Underbelly 5 Read online

  Terri Delaney’s children love to play. They are still too young to wonder why their mother is frightened of the dark and always checks behind the furniture whenever they come home.

  DOROTHY Haynes was Judy McNulty’s elder sister. When she first met Keogh she sensed trouble. She thought, ‘Judy, what can you see in this man?’

  ‘Judy was a warm, loving person. Whenever you went into her home there was a sense of warmth, but there was a coldness in this place.’ Dorothy Haynes said her sister was filled with guilt from subjecting her children to the dangerous Keogh.

  ‘Judy was never the same.’ On 4 February, 1982, police released an identikit image of a suspect in the bookshop murder. It would be the last major public appeal for new evidence. Police manned phones that night, hoping for fresh leads.

  Judy McNulty was visiting her sister that night at her South Melbourne home.

  They sat in the lounge and watched a Channel 9 report on the murder. Dorothy thought of the cold and violent man who had terrorised her sister. At the same time, Judy said, ‘I bet it was him.’

  Judy asked Dorothy to ring the police with the tip. At no time did she say she had provided Keogh with the crucial alibi more than a year earlier.

  Police notes from the time show Dorothy rang, identified Keogh, and left her name and number. She said he is a ‘slimer … a butcher who carries a knife and likes women’.

  What police did not know was the key alibi witness was in the next room and ready to recant. If they had known, Keogh would again have become a suspect in the case.

  Looking back almost 20 years, Dorothy believes her sister wanted to talk about Keogh and the bookshop murder. ‘She probably knew more than she was prepared to say. There were times that I think she wanted to talk but she was reluctant because of a sense of guilt. I wish I had urged her to talk, to open up.’

  Judy McNulty’s mother, Dorothy, also saw one of the photo-fits of the bookshop suspect. She remarked how the killer’s legs appeared too short for his body, ‘Just like Peter’.

  Police received about 40 calls that night with tips on the case. One was from Josephine Reeves – another sister of Judy McNulty. Police records show she said: ‘The person identified on 3KZ sounds like Peter Keogh, who has previously attacked my sister with a knife.’ But the police officer who took the call, mistakenly wrote the surname as Reedes, not Reeves. No connection was made to Judy McNulty, whose maiden name was Reeves.

  The key alibi witness was never re-interviewed.

  AFTER the trial of her daughter’s killer, Lorna Cleary was exhausted. She lay on her couch, still not understanding how the man who stabbed her daughter to death with a hunting knife, could have been acquitted of murder.

  The phone rang. It was a woman’s voice expressing sympathy.

  ‘I thought it might have been one of the jurors ringing to say she thought it was the wrong decision.’ But Lorna Cleary would find it was a woman who lived with Keogh.

  ‘She said, “I was the lucky one. It could have been me”.’

  The woman didn’t give a name, but the during the next call she said she was Judy. It was Judy McNulty, the woman who provided Keogh’s alibi for the bookshop murder.

  In the next call, she went further and told Mrs Cleary. ‘He’s already got away with murder.’

  ‘I asked, “What do you mean?” and she said, “The Thornbury bookshop”. It just came out of the blue.’

  The two women would talk regularly on the phone. Judy McNulty said, the day after the murder of Maria James, she was in the car with Keogh as they went to work. ‘She said he was very nervy and fidgety. He kept changing the channels on the car radio.’

  Judy McNulty concluded he was trying to find news reports on the bookshop murder. She later moved to Warrnambool to be well away from Keogh. ‘She was scared of him,’ Mrs Cleary said.

  The two women kept in contact. ‘She then rang and said, “I’m dying. I’ve got cancer and I wanted you to know”.’

  She died on 30 April, 1994, before police could re-interview her over Keogh’s alibi. She was 47.

  JULIE McAllister believed that after almost 30 years in the retail and hospitality industries she could pick a fake. She was wrong.

  It was while working at a Preston hotel in 1992 that she first met Peter Keogh. He had only been out of jail a few months after completing his sentence for killing Vicki Cleary.

  The single mother of two boys started having occasional lunches with Keogh. He told her Vicki’s death was a terrible mistake. ‘He said it was an accident. He went there to slash the tyres of her car. He said there was a struggle and she was stabbed. Because he was in jail for such a short time I believed him.’

  ‘Billy’ was one of the regulars at the Junction Hotel who would chat to Julie McAllister during quiet spells. Three separate times, the grey-haired man told her that Keogh, ‘killed the girl at the bookshop’. The hotel is only a few hundred metres from where Maria James was stabbed to death twelve years earlier.

  She thought he was confused and was talking about the Vicki Cleary case. She gave it no further thought – later, she wished she had.

  In early 1993, Keogh moved into her Mill Park house. She says he went through a period of heavy drinking and pill abuse, but, after a warning, his behavior seemed to improve.

  After a fight, he would sometimes send her flowers – carnations, the same type of flowers sent to Maria James before she was murdered.

  By early 1995, she had decided to return to country Victoria, believing it would give her younger son the best opportunities to grow. At first, Keogh was enthusiastic about the move, but he cooled to the idea.

  But Julie McAllister was beginning to tire of the lazy and erratic Keogh. She told him she was selling her house and moving. He could come or stay – it was his choice.

  She bought a house on almost a hectare of land, in a quiet court of four houses, ten minutes from Traralgon. The peace she was looking for would not last long.

  Her relationship with Keogh had broken down. They barely talked. He wouldn’t get a job. She told him to change. He wouldn’t.

  In April 2000, she told him to leave. She went to a bank and borrowed $10,000 to repay a debt to Keogh. He seemed to take the news calmly.

  ‘He stole property worth $4500 from my shed and $9000 from my father.’ It would be the least of her problems.

  The same pattern of harassment that terrified many women in Keogh’s life and cost Vicki Cleary hers was to begin again.

  It started with nuisance calls at home. She changed her number, then there were calls at work. She went to Melbourne during the school holidays and her car was vandalised.

  ‘He knew I would be in Melbourne and he drove around my friends’ houses until he saw the car.’

  In August, he was seen sitting in the car park of the Traralgon hotel where she worked. ‘There was no reason for him to be there.’

  Local rangers received an anonymous call that her dogs were barking. Centrelink received nine calls falsely claiming she was cheating to get a single mother’s part-pension.

  On 24 August, Julie McAllister went to the Moe Magistrates Court for an intervention order. She accepted a court undertaking that Keogh could not come within 200 metres of her property or business and could not phone her.

  In September, a quarry truck turned up and was about to dump crushed rock on her driveway before she told the driver it was a hoax call. Then he took a caveat out on the house. ‘It was mine, he was just cage-rattling.’

  In March 2001, she went to Melbourne for her eldest son’s wedding. She left her car in the driveway of her home and her three dogs on the property. To anyone who didn’t know her movements it would appear the house was occupied. But someone knew better.

  The house was well ablaze by the time the fire brigade arrived. Police were later to establish, the fire was deliberately lit in Julie McAllister’s bedroom.

  Whoever lit the fire left nothing to chance. The water to the property had been turned off at
the mains.

  When Julie McAllister contacted her insurance company to make her claim, she learned how long the arsonist had been planning the attack.

  Six months earlier, on 7 August, her insurance company received an anonymous tip. One of their customers, a Julie McAllister, had paid $5000 to a professional arsonist to burn her house down. The caller claimed he had secretly moved her good furniture out of the house and replaced it with old items as part of the scam.

  Police believe Keogh made the call and later set fire to the house.

  ‘I was terrified. I pride myself on being a good judge of character, but he conned me. I know now that I didn’t know him. I didn’t see that side of him until he left. He had two personalities.’

  ON Melbourne Cup Day, 1984, Vicki Cleary went to Broadford for a day with her family. When she returned about 5pm the house in Beauchamp Street, Preston, was empty.

  Later Keogh told her the police had visited to search the back shed as part of a routine search. It was something to do with a missing girl.

  The body of six-year-old Kylie Maybury was later found in Donald Street, Preston.

  She had been raped and strangled. Kylie Maybury was abducted after she went to a shop in Plenty Road, Preston, to buy sugar. She lived with her mother in Gregory Grove, about 70 metres from where Keogh lived.

  Relatives said Kylie Maybury would never trust a stranger. They said the man who took her had to be a local she recognised.

  At the inquest, coroner, Hugh Adams, said he was puzzled as to how traces of Valium were found in the bloodstream of the victim.

  Police say it was unusual for a child sex offender to use drugs on his victims.

  But, years earlier, Keogh was alleged to have used drugs to sedate his de facto and two of her children before trying to molest a twelve-year-old girl.

  The murder of Kylie Maybury has never been solved.

  PHIL Cleary says he was determined to expose Keogh, but was never obsessed by the case.

  He wrote articles about the stupidity of the law, which could find a stalker was provoked into killing. He wrote his autobiography Cleary Independent, which covered his sister’s death.

  He wrote to the then Chief Commissioner, Neil Comrie, in 1997, raising Keogh’s name in connection with the Thornbury bookshop murder. Comrie responded, ‘Dear Phil … I have read your letter with great interest … I felt it was necessary to have the relevant files reviewed.’

  Because of Cleary’s high profile, people who knew Keogh began to contact him with more stories about the killer’s past. ‘I did not seek these people out – they came to me.’

  On Sunday, 24 June, 2001, Peter Keogh left his small flat in Mansfield Street, Thornbury, and sat in his car.

  He turned the ignition and idled the motor. There was a tube from the exhaust into the cabin. He killed himself with carbon monoxide.

  He had told friends he was worried that Cleary was going to try to expose him over a minor traffic case.

  ‘That was nonsense. Perhaps he was worried I would expose him over other matters that may have involved him,’ Cleary says.

  Cleary has been asked to make a statement to police over Keogh’s suicide. He shows neither delight nor remorse at the death of the man he believes was truly evil.

  ‘I saw this as a battle of wills and I was not going to lose.’

  For police, the trail in the bookshop murder has long gone cold. The suspect, Keogh, is dead, as is his alibi witness, Judy McNulty.

  Keogh’s friend, Brian Freake, was murdered in his Highview Road home in March, 1998. The man who followed Vicki Cleary on behalf of Keogh, committed suicide in September, 1998. Margaret Hobbs, the psychotherapist who treated Keogh and believed he killed Maria James, was killed in a car accident in January, 1996.

  But, in the homicide squad, where there is death there is hope. Why Keogh committed suicide will be the subject of a coronial inquest. Detectives want to know if Keogh took his own life to avoid being exposed by the Cleary investigation.

  Before Keogh’s body was cremated on 29 June, medical experts went to the morgue and took a sample for DNA testing, to see if he could be connected with any unsolved murders – including the deaths of Maria James and Kylie Maybury.

  CHAPTER 2

  Burning desire

  I don’t love her, but I’m not cold and heartless either.’

  THE crime he’s accused of is not the only thing that shocks about the man in the dock. The first time we see him, there is the shock of recognition. He is so ordinary – so obviously one of us. A suburban husband and father, bland to the bone. Who could guess at the fatal fantasies hidden behind that mask?

  Mark John Smith is 37 but looks younger, almost boyish. He’s clean-shaven, and his dark hair is cut short and neat, with no sign of grey. Despite being held on remand in prison for months, his wiry frame is close to what it was when he trained regularly on his bicycle. His voice, heard in court only in taped interviews, is light and pleasant. And a touch too deferential, a juror might think, as if he’s trying to be agreeable to police, when another man might be angry at being accused of such a crime.

  Not quite handsome, not dashing, but trim and fit-looking, he wears square, fine-rimmed glasses and, even in a civilian suit, has a faintly military bearing that comes from being in the air force since high school.

  A harmless nerd, some might assume. Others, stealing a look from jury box or press bench, might think his lips thin and mean, but that would be unfair. The fact is, he wouldn’t look out of place in the jury box, press bench or bar table. He’s the man next door. Even his name sounds like a lame alias in a hotel register joke. Which is ironic, because Smith’s downfall, if you believe the police and the prosecution, began with his infatuation for another woman.

  THE prosecution case against Smith, which reached court in late 2000, was forged from a chain of circumstantial evidence. But at its heart is a scenario as shocking as an axe murder.

  To find him guilty, and not just seriously misunderstood, the jury had to believe that this mild-mannered, air force computer technician got up one morning, showered and dressed, took his baby son from a bassinette in another room and put him in bed next to his sleeping wife, soaked a handkerchief in ether (or a similar flammable anaesthetic), held it over her face until she lost consciousness, set fire to the bed and drove to work. Calmly planning, in a prosecutor’s bleak and carefully-chosen word, to ‘delete’ his family so that he could start a new life in a new country with a new woman and her child.

  Unless a jury believed Smith capable of such chilling premeditation, the prosecution and police had wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years, twisting together strands of evidence to form what the prosecutor described as ‘an unbreakable rope’.

  It is the web of circumstance – the ‘timeline’ of events, before and after the fire that killed Smith’s son and maimed his wife – that the prosecution relied on to show that murder, and not a tragic accident, unfolded at the unremarkable house at 7 Lorena Close, Hoppers Crossing, on the morning of 4 October, 1995.

  Investigators uncovered a lot about the accused man in the five years after the deadly fire, little of it in his favor, but they produced no ‘smoking gun’ – the alleged anaesthetic, a witness, or a confession – that would, itself, nail down charges of murder and attempted murder. The result is that Smith was charged and tried on the basis of a ghastly and compelling story – yet another variation of the ancient theme of sex, betrayal and death.

  The question was whether a jury would buy it.

  HIS Honor, Justice Frank Vincent, has seen a lot of accused murderers in his time. He defended dozens of them before rising from bar table to bench, and has sentenced plenty since. Each one different, but many of them classifiable into broad groups. There are the mad, the bad, the greedy and the pathetic – part of a vicious life cycle where violence begets violence. There are others caught in circumstances beyond their control that force them to lash out with fatal results.
r />   But how do you classify Mark John Smith, who has sat in the dock at the Supreme Court, facing Justice Vincent – and some disturbing questions – for a month?

  Smith’s defence counsel, Stratton Langslow, has, inside and outside the court room, depicted a mild and inoffensive man bewildered by the awful fix he’s in. So bewildered, in fact, that the kindly Langslow didn’t put him in the witness box to be exposed to robust cross-examination by the prosecution.

  Langslow, a pipe-smoking, rumpled, Rumpolean figure, without benefit of script-writers to ensure witty ripostes and happy endings, boxed on like the old trouper he is, reminding the jury at every chance that no matter what else it heard, no-one could prove absolutely that his client had used a bottle of ether and a box of matches instead of filing for divorce.

  Smith sat stock still and silent, meanwhile, as a passing parade of witnesses – one by video link-up from America – dissected key parts of his private life in the past decade.

  SMITH was not charged with contemplating or consummating an affair with the other woman, with sending her his entire superannuation and severance payout of $110,000, with buying her an expensive engagement ring and a cheap car, or lying to cover up the above. But, in effect, those actions have been put on trial. Because it is in the context of such behavior that the fatal fire at Hoppers Crossing began to look sinister to police, who initially suspected no more than an accidental tragedy caused by an aromatherapy oil burner.

  In his closing address the prosecutor, Bill Morgan-Payler, summarised the Crown case, detail by damning detail, to paint a picture of a man so obsessed with his lover and her baby (not his) that he would set up a fire to kill his wife and child.

  Smith, bright younger son of a respectable Cobram dairy farming family, joined the air force as an apprentice in the early 1980s. He did well, and in 1991 was chosen in a team to go to the United States to work on new systems for F-111 fighter aircraft. The year before, he had met Nicole Taylor, a Queensland-born teacher, and they had become engaged. When the Florida posting was confirmed, they moved the wedding forward to marry before leaving.