The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders (6 page)

The bare facts as Page knew them were simple enough: Ross Warren was last seen about 11pm on Friday, 21 July 1989 in the vicinity of Taylor Square after an evening with a friend in the gay bars on Oxford Street. His brown Nissan Pulsar was later found – close to Marks Lane, Tamarama – near a ‘gay beat’. Marks Lane is adjacent to the coastal walkway between Bondi and Tamarama. Keys to Warren’s vehicle were found at the base of a nearby cliff. So, maybe it
was
the obvious case of suicide that some people believed? Depressed, Warren could have driven to the Tamarama area, parked his car and thrown himself over the edge: clean and simple. An open and shut case.

But Steve Page wasn’t convinced. In Kay Warren’s letters she had never, not once, even hinted at the possibility that her son might have ended his own life. There was no suggestion of moodiness or depression, no recent changes in his personality or behaviour. In her desperation to have the issue finalised it would have been understandable had she tried to speed up the investigation by pointing the police in the direction of what we might call, least resistance: if the police were to accept, at her instigation, that Ross Warren threw himself off the cliffs at Tamarama, they would be obliged to do no more than collate old notes and shuffle paper to effect an easy conclusion for the coroner. But Kay Warren hadn’t done that: she hadn’t offered the police that easy option. Why not, Steve Page wondered? Presumably because she didn’t believe it: she had no doubt that, whatever had happened to her son, he had not committed suicide. And after examining the old case papers, neither had Steve Page.

The more he thought about it, the more Page was becoming intrigued by the fate of Ross Warren.

iv

On 14June, a month after he’d received it, Gordon Sharrock forwarded the Warren file to the sergeant assisting the coroner’s court with the following notation:

I have checked my records concerning this investigation. I did not investigate this matter initially. The only knowledge I have of this matter is what is recorded in this file and information that I was told by retired Detective Sergeant K. J. Bowditch in the past 7 days.

He informed me that in his opinion it was not a murder investigation and that he had forwarded a Brief of Evidence concerning this matter to the Coroner’s Court, Glebe in early 1990.

Why, then, if he did not investigate the matter, Page asked later, was Sharrock listed as assisting in the original case? Another piece that didn’t seem to fit the puzzle.

Sharrock also suggested that Constable Robinson, as the officer who took the initial report of Warren being missing, might be in a position to help. He also forwarded the file to the coroner’s court to instigate further searches for information. The coroner’s court, finding no trace of Bowditch’s brief of evidence from 1990, promptly returned the file to Detective Sergeant Page.

Acting on Sharrock’s suggestion, Page forwarded the file to former constable, now sergeant, Daniel Robinson. As the officer on the front line, as it were, at the time in question, Robinson could be expected to have enough relevant information to enable Page to move some considerable way towards concluding the case. Robinson’s response, dated 24 July 2000, came as quite a surprise:

My involvement in this matter is limited to receiving the initial missing person’s report whilst performing station duties at Paddington Police Station on the evening of 23/7/1989 and later causing inquiries to be made on behalf of detectives conducting the investigation. After taking and recording the initial report Paddington Detectives took carriage of the matter. My further involvement in the matter was specifically at the direction of investigating detectives who had carriage of the matter.

I undertook no direct investigative function in relation to this matter and have had no further involvement other than providing information to investigating detectives or the missing persons detectives.

Given that the primary investigative function in this matter has been undertaken by the Rose Bay LAC as far back as the initial disappearance of Mr. Warren and that the Rose Bay Crime Manager has been corresponding with the missing person’s mother since 7th December 1999, it appears prudent to me that this matter continue to be investigated by detectives from that LAC.

Advice sought by me on the 13th July 2000 in relation to this matter from the Coronial Support Unit concurs with this view.

Further to this, I have been non-operational for 8 years and do not have the investigative capacity to undertake such a coronial investigation. I also currently perform an administrative intelligence function and as such this precludes me from these duties.

All bases covered.

Behind the stiff and formal language of Robinson’s report there lies a distinct flavour of political buck-passing: he may well have been the first police officer to have been made aware that Ross Warren was missing, to have been
officially
involved, but apparently he was simply the conduit for the information. The responsibility lay above and beyond a mere constable performing station duties. And with that view the Coronial Support Unit concurs.

The file, once again, eventually came back to Steve Page at Rose Bay LAC.

On 28 July Warwick Brown (by then Inspector Brown) returned the file to Page with the following comment:

This file has been inspected by nearly every serving Police officer who might be able to have detailed personal knowledge of the matter. There has been no success in locating original statements and there appears to be no alternative to preparing a brief of evidence from the Rose Bay LAC.

The original report was taken at Paddington. Paddington police dealt with all enquiries. Warren was last seen in Oxford Street at Taylor Square in the Surry Hills LAC and his car was located at Marks Park Bondi in the Eastern Suburbs LAC. However, extensive enquiries were dealt with by Paddington, with some assistance from the Homicide Squad.

Rose Bay detectives should now create the required brief for presentation to the Coroner. In view of the fact that only one (recent) original statement is attached a conference should be sought with officers of the State Coroner’s Support Unit to ascertain whether or not witnesses have to be re-interviewed on the basic known facts, or whether the third-person police documents will suffice…

Mrs. Warren, the mother of the missing person, should be informed as to the state of the investigation at this time.

Not such a simple matter of paper-shuffling after all. Steve Page saw that the Warren case was, to use his own word, ‘complex’. He assumed the responsibility of case officer himself and set about deconstructing the file.

v

Less than a month later Page submitted a ‘Report of (Suspected) Death’ to the coroner. Against the entry, ‘Suspicious Circumstances:’ he had entered ‘Yes’.

What had persuaded Steve Page that not only was Ross Warren dead, he had possibly died as a result of foul play? The answer was quite simple: Page had actually joined the dots of the case to reveal a much bigger picture than that of just another missing person. And this picture was ugly.

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This last would torment Steve Page later in his quest for a ‘result’ in the Warren case: one chief inspector removed resources from Page’s investigation to redeploy them against a certain nightclub owner who was transgressing the licensing laws. Several quick arrests – even for relatively minor offences – looked better on the inspector’s CV than a possible single arrest for murder after a lengthy investigation.

CHAPTER THREE

What Happened to Ross Warren?

i

Ross Bradley Warren was a newsreader for WIN4 TV in Wollongong when he disappeared in July 1989. He had driven to Sydney for the weekend, as he regularly did, arriving at a friend’s house in Albert Street, Redfern sometime around 7pm on Friday, 21 July. Later that evening he drove to Taylor Square where he met another friend with whom he visited various known gay bars on Oxford Street. Born on 26 October 1964 Ross Warren was 24 years old and homosexual.

As is still the case today, Gilligan’s, on the corner of Taylor Square and Oxford Street, the Vault, in the Exchange Hotel, and the Midnight Shift were de rigueur if you were part of the gay scene in 1989: if you weren’t there, you were nowhere. Ross Warren and his friend were there. Until about 2.30am on Saturday, 22 July when they parted company. (Another anomaly: Page had earlier gleaned from the case papers that Warren had last been seen at around 11pm on the Friday evening. This was, in fact, around the time when he left Albert Street to meet his friend in Oxford Street. He was actually last seen sometime around 2.30am on the Saturday.) Ross’s friend watched him climb into his brown Nissan Pulsar and (inexplicably, given that he was supposedly staying in Redfern) drive away to the east along Oxford Street instead of taking the more direct route down Bourke Street. (The traffic flow system around Taylor Square has since been considerably modified and you can no longer drive south down Bourke Street.) He never returned to Albert Street.

Later that weekend, inside number 14 Albert Street, Ross’s friend, Craig Ellis, waited in vain for Ross to appear. When he didn’t, Ellis became worried: Ross, he thought, must be in trouble.

On Sunday, 23 July Craig rang WIN TV. Had Ross turned up for work? He hadn’t. Nor had he called in sick. With another friend, Paul Saucis, Ellis reported Warren missing at Paddington Police Station at 8.15pm before deciding to conduct their own search.

With over 3 million people living in an area of more than 1500 sq km it would seem an impossible task just to know where to begin. Ellis, however, knew Ross Warren well. He and Paul went to the Marks Park area between Bondi and Tamarama, where they soon located Ross’s car outside number 24 Kenneth Street.
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It was unlocked, there were items of clothing inside, both on the back seat and on the floor, and it was undamaged. So, where was its owner? Neither Ellis nor Saucis knew anyone who lived in the vicinity and Ellis felt sure Ross didn’t either. Having already expressed his concern for Ross’s safety to Constable Robinson, Ellis now began to have serious forebodings about his friend. The area, the social climate at the time regarding homosexuality, the time of day Warren had last been seen … All these elements conspired to produce a feeling of dread in the pit of Craig Ellis’s stomach, a feeling that, in 2000, Steve Page understood perfectly well as Ross Bradley Warren still remained unlocated.

ii

Despite having access to the original statements of Ellis et al, Page decided to reinterview the three friends of Warren who’d been the last three people known to have seen him: Craig Ellis, Paul Saucis and Philip Rossini, the friend Warren had been drinking with the night he vanished.

• • •

On 25September 2000 Craig Ellis made a statement to Detective Sergeant Page at Paddington Police Station. Ellis outlined his friendship with Warren, explaining that they’d had an intimate relationship for about two months after meeting at Marks Park sometime around Easter 1988, afterwards maintaining a close friendship. They spoke on a weekly basis and Warren stayed with him when Warren came to Sydney. Warren, he said, was warm and kind and well spoken, a little conservative and reserved. No, he said, Warren was never prone to mood swings, nor was he depressed, although, Ellis admitted, he wasn’t totally happy about living in Wollongong: Warren was ambitious and wanted to move to Sydney to further his career.

When Warren arrived in Redfern on 21 July 1989 he was in good spirits, urging Craig and Paul Saucis to go with him later that evening for a few drinks. They declined as they knew Warren was meeting a work colleague. They agreed, however, to go together to see a film the following evening.

Warren left Albert Street around 11pm to go to the Oxford Hotel where he was to meet Philip, but was expected to return and spend the rest of the weekend in Redfern. When he didn’t come back, Craig and Paul became concerned, reporting him as missing on the Sunday evening before going to look for him themselves. Even 11 years later Craig Ellis could recall every detail of finding Ross Warren’s Nissan near the corner of Kenneth Street and Marks Lane: the fact that Ross’s wallet was on the front passenger seat next to McDonald’s detritus, that it was dark but mild, that the car was parked on the ocean side of the street.

Ellis and Saucis went back to Paddington Police Station and told Constable Robinson what they’d found. In return, they were told about a body pulled from the sea at Bondi that morning. The body of a young man … Had Warren gone over the edge? Fallen from the cliffs as he walked along to the coastal walkway? It was inconceivable that it could be anything other than a horrible accident … Except that Craig Ellis knew of at least one gay man who had been bashed in the Marks Park area within the last few months and he had heard of others. Surely…

They were taken to Glebe morgue to identify the body but after speaking to a police officer it was decided that the body was not that of Ross Warren and it wasn’t necessary to view the remains.
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