The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (5 page)

So, what did the police have to do to help? As Kay Warren made clear in her letter, it was the police who must ask that an inquest be conducted. They would need to present a brief of evidence to the court disclosing the facts of the 1989 missing person investigation and the coroner would deliver his or her findings based on the evidence contained within that brief. A straightforward process that required a little paperwork and a number of man-hours. Not much to ask for a bewildered family to gain peace of mind that had eluded them for nine years?

Not much to ask but perhaps too much: the Warren family heard nothing for almost two months.

Of course, the police would have had other priorities. The level of crime in mid-1998 – especially in Sydney – was on the rise and police resources obviously had to be deployed accordingly. The Warrens understood that. Nevertheless, an acknowledgement…?

On 5 September Kay Warren again wrote to the police in Sydney. She enclosed a copy of her original letter and asked no more than to be reassured that something would be done at some time. She also expressed a willingness to do whatever she could herself to expedite matters. Her tone wavered on the edge of pleading.

This time she waited for more than two months before accepting that no reply was to be forthcoming. She contacted the police again, sending her letter by fax: a transmission report let her know it had reached its destination successfully.

Having previously written as a supplicant approaching authority with all due deference and respect, she was now, on 1 December 1998, politely asserting her rights. She again enclosed a copy of her original correspondence and, in a conciliatory gesture, suggested that it might have been sent to the wrong address, suggested that, somehow, it might have been her fault that the police hadn’t received her earlier letters. However, ‘it should have still found its way to your office’, she said reasonably, before adding, ‘but I have not had a reply’. She also included a phone and fax number in addition to her address. There wasn’t much more she could do to make it easier for the police to contact her, to let her know that the matter was in hand.

Six months later, in May 1999, Kay Warren’s tone was more firm. She had still to hear from the police. There had been no response whatsoever to her requests.

‘This is my third letter requesting that some action be taken re: my son’s case.’ (It was, in fact, her fourth). It was now, she pointed out, 10 years since Ross had vanished. Her words were less placatory as she explained that there were loose ends to be tied, personal affairs to be settled: this wasn’t just a legal issue – it had practical implications, too. She made sure to draw attention to the family’s new address: there was no point in gifting an excuse for not having received a reply because it had been sent by some uncaring officer to the wrong house. And to make doubly certain that nothing could go wrong, she phoned to make sure her letter had arrived safely. She was told it had and it had been passed on to the Crime Manager at Rose Bay Local Area Command. Now, she believed, something was at last happening.

ii

The vast majority of the Australian law-abiding public has a straightforward attitude towards authority, an attitude based on respect born of exclusion. After all, it reasons, lawyers, doctors, teachers and policemen are in possession of an esoteric education beyond that which most of us attain: they are the keepers of great and arcane knowledge, a knowledge that endows power on those who possess it. They are the people we turn to when we need advice, when we’re in trouble: they are the people in whom we, as a society, place our trust. They are society’s protectors and should be shown all rightful deference.

Kay Warren had been told her request had been passed on to the people who had the knowledge, the authority, to make things happen. After almost a year of letter writing those in power were about to do
something.

Or were they?

Worongary

QLD 4213

7th December 1999

The Crime Manager

Rose Bay Police

Rose Bay

Sydney

Re: ROSS BRADLEY WARREN

Dear Sir,

I am enclosing copies of earlier correspondence, the last of which was forwarded to your office.

I would like to know why there has been no action on my request. I understood that a person was presumed legally dead after seven years.

If there is a reason or something about my son’s disappearance that we have not been told, I would like to be informed. Sgt. Steve McCann who was investigating the case at the time told us after about three months there was nothing much more to be done and the case was put on file.

Will someone please do something to finalise this matter to enable the family to put the matter to rest as ten years is far too long.

Yours faithfully

The Warren family was losing patience. But although the request might have seemed simple, the logistics of it were less so. The Ross Warren file had been archived, relevant notes and reports had long since been destroyed, investigating police had left the force and moved away, retired, died. Kay Warren’s letters had so far found their way into the ‘too hard’ basket.

Until now. On 17 December 1999 the Crime Manager at Rose Bay Local Area Command (LAC), Detective Sergeant Warwick Brown, had received the correspondence and he replied to Kay Warren. He explained that the apparent delay in dealing with the matter was due largely to the ‘collation of many documents and enquiries from the various police units’ but that, now that it had been brought to his attention, the Warrens would be notified as soon as the enquiries were completed. Furthermore, in a PR move that should have been employed more than a year earlier, Detective Sergeant Brown made the following commitment to Kay Warren: ‘I can be contacted on the above phone number and … I undertake to keep you regularly informed of the progress of the enquiry.’ Efficient and compassionate, these few lines could have avoided many months of frustration and heartache had they been written earlier. Still, they were written now and a sense of relief flooded through Worongary as news of developments was awaited. Kay Warren replied after the New Year with a sense of relief, expressing her anticipation of an early outcome.

But three months later no news had come. It seemed that, despite his promises, Brown, too, had failed the Warrens.

On 26 April 2000 Kay Warren wrote to the NSW police for the sixth time. No longer overly polite, she made her points with bluntness: after almost 11 years since her son’s disappearance she still found it impossible to have a death certificate issued in his name; she failed to see how it could take so long to organise the necessary paperwork for a death certificate to be issued. And, she said, she realised ‘that to the Police he is just another statistic but he was a very important part of our lives and we want to put the matter to rest’.

Bureaucracy, however slowly it may grind, grinds inexorably and, unbeknownst to the Warrens, the file marked ‘Ross Bradley Warren’ was, indeed, being collated and organised. And on 9 May 2000 it landed on the desk of Detective Sergeant Steve Page at Paddington Police Station for review and allocation. In the bald, official language of the police, Detective Sergeant Brown outlined the case in a few lines: a missing person whose next of kin wished a death certificate to be issued … the case already created to facilitate the formulation of the brief of evidence. Nothing too difficult, merely time consuming. It seemed, at last, as if a coroner’s brief was about to be prepared.

CHAPTER TWO

A Simple Matter of Paper-Shuffling

i

In May 2000 Detective Sergeant Page had a history of getting things done. Determined to the point of single-mindedness, he had been instrumental in the solving of some of New South Wales’ highest-profile cases, patiently sifting evidence, building a case with infinite care, painstakingly manipulating funding that was often only grudgingly agreed to as senior officers preferred the political kudos attached to high numbers of easily solved cases over lesser numbers of serious and difficult cases: guaranteed quantity over only potential quality.
[1]

Described in certain areas of the press as ‘burly’, Page bore more than a passing resemblance to a heavy-set Kevin Spacey: high, intelligent forehead, bright eyes constantly seeing beyond their point of focus, rounded features that suggested a likeable quality within. But he also looked tough. Not ‘hard’ in the way that criminals are often labelled ‘hard’, but immovable, relentless. His reputation for being determined was well known; it was apparent in the way Steve Page inhabited his suit, in the way he carried himself and in the way he spoke with a soft but undeniable assurance.

He was 35 years old.

The file he now took charge of was unremarkable by case standards: a few letters, a handful of reports and statements, the request by Warwick Brown that a suitable brief be prepared for the coroner. All in all, pretty straightforward.

Some of the reports were those of the officers who had been involved at the time of Ross Warren’s disappearance, reports written by Constable Robinson and Detective Bowditch outlining information received in relation to the case. Page read the correspondence from Kay Warren, noting the letter from Brown to Mrs Warren in December 1999 and her subsequent acknowledgement of that response. He read a report dated 1 June 1999 created by Senior Constable Hill of the Missing Persons Unit (in response to Kay Warren’s fourth letter) recommending that the case be reviewed ‘with a view to submitting a brief to the Coroner’. Despite the fact that it would have saved Kay Warren some considerable heartache had action been taken two years previously, it appeared that Hill’s recommendation had not been acted upon.

As he turned over the occurrence pad entries, the running sheets and various other incident reports connected to the case, it became apparent that several errors had occurred in the conducting of the case: in one of Constable Robinson’s follow-up reports an anonymous tip had reached the police suggesting a connection between Ross Warren and one Anton Astone. They were rumoured to be living together in a homosexual relationship in South Australia. According to Robinson’s report, inquiries had been made of the Western Australia Police and the claim was proven false. But … South Australia …
Western
Australia? The error in the report was either sloppy police work or a deliberate confusing of the facts. Either way, Page was unhappy about it.

Another occurrence pad entry again related to the Astone claim. Plain-clothes Constable Chock in Sydney had spoken to Constable Wicks of Wollongong on 21 July 1990 as Wicks had been the recipient of the anonymous phone call. The caller alleged that Warren had staged his own disappearance because he owed serious money in Sydney in connection with drugs. An intelligence report was attached to the occurrence pad entry but the report had been ‘clipped’ so the author was unknown and, therefore, the information couldn’t be verified. Again, sloppy work or deliberate obscuration?

There were also a couple of other items that caused the detective concern: red herrings, certainly, but the kind of red herrings that appeared to have been set deliberately to hinder the course of inquiries at the time of Ross Warren’s disappearance.

What had originally seemed a time consuming but simple enough task of summarising an already extant file now seemed something altogether different: some of this stuff had to be re-checked before it could be aired in open court.

ii

No-one within the Rose Bay LAC knew anything about the case. The events had happened 11 years previously and 11 years in policing sees a lot of water flow under a lot of bridges. If Page was going to make headway he would have to find a way through the obstacle course of fact, obfuscation and possible incompetence before him. He needed the perspective of someone who had been involved in 1989.

Flicking through the documentation he found what he was looking for: a four-page occurrence pad entry (strangely, it had been created some days after the events of 22 July 1989) written by Detective Sergeant K Bowditch, who had conducted the original inquiry, and nominating a Detective Sharrock and Constables Ryan and Glascock as assisting the investigation. Constable Robinson was nominated as the officer in charge.

Inquiries determined that Bowditch had left the NSW Police at the end of August 1996 and was now the managing director of a security firm in the city. Senior Detective Gordon Sharrock, however, was still in the force, at City Central LAC. On 11 May 2000 Page sent him the Warren file, noting that as he had been ‘involved in the preliminary enquiries it [was] most appropriate that he have carriage of this matter’. Even if Sharrock couldn’t remember all the details, he should still be able to put his hand on his notebooks from that time.

iii

At the conclusion of the original investigation Warren had become a statistic: one of the 3000 people who went missing each year in Sydney alone. Most of them turned up sooner or later, either red-faced and apologetic, having tired of whatever adventure lured them away in the first place, or dead, their bodies washed up on shorelines or discovered in obscure places, victims of suicide or accident. But in almost 11 years Ross Warren hadn’t turned up at all. Reported as a missing person in July 1989, Ross Warren’s disappearance bore few of the hallmarks of a suicide – the usually expected outcome of these situations if the absconder fails to materialise after a given time. Yet members of the police force continued to regard the case as exactly that, a suicide.