The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (20 page)

Current Positions:

Incident room set up at Paddington Police Station … David McMahon has been interviewed and stated during his offence reference was made to another victim pushed off a cliff. Sean Cushman was previously identified as the principal offender in the McMahon matter. The Russell death predates McMahon by approximately 3 weeks, incident site no greater than 25 metres apart. A community source has been identified who nominates [Person of Interest] Cushman for pushing a gay male off a cliff at Bondi. Profiling and analysis of Cushman shows there are some 45 P.O.I.s to this enquiry who have to be interviewed. A draft [Telephone Intercept] affidavit and request for assistance has been forwarded to the Office of the Solicitor and Telephone Interception Branch for Cushman’s telephones. A media release is proposed … Cushman identified by surveillance and covert investigations to be residing at 6/928 Anzac Parade at Maroubra … Investigations have caused an organised crime group known as ‘PSK’ or ‘PTK’ (Park Side Killers/People That Kill) to be the target of this inquiry. PSK and PTK was a graffiti tag used by the group. Evidence available shows group members and associates are responsible for the following:

- murder of Raymond Keam (1987 Randwick, not cleared)

- murder of William Allen (1988 Alexandria, not cleared)

- murder of Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn (1990 Tamarama, cleared)

- murder of Richard Johnson (1990 Alexandria, cleared)

- murder of Noel Doull (1992 Alexandria, cleared/dismissed)

- murder of Brian Hagland (1996 Bondi, cleared)

Comment: … The initial investigations [into Warren, Russell and McMahon] when held up to scrutiny could only be described as ‘poor’, and [this] investigation has the ability of fixing these errors of the past. The Deputy State Coroner, Jacqueline Milledge SM has taken an interest in this matter and has indicated she will hear evidence. The media unit has stated the media attention on this investigation will be ‘massive’.

Forty-five persons of interest to be interviewed … Park Side Killers … People That Kill … The stuff of Hollywood imaginations? Hardly. The original PSK was a local gang based in the Philadelphia neighbourhood of Parkside during the early 1980s. They were essentially a group of disenfranchised black youths who hung out in the hope that one day they would make it as rap artists, ‘gangstas’ or some other stylistic successes. They adopted the tag ‘killers’ as no more than that, a tag. They were illicit boozers, dope smokers and mavericks who existed at the fringes, respected in the ‘hood’, unknown outside it. They were not killers in any sense of the word other than as used in local parlance, meaning ‘top’. (Various cultures throughout modern times have used ‘killer’ in one form or another to denote something great: killer bee, it’s a killer etc.)

In 1986 one of the gang members recorded what was to become a yardstick rap number, ‘PSK What Does It Mean?’ in which he chronicled the lifestyle of the gang: smoking, drinking, sex. In effect, it argues the alternative world of disenchanted black urban youth in the industrial belt of the States where the only options are alcohol, drugs, women – and rap. From that one record, not only was the career of Schoolly D launched into the music business stratosphere, but a whole new sound was born, a sound as distinctive as Motown had been 20 years earlier – but meaner, uglier. It was the sound of the streets.

Popular culture washes up on Australia’s shores long after its launch in the US or the UK and it took a couple of years before Schoolly D and his mega-hit established a hold here. But when the similarly disenchanted and largely undereducated youth of Sydney’s eastern suburbs heard ‘PSK What Does It Mean?’ it must have seemed like a clarion call to action. PSK was adopted by the Maroubra/Randwick gang as a tag, appearing on graffiti all over the city, on trains and walls, anywhere spray paint would stick. But it seemed that, maybe, the PSK was taken further, was taken literally: the new Parkside gang may, indeed, have become Killers. And the name apparently spawned competition among the other gangs in the region: the Part Time Killers were born, splintering away from the PSK (although the PTK covered themselves to an extent by claiming that the acronym stood for Prime Time Kids),
[1]
the BHS came into being: BHS – Blacks Have Style – was a more innocuous gang name adopted by young Maoris, Islanders and Aboriginals who created their own exclusive group whose membership was determined by race or colour, thereby putting them on an equal footing (in one sense at least) with the ‘whiteys’. In a way, though, these gangs were all second generation: the Bondi Boys had been known in the area for several years prior to 1986. They were a loosely connected group of older boys who’d been terrorising their victims in the region without reprisal for a long time. They were looked up to, respected by the younger thugs who graduated into the lower echelons as they ‘came of age’ and who eventually superseded those who had gone before. The PTK, in particular, identified themselves with the Bondi Boys and were seen as their natural heirs.

ii

So if the eastern suburbs were being terrorised by roaming gangs in the ’80s and ’90s, who were the gang members? Steve Page contacted the Intelligence and Analysis Section of the Police Information and Intelligence Centre for membership details of the Bondi Boys, PSK and PTK. He also drafted a plan to reinterview every potential witness he could find who might have fresh information relating to the crimes he was investigating.

While he waited for Information and Intelligence to come back to him Page received information from Detective Inspector Mayger that he, Mayger, had previously spoken to the mother of one of Sean Cushman’s associates. She told him that she’d heard that Cushman had been involved in a murder – another murder in addition to the Hagland case of 1996 – in the area. Page rang the mother on 7 June and arranged for her to meet him and Mayger on 13June. Two days before their appointment she rang and cancelled, claiming that she knew nothing about the Cushman information. She’d previously spoken to the mother of a girlfriend of Aaron Martin, she said, and had been told that Martin had been involved in a murder in the Coogee area. Raymond Keam had been murdered in that area, Page noted.

Cushman’s name kept cropping up. McMahon had identified him, now he’d been nominated by the mother of a close associate (even if she did recant soon afterwards, presumably because someone, maybe a lawyer, had suggested to her that she ought to think twice about what she was going to say). Page requested an undercover operation be put in place in addition to the telephone interceptions already in action. He would have someone try to get close to Cushman, someone who might be able to join the inner circle of whatever coterie of evil he currently presided over. At some point, whether it took weeks or months, Page believed that Cushman would brag about his past to assert his leadership, to establish his status. It was hopefully only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, Page arranged for Detective Sergeant Nicholas to take a fresh statement from Peter Russell, the brother of John. On 15June Peter Russell attended Paddington Police Station.

Russell quickly went over the facts from his original statement: he was John Russell’s brother … they’d lived in Oakley Street when John died … he’d identified the body in Glebe morgue and then made a statement at Bondi Police Station later the same day. He and John were close, he said. They were a tightknit family – he, John, their grandfather and Peter’s 11-year-old son. He’d become aware that his brother was gay, he said, when John was about 18: it was obvious from the places he used to drink and the people with whom he associated socially. From 1978 John started working in bars and clubs, including Charlie Brown’s in Kings Cross, a bar known as a gay hangout – although not exclusively so (especially given that homosexuality was still illegal in New South Wales at that time). After 1984 John worked at exclusively gay bars on Oxford Street as well as taking casual bar jobs at venues like the Bronte Bowling Club. Sometimes, Peter said, John was obliged to eject disorderly patrons from the premises: he was quite capable of looking after himself as he was fit and active, and had a history of having done judo and boxing. He had, on occasion, matched blow for blow with his elder and much bigger brother following heated arguments that got out of hand.

The brothers used to drink together three nights a week at the Rose Bay Hotel, sometimes quite heavily if they fell into company. But, Peter stressed, John never drank to the point of incapability, never liked being out of control. And he did have an apparently enormous tolerance for alcohol: he would often bring home a bottle of scotch after work and the brothers would finish it in two or three hours before John went out clubbing in Darlinghurst. Which clubs? The Taxi, the Flinders, the Vault, the Albury. In fact, John Russell’s life seemed to revolve around the Darlinghurst area: he worked there, he socialised there, many of his friends lived there. Sure, he knew – as did his brother – that Marks Park was a beat – had been for years – and sure, he went there sometimes, on a couple of occasions, but he was never a regular, never…

John Russell was not a drugs user, Peter said. He might occasionally smoke a bit of pot at a party but he wasn’t really into it, never smoked at home. There was no dope smoking stuff in his room when it was cleared out after he’d died and no evidence to suggest he’d ever smoked there. No, he wasn’t a drugs user.

Nor did he publicise the fact he was gay. Anyone who knew him from outside his gay circle wouldn’t know, for instance. Not that he was secretive about it, it just wasn’t an issue for him. Inside the gay community it was a different story, though. John had been involved in the Mardi Gras from the beginning, Peter said. He was one of the founder members of the ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ float and was well known throughout Sydney’s gay population. Through one of his gay contacts he’d also come to know Robert ‘Dolly’ Dunn, since convicted of paedophilia, and he used to visit Dunn’s chicken farm near Wollongong occasionally. But that was hardly relevant, was it?

Probably not but Steve Page was taking no chances. Dunn was transported from Silverwater to Surry Hills where he was interviewed by Page and Detective Constable Pincham in the presence of two other police officers.

Detective Page showed the prisoner a photograph of John Russell, asked him to take his time looking at it. ‘Are you able to tell me whether you’re an associate, or you were an associate, of that person?’

Certainly not an associate, Dunn said. It was impossible to say for sure that he hadn’t met him but…

What about the name, John Russell, Detective Page asked. Was that familiar?

It wasn’t.

Nor was Marks Park familiar to Dunn who answered all the detective’s questions politely and with consideration. To his knowledge, he’d never been to Marks Park.

Where was he living in 1989, Page asked?

Dunn said 1989 was a bit of a mixed-up year. At the beginning of the year he’d been living in Chippendale, in Ivy Street. But then he’d moved to Warners Avenue, Bondi, to look after a friend who was seriously ill with AIDS. Sometime around Easter he’d moved to Maroubra, to Broome Street, before moving again four months later, relocating to Green Valley.

He’d never had any connection with real estate in Wollongong?

‘No, none at all.’

And he’d never been associated with poultry farms?

‘Poultry farms? Never.’

• • •

There was no reason to disbelieve what Dunn had said. He would gain nothing by lying and seemed to be quite happy to answer the detective’s questions. So Dunn’s involvement with John Russell was imaginary. Peter Russell had been mistaken or had been given the wrong information by either his brother or by one of his friends. Maybe Dunn’s name cropped up as a result of pub talk, the largely harmless exaggeration that occurs after a few too many beers among friends, stories leading to increasingly unlikely stories as mates try to outdo each other with entertaining – but fictional – episodes from their lives. Whatever the reason Dunn had been mentioned, he appeared to have nothing to offer to the investigation and, for the moment, Detective Sergeant Page moved on.

iii

Since reading the McCann files relating to the Ross Warren investigation, something about Rowan Legge’s statement had been troubling Steve Page and he determined to clear it up by having Constable Harrison reinterview the flight attendant named by Legge. The interview took place, once again, at Paddington Police Station.

The 39-year-old Qantas worker explained that he’d started with the airline in 1985 and was still employed by the company. He’d first met Ross Warren in 1987 at some Channel Seven function where he’d been invited with his girlfriend, a model who worked in TV commercials, to act as a ‘filler’ to make it look as though a lot of people had turned up to whatever ‘promo’ was happening.

Somehow Ross got the flight attendant’s phone number and would often call when he was in Sydney to arrange to meet socially. At this time the flight attendant had no idea that Ross was gay and saw their relationship as being friends. However, he was soon disabused.

Rowan Legge invited him to a dinner party at his house in Balmain, a party the flight attendant assumed to be mixed gender. When he arrived he found a dozen gay males made up the guest list, but was relieved to see that Ross was there because he was a familiar face. They talked all night, staying together because the flight attendant felt threatened by the others, and then he drove Ross home to Bellevue Hill.