The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (11 page)

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If Rowan Legge genuinely – though mistakenly – believed the flight attendant to have some involvement in Ross Warren’s situation, there was no confusion about the subject of Elizabeth Fitzpatrick’s statement to Constable Ryan on 5October. Here was a red herring that had been very deliberately tossed to the investigating police in 1989.

Fitzpatrick was working on the switchboard at SBS TV station where she’d been employed for three months or so, when she took a call from a male purporting to be Ross Warren. The conversation, according to the receptionist went something like this:

Male Caller: Hi, this is Ross Warren. I just want to let you know that I’m alive, and to say hello to all my friends at WIN TV.

Fitzpatrick: Why are you calling here?

Male Caller: To let you know that everything that was published about me was rubbish.

Fitzpatrick: Where are you calling from?

Male Caller: Central Australia.

Fitzpatrick: What are you doing there?

The caller didn’t answer Fitzpatrick’s question, but repeated that everything that had been printed about him was rubbish. And then hung up.

Fitzpatrick left the line open and called Channel 4 and the police in the hope that the call could be traced. The caller, she said, had sounded sober, articulate and in his mid-20s. There had been no background noise.

There are a number of possibilities to be considered in connection to this call. Firstly, if we assume that the caller was, indeed, Ross Warren (and the articulation, estimated age and polite delivery support this assumption) why call SBS and not WIN4? Hardly a mistake he would be expected to make. And why, if he wanted to stage his own disappearance, make any contact at all? Surely, to disappear effectively, nothing less than total silence would work. Besides which, if Ross Warren had staged his own vanishing act but wanted to say ‘hi’ to anyone, it seems most likely that he would have spoken to his family rather than his workplace, as everyone agreed that he and his family were close.

The second possibility is that the caller was no more than a prankster, some joker who thought it would be amusing to confuse police by pretending to be the missing man who had occupied so many column inches in the press. This could explain the call being made to the wrong TV station. It could even have been the flight attendant if he was as malicious as Rowan Legge had claimed. But the police didn’t believe the call had been made by a joker. It just didn’t quite work: if someone wanted to create mischief they would have offered more than the few lines reported by Fitzpatrick, more for the police to work with.

Which leaves the third possibility: that the call was supposed to create a diversion, taking the police away from a more accurate line of inquiry. If Ross Warren had been murdered, for instance, a call from him would shift the focus of the inquiry away from the fact: there would be no point in pursuing a murder inquiry if the so-called victim wasn’t dead.

No official conclusions were reached by the police: the call could have been made for any one of the above reasons. Privately, however, given that Detective Sergeant McCann of the Homicide Squad had become involved with the case, the third possibility seemed to be given the most credence, despite the continued efforts of some members of the public intent on causing trouble.

One such person was Arthur Pillon.

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In March 1991 Constable Keith Rees was on duty at Warilla Police Station when Arthur Pillon walked in. Rees knew Pillon. He was the proprietor of a local security firm, although Rees and other officers at the station, all of whom knew Pillon well, believed he should never have been issued with a security licence: Arthur Pillon, in police eyes, was ‘of doubtful character’ and had had more than one criminal charge laid against him (the most serious – a sexual offence – eventually being withdrawn when no evidence was offered).

Pillon’s reason for being at the station on this occasion, however, was to offer information.

About three weeks earlier, he said, he’d been making a payroll run to a ‘homosexual strip joint’ in the Bondi area when he saw someone he recognised. He’d approached the man saying, ‘I know you. You’re the fella off Channel 4 who’s gone missing.’ The man replied, ‘Get lost. I’ve got my own reasons for disappearing. Now get out.’

The man, Pillon said, was Ross Warren.

As with the Rowan Legge information, Pillon’s story was crosschecked for verification and it was found that, according to the local Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officers, there was no known homosexual ‘strip joint’ in the Bondi area. Considering this, together with Pillon’s reputation for ‘big noting’ himself, Rees and the police discounted his story as being nothing more than an attempt to put himself in the limelight.

In July 2001, however, following his usual diligent approach to the investigation, Steve Page sent a constable to Pillon’s Warilla home to take a statement from his widow, Margaret.

Margaret Pillon, at 68, was in full possession of her faculties and gave a lucid and comprehensive statement in which she explained that her husband had died in June 1993. Before his death, Arthur Pillon had been responsible for finding new clients for the security company (which was owned by their son, even though Pillon was known as the proprietor) and for going to Sydney on a weekly basis to perform payroll and banking services for several companies. Margaret Pillon always accompanied her husband, she said, because Arthur had had a heart bypass operation in 1990 and she would help him carry the heavy moneybags. Both she and her husband had security licences. She could recall visiting an address in Castlereagh Street in the CBD and one somewhere in Bondi Junction, although she couldn’t remember exactly where.

Constable Harrison explained to Mrs Pillon that her husband had made a statement to police in 1991 concerning his having met Ross Warren at a homosexual strip joint in Bondi Junction. Could that be where they made their regular deliveries? Margaret Pillon agreed that the meeting with Warren could have happened, although she had never heard about it: her husband, she said candidly, would have kept the venue from her, but she knew that he frequented places of that sort. However, she was adamant that they never had business dealings with homosexual strip joints.

On the other hand, she said, ‘my husband did tell lies. He didn’t always tell the truth’.

[1]
As a result of a later media release ‘Derrick’ did come forward to give a statement to police. He did live at 91 Ruthven Street in 1989 and he knew Ross Warren. They met at a gay beat on the Gold Coast sometime in 1983 or 1984 and they kept in touch when Warren moved to Wollongong and Derrick moved to Sydney. They often met at the Green Park Diner, where Derrick worked, in Taylor Square and would go to the Midnight Shift together for a few drinks – although he had never seen Warren intoxicated, he said. Derrick thought that Warren continued visiting beats but he never went with him. Derrick also used to go to Marks Park but had never known of any acts of violence occurring there and, with regard to the location of Warren’s keys, Derrick had never heard of rattling keys as a signal from one gay man to another that he was interested in casual sex.

[2]
A statement that seems to corroborate the ‘Liverpool lady’ journalist’s ignorance of Ross Warren’s sexuality.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Love Triangle

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The fellow journalist at WIN TV had seemed fairly certain that Ross Warren was involved in an illicit affair with a woman already in a relationship. The journalist was unaware that Warren was homosexual and therefore, the police argued, the journalist might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. What if Warren had described his affair in only the very vaguest of terms, not actually identifying the sex of the other person? What if the journalist had misunderstood what he’d been told, had misheard or simply jumped to heterosexual conclusions? During the last evening anyone saw Ross Warren he’d said that he hoped he didn’t ‘run into Ken’. Warren’s drinking companion, Philip Rossini, believed that Ken was a Maori. Maybe Ken was the supposed ‘lady’ involved with Ross Warren. The officers from Operation Taradale set about trying to find out who Ken was.

In the meantime, Constable Catherine Morieson reinterviewed Christine Jones, a make-up artist at WIN TV.

Jones first met Ross Warren in 1986 or ’87, she said, when he started working at the station. Within a couple of months they became good friends, talking whenever they were both working the same shifts. Often, she said, Ross would come and talk to her after he’d finished recording. Occasionally they went to functions together as friends: but only as friends – Jones knew he was homosexual.

She’d already made a statement to police, she pointed out. On 26July 1989, the day the newspaper report suggested Warren had been murdered. In that first statement Jones said she’d told police that Ross had told her about a man he was seeing, a man called Ken. Ross had also told her that Ken had a partner. It was because of the partner that Ross had ended his relationship with Ken at least a month before he disappeared. ‘He was unhappy that the relationship had ended but he didn’t feel comfortable being part of a love triangle,’ Jones said. He just didn’t want Ken to contact him.

Suicide? Jones dismissed the idea unhesitatingly, arguing that Ross was not only a ‘very jovial’ person but he could also be quite mean with his money. Shortly before he’d disappeared he’d been complaining about having to spend $38 on a new side mirror for his car before he could register it: it was inconceivable that he would have spent the money if he’d been contemplating suicide. And, anyway, Ross was so close to his parents and his sister that he would never do that to them, never put them through that kind of hell. For the same reason – the fact that he was so close to his family – neither could Christine Jones believe that he would deliberately disappear without letting them know he was okay.

• • •

By March 2002 the officers of the Major Crime Squad had identified ‘Ken’ and, on 27March, he was interviewed at Waverly Police Station by Detective Page and plain-clothes Constable Morieson. Steve Page explained the nature of the interview and cautioned Ken that anything he said would be electronically recorded.

Ken supplied his full name, address, date of birth and place of employment in answer to the first few questions put to him. His manner was relaxed and his replies prompt and polite. Page then moved on to more sensitive issues:

Steve Page: I’m going to … ask you some questions in relation to the disappearance of Ross Warren. I’ll ask you some background questions first. Depicted in this photograph … an aerial photograph of Marks Park … Just to orientate you, to the right we have Bondi, to the left we have Tamarama … There’s a coastal walkway that forms a perimeter boundary to the park … Are you able to tell me whether you’ve previously been to that park?

Ken: I’ve been along the walkway, yes.

Steve Page: Have you ever been to the park during the hours of darkness?

Ken: No.

Steve Page: Prior to today were you, were you aware that this park was a gay beat?

Ken: No, I wasn’t actually.

Steve Page: I’ll now [show] you a photograph of Ross Warren. Are you able to tell me … if you knew, if you know this man?

Ken: Yes, I do. I did … We were introduced through a group of friends possibly at a bar or a nightclub [in the Oxford Street area] … I’m sure it was.

Steve Page: Alright. When would it have been that you met Ross Warren?

Ken: I think it was probably 12 months prior … to his disappearance.

Steve Page: Are you able to describe the relationship you and Ross had?

Ken: We were close friends.

Steve Page: It’s been indicated to me … that Ross portrayed you as being in a relationship with him. Is that the case?

Ken: No, it wasn’t the case. Not in a sexual relationship. We were close friends, yes.

Steve Page: Ross Warren disappeared from the area of Marks Park … in July 1989. Are you able to tell me anything about his disappearance?

Ken: No. As I recollect he had come up from Wollongong. He was living in Wollongong at the time. He wasn’t staying with us. He used to come up occasionally and stay with us. We were living at Potts Point at the time. But this particular weekend he hadn’t. But I think we had seen him on the Friday evening … he was staying with some other friends as far as I remember and it was a Saturday evening that I heard that his friends hadn’t seen him and they were concerned about his safety. That’s all I know.