Underbelly 5 Page 2

  PETER Raymond Keogh was born in February 1948, the second youngest of six children to a factory foreman and his wife, in the relative prosperity of post-war Victoria.

  He lived in North Fitzroy before it was trendy. He went to Merri Street State and Fitzroy High, leaving when he was fourteen to work in a string of factories and, for a time, as a meat boner – learning how to use sharp knives.

  His father died when he was young and his mother went out to work to support the children. Keogh would later say that he was deeply affected when he was sent to live at an aunt’s house when his father was dying.

  He was 12 when he was first charged with indecent assault and was given a good behavior bond. The following year, he was charged with theft and given probation. Police who interviewed him at the time, described him as ‘a bare – faced liar’.

  On 10 November, 1964, he waited with another teenager to ambush a foreman at Koala Shoes in Chingford Street, Fairfield. He was ordered to give up alcohol, but police who knew him doubted he would give up either violence or the bottle.

  On 3 October, 1966, he was charged with assault outside a dance in Bendigo and sentenced to three months’ jail. In April 1968, he attacked a man with a broken glass at the Junction Hotel in Preston, and was sentenced to one month’s jail.

  Court records show he was becoming increasingly violent and starting to concentrate his attacks on women and children.

  In October, 1970, aged 22, he went to a woman’s flat in Coburg, claiming he was there to buy her car. She took him for a test drive, but when they returned he attacked and tried to tie her up. He punched her, but ran away when the woman’s partner returned home.

  He attacked a man with a billiard cue in an Alphington pool hall in October, 1972, leaving his victim with a broken hand and head wounds. In late 1974, he dragged a female co-worker into the basement car park in a Collins Street building and repeatedly slammed her head against a wall. He was sentenced to five months’ jail.

  A few months later, he tricked a nine-year-old girl into his Richmond home where he sexually assaulted her. He was sentenced to eighteen months’ prison. Much later, a lawyer would claim in court, the attack did not involve ‘any true violence’. He did not mention the terrified girl gave sworn evidence that Keogh threatened to ‘smash her face inside out’.

  Seven years later, he was charged with molesting two eleven-year-old girls in Northcote. He was convicted and sentenced to two years’ jail, but the conviction was quashed on appeal in October, 1983.

  The arresting officer in the case, Bernie Gaffney, said: ‘He had these strange eyes. He was very dangerous to women and young girls.’

  Keogh was later to complain he was being harassed by police.

  Two days after his successful appeal, a public notice appeared in a Melbourne newspaper. ‘Well Peter, you got off again. Little children beware.’

  FRANK Bellesini was a uniformed constable stationed at Preston, when he got the call that a railway porter had been stabbed in the hand at the Northcote station, and the offender had jumped on a north-bound train.

  Local knowledge suggested to the policeman, the suspect was likely to travel only four stations before getting off at Preston. The area was the social capital of the northern suburbs, with a local bowling alley and two popular dances within walking distance.

  The head bouncer at the town hall dance was a tough TV Ringside boxer, who stood at the door with an iron bar – concealed in a rolled-up newspaper. There was little trouble.

  It was 21 September, 1963. Geelong had just won its way into the grand final that afternoon and about 60 people got off the train to head down the ramp.

  Bellesini was looking for a teenager in a white jumper. The youth he wanted was Peter Keogh, just 15 and angry-drunk after drinking a bottle of wine.

  ‘He jumped a fence on to the tracks and started abusing me,’ Bellesini recalls. He thought, ‘How easy is this?’

  The young policeman and the even younger suspect stood opposite each other. Bellesini, 24, had already pulled out his baton, but was still relaxed. He was bigger and stronger – he was also in uniform and backed by his partner. He was less than two metres from the young offender when ‘I saw his knife flashing’.

  Bellesini aimed his Browning .32 automatic – ‘a pea-shooter really’ – and fired a shot between Keogh’s legs. He thought it would frighten the teenager into surrendering.

  ‘He kept coming and I said, “Hey, stop son”, but he didn’t.’

  Bellesini warded off the knife attack, although he was slashed across the palm. Under present police training, Bellesini would have shot the armed offender in the body, possibly killing him. But, back then, the constable took a different option.

  He shot him in the left knee. Keogh stopped, started to collapse, but then continued towards the policeman. ‘I was backing back and he was still coming so I put one in his right knee. He was drunk and feeling no pain.’

  Keogh fell to the ground. Bellesini took the knife from the injured teenager who then jumped up and tried to run. With two damaged kneecaps he wasn’t going far. The policeman and his partner grabbed Keogh. ‘The crowd was getting a bit ugly so we put him in the van and took him to the station.’

  The bullets in his legs didn’t improve Keogh’s humor. While waiting for the ambulance he continued to threaten police. ‘He was a raving lunatic at the time. He was arrogant and abusive in the station. He said “My uncle’s a gunnie and he’ll get you”.’

  Bellesini knew there were some teenage hoods who grew out of their violent phase, but he thought Keogh wouldn’t be one of them. He thought the angry kid with the bullet wounds would only get worse.

  UNLIKE many divorced couples, John and Maria James remained good friends. She would often ring her husband for a chat at the Fitzroy Town Hall, where he worked as the town clerk.

  Maria Theresa James, 38, owned a modest bookshop in High Street, Thornbury. The front room was filled with hundreds of second-hand paperbacks wedged in shelves. Behind the small counter was a three-bedroom home where she lived with her two sons.

  On 17 June, 1980, John James’s day began badly. He had made only one work call when he realised he had forgotten his glasses and needed to drive home.

  He stopped for a coffee and, by the time he was back, it was almost 11.30 – the morning was slipping away. He left his office and went downstairs to discuss local government business with fellow council officers.

  It was about 11.50am when Maria James rang and spoke to his secretary, Isabella Fabris. There was no need for Mrs James to say who was calling – the two women had known each other for 25 years and grew up together in Fitzroy.

  She asked, ‘Is John there?’ When the secretary said he was out of the office she said, ‘There is someone in the shop – tell him to ring me.’ Isabella Fabris said that at the time she thought there was nothing in Maria James’s voice to indicate concern. But much later she would think again.

  Maria was well-mannered and would often chat to Isabella while waiting for her ex-husband to be free. But this time she was businesslike – almost curt. ‘She seemed a bit short on the phone,’ Ms Fabris would tell police.

  The two women had developed their own code. Maria James would allow the phone to ring only three times and if Isabella Fabris had not answered she would know the office was too busy for social calls and hang-up. This time, she let the phone keep ringing. This was no social call.

  John James came back to his office within minutes and was told about his ex-wife’s call. He responded, ‘Shall do.’

  He telephoned straight back, but this time his former wife seemed distracted. She said ‘Hang on, please.’ For the next four minutes he could only listen, first with mild curiosity, then uneasiness and finally with a sense of foreboding.

  ‘I held on and while doing this I heard discussion in the background and then a bit of a scream and then there was more discussion and then silence. I then started to get edgy and started to whistle into the phone to get so
meone’s attention. I could still hear the conversation in the background and I couldn’t hear the exact words, but Maria was talking fairly loudly.

  ‘I then heard a second scream. I then really thought something was wrong.’

  He walked out of his office and told his secretary. ‘I rang Maria and it was odd – there was screaming in the background.’

  It only took a few minutes to drive from the town hall to the bookshop in High Street. James parked around the corner, grabbed his umbrella and walked to the front of the shop.

  Although the open sign was displayed he found the door locked. He rang the bell and banged on the door, then went around the back and bashed on the rear door. James checked the outside laundry where a spare key was sometimes hidden.

  He then tried to kick open the back door before deciding to check the side kitchen window. He opened the window, hooked his umbrella on the air conditioning unit, climbed into the kitchen, grabbed a green-handled, small-bladed knife and yelled out.

  The television was on and the phone was still off the hook as James crept along the passageway, glancing left into his son’s bedroom before walking into his ex-wife’s bedroom to find her body.

  ‘Her eyes were open and there was blood all over the place. I knew she was dead.’

  She was dressed in dark slacks and top. Her open-toed, slip-on shoes were next to her body and her wrists were bound in front. She had been bashed and her throat was cut.

  But what the autopsy would later show was that her body was covered by 68 nick and cut marks. She was slowly tortured before finally being killed.

  James asked a neighbor to ring the police. When he came back there was a woman browsing in the shop.

  Police believe it was possible the killer escaped from the front when he heard James trying to enter the shop at the rear.

  Detectives could find no motive and could find no-one who disliked Maria James. They knew she had begun to date after the break-up of her marriage. She had told friends she was going to go out with a man named Peter, and police were to find three Peters who knew the victim. A local florist said a man had bought some carnations to be delivered to the bookshop, but he was never found.

  All they had was a description of a suspect: about 167 centimetres, wearing light-grey slacks. Police concluded the killer may have lashed out during an argument. They believed the murderer probably lived locally, knew Mrs James, had an explosive temper and a hatred of woman.

  From the early days of the investigation, police believed it would require a tip from the public to solve the case. The government offered a $50,000 reward within three days.

  But there was a short-list of suspects. One committed suicide days after he was interviewed by police. Another was known to have an explosive temper and to regularly visit the bookshop. When he was interviewed by police he told lies or said he could not recollect his movements.

  Within days of the murder, he had a sports coat dry-cleaned. The dry-cleaner said there was a mark on the jacket similar to a blood-stain. The binding used to tie the victim was similar to the type the man used to stake his tomato plants. Another suspect who matched the descriptions and knew Maria James moved to Queensland.

  But there was another name nominated at least four times after the bookshop murder. He was 167 centimetres, hated women, had an explosive temper and loved knives.

  Peter Keogh.

  MARGARET Hobbs spent her life exploring evil. As a probation officer and psychotherapist specialising in sexually deviant behavior, she dealt with some of Victoria’s most dangerous, serial offenders.

  One of Hobbs’s clients was Robert Arthur Selby Lowe, who abducted and killed six-year-old Sheree Beasley in June 1991. It was Hobbs who provided key evidence that helped police convict him of the murder.

  She treated hundreds of people with compulsive criminal disorders. One of them was Peter Keogh. Even the professional counsellor sometimes needs counselling and, when Hobbs had a particularly difficult or disturbing case, she went to her trusted colleague and teacher, Dr Jim Goulding, who was an acknowledged expert in the fields of the subconscious mind and clinical medical hypnosis.

  Hobbs studied and lectured at Goulding’s Australian Academy of Hypnotic Science and they had been friends for years. Goulding is now in his 70s and recovering from a heart attack, but he recalls when Hobbs came to his Deepdene office in 1980 – only days after the bookshop murder – to talk of Peter Keogh.

  ‘Margaret Hobbs was one of my students at the time and a very dear friend. I haven’t forgotten what she said – “I know that bastard did it. He told me he was going to get her”.’

  The doctor believed that Keogh told Hobbs: ‘I’m going to kill that bitch.’

  ‘She was a very responsible lady. She was very disturbed by him for years. She was a brilliant woman who specialised in deviant sexuality. She could spot a maniac a mile away.’

  His psychotherapist wife Joan was present during the conversation. ‘Margaret was very distressed by it. He had made rather threatening comments about a woman. She was convinced that he was the person who committed the murder.’

  Hobbs could not go to the police because she was trapped by the code of confidentiality, but Jim Goulding had no ethical dilemma. The suspect was not his client.

  He spoke to a senior policeman about his conversation with Hobbs and the information was passed to homicide. But by the time it reached the investigators, it had been diluted from a possible breakthrough to a well-meaning tip.

  It said that Margaret Hobbs had a client named Peter Keogh who lived in the area near the bookshop and hated women. No-one told police of Keogh’s alleged threat. For the homicide squad, 1980 was the worst on record, with 15 of 55 murders unsolved by the end of the year.

  The squad was split into crews of investigators, each with its own cases. Frank Bellesini ran one of the teams of detectives and while the bookshop murder was not his case, he heard that one witness identified a suspect with a limp.

  He immediately thought back to the angry young man with a knife he’d arrested seventeen years earlier. ‘I knew he loved knives and thought he was worth a look.’

  Bellesini didn’t need to check the records to see if the suspect had a limp. Keogh’s kneecaps, shattered by police bullets at the Preston railway station, left him with a distinctive gait.

  Police interviewed Keogh on 14 August, 1980. They searched his Westgarth Street flat and found nothing. They could not find a link between the suspect and Maria James.

  He said he was with his girlfriend, Judy McNulty, who supported his alibi … at the time.

  TERRI Delaney loves to sit and watch her two daughters play. They are too young to know disappointment and too protected to know evil. ‘My kids are never afraid. They don’t know what fear is.’

  Their young mother knows how precious the innocence of childhood can be. Hers was stolen by Peter Keogh in a Northcote home 20 years earlier.

  Her mother, Judy McNulty, fell for Keogh when they both worked at the Pampas Pastry factory. She had separated from her husband and was attracted to the rough-looking co-worker with the criminal past.

  ‘He was so different to dad,’ Mrs Delaney would remember much later. ‘Mum was a lovely lady who thought she could fix him and she couldn’t.’ Terri was just 12 when Keogh moved in to their St David Street home. ‘I didn’t get on with him at all. I’m not sure whether it was because of the (marriage) break-up or because he was covered in tattoos and so different to dad, but I didn’t take to him at all.’

  She felt the new man in the house didn’t like her and made no effort to break down the natural barriers.

  She remembers the family returning from her Aunt Dorothy’s South Melbourne home to find Keogh. ‘He was sitting in a chair. He was calm and acting too nice.’

  Unusually for the lazy and self-obsessed de facto, he offered to make hot drinks for the family – coffee for Judy and Milo for the kids. Terri refused the offer, but her sister, Allison, nine, and her mother accepted.<
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  They went to bed, Allison with her mother, and Terri and brother Bill, three, in the second bedroom. ‘I woke up and saw him pouring medicine in Bill’s mouth. He was still asleep. I asked him what he was doing and he said he (Bill) had a cough, but he wasn’t coughing.’

  He then took the sleeping boy into his mother’s room, leaving the twelve-year-old alone and isolated in one bedroom. She said she got up to find her mother. ‘He grabbed me and was dragging me back (to her bedroom). I tried to scream but nothing came out.’

  Finally her mother woke and took the children across the road to a neighbor’s house. ‘She was still dopey.’ The family remain convinced that Keogh used drugs to sedate Judy and Allison so he could rape the twelve-year-old.

  Judy McNulty ended the relationship, but Keogh reverted to type. He stalked the family, terrorising his former lover. She came home in December 1981 and checked the house, looking for the man she once liked and now despised.

  She opened her wardrobe to find her shoes and clothes slashed. Too late she smelt the roll-your-own cigarettes Keogh smoked.

  He jumped out from behind the wardrobe and grabbed her. He was carrying a knife. He put her in a headlock and forced her into the street. He had a knife at her throat and dragged her towards his car, parked in the next street. Luckily, the local garbage truck turned into the street and, again, Keogh reverted to type. He ran.

  Judy and her children moved to another house, but he continued to harass them and they moved again. ‘Mum was really scared,’ Mrs Delaney said.

  She said for years they hardly mentioned Keogh. ‘I think mum had an awful lot of guilt over being involved with him.’

  It was years later, when Keogh was released from jail after serving his sentence for killing Vicki Cleary, that the mother finally confided in her adult daughter.

  ‘If I hadn’t woken up that night he would have raped and murdered you,’ she told her. It was only then the daughter understood. ‘I was young and I don’t think I realised what could have happened.’