The Gangland War (22 page)

SHE was the ace in the pack — the witness that could prove to a jury of strangers how a gang of Melbourne armed robbers became ruthless police killers.

Taskforce detectives had worked on her for months, chipping away, hoping they could turn her against the men they were convinced had ambushed and murdered two young police constables in Walsh Street, South Yarra.

But she knew the rules. To talk to police, let alone give evidence for them, was an unforgivable act of betrayal. In the vernacular of the underworld, to give evidence — to tell the truth — is to turn ‘dog'. And she seemed set to be the biggest dog of all.

She was to be the 94th — and most important — witness, not only for what she was going to say under oath, but because of who she was.

Experienced defence barristers could easily discredit many of the witnesses in the case. These were criminals looking to curry
favour, men trying to do deals with authorities over their own criminal activities, or those who could provide only small snippets to add to events that took years to build, hours to plan and minutes to execute.

But Wendy Peirce was no outsider looking in. She was the wife of the alleged ringleader and could provide the jury with the chilling details of how and why the gang chose two young policemen they didn't know to ambush and murder.

Wendy was no tourist passing through. Her adult life had been spent in the black and bloody world of Australia's most notorious crime cell — the Pettingill-Allen-Peirce clan, in which violence was seen as a solution and murder an attractive option.

Her husband, and the father of her children, was Victor George Peirce, the leader of a gang of armed robbers hitting targets around Melbourne.

Wendy Peirce was the reason police were confident they could convict the men charged with the murders of Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, who were shot dead on 12 October 1988.

The prosecution case was that Peirce and his crew were driven by a pathological hatred of law enforcement after police killed two of their mates the previous year — Mark Militano in March and Frankie Valastro in June.

Detectives maintained that both men, who had long histories of violence, were shot when they refused to surrender and chose to threaten police with guns.

The gang was convinced members of the armed robbery squad had become trigger-happy and embarked on a policy of being judge, jury and executioner. They believed that when frustrated detectives couldn't find the evidence to convict suspects they would shoot them and later argue the killings were self-defence.

After Militano's death, detectives claimed Peirce and his team began to talk of fighting back. If more of their mates were killed
by police they would respond by killing two police in return, the story went.

There were rumours and whispers of the revenge pact and there was talk that members of the squad could be ambushed in the driveways of their own homes.

At the same time detectives grabbed Victor Peirce, told him they knew he was committing armed robberies and advised him he should pull up while he could.

The stakes were raised and a confrontation of sorts was inevitable.

On 11 October 1988, Peirce's best friend and prolific armed robbery partner, Graeme Jensen, was shot dead by police in a botched arrest at Narre Warren after the suspect went to buy a spark plug for his mower.

It was now flashpoint.

On Wednesday 12 October, a Walsh Street resident reported to police that a white Holden Commodore was apparently abandoned in the street with the bonnet raised, the driver's side door open and the rear passenger side vent window smashed.

At 4.34 am a D24 operator assigned the job to a patrol car using the call sign Prahran 311.

The two young policemen on night patrol in Prahran 311 were too inexperienced to be bored with routine calls and responded immediately.

The driver, Steven Tynan, 22, had been a policeman for two years and nine months. His partner, Damian Eyre, 20, was from a police family and had been in the job for six months after graduating from the academy on 27 April 1988.

It took just seven minutes for the pair to reach the suspect sedan. They had no reason to suspect a trap.

Tynan parked the divisional van behind the Holden. Both vehicles were facing north. Eyre got out of the passenger side of the van and walked to the car.

He glanced at the registration sticker on the front window and jotted down the number and expiry date on a sheet of paper on his clipboard.

Meanwhile, his partner went to the open driver's door and slipped behind the wheel.

Eyre then walked around the car and squatted next to Tynan, who was still in the car.

They would have seen that the ignition lock was broken so that the car could be started without a key.

Tynan had started to get out of the car when the shotgun blast hit him. The deadly force threw him back into the car, where he collapsed, with his head between the front bucket seats. It was 4.48 am.

Eyre began to rise from the squatting position when he was shot across his back in the upper left shoulder, also with a shotgun.

It should have been enough to stop anyone dead, but Eyre somehow rose and turned to face his attacker. He grabbed the gunman and fought. Police believe the shotgun discharged twice more, one blast hitting the wall of a Walsh Street house.

Even though he was seriously, but not fatally, wounded, Eyre continued to fight until a second man slipped up next to him and grabbed the policeman's service .38 revolver from its holster, put it to the policeman's head and fired.

Eyre collapsed and was shot again in the back as he lay next to the rear driver's side wheel of the stolen car. He was already dying when the second revolver bullet hit him.

Both Tynan and Eyre died in hospital from massive gunshot wounds without regaining consciousness.

It didn't take detectives long to work out that this was a cold-blooded ambush.

The dumped car had been used as bait to lure police — any police — into the quiet street. At the top of a very short list of suspects were Victor Peirce and his team.

Within a day Victor's mother, Kath Pettingill, the matriarch of the notorious crime family, was quoted as saying she knew her children were the prime suspects but denied they were involved.

‘It wasn't us,' she said. ‘I hate coppers but those boys didn't do anything. Our family wouldn't do that. We were not involved.

‘You don't kill two innocent coppers. If you want to get back you would kill the copper who killed Graeme.'

Police responded immediately, conducting a series of sometimes brutal raids. They were sending a clear message to the underworld: all business was off until the police killers were charged and in jail.

But one of the most defiant in the face of constant raids was Wendy Peirce.

Apparently blood loyal to her in-laws, after one heavy-handed police raid on her house she posed in the debris for the media with one of her children, looking every bit the innocent victims of police brutality.

Homicide squad detective Jim Conomy formally interviewed her on 9 November 1988.

Not only did she refuse to implicate her husband but she gave him an alibi. They were together all night in a Tullamarine motel and he did not leave, she said.

It was a lie.

On 30 December 1988, Victor Peirce was formally charged with two counts of murder over Walsh Street.

Three other men, Peirce's half-brother Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Farrell and Peter David McEvoy, were charged. Two other suspects, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, were shot dead by
police in separate incidents. Peirce's young nephew, Jason Ryan, was also charged, although he became a protected witness for the prosecution.

With no witnesses, police built a complex case that relied heavily on forensic evidence linking a shotgun used in Walsh Street to an earlier armed robbery alleged to have been conducted by the suspects, and a series of witnesses who were prepared to swear on oath that the men charged were the killers.

Much of the testimony was tainted by the fact it was from career criminals who were never going to be seen as reliable.

Many had at first denied any knowledge or helped provide alibis for the suspects.

Then, after being subjected to sustained pressure from detectives, they finally agreed to testify.

Members of the Ty-Eyre taskforce set up to investigate the murders continued to visit Wendy Peirce. They didn't use tough-guy tactics but gently tried to persuade her that this would be the one chance she had to change her life — to leave the underworld and make a fresh start. They told her she had reached a fork in the road and had to choose which way she wanted to go.

In July 1989 — eight months after the murders — she would spend three days with Detective Inspector David Sprague and Senior Detective Colin McLaren of the Ty-Eyre taskforce, making an explosive 31-page statement.

On Sunday 16 July, she told the detectives she wished to go into the witness protection scheme. Two days later, in an interview room in homicide she repeated her statement on videotape — a confession that could have condemned her husband to life in prison.

Sporting bleached blonde hair and wearing heavy make-up, she appeared remarkably relaxed as she read her statement. Yes, she had been with her husband at the Tullamarine Motel on the
night that Jensen had been killed but, ‘Victor was absent from the motel most of the night until the morning.'

In other words, he had plenty of time to drive to Walsh Street and return.

She read her statement in a monotone, stumbling over some of the words. But the message was clear. ‘He disliked police so much that he would often say to me, “I'd love to knock them dogs”. His hatred of police was so vicious that at times I was scared to be with him.'

She said the whole family hated police, but Victor was the worst.

‘On many occasions he would be holding on to a handgun and would say, “I would love to knock Jacks”.'

Wendy said there was one armed robbery squad detective ‘he wanted to put off'.

In February 1988, after police raided his family, Peirce ‘was yelling and screaming and in such a rage from yelling that he started crying from temper,' she said.

Why then had she protected him with a false statement to police?

‘I have been an alibi witness for Victor many times. I did so out of loyalty to him and also out of fear. I was well aware he would bash me if I didn't … I was fearful that Victor would kill me if I didn't supply an alibi.'

In this version of events, she said that when Peirce first learned police had killed Jensen, he had said, ‘Oh, Jesus', and had tears in his eyes.

She told police he then rang McEvoy and said, ‘What can we do, mate? Graeme's dead, what can we do?'

She said he told her, ‘I'm next. They'll shoot me now. They're dogs; they knocked Graeme for no good reason.'

What she then said could have blown a hole in Peirce's story that he spent the night with her.

She said they went to bed with his arm under her head. She heard him get up and get dressed. But she had learned over the previous thirteen years when it was best to mind her own business and she chose not to move or call out.

‘I heard him leave the motel.' She dozed and when he came back to bed he was cold.

The taskforce was delighted. They had infiltrated the family that lived by the code of silence. Wendy Peirce continued to talk. Tape after tape was recorded that implicated Peirce in murders and unsolved armed robberies.

Police and prosecution lawyers were confident that once a jury heard her version of events they would convict the four men in the dock without hesitation.

After all, why would a woman lie to help convict the father of her children?

For more than a year Wendy Peirce lived in witness protection waiting for the day she would be called to help send her husband to jail.

The committal hearing at the Magistrates' Court proved to be the perfect dress rehearsal. She answered all questions and made it clear her husband was the key figure in the group that killed the two police as a random payback after their mate, Graeme Jensen, had been shot dead by police during an attempted arrest the previous day.

She answered all questions, implicating her husband as the driving force behind the Walsh Street killings. She was cross-examined ruthlessly but stood up to the examination. A court veteran, she had acted as an unofficial legal assistant during many of the family's battles with the law.

But there were warning signs. In November 1990, shortly after the committal hearing, Wendy Peirce's brother told taskforce joint leader Inspector John Noonan they were about to be ambushed — that she would not give evidence when it counted.

It worried Noonan enough to front Wendy Peirce, who said the claim was ‘utter rubbish'.

But it wasn't.

The jury would never hear her testimony. In the pre-trial
voir dire
— closed hearing — at the Supreme Court, Wendy Peirce suddenly changed her story and so effectively sabotaged the police case.

After eighteen months in witness protection and after swearing to her husband's involvement at the Magistrate's committal hearings, Peirce betrayed her police minders and saved her husband, Victor, from conviction and a certain lifetime prison sentence.

Not only did she deny that her husband was involved, but she declared that she had never seen him with guns in their Richmond home.

Yet in her earlier police statement she said her husband was an expert at hiding guns and that when she saw him in their shed sawing off a shotgun barrel he said to her with the pride of a home handyman, ‘This will be a beauty, Witch.' (‘Witch' was her nickname).

She also knew first hand of her husband's interest in gunplay. She told police that once while sitting with Graeme Jensen, Victor became annoyed because they had run out of marijuana. ‘He was playing with a revolver and said, “Get up and dance”.' When she refused, ‘he shot twice between my legs' — the bullets were left implanted in the skirting board.