The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (21 page)

Bellevue Hill?

The flight attendant believed that the one-bedroom apartment was on Bellevue Road and was leased in the name of Ross’s friend, Derek, a crew member with Ansett. Ross, he said, stayed there when he was in Sydney having come up from Wollongong.

The night of Rowan Legge’s party Ross was drunk. The attendant went into the apartment with him and decided to stay there, sharing the bed without becoming intimate. His feelings, however, began to develop for the newsreader even though he, the flight attendant, was heterosexual.

Over the next couple of months the two men saw quite a bit of each other, going to the Unicorn on Oxford Street because it was one of Ross’s favourite bars. They quickly became intimate and the attendant explained the situation to his girlfriend who amicably agreed to separate. In the meantime, Ross and the attendant stayed in the apartment in Bellevue Hill whenever Derek was out of town.

When they went out on the town it was always to the ‘Oxford Street Strip’, the Unicorn, the Albury, and when they wanted to be more alone they would drive to Mackenzies Point and sit on the sandstone wall beneath the lookout. They did this maybe three or four times, taking drinks with them and just sitting and chatting. It was years later, he said, that he learned that that was a gay beat. And it was years after Ross had disappeared before he went back alone.

Sometime early in 1989 they drove home after dinner and had sex in the car before Ross told him it was over, that he didn’t want to see the flight attendant any more. ‘You’re smothering me,’ he said. ‘You’re too clingy.’ It was a hard end to the first gay relationship the attendant had had and he was extremely upset. He was even more upset when he heard from other flight attendants that Ross had only wanted to sleep with him because he was straight. They never spoke again.

Could he describe any of Ross’s friends from that time? Derek, perhaps?

He’d met Derek, of course. He was tall, five-ten, Caucasian, slim and blond … Used to model part time for Vivian’s Model Agency … be in his early 40s, now … Other friends? Besides Derek? Rowan Legge … an ex-boyfriend – name unknown – who was a police officer at the time Ross went missing but who had since joined Qantas as a flight attendant. They talked sometime around 1994 when another flight attendant pointed out the ex-cop saying, ‘he’s the cop that used to go out with Ross’. The ex-police officer seemed not to want to talk about Ross, simply saying that the police had ‘finished with the case’ because of ‘Ross’s lifestyle’.

So, what did he think had happened to Ross? Why did he disappear?

‘I always believed that Ross had gone to Tamarama Beach, not near Mackenzies Point. That’s where I thought his car was found. I thought that he must just have fallen off the rocks. He wasn’t athletic.’

Fallen?

‘I don’t believe that Ross committed suicide. In the time I was dating him he didn’t appear to be a depressed person. Ross never came around to my place with more than the clothes on his back. He would have driven from Wollongong after work and still be in his suit and studio make-up. He’d borrow clothes and toiletry items off me. He never seemed to have a briefcase or bag with personal items in it.’

No change of clothes?

‘He had some clothes and bits and pieces at Derek’s place in Bellevue Hill.’

• • •

If Rowan Legge had seemed to be less than credible a decade earlier when Detective Sergeant McCann spoke to him, the flight attendant was hardly any more so in his statement to Constable Harrison. The detectives from Operation Taradale knew that Ross Warren stayed with friends in Redfern when he was in Sydney (Ellis and Saucis, the friends who’d reported him missing precisely because he was staying with them but hadn’t returned to the house). And they knew that he’d visited other friends in Potts Point on occasion (Ken and Michael) although it remained uncertain as to whether or not he stayed overnight with them. But Bellevue Hill? This was the first mention of the apartment in Bellevue Hill. And Derek? Not the Derrick of Ruthven Street, Bondi, but another Derek, another flight attendant, one who hadn’t been previously identified by any other witness. And the ex-police officer boyfriend of Ross Warren, who was he? No-one else seemed to be aware of his existence.

In 1994 Rowan Legge had said that the flight attendant was ‘a compulsive liar’, an ‘unsavoury character’ who was ‘malicious’. In light of his statement in 2001 there were some grounds for trusting Legge’s judgement, though with some caution: it still seemed as if Legge had had an axe to grind all those years before. Unfortunately, Constable Harrison didn’t ask about the supposedly murdered James whose body the flight attendant had reportedly transported back to Ohio. Had he done so, the attendant might have been shaken into telling a little more of the truth. As it was, his statement was almost worthless: he claimed even to be unable to remember the surname of Sue, the model he was with when he first met Warren at the Channel Seven studios.

iv

A few days later Detective Dagg was searching for occurrence pad entries relating to the death of Russell at Bondi Police Station and while he failed to locate any such entries, he did discover some information on the Robert H incident in Centennial Park in December 1989, including the fact that H had been assaulted with a water pipe – what he had referred to as a ‘metal bar’.

The senior constable in charge of the H incident was spoken to by officers from Operation Taradale and the facts sheet was provided. Arrested with the two youths eventually charged with the assault was Darryl Trindall, the same youth who’d been named by Adam French as having attacked homosexuals in the Tamarama area. Steve Page determined to interview him when he’d had a closer look at the relevant information.

Meanwhile, yet another statement was taken from Peter Russell, this time at the Rose Bay Police Station. Steve Page showed Peter Russell photographs taken at his brother’s crime scene and Peter was asked to look closely at the ‘peripheral’ items in the pictures. After a couple of minutes Russell confirmed that his brother had been a cigarette smoker and that his cigarette of choice was Peter Stuyvesant ‘soft packs’, the same brand as depicted in the photographs. It was likely, he said, that the pack in the picture had belonged to his brother. The disposable lighter near the body was also likely to have belonged to John Russell, Peter said.

The Coke bottle sitting on top of the nearby rock was another matter, though. John Russell would not have drunk any soft drink after he’d been drinking beer, his brother insisted. He might have drunk the stuff as a hangover cure the following day, but not immediately after a ‘session’.

If the Coke bottle hadn’t belonged to John Russell then, argued Detective Page, it most probably belonged to someone who had gone down to the rock ledge after John Russell had fallen to check if he was alive. And as no-one had contacted the emergency services before Rick Saxby and Neville Smith the following morning, it would be reasonable to assume that whoever the soft drink belonged to, whoever had found the lifeless body of John Russell, had a good reason for not making a ‘000’ phone call. The only viable reason was that whoever it was had been the person who had pushed Russell from the cliff top.

And medical evidence suggested that it wouldn’t have been too difficult to accomplish the feat.

A senior physician had already been canvassed for his opinion on the physical state of John Russell on the night of his death, given the known facts. The police medical officer specialised in, among other subjects, the pharmacology of alcohol. He examined the post-mortem findings and concluded that John Russell, having the blood alcohol level as stated (0.255mg) ‘would have had impaired balance, impaired coordination and impaired spatial orientation. He would have diminished vision and hearing as well as poor judgement of things such as speed and distance. He would probably have personality and mood changes as well. He would have a diminished capacity to protect himself from danger.’

What the doctor appeared to be saying was that John Russell, having drunk more than a dozen beers during the course of the evening, would have been drunk enough to have staggered off the pathway beneath Marks Park, over the cliff and onto the rocks below. He wouldn’t have been able to judge the distance between himself and the precipice and was, therefore, possibly the cause of his own death.

Alternatively, the doctor could have been suggesting that, in his drunken state, John Russell wouldn’t have heard if someone had approached him from behind, wouldn’t have had the ability to fend off an unwelcome approach, would have been totally vulnerable to someone – some sober someone – intent on causing him harm. Taking into account the other reported (and unreported) events in the area, and the fact of the hair found on the back of Russell’s hand, it seemed even more likely that John Russell hadn’t staggered to his death but had been propelled to it.

v

While Steve Page pondered the police medical officer’s expert findings, information on the feral gangs of 1989 landed on his desk. A senior constable at Waverley Police Station had a fairly comprehensive record of events dating back to the beginning of January 1990, when he worked out of Bondi Police Station on Hastings Parade.

Between November 1989 and June 1995 Constable Bishop performed criminal investigation duties while he was attached to the Bondi Detectives Office. According to Bishop there was a group of youths who roamed the area at that time. They were the PSK (Parkside Killers) who also referred to themselves as the Bondi Boys.
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He listed 17 names including those of three girls. They were, he said, particularly notorious for assaults and robberies around the Bondi Beach front where they usually congregated, and also for breaking and entering in the area. Occasionally, they associated with other gangs from Randwick and elsewhere, as well as with individuals who seemed to be members of the group on only a part-time basis, individuals who were never quite fully accepted into the circle.

During the late ’80s and early ’90s a suspected paedophile lived in Oatley Road, Bondi where many of those Bishop had named stayed for extended periods. Absconders from juvenile detention centres were often found hiding out in the Oatley Road apartment, two of whom were implicated in many of the local assaults (and one of whom had earlier made allegations of sexual assault against the man).

In January 1990 Constable Bishop had reason to call on one of those juveniles who hadn’t been allowed full membership in the gang. The youth lived in Moore Street and Bishop asked him about the sudden appearance of PSK graffiti in the area. The 17-year-old knew nothing about that, he claimed, but he did know something: the Bondi Boys had thrown ‘a poofter off the cliff at South Bondi’. He described the area as that beside the Fletcher Street steps at Marks Park and as he spoke, Bishop had the feeling that the youth had actually seen it happen. However much he probed, though, the boy divulged nothing else, no further details, no names. Bishop, however, submitted a full report as he recalled a body being found at the base of those cliffs not long before. Now, more than a decade later, he couldn’t find a copy of that report and the notebook he’d used at the time had been destroyed in a cull of old records at Bondi Station.

Around this time, Bishop recalled, he understood that the youth who’d told him about the person thrown from the cliff was living at the same premises as Sean Cushman.

vi

The easy conclusion for Steve Page to accept was that all the talk about a body being thrown from a cliff referred to John Russell (even though Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn had also been thrown over a cliff those responsible weren’t members of the Bondi Boys). However, as the detective had already established that there had been at least two gay men who had met their deaths beneath the walkway around Marks Park – Russell and Rattanajurathaporn – why not a third? Why should the insinuations, whispers and rumours not also refer to Ross Warren? What if he’d been disposed of in the same way as the others but, instead of being found on the rocks or washed up against the cliffs, he’d been washed out to sea by the tide? Would that be possible, Page wondered?

Expert advice was sought.

A lecturer specialising in coastal geomorphology at the University of New South Wales was consulted in the hope that he would be able to confirm one way or another that Ross Warren could have been washed out to sea, rather than have been returned to the shoreline, if he’d fallen into the water.

Doctor Rob Brander had gained his PhD from Sydney University with a thesis on the measurement and behaviour of rip currents. His research, which he fully expected to take another 20 years or so to complete, was ongoing. Brander had been the resident caretaker of the Tamarama Surf Club for a while and he used to snorkel around the rocks in the Tamarama and Mackenzies Bay area where he continued to conduct research into the movement of sediment as the result of wave conditions. As the author of the entry on ‘Rip Currents’ in the Encyclopaedia of Marine Science, Brander was the ideal expert witness.

Describing the action of wave cycles Brander explained how the water carried shorewards by the wave returned to the open sea by either reflection (the wave coming in at an angle and reflecting out again at an equal angle in the opposite direction), undertow (the wave occupying the upper part of the water while the return occupies the lower reaches) or rips (narrow channels of fast flowing surges between sandbars, usually on beaches). In Mackenzies Bay, wave reflection is turbulent and energetic, Brander said, as there is more exposed rock face for the water to crash against and because there is little room for the returning water to escape by because of the shape of the bay. Rips at Mackenzies Bay tend to flow along the rock face because of the small size of the bay and, when the waves are larger, the entire bay could exhibit rip current flow. During large storm conditions, Brander said, with waves higher than three metres, Mackenzies Bay is characterised by ‘mega-rips’ which can extend up to half a kilometre offshore. (Ordinarily, a rip travels between 50 and 100 metres).