Underbelly 2 Page 10

  Homicide files contain many proven cases of incompetent killers who have hit the wrong person. In 1984 a harmless citizen called Lindsay Simpson was executed by career criminal Ray ‘Red Rat’ Pollitt at Lower Plenty. The target of the hit was drug dealer Alan Williams, Simpson’s brother-in-law.

  Another criminal’s brother-in-law, Norman McLeod, was shot dead as he left his Coolaroo home on his way to work in July, 1981. The unknown gunman mistook McLeod for his brother-in-law Vincent Mikkelsen, one of three men charged and later acquitted of killing painter and docker Leslie Herbert Kane.

  Meanwhile, investigators are striving to unravel a case that promised in the first hours to be another ‘domestic’ murder, but which now baffles them.

  When Jane Thurgood-Dove was murdered, police acted within seconds of the first call that shots had been fired near the school in Muriel Street. The first officers on the scene called in the homicide squad. The on-call section, crew five, was sent.

  The detectives’ first priority was to secure the scene and ensure the victim’s distressed children were looked after. It was two hours before they went to the Campbellfield packaging factory where the dead woman’s husband worked as a foreman.

  Homicide detectives chose to deliver the message personally for two reasons. One was that they are experienced at dealing with shattered relatives of murder victims. More importantly, they wanted to observe first-hand Mark Thurgood-Dove’s reaction to the worst news he’d ever hear.

  When a woman with no criminal connections is murdered, the first person police want to talk to is her husband, de facto or lover. Most murders are ‘domestics’, with people killed either by – or for – someone close to them. The most common motives are jealousy and greed.

  Just before knock-off time at the factory, detectives went quietly to the boss’s office and made discreet inquiries.

  Had Mark slipped out during the day? Had he been moody or distracted? The answer was no. Mark Thurgood-Dove was a man with no secrets.

  The firm’s trusted foreman was then called into the office and told the terrible news. Police went to talk to the most likely suspect, but what they found was a devastated man who had lost the woman he loved.

  Victims rarely take secrets to the grave. Detectives scour their personal history for any clue. In such cases, possible murder motives are often easily established. Was the marriage on the rocks? Was the victim’s life heavily insured? Were there financial problems?

  But not this time. In the first few weeks, detectives found nothing to indicate that Mark and Jane Thurgood-Dove were anything other than the loving couple they appeared to be.

  But police knew that if they dug deep enough there would always be secrets to be unearthed. Perhaps more than one.

  It is the human condition.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sweet Jane

  Two men loved her – but who killed her?

  The dead woman’s sister and a friend claimed Jane had told them … of an unspecified ‘dark secret’

  IT was the first time in his ten-year career that the senior constable had been in on the big one. It was, in fact, one of the few times he had been to police crime headquarters in St Kilda Road at all.

  But the plodding policeman from the suburbs wasn’t there because of his ability as an investigator. Far from it. He was on the wrong side of the desk … and he had a lawyer with him.

  In the stark homicide interview room on the ninth floor, a video recorder was cued to record not his questions, but his answers. The policeman knew word for word the formal caution recited to him by a homicide detective, which told him the same thing his lawyer had drummed into him before they arrived: he did not have to answer any questions, but that anything he did say could be used against him.

  Confused and disturbed, he took his counsel’s advice and stayed silent. For the lawyer, it was standard practice. But, for detectives, a ‘no comment’ interview raises suspicion. A long-held police axiom is that, in practice, silence is usually the refuge of the guilty.

  Which is why, when the senior constable left the building with his lawyer, the men in the dark suits in the homicide office believed they might have the first tiny break in one of the most distressing – and baffling – murders in their experience.

  Jane Thurgood-Dove was pretty, young, a wife and a mother. She lived in an ordinary house in an ordinary street. When she was shot dead on her doorstep in front of her three children on Oaks Day, 1997, it grabbed a city’s attention.

  Two men – probably paid killers – had stalked her for days around the north-western Melbourne suburb of Niddrie. Their car had been seen the previous day about 9.30am near Essendon North Primary School, soon after she dropped two of her three children at school. It was also seen several times near her home on 6 November, the day she was killed.

  She pulled into the driveway of her weatherboard house in Muriel Street at 3.50pm. A silver-blue VL Commodore sedan immediately parked behind her, blocking her blue four-wheel-drive.

  A pot-bellied man who looked to be in his forties jumped from the front passenger seat and chased the terrified woman. He shot her in the head at least three times with a large-calibre handgun as her children cowered in the car.

  The man got back into the Commodore, which was driven by a younger, thin-faced man, who reversed the car so abruptly that the fat gunman had difficulty closing the door.

  The car sped off, dodged around a couple of corners and was set on fire a few blocks away in a deserted side street near some parkland. From the burnt-out wreck, police recovered a brown parka, which was found to have been stolen from another Commodore in Carlton only a few days before.

  In cases like this, when the victim is seen as blameless, sympathy and outrage swell. The Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, intervened to double the $50,000 reward requested by police. It was a timely and popular gesture, but it wasn’t to make any difference to the investigation.

  Few of the seventy-odd murders committed each year in Victoria attract the wide interest, let alone concern and sympathy, that Jane Thurgood-Dove’s violent death did.

  But there is no sentiment in a murder investigation. While thousands of people who did not know the victim were saddened by her death because of the coverage it attracted, homicide detectives had to confront her grief-stricken husband, family and friends with the reality that – until proven otherwise – they were all potential murder suspects.

  Jane Thurgood-Dove … shot dead in front of her three children. The Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett personally intervened to double the reward to $100,000 to solve the case.

  Suspect … a police computer image of the getaway driver in the Thurgood-Dove murder.

  Pot-bellied killer … the man who chased Jane Thurgood-Dove around her car before shooting her in front of her children.

  Australia’s worst rail disaster … Granville, 1977.

  83 dead, 213 injured … and looters stole tools from the rescue trucks.

  Ron Williams … a battler taken in by a cold-blooded killer

  Alex MacDonald … murdered Williams to take his identity.

  The Commonwealth Bank at Port Douglas … MacDonald’s hostage plan failed for the strangest reason.

  The Chinese Vice Premier, Zhu Rongji, enjoyed Port Douglas.

  Armed robber’s kit … number plates, cash and pain killers.

  The cool cat in the hat … Alex MacDonald, wearing his distinctive hat, robs Airlie Beach bank in Queensland.

  Derek Ernest Percy … bad, but not mad.

  Yvonne Tuohy was murdered as a man called Armstrong was about to walk on the moon.

  Shane Spiller … took on a killer with his tomahawk, but it wasn’t enough to save his friend.

  Shane Spiller as a little boy a killer stole his childhood and blighted his life.

  Kathleen Downes … stabbed to death in a nursing home. Her killer has never been found.

  Hussein Issa (above) … drug dealer and idiot. Captured on a secret video trying to bribe police
. It didn’t work. He went to jail.

  Rocky Iaria … buried twice, six years apart.

  Even the police’s timing when they told Mark Thurgood-Dove of the murder was contrived. They set up the meeting at the Campbellfield factory where he then worked so that they could study him for any hint of a staged reaction.

  From day one, Thurgood-Dove was the main suspect. Not because there was a scrap of evidence against him — but because that’s where an investigation must start when there is no obvious lead.

  In the months after the murder, the shattered husband’s life was examined minutely. The conclusion: that he is a decent man, still shattered by his wife’s death, battling to care for their three children.

  If it wasn’t her husband, who did kill Jane Thurgood-Dove?

  Soon after the killing, a detective going through her possessions found papers connected to a uniformed policeman.

  It was, at that stage, only one of hundreds of details to be checked. The policeman, like scores of people vaguely associated with the dead woman, was routinely contacted.

  When he was first approached by detectives, just weeks after the killing, he admitted he knew the Thurgood-Doves socially. Then he surprised them by volunteering that he had harbored deep feelings for the married woman for years.

  Colleagues said the senior constable was ‘different’, a loner who lived by himself. In a profession known for bold personalities, he was shy.

  In a force of ten thousand sworn members, only a handful chase serious criminals for a living. The senior constable who knew Jane Thurgood-Dove has a spotless record – and a short arrest sheet.

  They met in the most mundane circumstances. He used to buy the sausages for his station’s barbecues and became friendly with one of the butchers, who was related to her.

  They began to move in the same social circle. He became friendly with Mark and Jane Thurgood-Dove and, although romantically involved with another woman, became obsessed with the young mother. The policeman began to orchestrate social gatherings just to be in her company. About 1994, Mrs Thurgood-Dove became uncomfortable with her admirer’s fixation. She tried to distance herself, but they continued to cross paths. It was inevitable. They lived only streets apart.

  In the frantic weeks after the murder, detectives spent hundreds of hours chasing dozens of dead-end leads. Despite their determination and the public’s outrage, they were no closer to an answer than the day Jane Thurgood-Dove was killed.

  So when the senior constable revealed his love for the dead woman, it was the only fresh development. For want of any stronger lead, investigators put the man under the microscope.

  When he realised he was part of a murder investigation, he went to the Police Association for help. He was given the number of a barrister called Tony Hargreaves, a seasoned lawyer who has helped many police in trouble — and who has also represented Laurie Tanner, husband of Jennifer Tanner, the woman shot dead in suspicious circumstances at their Bonnie Doon farmhouse in 1984. But that is another story.

  In January, the barrister Hargreaves and his nervous client went, by invitation, to the homicide squad, where the policeman exercised his right not to answer questions.

  Some investigators saw the policeman as a suspect, though not the only one. They calculated there were at least two other tenable theories.

  One was that the housewife was the victim of mistaken identity, that bumbling hitmen killed her instead of another young woman married to a known criminal who lives in the same street and who had already been the target of an aborted murder plot.

  The second theory was that the gunman was the father of a violent criminal connected right to the end with the late Alphonse Gangitano, although a motive has not been established, and it appears a long shot based mostly on physical description.

  Police have said the senior constable was one of about twelve people to be seriously questioned about the murder. But, for forty-eight hours in January, the policeman was the one in the frame.

  Then came a twist. The policeman walked into St Kilda Road headquarters – alone, this time, and prepared to answer questions. Yes, he said, he loved Jane Thurgood-Dove and had once wanted her to leave her husband. But he had not killed her. He explained his whereabouts around the time of the killing.

  He emerged as an ordinary uniformed policeman without the criminal contacts to find and hire someone prepared to kill for money. Detectives decided that he had no more resources to organise such a crime than the average bank teller or public servant.

  Within days of the policeman being formally interviewed, the police gossip network had spread the story. The man spoke to his station colleagues, telling them he had been questioned and had nothing to hide.

  Senior police fended off media inquiries. They said the case was open, and they were not close to a breakthrough of any sort.

  Months later, Channel Seven’s Australia’s Most Wanted program broadcast a police-generated story on the Thurgood-Dove murder in an attempt to provoke a public response – and fresh leads. Such cooperation with the media is usually a sign that an investigation is at a stalemate.

  The basis of the TV story was a claim by the dead woman’s sister, Sue, and a friend, Judy Fenner, that Jane Thurgood-Dove had told them, separately, of an unspecified ‘dark secret’.

  Days later, the Herald Sun published a page one story describing the unnamed policeman as ‘the prime suspect’.

  The head of the homicide squad, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins, took the unusual step of publicly denying that the policeman was a suspect. The policeman, deeply distressed, declined to speak to the authors of this book. He even refused to answer the door of the unassuming suburban house where he lived only a few blocks from the Thurgood-Doves’. In fact, senior police ordered welfare sections of the force to monitor the man’s welfare, believing he could be suicidal.

  Some police believed he shouldn’t have been kept on operational duties while he was depressed, because it meant he had access to firearms. Others, however, felt that removing him from his job could have tipped him over the edge.

  For outsiders, it seemed a juicy development: a distraught admirer of a dead woman in a murder case going nowhere. But police have to build evidence, not theories. Ultimately, a coroner or a Supreme Court jury must decide the truth.

  The best hope for a breakthrough is for an unknown car thief to surface. The thief, that is, who stole the car the killers used — and, probably, another Commodore a few days earlier.

  Months after the murder, with time and leads running out, detectives gave up hope of a thief with a conscience coming forward.

  Which is why, in addition to the $100,000 carrot, the chief commissioner of police has offered to make a deal with anyone on the periphery who can name the killers and stand up in court. Such a person will be given not only the cash but a ‘clean slate’, a pardon for their part in the crime, if any.

  Meanwhile, in the quiet suburban streets where Niddrie borders Essendon, two men who still live less than five hundred metres apart nurse shattered lives behind shuttered windows.

  Both are in mourning for the woman they love. Both keep pictures of her. There is no evidence, police insist, that either had anything to do with her death.

  But someone did. And they are still out there.

  CHAPTER 10

  Monstrous but not mad

  Australia’s Hannibal Lecter

  ‘He is the nearest thing to a robot I have met’

  HE was Victoria’s longest-serving prisoner, yet in the eyes of the law he remained an innocent man. He was declared mentally ill, yet was repeatedly denied treatment in a psychiatric institution.

  In August 1998 the forgotten man of the prison system, Derek Ernest Percy, was put under public scrutiny for the first time in twenty-nine years when his unique case was reviewed in the Supreme Court. It was the first time since 1969 that he’d been given the chance to argue why he should start his journey to freedom and why society no longer had a reason to fe
ar him.

  Hundreds of more notorious criminals have passed through Australian jails in the past three decades, and few people remember Percy. The police who arrested him have long since retired, his defence lawyer has moved on to be a respected Supreme Court judge, and many of the jails that had held him had since been closed. He was a model prisoner, seemingly content to play carpet bowls, collect stamps and browse though the cricket statistics he kept on his personal computer.

  Yet many in the criminal justice system feared the day this seemingly harmless man would be given a legal opportunity to push for his release. On Derek Percy’s first day in a cell Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, John Gorton was Prime Minister, Australian troops were fighting in Vietnam and a bottle of milk, home delivered by the local milkie, cost 19c. Derek Percy was twenty-one.

  Percy has been in prison since he was arrested for the murder of Yvonne Elizabeth Tuohy, a twelve-year-old girl he abducted, tortured, sexually assaulted and killed on a Westernport beach, near Melbourne, on 20 July, 1969.

  On the fifth day of his Supreme Court trial in March 1970 he was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity and sentenced to an indefinite term at the Governor’s Pleasure.

  Three psychiatrists gave evidence of his ‘acute psycho-sexual disorder.’ A jury found it impossible to believe that a sane man could have done what Percy did to young Yvonne Tuohy.