The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (10 page)

Having established that there was no substantial difference in Craig Ellis’s version of events, Page turned his attention to the detectives involved in the early stages of the case. On 14August 2001 he took a further statement from Robinson.

Under Page’s direction Robinson was given the opportunity to authenticate points made in his earlier statements, admitting that he had made a mistake regarding a radio broadcast made on Monday, 24 July 1989 relating to Ross Warren being missing: maybe it hadn’t been broadcast on commercial stations but only on police channels, he agreed. He also admitted that the location of Warren’s vehicle had been given erroneously as being on Fenneck Street instead of Kenneth Street, and that he had been wrong in stating that he’d met Craig Ellis and Paul Saucis on ‘the corner of Tamarama and Kenneth Streets’: he had since examined a map, he said, and saw that the streets named didn’t actually intersect. And, despite Warren’s car keys being found in a position that should have aroused at least a little curiosity if not suspicion, Robinson was unable to explain why he hadn’t photographed the scene or requested the Crime Scene Unit to attend.

As former Detective Bowditch had proven by his February statement, so now did Robinson show that Ross Warren’s disappearance in 1989 was not taken as seriously as it should have been. The police work had been slapdash at best.

The next obvious port of call was – again – Bowditch’s earlier statement. However, before re-examining and re-evaluating the former sergeant’s version of events, Page checked another couple of facts for himself.

Firstly, whilst then Constable, now Sergeant, Michael Ryan was listed as one of the five officers involved in the investigation he assured Page that his only action had been to take a single-page statement from one witness, a receptionist at SBS TV station who had received a strange telephone call exactly two months after Warren’s last sighting, claiming to be from the missing man. Despite not being able to locate any notebooks or duty books for the period in question, as far as he could recollect, he played no further part in any aspect of the case.

Another Constable – now Sergeant – Adam Glascock was similarly named by Bowditch in the ‘Action’ column of his report as taking part in the investigation in 1989. Again, despite having no access to duty books for corroboration, he was in no doubt that he had ‘no involvement in this matter’. Not, ‘limited involvement’, simply
no
involvement whatsoever.

Gordon Sharrock, who we have already seen, had minimal involvement in the case, now, at the prompting of Steve Page, offered the further information that, actually, he had been on annual leave at the time of Warren’s disappearance. Again, despite being named by Bowditch as playing a significant part in the investigation, he wasn’t even on duty.

So, despite Bowditch’s nomination of various officers as being actively involved in the case, there seemed to be no grounds for such claims. But why would Bowditch say otherwise? The Ross Warren disappearance had been a fairly straightforward matter: he had been reported as missing, police conducted inquiries, they searched the last suspected whereabouts of the missing person, interviewed potential witnesses and concluded that he had met with some sort of accident. Or had taken his own life. Not a pleasant outcome, but not a difficult case either. Which brings us back to the question: why nominate officers who had nothing to do with the investigation as having taken part?

The answer, perhaps, lies in the date of Bowditch’s occurrence pad entry 7/149. As Detective Sergeant Page pointed out, it is customary to create an occurrence pad entry at the time of the event it relates to. In this case, Ross Warren was reported missing on 23 July. Bowditch’s report, however, was dated 28July, almost a week later. Why the time lapse? Possibly because the
Daily Telegraph
carried a headline story on 26 July claiming that investigating police believed that Ross Warren had been murdered – a view, in fact, that was precisely the opposite of what investigating police actually claimed to believe. However, with the press producing statements like that, and having done precious little by way of conducting a proper inquiry, Bowditch possibly felt a sudden need to create ‘cover’ for himself. The first step would be to document, in detail, the investigation so far, hence occurrence pad entry 7/149. And as only Constable Robinson had performed any investigative function to date, Bowditch could have felt the additional need to form a fictitious team to support his own involvement. The team members he decided upon were Constables Sharrock, Ryan and Glascock.

But if the investigating team was a fiction, what else, Page wondered, might not be strictly true?

To begin with, Bowditch claimed to have spoken to Ellis and Saucis, implying that he had taken formal statements from the men. This was in direct contradiction to the statements of Ellis and Saucis. They had spoken only to Robinson, they said, Bowditch’s name was never mentioned. Then Bowditch claimed to have obtained health and dental records pertaining to Warren, but Page was never able to locate those records. Further searches, instigated by Page, also failed to locate those brief of evidence copies which were supposedly filed with both the Missing Persons Unit and at Paddington Police Station, as well as with the coroner.

Other failures of policing identified within occurrence pad 7/149 included Bowditch’s failure to identify the officers involved in the apparent canvass of the area after the initial missing person report was taken. Nor did it show the extent and scope of the canvass. Assuming his involvement at all, this again seemed to confirm Bowditch’s lack of interest in the Ross Warren case in 1989.

Finally, as Detective Sergeant Page had already discovered, the only relevant occurrence pad report, held in Corporate Archives, as witnessed by Laraine Tate, was number 7/123, was created by Robinson, not Bowditch.

In the meantime, at the end of July 2001, Page and another officer had been to the Information and Intelligence Centre in Strawberry Hills to examine any holdings relating to Warren that might have been submitted by Steve McCann when he had taken over the case. Those holdings consisted primarily of the personal possessions found in Warren’s wallet: a driver’s licence, library cards, a credit card and bills. They also included a handwritten note on a scrap of paper that read, ‘Derrick 91 Ruthven St. Bondi Jnct. 3876730’. All items were signed out and sent for fingerprinting, the results unfortunately proving negative: only Ross Warren’s prints were found. Interestingly, Detective Page noted that Warren’s vehicle had not been tested for fingerprints when it was originally located in Kenneth Street.

Inquiries were then made regarding the credit card. Was Warren heavily in debt? Had he run up such an enormous level of credit that he could see no way out? (Of course, everyone who knew him claimed that Ross Warren was not the kind of person to contemplate taking his own life but … Well, it was an avenue that had to be explored). A curious reply came in the form of an affidavit from an official at the bank. No accounts had been located in the name of Warren and the account number was not on file. Curious, but not sinister: a 12-year hiatus could have seen such drastic changes in banking technology that manual records – especially those relating to accounts with ‘no movement’ on them for protracted periods of time – might be expected to have been destroyed. Still, the situation was hardly helpful.

In relation to the driver’s licence, inquiries showed that it expired in May 1990 and had not been renewed. Warren’s last transaction with the RTA had been in 1987: it was unlikely that he was in hiding unless he had changed his name.

Page next turned his attention to the piece of paper which he presumed had been handwritten by Warren. Inquiries with Telstra confirmed that subscriber records were not available for that service, so Page contacted the owner of the property at 91 Ruthven Street. She had owned the house since 1986 she said, but had no knowledge of anyone called Derrick and no records to consult because in 1989 the property was being managed for her. The managing agent was spoken to in an effort to identify Derrick, but to no avail: records of tenancies were no longer available for so long ago.
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ii

In addition to those items found in Warren’s wallet, the Information and Intelligence Centre also provided Page with other documents. Among these was a notation, seemingly written by an investigator, containing the name of one of Warren’s colleagues at WIN4 TV. Detective Nuttall contacted the colleague in question and obtained a formal statement at Wollongong Police Station in November 2001.

The journalist in question had known Ross Warren for about a year, more as a colleague than as a friend. In fact, he said, he didn’t think he’d ever associated with Warren outside work. However, he could recall a conversation they’d had early one morning. (It must have been morning, he said, because Ross presented the early weather and snow reports). During the course of the conversation he’d asked Ross what he would be doing that weekend and Ross had said he would be ‘keeping a low profile’ as he’d been caught in a sexual relationship with ‘a lady’. Apparently, the lady was already in a relationship with another man but had had sex with Ross in Liverpool. This conversation occurred, the journalist said, no more than two weeks before Warren disappeared and the only reason he remembered it was because, after Ross had disappeared, there were rumours at work about him being gay. The story of the lady in Liverpool and the suggestion he was gay didn’t gel, so the conversation stuck.

It is a little surprising that the colleague had no intimation that Ross Warren was gay because he had previously declared his homosexuality to his boss at the TV station, as well as to others. The rumours alluded to by the colleague were, in fact, statements of truth. Nevertheless, it was accepted that Warren didn’t flaunt his homosexuality because he believed it might prejudice some people against him, a prejudice that could thwart his ambitions inside television.

iii

If the Liverpool ‘lady’ was nothing more than a red herring, it certainly wasn’t the first to come to Operation Taradale’s attention.

In 1994 then Detective Sergeant Mark Murdoch, attached to the Homicide Unit at the Major Crime Squad, received a call from Rowan Legge, a friend of Ross Warren, claiming to have information relevant to the inquiry. On 1June 1994 Murdoch spoke to Legge in his Balmain home and was told that Legge and Warren were good friends who moved in the same social circle. About three months prior to Warren’s disappearance, Legge had introduced Warren to another homosexual friend, who worked as a flight attendant with Qantas, and the two new acquaintances soon became lovers. However, at the time of his disappearance, Legge alleged, Warren was in the process of ending the relationship, a development heatedly opposed by the other man. The flight attendant, Legge asserted, was a compulsive liar, an unsavoury character who Warren would be better off without. After all, why would Ross Warren want to associate with a nasty and conniving person like that? (Legge seemed to have forgotten that it had been he who introduced the two men in the first place).

Furthermore, according to Rowan Legge, although he initially presented himself to his friends as ‘a genuine type of person’, the flight attendant was continually forced to move from one group of friends to another as he quickly became alienated when it was discovered what he was really like. In case of point, Legge’s immediate circle had long since ceased to associate with the man as they believed him to be totally untrustworthy and malicious.

And then, subsequent to Warren’s disappearance, the flight attendant had become involved with a student named James. Some time later he, the flight attendant, had told friends that James had been murdered in Hawaii either on Christmas Day 1993 or New Year’s Day 1994 (Legge knew that it had happened on a specific public holiday but couldn’t remember which one). It had been the flight attendant who arranged for the body to be transported back to James’s family in Ohio. Since that time, however, Legge had not only seen James in Sydney, but understood that he was still in a relationship with the flight attendant.

In terms of the Warren investigation, Legge admitted to knowing that Marks Park was a beat, but claimed that Warren told him that he no longer frequented the beat scene. This may have been untrue, Legge believed, as Warren might just have been covering his embarrassment at his continued attraction to such venues.

Legge believed that it was possible that Warren might have committed suicide but thought that, had this been the case, he wouldn’t have done it in an area that would have highlighted the fact of his homosexuality. Warren, he said, was a very private person who didn’t advertise his sexuality. In fact, Legge said, he didn’t think that Warren’s family knew he was homosexual, he kept it so much to himself.
[2]
However, while suicide was a possibility, Legge believed that the flight attendant had a significant motive for murdering Warren: the ending of the relationship was much against his own desires and he had let the strength of his feelings about it be known. Besides, his reaction, when police started to ‘snoop around’ after Warren had disappeared, according to Legge, had been ‘so understated’, as though he knew something no-one else knew. Then, when he saw that he could be interviewed in connection with the case, he became ‘quite panicky’. Therefore, Legge concluded, the flight attendant might have been responsible for Warren’s disappearance.

Sergeant Murdoch diligently followed up the information he’d been given by Rowan Legge, first checking with Qantas to make sure the flight attendant was who Legge claimed him to be. He was. And he’d flown out of Sydney as a member of the crew on a flight through Asia on the morning of 20 July 1989, returning to Australia on 24July.