Underbelly 6 Page 11

  The veteran investigator is known as ‘The Pope’ because it is alleged people are often filled with a desire to confess when in his company.

  It was Morrish who was to arrest Harrod for murder in August, 2000. The suspect was 71 and had moved to Golden Beach in Gippsland, well away from the home he built and the whispers he created.

  Harrod had a minor criminal record, beginning when he was convicted of horse stealing in 1944 and ending when, in January, 1973, he was found guilty of car theft.

  Memories play tricks. When Harrod became a murder suspect, his views on his missing mate seemed to change suddenly. Setek was no longer the eccentric pensioner with a love of dogs, but a brutal manipulator.

  Senior Detective Kate Fairbank said to him: ‘Everybody we’ve spoken to has said how dedicated Johnny was to his dogs. He loved his dogs, he would never leave them like that.’

  Harrod: ‘That’s all bull. Well, I was up there for 18 months, nearly two years – and I’ve seen him kick the dogs, hit his dogs and all and he was a – the only thing he – he was worried about the bloody money for ’em. That’s all bull, being dedicated to his dogs. ’Cos he – I used to feed ’em and look after ’em, wash ’em. Clean out the dog runs for him of a morning, he – while he’s still in bed. He was only using me.’

  ‘But you’re good mates?’ Fairbank asked.

  ‘Yeah, we’re good mates, yeah.’

  THE truth of what happened to Johnny Setek was supposed to be decided by a Supreme Court jury in Bendigo in 2002 but the case lapsed when Russell Harrod died in November, 2001, from lung cancer. He was 75.

  Morrish had earlier approached him and said if he thought he was going to die he should clear his conscience by confessing where he hid the body.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do it.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The fall guy

  There is always unspoken pressure to prove your ability and your nerve.

  THE kid was good. He’d ride his Yamaha down the street from where the family lived on the outskirts of Cairns, roar up a steep bank into the empty canefields and practise stunts for hours. Wheelstands, controlled skids, jumps, the lot.

  The police didn’t care what he did in the paddock, but they’d warned him about riding the unregistered machine on the street. The kid rode it anyway. Until the day the patrol car idled down the street, around the corner and parked hard against the bank, hidden from view, lying in wait.

  The policeman heard the bike before he saw it, the high-pitched motor revving hard … much too hard to stop. It was never going to. The policeman stared as the bike sailed over the bonnet of the car, landed perfectly and roared away, like something out of a film.

  When the cop knocked on the door he looked stern, but his eyes twinkled as he spoke to the boy’s father. Tell your son, he said, that he shouldn’t jump police cars. And if he does, the cheeky young bugger definitely shouldn’t wave at us as he does it.

  It was then that Erik and Julie Dragsbaek suspected that their son, Collin, had the makings of a stuntman. A year later, when he jumped his bike over several cars in a stunt exhibition at the Cairns Show, they were resigned to it. It wasn’t the most reassuring feeling for parents. But they soon realised that, even as a youngster, Collin had the discipline to dilute the potential danger in even the most spectacular-looking stunts. He was daring, but no ‘daredevil’.

  And, after all, performing and adventure was in the blood. Erik, orphaned as a child in Denmark in World War II, had jumped ship from the Danish merchant navy and worked in labouring jobs before ending up in showbiz — doing anything from stand-up comedy to mime on the club circuit. That was how he’d met and married Julie, a professional dancer he’d met behind stage on the circuit that had them both appearing on variety shows in television’s early days.

  Erik had been given the chance to go to Las Vegas in 1958, but Julie was pregnant with Collin by then, so they stayed home and he took a steady job managing a bar, plus a little acting on the side. They didn’t know it then, but it would be up to their baby boy to make the family name as a performer, years later.

  Collin’s first paid appearances were with motorbikes and cars. He was good at it, and spent a couple of months with a touring stunt show, but came home disgusted because he thought the promoter wasn’t safety conscious.

  Later, he was to set world records for riding through brick walls and walls of fire, but that wasn’t enough for Collin Dragsbaek. He wanted to fly.

  EVER since he’d been a little boy in the Sydney suburb of Graystanes, the Dragsbaeks’ little boy had been fascinated by heights. When his mother wasn’t looking he used to sneak into the back yard to climb a gum tree, perch on a lower limb and jump off.

  One day his father bought a truckload of sand for concreting, and it was dumped under the tree. Collin worked out that if he landed in the sloping pile he wouldn’t hurt himself. He started to jump from the higher branches. The good feeling he got never left him.

  While his schoolmates played football and cricket, the boy with no brothers devised his own thrills – with skateboards and bikes, ropes and ladders. He graduated to the motorbike after the family moved to Cairns, but it wasn’t until they moved again – to Brisbane in the late 1970s – that he took up high falls in earnest.

  The Dragsbaeks bought a two-acre property at Camira in Brisbane’s outer suburbs. Collin, by this time about 20, begged foam landing mats from a mattress-making company, rigged them up under a tree at the back of the block with a 10-metre ladder. Then he started training.

  Each morning before breakfast he’d do practice falls. He honed his repertoire so he could fall in any position – face down, running in the air, or swan diving – then flick over with split-second timing to land spreadeagled on his back, right on target.

  Already known as a stunt driver, he started to get falling parts in films, and a reputation to go with it. In industry jargon, if he took a gig the producers could be sure he’d ‘nail it’ in one take. He was to become one of the best high-fallers in the Australian film industry.

  But Dragsbaek had more than the right stuff, according to those who knew and admired him. In a business of doers, he was also a thinker. Some would-be stunt actors were reckless, but Collin taught them that mere willingness to suffer injury did not make anyone a professional ‘stuntie’. He applied his quiet intelligence to calculating risks, then minimising them. And, unusual in a jealous industry, he shared his hard-won knowledge unselfishly.

  On evenings and weekends he ran stunt schools, instilling proven routines that ensured the most spectacular stunts could be done safely. He ran ‘driving days’ with cars and motorbikes, ‘fire days’, and ‘high-fall days’. And despite suggestions that he capitalise on his ability to teach, he refused to charge his pupils more than $5 a session. He didn’t want to make money, he told his bemused parents; he wanted to help others, and he wanted to make the industry safer.

  No matter what the stunt, Dragsbaek insisted that learners master safe techniques perfectly before moving on to a higher level. Evel Knievel might boast that he’d broken all his bones, he used to say, ‘but I’d rather boast I haven’t broken any’.

  By the mid-1990s he was fielding calls from British and American stunt actors who’d heard of his school, and his students included a martial artist who doubled for Jean-Claude Van Damme and another who worked on the Water Rats television series. He himself had doubled for several Australian and American actors, including Tom Berenger, Tom Selleck, John Waters, Christopher Lambert and Stacey Keach.

  Nigel King was already a stuntman when he went to Dragsbaek in the early 1990s to polish his technique. ‘Collin was THE man’, King was to recall. ‘His nickname was “Collin the cat”, because no matter which way he fell, he always nailed it.’

  Maurie Leeke met Dragsbaek on location in 1987 in the country outside Brisbane. British-born Leeke was an actor, and Dragsbaek was his stunt double. They looked like brothers, and after 10 weeks camping
in a portable hut at the bush location, they acted like it. Later, Leeke taught some of Dragsbaek’s stunt students to act; in return he learned stunt work. He admired his friend’s high standards, and his opposition to film-makers using ‘cowboys’ straight off the street.

  Leeke’s wife Janet puts it this way: ‘Collin wouldn’t take risks and he wouldn’t let anyone else take risks, either. It was all calculated.’

  That,’ says Leeke softly, staring out the window of his suburban Brisbane home, ‘is probably why I’m still here today.’

  And why the worst injury Collin suffered in hundreds of falls over nearly 20 years was a sprained finger. Right up until the day he was killed.

  SOME people were to claim later that Tuesday, November 14. 1995, wasn’t particularly windy. But from where the editor of the Robinvale Sentinel sat in her office a few hundred metres away, the wind was strong enough that she assumed the most exciting news event in town for years would be postponed at least another day. Which is why she didn’t send a photographer to cover it.

  In some ways, given what unfolded that afternoon, Marion Leslie is glad she didn’t get photographs – although a series depicting precisely what happened might have been useful later in unravelling the web of self-interests surrounding the death of one of the most skilled high-fallers in the country.

  Robinvale is a sleepy country town just far enough from Mildura to have its own identity. The dominant feature of the local landscape is a group of grain silos, which is one reason why, in late 1995, the makers of the quirky romantic comedy Love Serenade had chosen to shoot the film there.

  The film is set in a fictional country town, ‘Sunray’, which has passing similarities to Robinvale. Understandable, perhaps, given that the film’s writer and director Shirley Barrett is married to the son of a well-known local couple, and knows the area well.

  When the film people came to town in late 1995, Robinvale welcomed them. Local ties or not, it was a touch of Hollywood glitz in the bush, and it injected much-needed cash – and a little pride – into the community.

  Most of all, it was something new to talk about. Especially the stunt planned as the film’s climax: a ‘suicide jump’ by the film’s male lead from the top of one of the silos.

  Among the onlookers were Mick and Margaret Ryan and their four children, who had come to watch after their two older children finished school.

  They missed seeing the practice fall a little earlier, but Margaret Ryan’s sister and others told them about it. The stuntman slid down the silo’s sloping conical roof, then rolled over the guard rail.

  The rehearsal looked perfect to onlookers. But, curiously, one man within earshot later told friends that Collin Dragsbaek had complained of the impact being ‘too hard’. If so, had he meant that the bag needed more – or less – air inside it? Too much and the bag would be too firm. Too little, and the cushioning effect would be lost on impact.

  Whether someone among the film crew, acting on Dragsbaek’s complaint, loosened the big velcro air flaps on the side of the bag is unknown, although it has been suggested. In the years since, memories have proven selective and lips tight.

  Preparations for filming the real thing – ‘the take’ – dragged on. ‘They seemed to wait a long time to get the light right,’ was the way Margaret Ryan was to recall it.

  Then, of course, there was the wind. Anyone who has stood on a high roof in apparently harmless weather knows how stiff the breeze can be above the treetops compared with standing at ground level. On top of the silo, shortly before the cameras were set to roll, the wind was whipping at the jacket that the role required Dragsbaek to wear.

  Joe and Renay Heeps watched from the front of the McWilliams Wines office, directly opposite the silo. They stood with winemaker Matthew McWilliam and his wife Lisa. Both women had cameras trained on Collin Dragsbaek on top of the silo.

  To Joe Heeps, it seemed that ‘Collin sort of threw himself out when he jumped. The wind was blowing directly into his face, and to me it was as if he was allowing for the wind to bring him back in.

  ‘When he came down I said to my wife, “He’s not going to hit the bag”. He landed on his left shoulder on the corner of the airbag, and hit the boxes. To me it wasn’t set up properly, but I’m not an expert. I remember the sound … It was a sudden thump. I couldn’t sleep for a couple of weeks afterwards.’ His voice still catches as he remembers.

  Margaret Ryan was watching from a different spot, but describes it similarly: ‘He seemed to do a jump as if he was diving off the edge of a pool, very different from the previous (practice) one. It happened so quickly. We saw him land. It didn’t look good. I thought “God, let’s get the kids out of here”.’

  Those who were closer saw that Dragsbaek had landed off-centre of the bag, near an outside corner. Opinion varies as to whether he landed feet first – ‘spearing’ the bag – or whether he landed on his back in the correct way.

  If he did land the correct way, then the bag failed him, flicking his body downwards so his head hit the ground beneath with sickening force.

  Either way, there was no argument about the effect of the fall.

  By the time the ambulance driver and site nurse reached him, seconds later, Collin Dragsbaek was bleeding from the ears. The wonder is that he survived the trip to hospital in Mildura, 90 kilometres away.

  Meanwhile, there was plenty of off-camera action on location. In the 13 minutes it took the police to arrive, the scene changed greatly. The air bag had been deflated and folded up, and the cardboard boxes that had surrounded it cleared away. The police didn’t impound the bag and asked only a few brief questions.

  Other things happened that afternoon that were to raise eyebrows later. The winemaker Matthew McWilliam, for one, is guarded about what he saw and heard.

  Speaking before being called to give evidence at the coronial inquest into Dragsbaek’s death, McWilliam was wary of confirming he saw a video film of the accident played by some of the film crew shortly after the fall. A video which, he told Erik Dragsbaek soon after the incident, was taken from a wider angle than the one subsequently produced for the inquest. A video which, if it existed, seems to have disappeared.

  Some people, he says carefully, ‘don’t know which fence to sit on, and they’re getting nervous’.

  ‘It involves friends,’ McWilliam says cryptically. Some want him to give certain evidence, but others don’t. He is firm about about one thing. ‘I will not perjure myself.’

  THE call reached Brisbane around 10pm, before Erik and Julie Dragsbaek went to bed. It was a doctor at Mildura hospital. He said Collin had been badly hurt doing a stunt. He rang back soon after to say their son was dead.

  Erik called their daughter, Michelle, and her husband, Kerry Ah-Quay, who were visiting friends. He told them to come home because Collin had been ‘injured’. When they arrived, he broke the news.

  Some time after midnight, Julie Dragsbaek called Maurie Leeke. They’ve taken my son,’ she sobbed into the handpiece.

  Leeke was stunned. ‘Collin didn’t make mistakes on high falls,’ he was to say later. ‘He never missed.’

  Erik and his son-in-law, Kerry, took the first flight to Melbourne next morning, then waited for a connecting flight to Mildura. They arrived in late afternoon. Still in shock, they wondered numbly how Collin could get what was just another fall so wrong. They didn’t yet suspect there was any more to it than terrible luck. That attitude was to change in the following weeks and months, and pull them back to Robinvale twice more.

  Looking back, some things were to suggest a disturbing pattern for Erik Dragsbaek. As they left the aircraft at Mildura, for instance, he was startled to recognise one of the other passengers as stunt co-ordinator Glenn Boswell. He knew Boswell was heavily committed in the making of a big-budget film, The Island of Dr Moreau, at Port Douglas in far north Queensland – and yet here he was, rushing south on the first flight to Mildura.

  Next morning, Erik Dragsbaek and Ah-Quay drove to
the production office set up in a hall at Robinvale, and met the film crew and a friend of Collin’s, Neville Foster, who’d driven from South Australia.

  They were invited (they both insisted later) to watch a video tape of the fatal fall, including the landing. They said they weren’t up to it yet. But later, when they asked about seeing the video, they were told they must have been ‘mixed up’ … there wasn’t one.

  This struck them as odd, because they knew there should be at least one complete videotape record of the stunt. Collin religiously took his own video camera on set so that a crew member or spare camera operator could tape his stunts for his private resume.

  They were shown to Collin’s motel room to collect his belongings. Curiously, his gear had already been packed. Among it was his video camera in its carry bag. Kerry checked the camera. It was empty. There was one spare tape in the pocket of the bag, but it was still sealed in its wrapper. They knew he always carried two tapes. What had happened to the other one?

  They were dimly aware something didn’t seem right, such as a conversation between two senior film crew people in which one said (according to Kerry Ah-Quay’s memory of it), ‘the police think they’ve got the master copy, but they haven’t’.

  They wondered why they, travelling from Queensland, got to the scene before a workplace safety officer from Melbourne. They wondered why Collin’s assistant, Debbie Santic, had been ordered to fold the air bag immediately after the accident. They wondered why the bag had been surrounded with cardboard boxes. It might have looked a sensible precaution to a casual onlooker, but Erik knew from his own experience in stunts it may have meant that the bag was too small.

  ‘It’s a half-arsed fix to stack boxes around an air bag,’ he was to say. ‘It doesn’t work because the boxes and the bag have different densities if they are at the same level.’ In other words, boxes would have to be stacked much higher than the air bag to achieve the same effect. If someone landed partly on both, it could be deadly.