The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (36 page)

‘Well, you’ve reassured me, son, let me tell ya,’ his father-in-law said.

Like, as if he’d do that kind of stuff. Back then when he was nothing but a kid. ‘Sixteen years old,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be doin’ that. I was probably at home doin’ my homework or something, huh?’

Was relief pouring through the girlfriend’s father as he listened to the protested innocence of Brian Hagland’s convicted killer? He seemed happy to hear it, happy not to be the fool the detective had hinted he was, telling him that his daughter was in ‘bad hands’, telling him that Sean was some sort of evil wrongdoer, a through-and-through loser. Nobody would want their daughter to associate with someone like that, would they?

‘If there’s any such thing as slander,’ he said. ‘But you can’t … He was just trying to spook me.’ Maybe Sean should get legal advice, he suggested, just in case. Because when they threw the dummy off the cliff – well, what could they say that proved? When they did those tests, with the photographer and that, wasn’t it the police who did them? Did the tests? Not exactly independent was it?

When Steve Page read the transcript of the phone call he shook his head, a mixture of sadness and disbelief and wonder at the infinite capacity of Joe Public to hear only what he wanted to hear: when they’d spoken to Cushman’s father-in-law they’d explained that the re-enactment with the dummy had absolutely no forensic value whatsoever, that the entire exercise was designed as a kind of physical mnemonic, a memory jogger. Nothing more. And here he was discussing the legal ramifications of nonindependent measurement of evidence and its testing. On the positive side though, maybe the man had forgotten what he’d been told because his mind was cluttered with the worry of what might actually be true … That was a more comforting thought, Page decided.

With half an hour to go before the calendar clicked over into Christmas Day, Cushman rang his girlfriend to tell her about the day’s developments. ‘Hey,’ he said, upbeat, ‘the coppers went to your house lookin’ for me and that. Your dad rang me and that, man.’

His girlfriend wanted to know how much her dad knew, what they’d told him. Did they tell about…?

‘Yeah, he knows all about it.’ Like, it’s cool. He doesn’t believe any of it, thinks it’s all bullshit. ‘He knows about the poofs that died and all that shit and that.’

ii

Yeah, it was cool. And maybe it was about to get even cooler.

Two days after Christmas, Cushman was talking to Donovan Reynolds again. And Reynolds seemed to have been doing some of his own research into what was going on.

Initially, Cushman launched into story-telling mode, telling his mate that the police had been round to his girlfriend’s place, looking for him. He told it as though it was a game, the kind of game in which the police looked stupid being unable to catch him, unable to find out where he was. Reynolds, however, wasn’t entirely convinced.

‘They’re after ya heaps, bro’,’ he said warningly. ‘What d’ya reckon it’s for? The taxi driver? When you threw the money at the taxi driver thing?’

‘Nah, it’s from the fuckin’ murders and that,’ Cushman replied dismissively. ‘But they’re barking up the wrong tree, bro’.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Reynolds remembered. ‘I was talkin’ to Jason about that, eh? The murders and that. He reckons he knows who did it and that. Do you know? Do you know who it … Who do you reckon it’d be?’

‘Fuck, I don’t know.’ What kind of fucking question was that? That was a fucking cop’s question, man.

‘It wasn’t one of our crowd,’ Reynolds said. ‘It was fuckin’, um, apparently he thinks he heard, he’s pretty sure he heard that it was, er, Atarn and Barney and all them. Fuckin’ all those boys. Scott, Brian, Tarn and all them. But the thing about it is, that fuckin’ Barney looks identical to you, bro’. So that’s probably why they’re sayin’ that you … you know what I mean?’

Fuck, yeah. If that was the case, then … Merry fuckin’ Christmas. When the D’s came to him he could just tell them, tell them that it wasn’t even his fuckin’ gang. ‘I’ll just say, go and ask another crowd, bro’. Fuckin’, mate, no good asking me, mate. Fuckin’ barkin’ up my tree, bro’.’ That’s exactly what he’d say. Man, that was good.

‘Yeah, but that’s probably what they’re doin’, anyway. Probably just barkin’ up everyone’s tree to try and scare someone into sayin’ somethin’. You know what I mean?’

‘Oh, that’s alright,’ Cushman said. ‘I know I didn’t do nothin’, bro’. They’re just tryin’ to scare me, and scare us and that. You know what I mean? Try and put it on us or somethin’.’ Let them fucking try, he seemed to be saying. Now that he knew…

‘You can tell who did it, but.’ Reynolds said, a note of concern entering his voice, seeing the repercussions of what he’d told Cushman getting out. ‘I don’t care. But you don’t ever fuckin’ tell ’em that you heard from me.’

Of course he wouldn’t. You don’t dob in a mate. What did he take him for, eh? ‘But it sounds good, though,’ he said, excited. ‘It sounds like them.’

‘’Cause all their crimes, right, were violent crimes,’ Reynolds agreed. ‘They’re fully assaulter and gang bashers. They’re psychos.’

And Barney in particular, man. Fuck, was he a crazy or what? He was the most violent out of all of them, a real killer – and, like, really. Yeah.

‘Mate, you know it was them for sure,’ Reynolds was saying. ‘Like, as soon as he said that to me, I thought, yeah, already I was thinking that.’

‘Yeah, same here,’ Cushman said eagerly. ‘As soon as you told me I went, fuck, yeah.’

So, that was it. Even if it wasn’t Barney it didn’t matter: someone else’s name was in the frame and that someone had an even greater reputation for thuggery than Cushman. Not that he seemed to give a shit anyway, apparently convinced the police weren’t going to pin this stuff on him. They weren’t going to pin any shit on him, he seemed to be saying: he wasn’t going to get caught for nothing, man.

And the next day he tried to tell his girlfriend the good news, tried to tell her that he was in the clear, that he knew who’d done all that stuff and it wasn’t him. But as far as the police could make out when they listened to the tapes of Cushman’s conversation with his girlfriend, she appeared to be heavily drugged, claiming that the police kept coming around asking her about Sean, whereas no detectives from Operation Taradale had spoken to her at all.

iii

Maybe the police hadn’t spoken to Cushman’s girlfriend, but they had spoken to others, tracing the whereabouts of as many of the associates of the Bondi Boys as possible. And when they found them, they followed the same procedure: did they know anything about the incidents under investigation … did they recognise anyone in the photograph booklet? The answers were largely what the police expected: no-one knew anything about the killings … everybody recognised some of the people in the pictures. The main purpose of the exercise, however, wasn’t the discovery of the crucial piece of evidence to convict the perpetrator or the sudden admission of guilt by one of those interviewed. It was the dissemination of fear, the destabilisation of a small and corrupt community. And, almost as a kind of bonus, the police found that some people used the opportunity to settle old grudges.

When John Russell was thrown to his death Kylie was a 17-year-old habitué of Sean Cushman’s inner circle. With her outsized glasses, high forehead and rounded face she looked like a large and harmless insect, some sort of big-eyed bug. Her involvement with the Bondi Boys belied her innocence though, and hers had been one of the first telephones to be tapped by Steve Page’s team. At 6.30 on Christmas Eve she was talking to her friend, Karen.

Half furious, half tearful, Kylie was saying how no-one from when she was a teenager wanted to have anything to do with her any more. But not only that, did Karen know what Kerry had done when the police talked to her? ‘Everyone in the photos she knew,’ Kylie said. Everyone. ‘She knew every single one of them. But she only gave my name up. I’m not impressed, but anyway –’

Did she know what it was about, Karen asked? Was she there? Surely she didn’t…

‘Yeah, it’s got nothing to do with me,’ Kylie assured her. ‘I was pregnant that year. I was nowhere near the place.’

But why would the cops have photos … Karen wanted to know. Why have Kylie’s picture, and that? Maybe one of her mates did it, pushed the gay guy off …? Was she sure none of her crowd…

‘Well, like, I mean I’ve hanged out with some naughty boys, eh? And, I mean, they’ve got themselves in big shit over the years. So maybe they took photos then to keep an eye on them.’

But even so, Karen wondered, why say it was Kylie and her mates who’d killed the guy? Why them? Even if they did get into big shit, killing somebody was more than just ‘big shit’, yeah? Maybe it was one of their gang, but Kylie just didn’t know about it? Couldn’t one of … some of them have done it?

‘I think it might be Robert Valecky,’ Kylie said. ‘Yeah, I can remember something, oh, a long time ago.’

What, Karen asked, about the murders? Or about Robert?

‘They’ve reopened a case that’s been closed for 12 years,’ Kylie was saying, sounding almost as if she was musing to herself. ‘Robert remembers it. I don’t remember it, eh? And it was supposed to be, from what they’ve told Kerry, there’s three people. They’re three fags. One got, one got, um, thrown off the cliff. And where they found the body they found another man’s set of keys with the car up the road and he’s missing, so they don’t know where he is. And the third man has identified one of the boys.’ She thought for a second or two. ‘I just can’t remember any of them doin’ anything like that.’

From what they’d told Kerry … From what Kerry had told her, Kylie knew that the police would be around some time soon, they were talking to everyone, Kerry had said, so they were bound to come and talk to her …

Had she been able to put the situation out of her mind for a couple of days, the Taradale officers wondered? Had she enjoyed Christmas for a couple of days, enjoyed the long days of holiday nothingness through to the New Year. Until the second of January.

She’d been thinking about telling some of the others, warning them what they could expect, and early in the evening of the second, she called Shari.

‘The coppers want to talk to you,’ she said as soon as Shari answered. ‘They want to talk to all of us, mate. They went over, they went over to Kerry’s house the other day … You know that faggot that got pushed off Marks Park cliffs? Remember they’ve been talking about they’ve reopened the case and they threw a dummy off the cliff to see if he got pushed off, right?’

‘Oh? No, not really.’ What was Kylie talking about? What was this shit? Shari seemed to have no idea.

‘I knew you wouldn’t know,’ Kylie said triumphantly, ‘because I didn’t know anything about it, either. But anyway, they’ve got an A4 folder, right? And it’s got all our photos in it –’

Photos? Like, pictures of them? In a folder?

‘Yeah. And you’re in it, I’m in it. Jenny’s in it. They took Kerry to the police station, right? She was there for three hours.’ And Kerry had told her about what it was all about, she said. Told her about how they were all sort of suspects or something. ‘And I’ve gone, well, fuck, I was pregnant. I was giving birth, mate, in August. Well, not, I don’t know what time, what year, August, sorry. I don’t know what, what month. But it was 1989. I said, well, I was fuckin’ pregnant so I’ve got nothing to do with it.’

‘Oh, no,’ Shari said, a little shocked. ‘Who was the guy?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kylie said impatiently. ‘He got, he was a poof and he got bashed and he was thrown off a cliff. Now there was three of them.’

‘We might have been naughty but we were never that bad,’ Shari said, still shocked. ‘We were little bloody runabouts, drinkin’, fuckin’, doin’ shit.’ But nothing as extreme as throwing somebody to their death, she was saying.

‘None of us would’ve killed anybody,’ Kylie agreed. ‘I’m telling you that, now. Maybe Robert Valecky, you know what I mean? Remember the body that, you know, the body that disappeared? Remember the extinguisher … Didn’t you and me go somewhere? Robert was, Robert was saying somewhere at Kensington that they burned someone. We thought it was just a joke. What if they were telling the truth and they, and they did do that? Do you remember that, Shari?’

‘I, I do. Vaguely. But it’s just, like there are so many things that are just…’

There are so many things … so many…

iv

Three days later Shari had been interviewed by the police and Kylie was talking to another friend on the phone.

‘Shari got taken to the police station,’ she said. ‘So did Kerry … you know that guy that got pushed off Marks Park cliff?’

‘No.’

‘The faggot?’

‘No. What’s Marks Park?’

‘I don’t know. I, they – Kerry, uh, Kerry and Shari – tried to describe it to me. You know when you’re walking to South Bondi? You walk to South Bondi, you go past, you go, you know, past, and there’s a park up at the top when you keep … uh, you go up heaps of stairs … you go around past Bondi, like, South Bondi, and past –’

‘Yeah, and there’s a little kind of bay with all, like, rocks and stuff.’

‘Well, anyway, this guy got pushed off and they threw his body, they threw a dummy. It happened in 1989 and they threw a dummy off the cliff the other week. Can you remember it? They reopened the case.’

‘No, I haven’t heard anything about it.’