts were granted permission to take a six-week holiday in the United Kingdom to catch up with friends and relatives.
Questions from the Outside In
What Terry Lewis could never control or be prepared for – no amount of diarising could stave them off – were the questions that came from the outside. In late 1997
Courier-Mail
journalist Michael Ware began an intense inquiry into whether former Commissioner of Police, Terry Lewis, and other police had ever obstructed serious investigations into paedophilia.
Ware, a gun reporter under editor Chris Mitchell, ended up tracking down former Paedophile Task Force members Kym Goldup and Garnett Dickson. Goldup was living with her husband on the Gold Coast. ‘I’d been contacted by a lot of journalists over the years and said I didn’t know anything.’ Goldup recalls her initial reaction to the revived media interest: ‘I didn’t want to relive it. Michael Ware said, “I know you do know something. I know this and this.” I thought, who have you been talking to? So I got in touch with Garney. He said, “I think we can trust him.”’
According to Goldup, she, Dickson and Ware met at Goldup’s house in Parkwood on the Gold Coast. Soon after, Ware and the
Courier-Mail
started publishing a series of articles that sent shudders through government ranks. On Saturday 16 August they ran with a front-page story alleging that files taken from former commissioner Terry Lewis’s safes by Fitzgerald Inquiry officials back in the late 1980s were potentially a political time bomb. ‘The files contain material on alleged sexual behaviour involving top state and Federal Government advisors and senior public servants,’ the newspaper said.
‘Much of the material … fails to provide hard evidence of criminal activity but reveals behaviour which warrants investigation.’ Later articles also resurrected the perceived inaction by Commissioner Lewis in relation to the activities of former Senior Constable Dave Moore and radio celebrity Bill Hurrey in the early to mid 1980s.
Goldup says she’s always wondered whether cooperating with the newspaper investigation was the right thing to do. ‘Part of me does regret it,’ she says. ‘All it did was … [it] made the hierarchy very aware that there was still stuff out there we knew and had.’
As for Lewis, sitting over in South Brisbane, he was incensed. He described the paedophile articles as ‘full of false accusations re sexual blackmail’.
The stories also rallied friends to Lewis’s defence. His diary noted that former police officer Neal Freier phoned ‘re disgraceful article. A lot of people still love you.’ Murphy also phoned to tell Lewis he’d been in touch with Alan Barnes and Pat Glancy. As the articles continued to be published, so the phone at the halfway house ran hot for Lewis.
Lewis said in no uncertain terms that the articles alleging he covered up paedophilia were nothing but a pack of lies, that he’d never interfered with any investigations, and that he was happy to assist in any inquiry if required.