Underbelly 11 Read online

  Perhaps she would have been even more upset if she’d known how he referred to her (according to one of his lovers) as ‘horse head’ and ‘boot face’ – never Anne.

  The man who was mercilessly teased at school over his disabilities had apparently forgotten the venom of harsh words.

  He would later say he and Anne were battling through the tough times and were emerging from the darkness when she died in the accident. He claimed that in her final three days they talked about their problems, staying up late the night before the ‘accident’.

  When asked by his lawyer: ‘Did you resolve your issues?’ Crawford responded: ‘I thought we did. I thought we covered everything.’

  He claimed he agreed to join her in counselling (she was already seeing an expert through the Catholic Church), promised to end his ‘friendship’ with his lover and began to plan an overseas holiday for that September. In fact, he said, she was to have passport photos taken on the day she died.

  Of course the only person who could verify the chemist’s claims was his wife – but she had been silenced eighteen years earlier.

  There was another version. According to the prosecution, Anne Crawford was on the verge of demanding a divorce – a move that would cripple her husband’s expanding chemist business. The prosecution claimed she confided to a friend that her unfaithful husband was ‘a bastard’ and she intended to leave him.

  She would never have the chance.

  When one relative urged her to stay in the marriage for the sake of the children she said, ‘He’s a monster, you don’t know what he’s like’.

  For a man who claimed to be shattered by the death, Ron Crawford made a remarkably quick recovery. Within days of the funeral, he rang the woman he promised his wife he would never see again and asked her to go shopping to buy some clothes for his daughter.

  He would not remarry, although he would father a child with another woman.

  He would buy a country farm, rent the De Havilland Avenue house and own an Essendon home valued at $1.5 million.

  He eventually sold his chemist shops for a total, police estimate, of around $10 million.

  On a school reunion internet site, he portrayed himself as part-mogul and part-martyr, declaring he had ‘entered the world of retail pharmacy at Ravech Pharmacy in North Coburg, then expanded the retail “vision” with sites in Airport West, Wantirna, Vermont South, Reservoir, in between raised my children after Anne’s tragic death. Now still working five days and two days on the farm’.

  The boy who had been teased at school seemed to be saying that he had beaten the odds.

  Aged in his 50s, he was able to afford the dream of many middle-aged men – a high-performance imported car with personalised plates. He chose RC-88: his initials, curiously added to the year of his wife’s death.

  Some detectives suspect the letters were a dark, phonetic private joke about him getting away with murder – Arsey 88.

  But while Crawford was getting on with his life, a woman connected with the underworld knew the true story and was quietly stewing.

  She knew it was no accident because she also knew it was her ex-husband who all those years ago had accepted the contract to kill.

  In 2003, fifteen years after Anne Crawford’s death, when it seemed destined to remain the perfect murder, she made a call to the homicide squad. Eventually the information was handed to the specialist cold case crew and finally murder investigators began to examine the case.

  The cold case crew of the Melbourne homicide squad (since disbanded in a police reshuffle) was used to spending years reconstructing murder investigations.

  Using new methods, such as DNA testing, on old crimes, the detectives’ aim was to time warp buried cases into modern investigations.

  But when Detective Sergeant Mark Colbert and Senior Detectives David Butler and Wayne Newman were assigned the case, they must have thought it was destined to remain a mystery.

  What they had was the ex-wife of a career criminal declaring her ex-husband had been contracted to kill Anne Crawford.

  But what they didn’t have was a body, as the victim had been cremated, nor did they have forensics from the scene, as the area was never treated as a crime scene, or even officially a murder, as a coroner had declared her death accidental.

  They knew that if Ron Crawford had organised the murder, he was unlikely to confess. But they also knew that allies drift apart, friends grow distant and discarded lovers can become ferocious enemies.

  They approached one of his old girlfriends, who opened up, saying, ‘He’s gotten away with it for too long. Anne didn’t deserve it … I know that Ron Crawford did it’.

  She had worked in one of his pharmacies from 1979 to 1985 and at first she’d found him cold and rude.

  The female staff members called the tall and cold chemist ‘Lurch’ after the near-silent butler in the 1960s Addams Family television series.

  But despite her initial judgment, she started to see a softer side in him. When she was sick in 1982, he sent her flowers and they soon became lovers.

  She told police that over the next three years, he spoke constantly of getting rid of his wife. She said he estimated it would cost $5000 to have her killed or $10,000 to make sure her body was never found.

  She gave sworn evidence that he told her of several plans he had considered, such as rewiring the toaster so she would be electrocuted, dropping the hairdryer in her bath, having her run over by a truck or tossing her from a balcony of an apartment building in Queensland.

  When she suggested the less radical approach of a simple divorce, she claimed he responded that he’d ‘worked too hard to lose anything’.

  ‘Why should she get half of his money when he’s worked so hard and why should she get the kids?’ the ex-lover described Crawford’s rhetorical question.

  In January 1985, he took out an MLC life insurance policy to update the $20,000 they had taken out two months after they married. With interest, he received $79,029 when she died.

  His half-baked plans could have appeared to be the rantings of an angry man and not the thoughts of a ruthless one.

  After all, the hair-brained murder schemes appeared to have all been borrowed from B-grade Hollywood thrillers.

  But Anne Crawford didn’t die in any of the ways her husband discussed – she died in what would appear to have been a one-in-a-million accident.

  But in Strathmore lightning does appear to strike twice. Eleven months to the day before Anne Crawford died, a young man, aged just twenty, was killed when the car he was working under slipped off a ramp in the carport of his home.

  It was in Boeing Street, which joins De Havilland Avenue about 200 metres from the Crawford home.

  It had been the talk of the area, particularly since Anne’s best friend lived opposite the house.

  It was an obvious and graphic warning to locals to remain rigidly safety conscious when working under cars.

  But, according to police, it was more than that. They claim that for Crawford, it was a light bulb moment – the beginning of a plan that almost worked.

  FOR the cold case crew, the former girlfriend’s recollections may have been graphic but they were uncorroborated. In the eyes of the law, Crawford was still the grieving widower.

  So rather than rely on hard evidence, they slowly began to build the pressure on the main players, hoping the targets would implicate themselves by their present actions to a crime committed fifteen years earlier.

  While at first they gathered information and slivers of evidence in secret, by 2004 they were ready to run an open campaign. They began to contact friends and relatives of Crawford, making it clear they were reinvestigating his wife’s death.

  It was a case of firing a shot just to see which way the rabbits would run.

  Police spoke to PS’s father, saying they wanted to speak to his son about an old case but stop short of providing any details. The father rang the suspected contract killer to say detectives were looking for him and
within 25 minutes PS rang Crawford to talk.

  He obviously had no doubts about which case was important enough to reopen so many years later.

  As the pressure built, Crawford spoke to confidantes, declaring he didn’t want to be subjected to another investigation.

  But why would a man who believed his wife died accidentally, be worried about a new investigation and why didn’t he wonder why police thought there was a link to PS and the death?

  A go-between rang PS to tell him that Crawford intended to refuse to answer police questions when he was interviewed. The message was clear to the career criminal. Everyone should remain silent and the investigation would probably die.

  But PS was not the same man who coolly took a contract to kill a woman he didn’t know. He had become a police protected witness who had given evidence against some of the most vicious criminals in the state as part of the Walsh Street trial where four men were charged and acquitted over the 1988 murders of police constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre. He had been given a new name and a new life, declaring he was finished with crime.

  Now he knew that if he was charged and convicted of the murder, he faced a life in prison and Crawford could walk.

  He decided, not for the first time, to get in first.

  Just ten weeks into the pressure cooker phase of the operation, PS was interviewed by detectives and admitted he killed Anne Crawford for $10,000 in cash.

  He claimed to police that when he walked up the drive, Crawford had already left the car jacked up, with the front tyre removed as arranged.

  (Police allege Crawford deflated the second tyre to make sure the vehicle couldn’t be fixed before the hit man arrived.)

  He rang the front door bell and when Anne answered he grabbed her by the left arm (leaving the four bruises) and forced her back to the lounge room.

  He said he placed a pillowcase over her head, punched her in the jaw, knocking her unconscious. He then carried her to the car, placed her under the chassis and just pushed the side of the car so the jack would slip out – exactly as the police reconstruction in 1988 showed.

  According to the prosecution, PS rang Crawford from a phone box with the coded message that the murder was complete, saying he couldn’t catch up that day because his car was ‘stuffed’.

  PS pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to a minimum of twelve years jail. It was a light sentence for such a cold-blooded hit but he received a discount because he pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Crawford.

  According to one of Crawford’s former girlfriends, when he was considering killing his wife he bragged that his friends inside the police force would protect him.

  He told one of his girlfriends, ‘I could do it and get away with it. I’ve got plenty of copper mates who would help me out and cover it up.’ His relationship with ‘copper mates’ resulted in his first trial being aborted on August 23, 2006 as a result of a former policeman friend approaching a member of the jury the previous night in a suburban pub.

  The former policeman, an ex-boxer, had been in court watching the case and supporting his mate. He left the police force in 1988 – a few months after Anne’s death.

  For a man trained in court proceedings to approach a juror was – at the very least – an act of breathtaking stupidity. The approach was made just as PS was being cross-examined by Crawford’s lawyers. It was a crucial time in the trial.

  The former policeman had always maintained Crawford was innocent. What the jury would have concluded we will never know because Justice Tim Smith had no choice but to abort the trial and immediately set up a new hearing.

  A second trial was also aborted and a third was needed. In an unusual move Crawford, 55, chose to give evidence before the jury.

  Usually an accused in a murder trial will remain silent as the onus is on the prosecution to prove its case. Put your client in the witness box and you open him up to cross-examination and you lose control of your defence. The move to put the chemist in the witness box smacked of desperation – as if the defence could hear the cell-door closing behind their man.

  The widower told the jury he no longer believed his wife was the victim of a horrible accident. Faced with the evidence he now accepted it was murder but he swore he had nothing to do with the crime.

  Crawford may have been unfaithful, he may have been callous and he may have been a liar but the defence stressed that did not prove he was the killer.

  Crawford’s heavyweight barrister, Con Heliotis QC, argued that PS must have gone to Crawford’s home to commit a burglary expecting the house to be empty.

  Mr Heliotis, perhaps wisely, did not address the puzzling question of why an experienced criminal would believe a house was empty when there was a car with a flat tyre sitting in the drive.

  The defence theory was that when he was Anne Crawford he killed his victim and then made it look like an accident.

  No, Crawford was not a killer – he was a victim. His wife was killed and now, so many years later, he was accused of a crime he did not commit.

  Court observers say Heliotis’s closing address to the jury was masterful and persuasive. It had to be – as some close to the defence thought they were sunk.

  Justice Smith dutifully warned the jury to be wary of the uncorroborated testimony of co-accused offenders. PS was a career criminal with a history of dishonesty and violence. By implicating Crawford and pleading guilty, he received a sentence discount. The self-confessed killer was not motivated by conscience but by self-interest.

  In contrast Crawford was a middle class family man who had brought up his two children after their mother’s death. Even some (but not all) of Anne’s family were behind Ron Crawford, refusing to believe he was involved.

  In late September, after deliberating for four days, the jury of eight men and four women acquitted Crawford. He left court a free and clearly relieved man. Many were surprised by the verdict and at times his legal team seemed resigned to a guilty verdict. One legal expert present at the trial told the prosecution team, ‘You were robbed’.

  PS returned to prison to serve his sentence. He deserves no sympathy. He killed a woman he did not know for personal gain.

  But the intriguing question is why would a career criminal who knows the system confess after so many years of remaining silent? There was no forensic evidence, no body and no eyewitnesses.

  He was convicted purely on the basis of his own confession and he did not make it to clear his conscience.

  Police say he did a deal because he was frightened Crawford would get in first and make a statement. But if the chemist was not involved then PS was in the clear – so why talk?

  There is no doubt the hit man is guilty, but is he the only one?

  CHAPTER 2

  The face of evil

  ‘He didn’t scream, cry or really show any sort of emotion that you would expect from someone with a knife in their leg.’

  THE young sailor slumped on the small bed was crying with self-pity when he looked up to see an old school friend walk into the tiny watch-house cell.

  It was the first face he had recognised since his arrest two days earlier at the Cerberus Naval Base for the murder of a twelve-year-old girl abducted from a nearby beach.

  But what the sailor didn’t know was that the ‘friend’ was not there because of concern for him. In fact, he was a young policeman sent by the homicide squad to persuade the prisoner to talk about past crimes.

  The sailor was Derek Ernest Percy. He had been arrested trying to wash away his guilt in the laundry of the naval base just hours after Yvonne Elizabeth Tuohy was grabbed at Ski Beach, Warneet, and then molested, tortured and murdered.

  When Percy grabbed Yvonne on the beach he also tried to abduct her twelve-year-old friend, Shane Spiller, who escaped only by threatening him with a tomahawk and then running away.

  The nature of the abduction and the manner of the little girl’s death led detectives, including elite investigator Dick Knight (later an a
ssistant commissioner) to conclude that this was not Percy’s first attack.

  It was the 1960s and Australia was reeling from a series of child abductions and murders in four state and territories. The headlines and community fears scarred a generation of baby boomers who later would lock their doors and refuse to let their own children (and later their grandchildren) walk to school or play in parks unsupervised.

  The murders of fifteen-year-olds Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt on Sydney’s Wanda Beach in January 1965; the disappearance of the three Beaumont children – Jane, aged nine, Arnna, seven, and Grant, four, in Adelaide in 1966; the murder of Allen Redston, a six-year-old grabbed in Canberra in September 1966; Simon Brook, three, killed in Sydney in 1968; and Linda Stilwell, seven, abducted from St Kilda in August 1968. All remain unsolved. For nearly 40 years police have suspected that Percy is the man responsible. Now, after a complex investigation involving old memories and new techniques, they have built a compelling case against Australia’s longest-serving prisoner – a man who retreats into his own murky world when confronted with his past.

  But back in July 1969, in the cold Russell Street cell the novice policeman, aged just twenty, was supposed to listen to his old schoolmate in the hope he would open up if given a familiar shoulder to cry on.

  And it almost worked.

  The policeman, who resigned in 1989, has returned to country Victoria for a quieter life and tries not to dwell on the past. But when contacted by cold case unit detectives he immediately knew why they had come calling. Without prompting, he recalled his last conversation with Percy.

  ‘He looked up at me and it appeared that he had been sobbing and was very distraught.’

  ‘He said, “Looks like I’ve fucked up this time.” I said, “It certainly looks like it, Derek”.

  ‘Derek put his head in his hands for a while, then he looked up at me again and he had tears in his eyes and panic written all over his face. He also looked at me with a plea for help.’

  The schoolmate gently suggested Percy needed psychiatric help and then asked: ‘Were there any others, mate?