Underbelly 2 Read online

  Later he become even more desperate. ‘What does it take for me to get off, I’ll – I can do it. Anything.’

  He offers to pay the police $10,000 a week while he is out of jail. ‘I’ll make the money. The money’s there, it’s just – the druggies, you know, everybody smokes.’

  RUDDOCK: ‘What makes you think everyone’s prepared to take bribes?’

  ISSA: ‘Talk to me, talk to me. I’m trying to work with youse. Those guys, they don’t want to work with me … What about the charges. Can’t we work on the charges?’

  The answer was no.

  CHAPTER 14

  The day we locked our doors

  Still looking for the Beaumonts

  By the next afternoon it was the nation’s biggest story

  JANE Beaumont wanted to be a writer when she grew up. She could hardly have written anything as heartbreaking or haunting as the story of how she, her brother and sister vanished from an Adelaide beach one hot day more than thirty years ago.

  The story of the Beaumont children, which has become a long and tangled tale, has lost none of its potency. At its heart is an act of unspeakable cruelty: of parents being robbed of their children and of never knowing their fate; of being tormented, year after year, with theories, rumors and speculation, false leads, false hopes and false prophets.

  And, with each twist in the tale, with each turn of the screw for the lost children’s parents, Australia has been mesmerised by a story as mysterious as Picnic at Hanging Rock, as sinister as Silence of the Lambs. It has burned deep into the national psyche, transcending time and place in a way other crimes have not.

  It marks, perhaps, an end of innocence for an old Australia when doors were left unlocked and kids went to the beach alone.

  Australia’s population has grown by millions since 1966. No one under the age of thirty was born when Jane, Arnna and Grant disappeared, and few under forty actually remember it happening. But that doesn’t matter. The Beaumont children are as much a part of popular culture as Ned Kelly or Don Bradman, names that echo down the years and have become part of our mythology.

  So, when a retired detective claimed in 1997 that a Canberra woman could be Jane Beaumont, it spawned yet another flurry of publicity. This says more about our preoccupation with the case than about the merit of the claim.

  If Jane Natarlie Beaumont were alive when the claims were made, she would turn forty one on 10 September. Arnna Katherine would be thirty nine on 11 November, and Grant Ellis would have turned thirty six the same year.

  On Australia Day, 1966, they were nine, seven and four. It was a Wednesday and one of the hottest days of a sweltering January. At the Beaumonts’ modest war-service home in Harding Street, Somerton Park, Nancy Beaumont gave in to her children’s pleas to let them go to nearby Glenelg beach straight after breakfast.

  Mrs Beaumont had work to do, her husband, Jim, a travelling salesman, was away, and it seemed safer to send the children on the bus than to let them ride their bikes; more reasonable to let them go early than make them wait for her. She watched and waved as they went out the gate, holding hands, about 8.40 am.

  When they failed to return at noon, as arranged, she assumed they had missed the bus and would be on the next one, at 2pm. When they were not, she worried. When Jim arrived home an hour later, they began a search that has never really ended. By next afternoon, it was the biggest story in Australia.

  The police were to follow up thousands of leads in the coming months and years, but there has only ever been one firm clue.

  Several witnesses had seen the children playing with a tall, thin, blond surfie wearing navy blue bathers. He was never identified.

  The search spread interstate, even overseas. A Dutch clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset, arrived in late 1966 amid a huge furore, but his ‘visions’ failed. Although Croiset died in 1980, his influence has lingered. In 1996, Adelaide businessman Con Polites finally achieved his ambition of digging up a warehouse floor where Croiset thought the bodies could be buried. Stan Swaine was prosecuting a case in a country court the day the children disappeared. Like everybody else, he was interested, but it was not until he took charge of the state’s homicide squad two years later that he became involved.

  Detective Sergeant Swaine, then forty-one, disagreed with other police that the children had almost certainly been murdered. He thought they might have been taken to be raised by a cult. For a while, the parents, hungry for any hope, grasped at the theory, perhaps earning it more attention than it deserved.

  A letter from Dandenong in 1968 lured Swaine and the Beaumonts to drive across for a rendezvous with an unknown person who promised to hand over the children. The supposedly secret meeting had been leaked by other police, and Swaine and the Beaumonts were followed from Adelaide by two carloads of reporters. It did not matter – there was no sign of the children.

  A month later, acting on a letter from New South Wales, police searched Mud Island and Swan Island, near Queenscliff, then a spot near Anglesea. In September that year, a ship’s crew was questioned and fingerprinted in New Zealand, because the ship had been in Adelaide in January 1966, and in Melbourne in August 1968, when a young girl disappeared from a St Kilda amusement park. No result.

  There were many more leads. A sealed shipping container was searched for remains. A blond surfie in Tasmania was heard talking to a child about Adelaide. A Kaniva policeman overheard someone talking about the Beaumonts on a crossed phone line. A Kalgoorlie couple came under scrutiny in 1985 after former neighbors talked of old gossip alleging they had kidnapped the children. Three suitcases full of scrawled-on press clippings about the case were found at an Adelaide tip in 1986. They turned out to be the collection of an eccentric old woman and had been thrown out by relatives after her death.

  Nothing indicated the children were alive. Yet, three decades on, Stan Swaine argues they probably are. This might say more about him than about the mystery.

  THE man involved for three decades is not so much obsessed as enthusiastic about the case. It is Swaine’s hobby. After a lifetime as a detective, he still likes to dabble, and the Beaumont connection always gets him some attention.

  In 1997 Swaine appeared at a closed Magistrates Court hearing in which a woman, forty-one, applied unsuccessfully for a restraining order to stop the ageing sleuth approaching her.

  His version of events is that, eighteen months before, he was asked by a women’s magazine to check out the woman, who claimed to have been brought up by a cult and had herself suggested she might be Jane Beaumont.

  He made several trips to Canberra and interviewed the woman. Eager to believe he had cracked the case at last, he seized on the slimmest of ‘evidence’ – that she has hazel eyes ‘like Jane Beaumont’s’ and that she is roughly the right age.

  He says he has seen an extract of her birth certificate, under her present name, but that it was issued after 1966 and he suspects it could be a fake. He cites the bogus identifications obtained by Anne Hamilton-Byrne and others in the cult known as The Family.

  The police, however, have no such misgivings, accepting the woman’s family’s assurances – and her birth certificate – as proof that she is not Jane Beaumont.

  Swaine is not convinced. Cults, he shrugs, do unbelievable things. After 900 people poisoned themselves at Jonestown in Guyana, anything’s possible, he says.

  And, why did intelligent, legally sane people dress in their best clothes, pack their bags and quietly kill themselves in California a few months before, convinced they were being picked up by a spaceship?

  Compared with that, and other bizarre incidents, he claims, the idea of children being abducted to be brainwashed and brought up by cult ‘parents’ is quite plausible.

  At first sight, Stan Swaine makes an unlikely private eye. At seventy-two, he is no Philip Marlowe; just an old bloke whose good looks have worn down to a vague kindliness, punctuated with a nervous tic that could be the legacy of being stabbed in the head by a criminal with a screwdr
iver in 1952, an attack which was nearly fatal for the policeman – and very fatal for the attacker, whom he shot with his service pistol.

  He left the police in 1973 to become a private investigator and has been at it ever since. Along the way, he says, his marriage broke up and he lost several Adelaide properties.

  Now a pensioner who plays at private eye, he lives alone in a tiny public-housing flat.

  Fast chases are out. Swaine does not drive any more and walks with the aid of a stick, nursing a bad knee and juggling a mobile phone, fob watch and insulin syringe kit. He wears a comfy cardigan, sports jacket, tie over nylon shirt and brown pants with a dodgy zipper that threatens to reveal Jockey Y-fronts to match the spare pair drying on the heater in the cluttered flat.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m a recycled bachelor,’ he says apologetically, waving at the books and papers on the dining table that doubles as his desk.

  Thirty years after the disappearance the Beaumonts remain big news and Swaine was keen to bask in any reflected publicity.

  After flying back from Canberra and an interview with Ray Martin on A Current Affair he was pleased with himself. He had been met at the airport by a Nine Network car and a producer detailed to keep him away from rival networks. Then he had been whisked to Nine’s studios for a chat with a slightly embarrassed assistant police commissioner and, finally, taken home. There, the answering machine blinked with nine fresh messages, and his mobile phone chirped with interview requests.

  ‘This is like when it first happened,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I’ll be the cynosure of all eyes down at the retired policemen’s club, that’s for sure.’

  He still happily cites the letters sent from Dandenong in 1968 as the basis for his cult theory, ignoring or forgetting the fact that, in 1992, new forensic methods finally proved the letters were a hoax by a teenage boy and so killed any faint chance that the children had ever been held in Victoria. Five years later he was not worried about police dismissing his latest tilt at cracking Australia’s biggest case. ‘This is not the end of it, mate,’ he said conspiratorially. ‘All the police have done is look at her birth certificate and talk to people who could be mixed up in a cult, anyway.’

  Meanwhile, he is off to the retired policemen’s club for lunch. It has been a big week and a most excellent adventure for a bored old man.

  Not so for Jim and Nancy Beaumont, perhaps. They both had birthdays a week before the latest false lead – he turned seventy two, she seventy – but all they got was yet another faint hope extinguished.

  Chances are, only one person can help them. Somewhere out there is a man who was tall and thin and blond in 1966. Somewhere, in a dusty family album, there will be a snapshot of him in navy blue bathers. Someone, somewhere, must suspect who he is.

  Jim and Nancy Beaumont will be always united in grief that only their own deaths will end, but they have lived apart for many years now. They lost their children, and then they lost each other.

  Postscript: A middle aged man who lives in a Melbourne psychiatric hospital has changed his name by deed poll to Grant Beaumont, convinced he was abducted with his sisters more than thirty years years ago.

  CHAPTER 15

  A rebel with a cause

  Still Peter, not lawless any more

  ‘This is the first time in forty years that I don’t owe time’

  THEY sat around the board table of the Hawthorn Football Club in comfortable middle-class Melbourne, making their case. They were once the best of enemies, now they found themselves pushing the same cause with equal passion.

  Present at the meeting were Hawthorn Chief Executive Officer, Michael Brown, the club’s marketing manager, James Henderson, a senior executive from Puma Australia, John Forbes, the respected former police chief commissioner, Mick Miller, and a convicted killer, Peter John Lawless.

  The professional policeman, and patron of the Reclink football league, and the career criminal turned football coach, were there to persuade the AFL club to turn over its home base – Glenferrie Oval – to a bunch of unemployed, homeless and drug-addicted men for a regular game of footy.

  Mick Miller, the powerful law and order advocate and Lawless, the self-taught jailhouse lawyer born with a name no script writer could better, won the day. And so the Puma Street Hawks had a home. But the moment also marked the private and public rehabilitation of one of Australia’s most notorious criminals. Lawless had been out of trouble for seven years, and many police were prepared to mutter the once inconceivable – that he had gone straight, for good.

  Some experienced detectives harbor a rough affection some of the criminals they pursue, but Peter John Lawless was never one of them.

  ‘He was a smartarse. One prosecutor is still terrified of him. Lawless threatened him and his family,’ one detective recalls.

  For Lawless there were no truces, no common ground. For decades the ‘jacks’ were the enemy and could not be trusted under any circumstances, and he played the game tough and dirty.

  Throughout the 1970s the hard men of the underworld, Lawless, Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley, the Kane Brothers and Chuck Bennett were known, at least by reputation, by all the police in Victoria.

  A few years ago Lawless had to deal with a policeman over a routine, non-criminal matter. He squared up and said, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Peter John Lawless.’ The young policeman looked at him blankly, not a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. It was then Lawless knew that in criminal terms, he was yesterday’s man.

  After more than a half a decade out of jail he had lost the grey pallor of the long-term inmate. He no longer had to look straight ahead when a police car went by – and he no longer had to look behind, fearing a sneak attack.

  At fifty-eight, with wispy grey hair and reading glasses, he looks nothing like the man who was once for many police the most hated criminal in Victoria.

  So where did it all begin? In post-war Melbourne, the young Peter Lawless was an ordinary son from an average family. His housewife mother, Isabel, and his house painter father, Claude, knew their boy was a little wild, but they could hardly guess that he would end up one of the state’s most infamous criminals.

  By the age of eight the mischievous boy at Tooronga Road Primary School in Malvern had learned the benefits of accurate records. ‘I had an exercise book that listed all the houses I could raid for fruit in the district.’

  By the time he arrived at Spring Road Central School in Malvern as a skinny twelve-year-old he was ready to rebel, a trait he would keep for another forty years.

  ‘I had a lot of trouble with the boss cocky teacher. I couldn’t understand why we were studying Latin and French. I thought it was ludicrous and I didn’t try,’ he was to explain.

  While he was less than impressive in the classroom, failing seventh grade twice, he loved sport, even though he was small for his age. Reputedly an A Grade tennis player as a teenager and a keen footballer and cricketer, he spent more time playing sport than in the classroom. It was a different era, with full employment and a secondary industry protected by tariffs, and teenage boys could swap school uniforms for overalls and be doing a man’s job long before they could vote or drive.

  Lawless said most teachers ignored him, but there was one he still remembers with respect and affection. He said he had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the teacher who was as sports mad as he was. Lawless said the teacher would turn a blind eye to Lawless’s smoking if he turned up to play footy for the school. The teacher, who also coached the cricket and football sides, was an expert at striking deals and pushing through compromises. He was later to use those negotiating skills on a bigger scale. Lindsay Thompson went on to become Premier of Victoria.

  More than forty five years on the former Premier remembers Lawless as a small boy who, at the age of twelve, was already an accomplished liar. ‘He would look at you straight faced and tell you the most extraordinary stories.

  ‘He arrived one day at 10am and I asked him why he was late. He sai
d his grandmother fell over the letter box and dislocated her left elbow. The story was so strange you felt it couldn’t be made up.’ But after the third similarly extravagant story the teacher realised his young student, for all his ignorance of books, could think on his feet.

  ‘I knew he had some problems and I took an interest. At the end of one year he knocked on the staff room door, thanked me and presented me with a Parker pen.’ Thompson, who knew Lawless had a paper round that put him in close proximity to the news agent’s stock, suspected the gift may have been shoplifted. He believed the only way

  Lawless would have put his hand in his pocket would have been to hide the pen rather than to pull out his hard-earned shillings to pay for the gift.

  The teacher went to the principal and asked advice. ‘Keep it, you’ve got no proof and you’ll hurt the boy’s feelings,’ he was told.

  Decades later the then Minister for Education was chatting with a judge, who said a man was to be sentenced the following day for murder. ‘He said the man had run his own defence and had done a pretty good job,’ he recalled. ‘It was Peter Lawless.’

  AT the age of fourteen Lawless and formal education parted company by mutual consent. He left school when he was asked to repeat grade seven for a third time, and became an apprentice motor mechanic, later working for a year in the spare parts division. Then he joined his father in the painting business. Although he loved football and made the Richmond under-nineteen squad – ‘I had my chances but I didn’t take them’ – Lawless was in too much of a hurry to dedicate himself to trying to make it on the football field.

  He painted during the day but at night he was learning another trade from an older man: how to be a thief. ‘There was always something I wanted. I learned the hard way with another guy before I went solo.’

  Between 1960 and 1962 the pair pulled a series of safe breakings and burglaries. ‘In two years we did all the TABs. He said “that’s enough for me” and bailed out. He’s now a successful businessman.’