The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (7 page)

On the following morning Ellis and Saucis returned to the area and, after a fruitless door knock, during which they spoke in vain to local residents, they continued their search. Finding nothing in either Marks Park itself or along the ‘ocean track’ – the coastal walkway – Craig made his way to the rock shelf below the cliff. The surface was wet from recent tides, small pools of water lay in the pockets eroded over aeons by wind and sea and rain. Out towards the horizon waves rolled landward, occasional whitecaps visible on their crests. Staying close to the cliff face, Ellis picked his way over the rocks, expecting nothing but looking anyway. What could there possibly be to find? Still, he had to do something, had to at least feel as if he was making a difference. He looked into the rockpools and kicked over stones. He approached a section of cliff face honeycombed by the elements, lace-patterns poked into the striated sandstone like a huge moth-eaten theatre backdrop and it was here that he made a chilling discovery: Ross Warren’s keys had been placed in a recess in the cliff face, a kind of honeycomb formation created by wind and wave action. Craig Ellis has always maintained that the keys appeared to have been ‘placed’ where they were found rather than having fallen or been thrown there, thereby posing the question:
why would Ross Warren place his keys in a position of apparent safekeeping at the base of the cliffs in the middle of the night?

Ellis stayed with the keys while his friend Paul went away to contact police.

• • •

Later on 25September 2000 Detective Page reinterviewed Paul Saucis, also at Paddington Police Station. In essence, he corroborated Ellis’s statement, although he added that Constable Robinson explained that no action would be taken when they first reported Warren missing: Warren was a) an adult and was free to come and go as he pleased and b) hadn’t been missing long enough – in police terms – to warrant concern.

Neither Ellis nor Saucis believed that Ross Warren would take his own life and both asserted that they had not seen or heard from him during the intervening period.

A week or so later, on 4 October 2000, Detective Page received a statement via email from Warren’s friend Philip Rossini, with whom he had been drinking the night he disappeared. Warren, he said, was in a good mood. They talked about work, about Sydney, about forthcoming events. It was the first time they had been out socially and, despite stating that they met at around 11.45pm and spent ‘a few hours together’, Rossini claimed to have left sometime around midnight as he had to work the next day.
[3]
As he waited at traffic lights at Taylor Square he watched Warren pull out of his parking spot in front of the court house and drive east along Oxford Street. He never saw Ross Warren again.

iii

Armed with the statements of Ellis, Saucis and Rossini (who had moved from WIN4 TV in Wollongong shortly after Warren’s disappearance, having accepted a job in New York where he currently works as a sound recordist) Steve Page realised he needed more contemporary information regarding the topography of Marks Park and the nature of the ‘beat’ there.
[4]
In researching both he was to come across a culture of gay-hate crime far greater in depth than anyone knew.

Marks Park has changed little since 1989. Situated on a headland between Bondi Beach and Tamarama Beach it is a scruffy patch of litter-strewn open ground with a few wind-blown trees here and there, and an eastern border of scrubby vegetation. Empty soft-drink bottles, VB cans, used condoms and cigarette packets lie everywhere, evidence of its continued nefarious usage. It does, however, offer fantastic views over Bondi and the ocean, attracting artists of all calibre who spend most of the daylight hours sketching or water-colouring images of Campbell Parade and North Bondi. The park itself is in an elevated position with several sets of steps leading down to a coastal walkway that runs beneath the vegetation border, around the rock face. In 1989 this walkway was more ‘rural’ than it is today, having fewer safety rails and a less ‘constructed’ feel about it. Today, the walkway is an established tourist route and has been gentrified accordingly: the path is wider, the access is easier. Marks Lane, with a mixture of detached houses and blocks of units overlooking the otherwise secluded space, runs along the western edge of the park.

At the time when Ross Warren visited Marks Park in the late ’80s, it was known (and had been for decades) as a predominantly night-time beat used by both gay and straight men looking for a homosexual liaison.
[5]
A quiet night – or an early night (before midnight) – might find a dozen or so men cruising the park, especially at weekends. When it was busy, Marks Park would host up to a hundred gay males seeking casual sex. Other beats cater to different tastes: there are beats for transvestites, S&M, groups and so on. And not just in the decadent city. Country beats are often more extreme, more populated, because attitudes in the country tend to change more slowly than those in the metropolis and people involved in fringe activities are driven to greater secrecy and greater degrees of desperation.

But if the beats attracted those shunned by mainstream society because of their sexual preferences, they also attracted the predators, those who targeted those outsiders who were regarded as being sexually deviant. Bashings were rife.

In December 1999 Jenny Mouzos and Sue Thompson
[6]
presented a paper to the Hate Crime Conference at the University of Sydney
.
Steve Page read the results of their research with both interest and horror. Some of the main findings demonstrated that, compared to other male homicides, those that are gay-related tend to be:

~ Incidents which are more likely to involve multiple offenders and highly unlikely to involve multiple victims;

~ Where the victim is likely to be older than the offender(s);

~ Where the victim is more likely to be brutally beaten to death or repeatedly stabbed to death;

~ Where the victim is more likely to be killed by a stranger;

~ Where the gay-hate homicide offender is likely to be aged between 15 and 17 years;

~ Where victims and offenders are more likely to be Caucasian;

~ Where victims are more likely to be employed whilst offenders are more likely to be unemployed.

The writing of the paper had been prompted by the murders of two homosexual men in Sydney: one, in January 1990, by eight school-age boys from an inner-city public school and a local Catholic boys’ school; the other, the murder of a teacher employed (coincidentally, as it transpired) at the public school in question. In response to these murders the NSW Police Gay/Lesbian Client Consultation Unit started to gather data relating to gay-related homicides.

Part of Mouzos and Thompson’s research uncovered a tendency by some courts to endorse what became known as a ‘homosexual advance defence’ (HAD) in which the offender had claimed that the victim made homosexual advances that had triggered a sense of escalating violence because of the inherent challenge to the offender’s masculinity. This violence eventually culminated in death. Other research suggested that the motivation for these murders resided in the offenders attempting to build their sense of self-esteem at the expense of another.

Mouzos and Thompson’s paper is a masterpiece of clinical analysis, stark and unemotional, despite including detailed information on the nature of gay hate-related homicide. In a subsection on Victim Comparison, for instance, they report their findings regarding the brutality of the crimes in question, noting that in one case a gay victim had been stabbed 75 times in the chest, and in another, the victim had been stabbed 35 times in the neck. Other cases over the years, they claim, have involved mutilation and dismemberment.

For such research to have been undertaken in the first place, and such a paper to have been presented, the perceived problem of gay hate-related homicide – and gay hate-related crime in general – was obviously significant. But did it have any bearing on the Warren case? Had Ross Warren fallen victim to one of these apparently random acts of violence perpetrated against homosexuals across Sydney in the late ’80s? Detective Page turned to the work of Detective Sergeant McCann, the homicide detective who’d investigated the case in the ’90s. Maybe in his archived files there could be a clue to help solve the mystery. Or at least to point him in the right direction. But first, why not speak to McCann in person, to see what he could remember from that time?

Brief inquiries by Page ascertained that DS McCann was on extended sick leave as a result of stress and a phone call to him ended with McCann regretfully declining to make a statement that, he believed, could jeopardise the speed of his recovery.
[7]
Nevertheless, he recalled that his initial investigation into the Warren case led him to a number of other gay-hate cases at around the same time. These were: the murder of Richard Johnson on 24 January 1990 in Alexandria (one of the cases to prompt Mouzos and Thompson’s research paper), the murder of Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn, a Thai national, on 27 July 1990 at Marks Park, and the suspicious death of John Russell on 11 November 1989, also at Marks Park. The Johnson and Rattanajurathaporn murders had been solved, largely by McCann, who, in the case of Johnson, ‘fronted’ the suspected killers alone as they played basketball together, identified the one he thought would be the weakest link and pursued him relentlessly until he cracked, giving up the other seven in his confession.

In addition, McCann stated, there were other crimes against homosexuals at that time which, although they didn’t result in the death of the victim, were certainly part of the broader social picture of that era.

Steve Page was beginning to sense the true scale of the Warren investigation as he spoke to McCann, beginning to see the endemic nature of the problem. This wasn’t some isolated incident in which the victim – Ross Warren – had been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, this was one episode among many, one instance of widespread
calculated
victimisation. Page found McCann’s archived reports and started to read.

[1]
Constable Robinson’s original report states that the vehicle was found outside 24 Fenneck Street, adjacent to Fletcher Street, Bondi. As Detective Sergeant Page was to point out a decade later, there is/was no Fenneck Street in Bondi, and Kenneth Street – the actual location – is not adjacent to Fletcher Street.

[2]
The body was actually that of a genuine suicide, Clayton Beackon, and had been recovered from the water beneath Ben Buckler Point, North Bondi.

[3]
In an earlier statement to Detective Sergeant McCann of the Homicide Squad Philip gave a more detailed version of events. He and Warren met at Gilligan’s around 11.45pm, drank mineral water and spoke to no-one. He recalled the barman who was ‘large with a big earring’ and who was probably an Islander and he remembered that Warren had said, ‘I hope I don’t run into Ken.’ Philip believed Ken to be a Maori. When Gilligan’s closed they moved on to the Vault where they stayed for 30 minutes or so. Warren spoke to ‘several men’ who he introduced (but whose names Philip instantly forgot). After the Vault they went to the Midnight Shift, staying for approximately an hour, drinking iced water. Warren spoke to five men during this time but Philip couldn’t recall their names. They left the ‘Shift’ sometime around 2am with Warren unaffected by alcohol and in good spirits. This statement was made to Sergeant McCann on 26 July 1989, four days after Warren vanished. One potentially telling fact offered up by Philip suggested that in a general conversation two weeks previously, Warren had claimed to be so depressed that he said, ‘I could slash my wrists.’ Afterwards, however, he laughed and Philip assumed the outburst was no more than histrionics.

[4]
A ‘beat’ is described by Mouzos and Thompson (see 7) as ‘a park or public space, where men are known to meet other men for social interaction or anonymous sexual encounters’.

[5]
Research shows that there are many heterosexual males, often married or in established heterosexual relationships, who indulge in regular homosexual activities at certain beats.

[6]
See ‘Comparison Between Gay Hate-Related Homicides of Men and Other Male Homicides In New South Wales 1989–1999’ a paper by Jenny Mouzos and Sue Thompson which was presented at the Hate Crime Conference, University of Sydney, on 9 and 10 December 1999.

[7]
The fact that McCann declined to make a statement which might help a fellow officer should not reflect negatively on him. He was – and remains – a highly respected police officer (not least of all by Steve Page) with an impeccable record. His stance in response to Page’s overture was taken purely on health grounds and should in no way be seen in obstructive terms.

CHAPTER FOUR