The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (24 page)

The telephone intercepts were in place, the undercover operation had approval and was in the process of being finalised. In the meantime, there was plenty to occupy the detectives: some of the finer details of the Warren, Russell and McMahon cases had yet to be attended to.

iv

If David McMahon was right in his identification of the unit from which the voice had called out,
I’m not gonna help you, you poofter
, then the occupant at the time was Harry Lesley, a retired schoolteacher who now lived in a retirement home. In September 1989, however, he lived in the unit on Wilga Street.

The 82-year-old was told that McMahon had called out for help when being robbed in Marks Park late in the evening and that he had seen a light come on in Lesley’s unit. He was then told that a male voice replied, shouting that he wasn’t about to help a ‘poofter’. That voice, Lesley insisted wasn’t his: it must have come from another unit.

Did he hear the call for help? Did he turn on the light? The old man couldn’t say, it was too long ago. What he was certain of, though, was that he would never call anyone a ‘poofter’ and he would always help anyone in trouble: Harry Lesley knew what it was like to be victimised, he said, because he’d often suffered anti-Jewish taunts and he’d been a prisoner of war in Changi. Yes, he knew what it was like to be victimised.

So David McMahon was wrong in his identifying the exact unit from which he’d heard the rejection of his call for help. Maybe, given the trauma he was going through at the time, he’d misheard the voice completely, misheard the words themselves. Maybe, one of the gang who were beating him, trying to insert a stick into his anus, ripping his earring from his ear and dragging him towards the cliff edge with the stated intention of throwing him to his death, maybe one of them had said something along the lines of,
No-one’s gonna help you, you poofter
. If that someone had been lurking at the back of the group of 16 thugs it could easily have seemed like the reply had come from elsewhere during the painful confusion of the moment. In fact, it even seemed likely. The line of inquiry was terminated.

v

An almost definite identification of the blond-haired Cushman by McMahon … blond hairs on the back of John Russell’s hand … a record of violence and homophobic attacks … The strands were all starting to intertwine. Steve Page decided to have another talk to Rod S about the events he’d heard rumoured to have happened around the time that Russell was murdered.

Rod was interviewed at Waverley Police Station early in the morning. He was shown the statement he’d made to Sergeant Ingleby in 1989 and agreed that it was his: his statement, his signature.

Asked why he’d made that statement back in ’89 Rod answered with a slight frown. He explained that, as he’d already said, he’d started running in the area a couple of years before and occasionally – at the beginning, anyway – he’d kind of hang around on the off-chance of meeting someone who might be interested in casual sex. Gay sex. In the bushes. He reiterated his meeting with Red and went over the conversation they’d had about Red hearing the sounds of what he thought at the time was a bashing. It was all in the original statement, he said. He spoke naturally, easily, his voice rising and falling with an untroubled cadence. This was old news, he seemed to be saying, but if the police wanted to hear it all again, that was alright with him.

A few weeks later – after Red had told him about the bashing, a friend of his was ‘up from the country’ and dropped by unexpectedly. The friend, Greg, talked about how he’d lost a couple of other friends recently, guys who’d died from AIDS, and how another friend – John Russell – had been found dead at the bottom of a cliff at Bondi rocks. Interestingly, Rod had originally said that Greg said Russell had been found ‘murdered’: this time he merely said ‘dead’. Perhaps time had taken the edge of sensationalism away from the event, eroded its dramatic impact. Or maybe, in the final analysis, the two words were simply interchangeable. Anyway, Rod said he made no immediate connection between the information he was given by Greg and that given by Red a couple of weeks earlier. Afterwards, though … afterwards he thought about it and, although he didn’t know what day Russell had died, nor what day Red had heard the commotion, Rod made a tentative connection, put the two events together in his mind, and went to Bondi Police Station where he made his statement to Sergeant Ingleby. Exactly as he’d said in ’89.

So, if it was all unchanged, if everything Rod told Steve Page that morning was precisely what he’d told Ingleby before, what were the police looking for? What did they expect to uncover now that they hadn’t uncovered the first time around? If they knew, they weren’t about to let Rod know. Instead, they asked about the location, about Bondi rocks, and about the reasons people went there.

Rod smiled. It was a public area, he said. People go there. But he knew what they were getting at. It’s well known to the police, he said, and he thought, to the public at large as a meeting place for gay men. It’s a park, a cruising area for gay men, between Bondi Icebergs and Tamarama Beach. But only at night as far as he knew, late evening and night. He’d never been there during the day so he wouldn’t know, really. He went two or three times a week, he said, but … Well, he stopped going in ’92 because there was a series of deaths, disappearances, of gay men in the area. It became too risky, too dangerous.

So how did he meet Red? Was that while he was cruising the park?

Actually, he said, he met Red at Moore Park in about ’87. He had a gay twin brother in the Navy but he – Rod – knew nothing about him other than he was Red’s twin. Rod and Red met four or five times during late ’89 and early ’90 and during one of their meetings Red said he’d been assaulted at the Moore Park beat, had been stabbed. He showed the scars on his upper body. They struck a chord with Rod, he said, because he’d been assaulted himself in 1986 and, although he had a natural interest in these things, it was mainly as a means of gathering information that might help him avoid similar situations in the future. That’s why the conversation about the bashing at Bondi rocks stayed with him, he said.

Okay, the police said, could Rod repeat precisely what Red had told him? Exactly, word for word? Rod smiled ruefully, no, he said, the imprecision of memory … He could paraphrase what he’d heard, could give a general idea…

Steve Page nodded. He understood that 1989 was a long time ago, that too much happens in people’s lives for them to be able to remember what become minor details in their past. He referred to Rod’s original statement and asked about when Red had spoken about the loony who’d tried to push him off the cliff but Rod couldn’t recall any of that conversation. Neither could he remember much about going to Marks Park with Sergeant Ingleby to try to find Red. Some things, he said, just didn’t stay in your mind.

Again, Steve Page nodded his understanding before back-tracking to Red’s true identity. Rod had no idea, he said. He thought Red was working class, could probably handle himself quite well (he’d managed to survive a knife attack) and was possibly known to the police because he refused point blank to tell his version of the bashing incident to Ingleby. That refusal – and his reluctance to even talk about it – suggested to Rod that there was an ulterior motive for his friend not wanting to get involved with the law. Also, whether or not it was of any relevance whatsoever, Rod said, Red seemed not to be employed. Which Rod would have been interested in, seeing as he was an employment consultant.

Anyway…

What about Greg, Detective Sergeant Page wanted to know? How did Rod know him? How did Greg know John Russell?

Rod cast his mind back, thought back to the ’80s. He’d met Greg at a gay accommodation place on South Dowling Street, he said. No, it was at a Gay Centre fundraising dinner – Greg was the manager of the South Dowling Street accommodation place. It was closed now, he said, but it used to cater mainly for tourists … Anyway, he – Greg – was from the Bondi area, went to school there, so he knew it well. But he moved away to Lismore. When he came to Sydney the time he dropped by unexpectedly, Rod said, he was in a state of shock. Two of his friends had just died and there was this other one, this John Russell. Greg said he’d known this John Russell for years, from when they were teenagers, and how Russell had been found at the bottom of the cliffs. Greg thought he’d been murdered. Pushed off.

Why did he think that, Steve Page wondered?

Rod couldn’t remember. He remembered that Greg said Russell had been drinking in one of the pubs in Bondi, drinking until quite late. He’d been seen in the pub and it was quite late so he must have ‘gone over’ after midnight. And Greg had been convinced that Russell had been murdered.

And where was Greg now?

Rod didn’t know really, dropped off the radar. He’d moved away from Sydney, as he’d said, moved to Lismore, well, not Lismore itself – one of the villages in the area. Had the detectives heard of the Tropical Fruits? No? They were a bunch of, a social group out in the country, Rod said. There was a thriving gay community in the country, he said, because people were more laid back out there, live and let live, sort of thing. He hadn’t seen Greg for, oh, for years, three or four years at least. Greg was probably still there, probably having a great time.

Detective Page switched the focus of the interview back to Marks Park again, asked about how contact was made between interested parties. Rod was becoming garrulous, starting to find his rhythm. He told the detectives how guys would eye each other, would establish a kind of accord without speaking, how they would tacitly agree to covert sex and follow each other up into the bushes or down to the rock shelf. So there was no signal, Page asked, no movement or sound to let the other know …? No. It was all in the eyes, Rod said, all body language. But wasn’t there the possibility of making a mistake? You know, it’s dark, you can’t see clearly – couldn’t a subtle eye movement be misinterpreted? Oh, yeah, Rod agreed. He recounted stories of how he, himself, had fallen victim to that kind of misinterpretation, how he’d found himself treated aggressively by someone who wasn’t at all interested even though he, Rod, had thought differently. Luckily, he said, he was pretty big in the shoulders and had a history in rugby, so it was rare that the aggression lasted long. And he told stories of how, once contact had been made, sometimes it wasn’t ‘quite right’, something was wrong. There’d been one guy who’d followed all the protocol and who’d started to go off into the cover of the trees expecting Rod to go with him – which he did until he, Rod, saw some kind of baton sticking out of the guy’s pocket, a kind of security guard’s baton. He mentioned it, already feeling misgivings about the situation, and the guy turned and chased him intending, Rod believed, to beat and rob him. But that wasn’t a case of misunderstanding the signals, he said: that was just an attempted robbery.

But when you do go with someone, Page asked, it’s always away from the path, out of the public view?

And what about the time he was attacked, Page asked? That was earlier than ’89, wasn’t it?

It was 1986, Rod said. Randwick. Near the shopping centre. He was just sort of hanging out and three guys approached him, asked for sex, outright. He explained that it wasn’t on, three guys together, it didn’t seem like they were genuinely interested … Anyway, they – or he, he couldn’t remember for sure – moved off, went their separate ways. And then, maybe 20 minutes later he was going back to his car when one of the guys approached him again, again asked for sex and Rod thought, what the hell, why not? He started to walk into some nearby bushes with the guy behind him. When he turned around he saw that the guy – small, Mediterranean-looking – had a knife in his hand. There was a scuffle and the knife was dropped. Rod walked away, angry and resentful, not knowing he’d actually been stabbed more than once, superficial wounds but wounds nonetheless. He walked away towards his car, jumped a fence … tried to jump a fence. But as he jumped, his leg was grabbed and he fell awkwardly, one leg on either side of the fence. He turned to see the other two associates of the little guy holding him. Instinctively, Rod threw a punch, hit one of them hard. The other let go and Rod limped off, his anger now building into fury. He was followed until he turned to face the guy, turned and swore at him, snarling, ready to fight. The attacker ran away. In a state of shock Rod drove home. But afterwards, when he’d calmed down, he decided to report the incident to the police so he went to Coogee Police Station the next day to make a statement. Not that the police gave a shit, he said. The desk officer told him the assault didn’t matter: after all, there was no real damage done, he wasn’t seriously hurt and he hadn’t been robbed. It was hardly worth bothering with, was it? Rod was furious, made a scene until eventually a sergeant came and took a statement from him.

Rod ended up seeing a psychiatrist, he said. He had nightmares and constantly felt anger welling up inside him. He wanted to hit people, he said. It went on for a long time, his feeling angry at people of Mediterranean appearance, at the police … And then that karate expert was murdered in the park at Randwick where he’d been. The police suddenly took an interest in his case then, he said, the assault on him suddenly did matter. Came and spoke to him, took him to look at some ‘mugshots’. But he couldn’t identify anyone in the photographs and they never found the thugs who’d tried to beat him. Probably didn’t try very hard seeing as how he hadn’t been able to identify anyone who might have helped them with the karate expert.

How old were the youths who had attacked him?