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Tong said he was flying down to Melbourne the next day to try to resolve the issue. If this failed, he would ask Elliott to come up to Sydney the day after, presumably by making some false promise to him. That was the point at which he'd need Christiansen's assistance. Tong gave Christiansen a new phone to use for future contact. He also gave him 2.985 kilograms of methamphetamine as prepayment for the job. This was some of the poor-quality speed that Elliott had been sold and rejected, but Christiansen either didn't know what he'd been given, or thought he could do something with it anyway. The
fact of the prepayment suggested Tong had no confidence his trip to Melbourne would fix things with Elliott.

Christiansen kept trying to call Curtis to give him the details, but couldn't get onto him. Unbeknown to him, Curtis had fallen off his pushbike and cracked some ribs, and was in John Hunter Hospital with his phone off. Christiansen realised if the job was to go ahead, he'd have to do it himself.

The Melbourne meeting achieved nothing, and Tong contacted Christiansen to say Elliott was coming up. According to Christiansen, Tong asked him to buy a toolbox and take it to the meeting. Christiansen purchased the toolbox, a big wheel-equipped model closer to a square than a rectangle, from MW Sheetmetal, on the Princes Highway at St Peters. Unlike the toolbox used in the Falconer abduction, this one had the familiar checked pattern on its galvanised surface.

On Saturday 6 December, Christiansen, driving a white van with the toolbox in the back, collected Tong from Belmore and took him to an address in General Holmes Drive at Brighton-Le-Sands. Christiansen drove down the driveway past the side of the house and unloaded the toolbox in the garage at the rear. Then he parked the van out in the street and went into the house, using the back door as the entrance point. Elliott was supposed to arrive at 1 pm, but he was late.

They waited several hours. At about 3.40 pm they heard a car pull up in the driveway, and Christiansen went into the front room, telling Tong to do his best to resolve the dispute. Tong met Elliott outside, and the two began a conversation and came into the house.

‘Why are we meeting here?' asked Elliott.

‘I have some money for you.'

They discussed the amount, and Elliott grew angry. He said, ‘That's not good enough.'

He seems to have suspected it was a trap, and unwisely began to search the house, getting closer to the room where Christiansen was waiting. Before long Elliott entered the front room, saw Christiansen standing holding a pistol, and went for his own weapon. Christiansen shot at him three times, hitting him once in the chest and once in the head.

The men put Elliott's body into a large plastic bag. Tong went out to the backyard and washed his hands under the tap, and then his face. Then he helped Christiansen bring in the toolbox from the garage. They put Elliott's body inside, closed it and took it back out and loaded it into the van. Christiansen took the box home with him to Annandale and left it in his garage. His friend Jeremy Postlewaight was there, and they arranged for him to borrow a boat for tomorrow so they could dump the box at sea. This way of getting rid of a corpse has a long tradition in the Sydney underworld and is, as the Perishes had discovered to their cost, superior to other methods.

With Tong's help, Christiansen moved Elliott's hire car to Alexandria, an inner-city suburb not too far away from his house. That night Christiansen's friend Marcelo Urriola came by. Christiansen said he'd ‘done a job with the Asian guy' and had been paid with twelve pounds of ‘base' (methamphetamine). He added, ‘Po was supposed to help me, but he didn't.' Christiansen and his friends used nicknames for each other adapted from the children's television program
Teletubbies
: Curtis was ‘Po', Christiansen ‘Twinky', and Jay Sauer ‘Laa Laa'.

Urriola was another young man, like Postlewaight, who'd come under Christiansen's influence. Born in 1985, he'd grown up in a close family in Forestville and became a qualified landscape gardener, although his intention was to be a professional rugby league player. This ambition was thwarted in 2004, just as major clubs were discussing his future with him, when he suffered a serious knee injury. He took this badly and after meeting Christiansen at a Surry Hills gym, began to train with him in order to compete as a bodybuilder. He received steroids and cocaine from the older man, and eventually became Christiansen's driver for his drug business. For this he received somewhere between $200 and $500 a day. By 2008 he had a loyalty to and even a great regard for Christiansen, whom he lived near and saw almost daily.

The morning after Elliott was shot, Jeremy Postlewaight arrived at Christiansen's place in a truck towing a large boat, a Haines Hunter 650 Horizon. Urriola was there again, and Brad Curtis turned up at the front door, having driven down from Newcastle with his ribs strapped up. Christiansen met him and they walked around the block to the back laneway.

‘I did that thing,' Christiansen said, making the shape of a gun with his hand.

They kept walking until they reached the garage, where they found Urriola. Christiansen went back to the house for a moment and Urriola said to Curtis, ‘He did good,' and also made the gun shape with his hand. Obviously it was catching.

Postlewaight put a tarp on the floor of the boat and Christiansen opened the back door of the van in the shed to reveal the large metal toolbox. Christiansen and Urriola got the box out of the van and lifted it up onto the side of the boat.
Blood somehow dripped out onto the boat and the roadway, and was cleaned up by Postlewaight and Christiansen.

Curtis soon left, and the others headed off to dispose of the toolbox. They launched the boat at Drummoyne and motored east, beneath the Harbour Bridge, past the Opera House and out through the Heads, and kept going until they could no longer see land. Christiansen and Urriola were seasick.

‘How far do we have to go?' Urriola asked Postlewaight.

‘A hundred and thirty metres [deep],' was the reply.

Christiansen had brought a cordless drill with him, and when they were out to sea he drilled two holes in the box to help it sink. An anchor was attached to the box, and finally they dumped it over the side. Postlewaight said a prayer as Paul Elliott's makeshift coffin quickly slid beneath the waves.

It was a long haul, and they didn't get back to Drummoyne until about 3 pm. That night, Christiansen and Urriola went to Alexandria on motorbikes and Christiansen ‘turned and burned' Elliott's hire car. He brought some petrol in a tin can, splashed it around inside the vehicle, and set it alight using a Zippo lighter.

About a week later, Christiansen and Curtis were doing some Christmas shopping together at the Broadway Shopping Centre, and passed a bookstore.

‘Do you want me to show you that guy I did?' asked Christiansen. ‘He's in that Underbelly book.'

The reference was to the popular volume
Gotcha: Best of Underbelly
by Andrew Rule and John Silvester, which Tong had previously shown Christiansen. A copy had also been found in the house of Lyle Pendleton when he was arrested.

After Christiansen made his statement to Joe Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald about the killing of Paul Elliott, they had a team at the Brighton-Le-Sands address within hours, with detectives interviewing neighbours while crime scene officers carefully went over the house. In the room where Christiansen said the shooting had occurred, a large portion of carpet and underlay had been replaced. The rooms were checked for blood traces using Luminol. The reagent is sprayed on a surface in darkness, and if blood is detected it glows with a blue light known as chemiluminescence. Positive reactions were found on some carpet and a piece of underlay, and also on floorboards. Swabs were taken, and the DNA from the blood on the underlay was matched to that of Paul Elliott.

Also after Christiansen's statement, detectives spent many hours reviewing the surveillance records of the Kennards lock-up. These showed Christiansen coming in and collecting a gun a day or so before the murder. He returned with a backpack containing a large quantity of drugs (his payment from Tong), and later the gun and Elliott's bumbag. Following Christiansen's confession, they could see how these movements matched the chronology of the murder. It was chilling to think that, thanks to the surveillance they'd been conducting, they had actually recorded the arrangements for a killing. But at the time they had no idea of this.

The one action that didn't fit the chronology was Christiansen placing Elliott's bumbag in the lock-up, which did not occur until a fortnight after the murder. This seems to be because, as soon as the body had been given a ‘Sydney send-off' out at sea, Christiansen and Urriola had done another job unrelated to Elliott—a drug run to Perth—that took them
away. Christiansen must have kept the bag somewhere else until his return. Police were puzzled that he would keep the bumbag with Elliott's identification in it. The only reason they could think of was that he was so convinced Elliott's disappearance wouldn't be solved, he'd been considering using the driver's licence and other items for some sort of identity fraud. But it was still a reckless act.

Tuno still didn't know the real name of the man Christiansen called Tong, but over at the Crime Commission, which was also looking at Elliott's murder, the analyst got to work on the records for various phones that had been seized, and found that Lyle Pendleton, who'd originally brokered the protection contract, had spoken a lot to a man named Thanawat Chudtalay. And Chudtalay's phone had him talking often to a man named Tuan Anh ‘Andy' Tran.

Phone records indicate the approximate location of their users because they show the mobile phone tower used for each call. With this information, the analyst was able to ascertain that Tran had been in the same area whenever Christiansen said he'd met Tong, so Tong and Tran were probably the same man. This important information was passed on to Tuno. Still not having enough information to charge Tran with involvement in Elliott's murder, they arrested him on unrelated drug charges on 11 August 2009. Not only did he decline to talk, the detectives had a real problem with the issue of identification.

As we've seen, after Christiansen told detectives the location of the murder, police ‘canvassed' nearby houses, asking the occupants if they had any memory of activity at the location around the time of the killing. They soon heard a bizarre
story. In one of the neighbouring houses, a few boys had been hanging out in a room on the second floor while the parents of the one who lived there were at work. Over the course of the afternoon, they'd taken an interest in the comings and goings next door, and had seen the white van arrive and the toolbox being lifted out and carried into the garage. Later, they'd seen a black Statesman turn up, and soon afterwards heard some banging sounds, like gunshots. The boys had been watching movies, so their observation wasn't continuous, but they had seen the same men who'd carried the toolbox out of the van carry it back to the vehicle later, and noticed that this time it seemed a lot heavier. When the mother of the boy who lived in the house came home that night, he told her he thought someone had been shot next door. She told him not to be silly, and that he'd been watching too many films.

The next day the boys got together again, and while one kept watch, the others got into the house and found a patch of carpet had been removed in the front room. While they were inside, a small car arrived and two Asian people got out with cleaning equipment. The cockatoo panicked and, trying to buy time for his friends still in the house, told the cleaners, ‘We thought we heard gunshots from in there yesterday.'

‘No,' one of the Asians replied. ‘We're just doing some renovations and using a nail gun.'

The boys accepted this, at least to the point where they did not say anything to the authorities, until police came knocking. Then they gladly told their story, but it contained one detail that created a huge problem for the police. The boys said one of the men they'd seen carrying the toolbox was dark-haired and huge—Christiansen—and the other was
Asian—Tran—and had a
pale mohawk haircut
. That last detail seemed completely wrong: when Tuno arrested Tran he had average-length dark hair, and it was unlikely he'd had time to grow out a mohawk since the murder. Tran still wasn't speaking to them, but no one who knew him—including Christiansen—had any memory of a mohawk haircut, pale or otherwise. The detectives obtained what photographs of Tran they could from previous years, and in all of them his hair was quite ordinary.

The detectives came to the conclusion that the boys had made a mistake. Probably it had happened because one of them had been in error about what he thought he'd seen, and in discussions afterwards his memory had been accepted by the others; such errors are less rare than most people realise. This one presented a problem to the police: they would have to disclose it to the defence, who would naturally make a great thing of it in court.

Tuno and the Crime Commission decided to use covert listening devices to record some of Tran's conversations while in custody, particularly with Thanawat Chudtalay, his co-offender in the unrelated drug matter for which he'd been arrested. Chudtalay was a close associate of Tran, and his DNA had been found on the bag of drugs located in Christiansen's lock-up. The police installed the listening device, told the two men they were being investigated for the Elliott murder, and sat back and waited.

On 14 August 2009, Tran told Chudtalay not to talk to police, and also relayed some advice he'd apparently received from his lawyer, whom I'll call Dave. His English was not good: ‘Just stick to that, man, because, like, what, from what
we know now, they have hard-core—Dave go to me my only escape, see what, what the situation is, switch that into self-defence.' In subsequent conversations he was more explicit, and the police recorded him admitting to arranging the meeting at which Elliott was killed, to being there, and to helping Christiansen put the body in the toolbox.