Underbelly 6 Read online

  Ramchen was determined to settle his affairs. He put the mansion on the market – originally for $5.85 million, but later dropping the asking price to $3 million plus. In July 2002, it went to auction and was passed in at $3.8 million before being sold for an undisclosed price. Macedon Grange was also put on the market for $1.475 million.

  Charlie Bezzina passed a message to the ill man. He wanted an anonymous letter telling him where Jacqui’s body was hidden. ‘I would like to be able to find her for the sake of the family.’ The letter never arrived.

  IN 1950 Hennie and Josephus Mertens and their three children left Rotterdam in their native Holland for Australia. The young mother couldn’t speak English and was left to survive in a house in the bush near Monbulk while her husband worked in the building trade. She later started making sandwiches for a local shop, then serving food in a small local restaurant.

  Within 10 years Hennie Mertens felt confident enough to start her own business. She took over a local hall used for bush dances and turned it into the Highwood Inn, a restaurant catering for day-trippers with home-made soups, old-style roasts, and traditional desserts. ‘They loved my jelly wine trifle,’ she was to recall.

  Her daughter Jacqui worked at the restaurant even before she left school.

  ‘She was a popular hostess. She was good with children, everyone liked her.’

  Jacqui showed her creative talents while still at school, painting European winter scenes on the wall of the Highwood Inn.

  Hennie Mertens said her teenage daughter was a beauty who remained unaffected by her looks.

  She tells the story of a friend of the family – a lonely, plain-looking boy, who couldn’t get a date for the local social event of the year.

  Jacqui offered to go as his partner and the boy was the proudest person at the dance. He died suddenly about a year later.

  ‘She had a very good heart and cared for people.’

  Hennie knows her daughter is dead and she knows the murderer will never appear before a jury. ‘It happened 10 years ago but it is on your mind every day.’

  Jacqui would never have just walked away from her family, she said. ‘She told me she couldn’t leave her children.’

  Hennie Mertens went to the magistrate’s court to listen to the evidence gathered against Victor. She felt sadness, anger and a strange sense of relief.

  The anger was over hearing lies about her daughter and the sadness was finding the case would remain unsolved.

  But the feeling of relief came when she saw her three grandchildren outside the court – all seemingly healthy and content.

  ‘I was happy to see that Vic had looked after them. They all look well. He is a good father.’

  She remains bitter that Vic has stopped her seeing her grandchildren. ‘I hope one day when they are old enough they will come here. They will always be welcome.’

  She was moved to see Lev. Mature beyond his years, the gifted student had inherited his mother’s fine-boned features. ‘He is just like her.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Cold-blooded murder

  ‘It is hard to think of a more callous, heartless, wicked person.’

  AS a child, Colleen Moss loved to watch her mother in the warm country kitchen of their modest Bendigo family home.

  Her once fun-loving father, Johnny, was gravely ill and the daily ritual of seeing her mother prepare evening meals as if nothing had changed was somehow soothing to the concerned and confused teenager.

  Lorraine Moss was glad of the company. A good cook, she usually enjoyed answering questions from her curious children about recipes and ingredients.

  But when Colleen watched her mother mix a white powder into a bowl of butter her questions were met abruptly.

  At first she said doctors had given her the powder to spread on John’s toast.

  But when the teenager asked further questions, her mother suddenly snapped, Colleen was to recall. ‘My mother became very angry and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and then led me out of the kitchen, and then closed the door in my face.’

  It was a strangely vehement reaction, out of all proportion to the apparently harmless question. Colleen never forgot it.

  THEY were just kids when they married. It was the oldest story of all but, being young, they didn’t realise it then. Boy meets girl. Girl gets pregnant. She was 17 and imagined she was in love; he was 21 and working at a local meat processing plant. From whirlwind romance to shotgun wedding took only a few months and then, suddenly, there they were: handcuffed together, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do them part.

  They had met at the Golden Square Fire Brigade country dance late in 1965. Johnny Moss was Lorraine Stone’s first and only boyfriend and she was determined, back then, to make a go of their life together.

  They were to have two girls and a boy in four years and settle into a house in Upper Road, California Gully, on the outskirts of Bendigo, a provincial city in the heart of the old goldfields in central Victoria.

  They were both raised in the region, their horizons were limited and it seemed natural they would settle down there in the same way thousands of other couples had.

  They had a decent-sized block of land behind the house and Johnny grew vegetables and fruit trees. He even dug a little dam to keep yabbies for fishing bait.

  Money was tight but that wasn’t unusual in that time and place. The young family looked forward to their regular fishing trips to the Murray River and seemed content enough.

  Johnny liked to go to the Newmarket Hotel with his mates on a Friday night, but mostly he enjoyed pottering around the house and garden.

  He welcomed friends home for a beer and to watch the footy, particularly when Carlton was playing. Under the old VFL zoning system, promising Bendigo players ended up playing with Carlton, so there was always a lot of support for the Blues among the locals.

  Lorraine was quiet and had fewer friends than the gregarious Johnny. She spent most of her time caring for her children.

  Moss’s work at Mayfair Hams and Bacon was hard and bloody but he didn’t seem to mind. He eventually progressed to first man in the ‘gut line’, where his job was to open up freshly killed pigs and expose their internal organs for removal.

  He was well-respected by bosses and fellow workers and was chosen by 50 staff to be their union representative.

  Even after he lost his left eye in a car accident, he remained active and energetic. Honed by hard work and an outdoor lifestyle, he was hardly ever sick. ‘I would think he was one of the fittest blokes at work,’ his oldest friend, Cliff Johnson, was to say.

  But, in November 1978, John Moss became ill, and began to suffer from unexplained night sweats, stomach cramps and diarrhoea.

  At first, doctors diagnosed gastroenteritis. Later they would suspect leptospirosis – a disease suffered by vets, slaughtermen and people who regularly deal with domestic animals.

  Those in contact with the urine or kidneys of infected animals are particularly susceptible. Moss, who made a living from handling freshly-killed pigs, was an obvious candidate.

  He was to recover, but entered a cycle of ill-health that would include frustrating bouts of fatigue, dizziness, and numbness in his fingers and toes.

  In September, 1982, he went to his local doctor after a vomiting attack. He told Doctor Jagat Singh he had developed a rash, a tender stomach and had been exhausted for 10 days.

  Tests were inconclusive, but because the problems subsided no one could forecast it was the beginning of a slow, painful and mysterious decline leading to his death. Within weeks, Moss apparently began to recover and tried to wrest back control of his life.

  It was a pattern that would continue for the next two years. He would appear to improve and then slide back, each relapse leaving him weaker and more disoriented.

  Tracey Moss didn’t know her father was seriously ill until the middle of 1983 when he came into the house after gardening and she noticed his back was covered with an a
ngry rash and hundreds of blisters.

  In February, 1983, Cliff Johnson was driving home from work with him when Moss said he was losing feeling in his hands. Then, at work soon afterwards, ‘He turned white and started shivering,’ Johnson was to say.

  The once robust slaughterman began to take more and more sick leave. Sometimes he would have to leave in the middle of a shift and eventually he could not work at all. But Lorraine continued to take him to the pub on Friday, first with a cane and finally in a wheelchair, so he would not lose contact with his workmates.

  ‘John became very frustrated with his illness and was very determined to get better,’ Johnson said. He could not use his thumbs and had to use his fist to light a match.

  In May, 1983, he went to the Bendigo Hospital complaining of numb hands, blurred vision and slurred speech. Doctors considered a stroke, encephalitis or heavy metal poisoning as possible causes.

  He was admitted to hospital and again appeared to improve, although he could still only walk with the help of a frame.

  Johnny Moss was not the only man at Mayfair to suffer from a mystery illness. A close friend of his, Dennis Thatcher, was one of the regular crew who would meet at the Newmarket Hotel. They worked on the same line at Mayfair – and had their lunch and ‘smokos’ together.

  ‘Johnny would sometimes pass his lunch on to someone else because he felt too crook to eat,’ Thatcher was to say. One day, Moss gave Thatcher a serve of home-made stew. Thatcher, a single man, took the meal home for dinner that night but after eating it he became ill and began to hallucinate.

  ‘It was the worst I had ever felt in my life … I couldn’t eat anything or drink anything and I wonder how I survived,’ he was to recall of his ordeal. Many of the symptoms were similar to those Moss had suffered in the early days of his illness.

  ‘I started to put two and two together and after hearing a bit of talk about Johnny I thought that perhaps the meal I ate of Johnny’s was laced with something.’

  He was not the only one. Another worker took eight months to recover after eating one of Johnny’s home-cooked lunches.

  EVERYONE felt sorry for Lorraine Moss. Her once strong, fit husband was becoming an invalid and no one seemed able to help. Not only was he losing his strength but his mind as well.

  He suffered from hallucinations, found it difficult to speak and his behaviour became increasingly bizarre. He would pluck at imaginary items on his blankets and lapsed in and out of consciousness.

  His throat was stripped raw and he had difficulty eating. He lost weight and became a shadow of the tough worker he had once been. Doctors ordered tests in Bendigo, Ballarat and Melbourne but no one could find why a seemingly healthy man was collapsing into delirium.

  What puzzled medical staff was that five times when he was admitted to hospital his condition improved, only to relapse on release.

  During the battle, Lorraine Moss remained loyal and stoic. It seemed to friends, neighbours and relatives that she cared for him seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

  When the weather was warm enough, she would take him into the garden he could no longer tend. He would reach out to try to touch the soil and foliage he loved.

  When he grew so ill that he was admitted to the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, his wife stayed in the nurses’ quarters to be close to him. She refused help from the District Nurse, saying it was her duty to care for her husband.

  When he was well enough to be at home she would feed him, even though he had lost his appetite. Home-cooked meals when he felt up to it, tinned fruit when he wasn’t. She would race off to buy Chinese food when he asked, only to find he had lost the urge when she returned.

  Even Johnny’s mother said Lorraine was devoted to the point of obsession to her ill husband. ‘Lorraine insisted on doing everything for John. She would not allow anyone else to help John in any way,’ Marjory Moss was to say.

  Victims usually recover from leptospirosis within weeks but in some cases it can cause damage to the kidneys, liver and heart. Only rarely is it fatal.

  But Moss continued to fade. His one good eye rolled in his head, his tongue lolled from his mouth. His feet and hands were swollen and numb. He could not walk and hardly ate. It was painfully clear he was dying.

  In August, 1983, doctors took nail and hair samples to test for lead arsenic poisoning. In an act, described by a Supreme Court judge nine years later as ‘gross carelessness’, the results were mislaid and didn’t get to the doctors at the Austin Hospital until January 12, 1984.

  It was too late … Johnny Moss died the next day. He was 38.

  When the doctors told her he was dead, Lorraine Moss at first refused to believe it. Then she collapsed. Hospital staff, although conditioned to the irrationality of grief, were still puzzled by her reaction.

  She asked one of them a strange question: ‘Am I going to jail?’

  WHEN doctors found the cause of death they notified police and it was handed to the homicide squad.

  Four days after John Moss died, police searched the house and found nothing but, two days later, they came back and searched again. This time they discovered a small brown Tupperware container hidden on rafters in the garage. It contained an off-white powder, later found to be arsenic.

  A fortnight later, on February 3, 1984, Detective Sergeant John Hill spoke to the new widow and asked her if any arsenic was kept on the premises.

  She was adamant: ‘There’s never been any of that around here.’

  But her 17-year-old daughter, Tracey, said, ‘Yes we did, remember, we bought it for Dad once, years ago.’

  Police were later to establish that the Mosses bought a tin of Lanes brand arsenate from a local nursery in 1978 – around the time Johnny Moss first reported feeling ill.

  The powder – used to spray apple trees for Codling Moth was withdrawn from sale in the early 1980s.

  Lorraine asked Hill: ‘Does this mean we are in trouble? I don’t want to be blamed for something I didn’t do.’

  Police sent samples from Moss’s body to the Atomic Energy Commission in NSW to be tested by analytical chemists. Commission experts using neutron activation analysis showed Moss’s hair had 80 times the normal level of arsenic. Tests on hair and nails showed Moss had been methodically poisoned and had developed a tolerance to arsenic. Finally, he was fed four massive doses over the last eight weeks of his life.

  Months later, Detective Senior Sergeant Jack Jacobs and Senior Detective Brendan Murphy took Lorraine to the Bendigo police station for questioning. She had now changed from victim to suspect.

  She told the detectives she had devoted herself to her husband – ‘helping him swim, exercise, lifting him, carting him around everywhere. I loved him, I had him 18 years, no 20 years … I did not hurt him. The children loved him, we loved him and our whole life was fishing, gardening and loving him. He loved me. I loved him and he loved the kids.

  ‘I bathed him, washed him, powdered him, put cream here, powder there, and I watched him go down to nothing. Why would I do all that, then hurt him?’

  Murphy said, ‘It seems someone wanted to hurt John.’

  She said: ‘Johnny didn’t have any enemies; everybody loved Johnny.’

  The detective said, ‘Someone was killing him in a slow, painful way and we’ve already explained that the chances of it being a stranger are remote.’

  She responded, ‘Yes, but I didn’t hurt him. I saw him trickle away to nothing. I looked after him. I did everything I could. I asked professors, the doctors, what was wrong with him. They’d say, “We’ll do this test, we’ll operate this day or that day.” We had plans for the future.’

  Which was half true, anyway. It turned out that Lorraine had plans for the future. But they hadn’t involved her husband.

  The detectives asked her if she had been faithful. The widow said, ‘I’d never been unfaithful to him and he’d never been unfaithful to me … Johnny was my man.’

  But some were not so sure. Sisters-in-law Brenda and Doro
thy Murley joined a Thursday morning tenpin bowling team at Bendigo and one of their team-mates was Lorraine Moss.

  In the late 1970s, the team finally won a premiership but Lorraine missed the celebration because she was in hospital for an ear operation.

  The Murleys decided to take Moss her trophy and flowers. They soon wished they hadn’t. They walked in to her room to see their team-mate cuddling a man with his head resting on her stomach. It was not her husband.

  ‘I wished the floor had opened up and swallowed me up because I was so embarrassed,’ Brenda Murley would recall more than 20 years later.

  It was around the time Johnny Moss started to get sick. A defence lawyer would call that coincidence. But police don’t believe in coincidence.

  IT didn’t take long for the rumours to start. Lorraine Moss killed her husband to run off with another bloke.

  The Mosses had always struggled financially; with three kids there was never anything left over for luxuries. During her married life, Lorraine rarely used make-up and wore practical, hard-wearing clothing.

  But, according to daughter Colleen, ‘Our whole family life fell apart after Dad died. Mum changed. She started wearing a lot of make-up and provocative clothing.’

  Bobby Whyte worked at Mayfair with Johnny and had started doing odd jobs around the Moss home when his work-mate became an invalid – but it was no act of charity. Johnny sometimes expressed mild annoyance that Bobby was always around his home but the gravely-ill man didn’t have the strength for a confrontation. Lorraine apparently didn’t feel the tension, saying Whyte was ‘a tower of strength’ during her husband’s long illness.

  A few months after Moss died, Bobby Whyte moved in. ‘It wasn’t long at all before my mother and Bobby were sleeping in the same bed,’ Colleen said.

  Lorraine once raised the issue of the rumours with her daughter, Tracey. ‘What would you do if I told you I killed your father?’ she asked.

  Tracey responded, ‘I would kill you.’

  Lorraine then said, ‘Well, I didn’t anyway.’