Underbelly 2 Read online

  But, seventeen years on, she pays her children’s father (‘I call him the sperm donor, not my husband’) a grudging compliment. ‘He did some awful things,’ she says, ‘but I will say he always had a job. Still has.’

  She doesn’t add that it’s more than can be said for her three children, or most of those that hang around them. She doesn’t have to. It’s a fact of life. In her world, they learn the facts of life early. All of them.

  KATIE renames herself Kadee around the time she first leaves home. She’s fourteen, a rebel, and stays seven weeks with friends, then goes home because ‘Mum would buy me smokes, and the other people wouldn’t’. This is after they’ve returned to Myrtleford, the fifth of fifteen moves in twenty years.

  Kadee turns fifteen around the time they move to Heyfield. She leaves Maffra High School in year nine, bolts to another town and lands ‘the second best job I’ve ever had’, in an old people’s home: ‘I got $75 a fortnight and thought I was rich.’ It lasts nine weeks. Until the day (she says) her boss argued with Kadee’s grandmother on the golf course. Arguing seems to run in the family.

  Kadee’s favourite job is sorting rubbish in a recycler’s yard, but that does not last long, either. In fact, the most constant thing in her life is the social security payments. They’ve been far more reliable than most of her men. Which is where the family’s recent troubles really start.

  Kadee is sixteen when she leaves home for the second time. She takes the train from Nathalia, her mother’s eighth home in as many years, to Moe, where she’d met a girl on a previous visit. ‘Everything I owned was at my feet,’ she says, ‘and I had nowhere to go.’ She finds the girl, and arranges to stay in her flat. Three nights later they go to a party, armed with a flask of Jim Beam.

  ‘We spotted three guys. Gave them marks out of ten. One was gorgeous, and we gave him bonus points because his fly was undone. Another got seven, but he was married.’ They give only three points to the third (‘he was feral’) but when Kadee goes outside later, he follows and chats to her. His name is Brett Leskie. They spend that night and next day in the flat.

  Two days later he dumps her. A week later she gets back with him, takes him to Nathalia on the train to see her mother, flaunts her independence by sleeping with him on the couch. Pam doesn’t like the sixteen-year-old Brett (‘I thought he was a selfish little mongrel’), and, naturally, that’s enough to make Kadee want to keep him. Pam notices him looking over Kadee’s kid sister, Bilynda. ‘She was only thirteen, but she had big norks,’ is her summary of the situation.

  The pair go back to the La Trobe Valley. Kadee moves in with the Leskies, then share-farming at Yallourn North. She pays $25 a fortnight board, helps milk the cows four nights a week and Sunday mornings. She and Brett draw the ‘de facto dole’ because it’s bigger.

  It’s a wonder it lasts five months. After the split, Kadee moves in with ‘a big-time junkie’ in Moe who beats her up, then she goes back to her mother at Nathalia. They move to Moruya, in New South Wales, where Pam later has the stroke that paralyses her down one side and puts her in hospital for months. After three weeks, Kadee gets itchy feet and goes to Lakes Entrance.

  She runs into Brett Leskie at the local speedway car races, spends two nights with him at the caravan park where she’s living. ‘I tried like mad to get pregnant to him,’ she says, ‘because then I thought he’d have to stay with me.’ He leaves. She doesn’t see him for eighteen months.

  A few weeks later, she does get pregnant – to a drug addict who doesn’t know about the baby boy born later, in late 1991, back in Moruya. They all move to Sale: Pam, Bilynda, brother Glenn, Kadee and baby Harley. They stay with friends. It doesn’t work. How could it?

  While in Sale, Kadee chances on Brett in the street. He looks at the baby. She doesn’t tell him it’s not his. Later, he comes around. It’s pension day. Kadee buys a bottle of rum for the occasion: ‘I thought if we get pissed and get back on together, that’s a start.’

  This time she does get pregnant, although she later miscarries. Brett’s mother, Elizabeth Leskie, says they have to get married. Kadee, happy, borrows a debutante dress that’s too small, and has it altered. The Leskies buy the rings from a pawn shop in Morwell and set a date three weeks away, 24 October, 1992.

  A Baptist minister marries them in the front yard of the Leskies’ brick veneer on their new share-farm at Denison, on the flat irrigation farming country near Sale. The reception is a barbecue in the backyard. Kadee recalls spending the afternoon driving Brett and his mates around in her car ‘getting pissed and stoned’. Just another weekend, really.

  She says Brett is drunk by 5pm, and unconscious in bed, alone, by 8.30pm. Kadee drives to Sale, buys beer and spends her wedding night drinking with a female friend.

  The ‘honeymoon’ is spent on the farm, putting a new motor in Brett’s car. Not long afterwards, says Kadee, Brett’s parents kick him out for ‘doing donuts and burnouts’ in front of their house. They go to his sister’s at Morwell, then rent a house at Yallourn North.

  Brett, she claims, starts to ‘dress up to the nines’ and stays out late while she is home with her baby boy. She suspects he is seeing other women, and cries herself to sleep each night. She demands he leaves her enough marijuana to stay stoned all day, to kill the loneliness. She is pregnant again with her second child. Kadee has problems, but lack of fertility isn’t one of them.

  They argue at their joint 21st party in June 1993. They go to Lakes Entrance to try to patch it up. Kadee, eight months pregnant, says she finds Brett embracing Bilynda, now sixteen and still with ‘big norks’, in a back shed. He insists there’s nothing in it, but that night he tells her he’s ‘fallen out of love’ with her. She abuses him, tells him to leave.

  He takes Bilynda with him. Two weeks later he returns with a carload of mates. Kadee’s version of what happens next is that when she stops him removing his stereo from her mother’s car, he assaults her. Two weeks later she gives birth to his daughter, Shannan.

  Kadee promises revenge. If it takes her ten years, she says, she will split her husband and her sister. As it happens, it takes her only four.

  CUT to early 1997. Brett and Bilynda have had two children, Breehanna and Jaidyn. Kadee, by this time with a third child by a third man, is also coping with the knowledge that her daughter, Shannan, has leukaemia. She finally hatches her plot.

  Kadee knows if she can get Bilynda interested in someone else, she’ll leave Brett. Kadee picks one of Brett’s friends, a self-taught mechanic and panel-beater who runs a panel shop with Brett in Moe under a CES grant scheme. She calls him Grishka, but most call him Greg. She can’t spell his surname – Domaszewicz. Sometimes they call him ‘Doma’.

  ‘I stooged Brett with his best mate,’ she is to recall with characteristic bravado. ‘I kept tipping Boo (Bilynda) off about Grishka. We had a code so I could tell her when he was down the street without Brett knowing. Brett would even mind all the kids while we went down the street. Grishka knew I was using them all as puppets, pulling the strings. I said to him, I didn’t care if he stayed with Bilynda or not, as long as he split them up.’

  Eventually, Brett Leskie has an argument with Bilynda and leaves town, then heads to Kalgoorlie.

  This allows Bilynda to openly carry on her affair with Greg Domaszewicz, who seems fond of her 14-month-old son, Jaidyn, and often looks after him. For a while, Kadee is happy, or as close to it as she gets.

  Two months later, Jaidyn goes missing.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Lime Funeral

  How Rocky Iaria was buried twice

  As a crook the boy makes a pretty good fruitpicker

  ROCKY Iaria’s mamma believes in miracles. Long after giving up hope her boy will turn up alive, she prays his body will be found so she can lay him to rest properly, with tears and wreaths, a headstone of Italian marble and all the rites of her religion.

  She waits more than six years from the night Rocky disappears, never losing faith. Then, on 1
9 February, 1998, Mrs Iaria gets her miracle …

  It’s a Thursday morning, cloudless and still, another in the endless succession of fine days in the drought-stricken countryside, but perfect for weddings and funerals.

  The gravedigger at Pine Lodge lawn cemetery, a peaceful spot on the Benalla road in the flat country east of Shepparton, trundles through the cemetery gate in a tip-truck. There’s a funeral later that day; he has to open a grave so that the recently-deceased Derwent Phillip Pearson — known all his life as Jim — can be buried with his wife Dulcie, who left him behind in early August, 1991.

  He reverses the truck to the Pearson grave, which is near a tree at the rear of the cemetery, well away from the road. Then he starts the yellow Massey Ferguson tractor with its front-end bucket and backhoe, and begins work, the rattle and hum of the diesel motor echoing across the flat paddocks.

  The soil has settled a little in the six-and-a-half years since Dulcie Pearson left her Jim, but it’s easy digging with the backhoe. The operator knows from practice just how deep to go without hitting the coffin below. It’s all worked out: the first coffin into a double grave is buried two metres deep, leaving plenty of room for the second to sit above, with a few centimetres of earth sandwiched between the two.

  That’s the way it’s supposed to be, anyway. Which is why the gravedigger is surprised, he later tells police, when the jaws of the backhoe strike something odd only ‘a couple of feet down’. He gets off the tractor and peers into the hole.

  He works the levers, then stares and feels a flutter of apprehension. Poking through the loose earth is something swaddled in black plastic. The steel jaws have torn the plastic, and stinking slime oozes from the tear. For a moment, he thinks there’s been some ghastly mistake: perhaps someone has buried a baby in the wrong grave.

  It’s the wrong grave, all right. Whoever buried the thing wrapped in plastic made a mistake. They picked a fresh grave where the ground was already disturbed, but they didn’t realise — or didn’t care — that one day it would be reopened. Otherwise, it could have been the perfect crime.

  The gravedigger doesn’t know any of that yet. He calls a supervisor, who tells him to proceed carefully. He does. He jiggles the foul-smelling thing into the bucket of the front-end loader and places it gently on the truck.

  As he does, the plastic tears some more, and he sees the leg of a pair of beige-colored jeans. It’s then he knows it’s a job for the police. He kills the motor and reaches for his mobile telephone again.

  ROCKY Andrew Iaria would have turned twenty-seven in 1998, as his father, Antonio, recalls sadly when asked about the fourth of his six children.

  Iaria senior is a leathery little man with the marks of many seasons on his face.

  He speaks fractured English, learnt after arriving from Calabria at age fourteen, and doesn’t say much. His wife, Raffaela, says little more, but her eyes glisten with tears as she spreads on the table a handful of photographs marking milestones of her boy’s short life.

  Here’s Rocky the toddler. Then the cheeky schoolboy, the cocky teenager, and the sharply dressed best man at a cousin’s wedding, his curly hair short at the sides, shoulder length at the back, tumbling over the rented tuxedo as he looks at the camera with a faint smile on his angular young face.

  The wedding picture is the one his mother chooses for the memorial cards given to mourners at the Requiem Mass when they re-bury Rocky — in his own grave, this time — at Myrtleford on 3 March, 1998.

  In another snap, taken when Rocky is about seventeen, he sports a windcheater with the words ‘Already A Legend’ on it, a gold ring on his index finger, a cigarette, and a nonchalant look. He looks like a kid who wants to be a tough guy.

  The impression is reinforced in another picture, released by police. Eyes narrowed, he’s blowing out a plume of smoke and wearing a sharp checked bomber jacket. The same one he wears the night he goes missing in September, 1991.

  By that time Rocky’s twenty, and in big trouble, just like a real tough guy. But he isn’t that tough, he isn’t that smart, and he doesn’t realise the trouble is big enough to get his head blown off with a shotgun. How can he? He’s only a kid.

  Rocky Iaria was born and bred in Shepparton, where his mother moved from Myrtleford after she married Antonio in 1966.

  Raffaela Iaria will never forget the day she bought her bridesmaids’ dresses for the wedding. It’s the day Shepparton closes down for the funerals of two local teenagers, Garry Heywood and Abina Madill, abducted on 10 February, 1966, and found, murdered, sixteen days later. It’s a crime that shocks Australia, and is to echo down the years until the killer, the man they call ‘Mr Stinky’, is caught almost two decades later.

  The young bride can hardly guess that she, like the dead teenagers’ parents she pities that afternoon, will later also suffer the agony of not knowing a child’s fate.

  Not just for sixteen days, but for more than six years. In the 1990s, however, neither her son’s disappearance nor the discovery of his body is to rate much more than local headlines.

  One reason for this is that as violent death becomes more common, reaction to it wanes. Another is that for a long time Rocky Iaria’s disappearance is only that: any public interest in the mystery fades with time and the lingering suggestion that he might have run away. Third, the taint of a criminal connection hangs over the case. And, finally, the missing man belongs to people who tend to keep their tragedies private — and to settle grievances their own way.

  The Iarias live, for a while, on a small orchard at Shepparton East, before moving into the town when the children are small. They work hard but keep, in many ways, the peasant mindset of their forebears. They belong to a tight-knit local Calabrian community which, by the 1960s, dominates the Melbourne wholesale fruit and vegetable market.

  Some families flourish more than the Iarias. Such as the Latorres, who work hard and become well-known and relatively prosperous figures in the market scene.

  By the late 1980s, Mario Latorre, born in 1942, has a fruit business at Epsom, near Bendigo. His brother John Latorre, born in 1959, is a stallholder at the wholesale market in Melbourne. Their younger brother, Vincent Paul Latorre (not to be confused with an influential relative, also Vincent Latorre, now of Werribee) stays on the farm at Shepparton.

  Vince Latorre loves fast cars and he finds the money to buy them. In the late 1980s he owns, according to local police, two customised ‘Brock’ Commodores, instantly recognisable to anyone interested in cars. It’s hardly surprising that Rocky Iaria — ten years younger, also car crazy, and a seasonal farm worker — gravitates towards Latorre, a fellow Calabrian who hires farm workers he can trust in a business where edible fruit and vegetables aren’t the only produce.

  Rocky not only works for Latorre. He hangs around with him and another colorful Shepparton East identity, Danny Murtagh, who has married into a local Italian family.

  Keeping such company isn’t wise for young Rocky, according to police intelligence, which in 1989 puts some of the locals high on a list of suspects for a series of burglaries and robberies of wealthy Italians. They don’t come much wealthier than Stephen Monti, a millionaire tomato grower from Bendigo, who returns to his home in Napier Street, White Hills, on the evening of 16 May 1989, to find his back door blocked, his front door open and the house ransacked.

  Gone are a clock radio, a camera, a video recorder, watches and leather jackets — but what really hurts is that Monti’s open fireplace is smashed and the safe that had been bricked into it is gone. Few people know the safe exists, let alone what’s inside, but Monti tells police there was about $300,000 cash, 110 ounces of gold and expensive jewellery. Estimates of the total value of the haul range from $500,000 to $700,000.

  For several reasons, the best being a tip-off, police suspect the Shepparton crew for the Monti heist. One reason for this is that Vince Latorre’s distinctive Brock special is seen near Monti’s house. In fact, a truck driver with a keen eye for cars notices it
four times on the day of the robbery.

  The truckie, one Stuart Andrew Young, is later to testify in court to seeing the car at Goornong (between Shepparton and Bendigo) early that morning, then at a McEwans hardware store about 11.30am; there are two men in the car and a third getting into it after buying some ‘jemmy’ bars, the house-breaker’s tool of choice. Later, Young sees the car in a side street near Monti’s home. And, about 3.30pm, he sees it turn into the Epsom Fruit Works, owned by Mario Latorre.

  Young isn’t the only witness. It seems to others that Rocky Iaria, or someone very like him, is keeping lookout in Napier Street around the time of the burglary. Unfortunately, he tries hiding behind a post that’s thinner than he is, which makes him look both ridiculous and suspect.

  If it is Iaria dodging guiltily behind the road sign — as the Crown later claims — then as a crook the boy makes a good fruit picker.

  THE execution of the Bendigo burglary might be amateurish, but there’s nothing amateur about the information that prompts it, nor the size of the prize. It is deemed a major crime and therefore a job for the major crime squad, a group later disbanded amid official misgivings about the activities of a few of its members.

  The official line on what happens next is, in the words of one policeman, that the squad ‘commenced an investigation that identified two suspects at Shepparton’. Meaning that at dawn one morning soon after the Monti job a crew of major crime detectives uses a sledgehammer to open the door of the unit Latorre then lives in with his wife, Angela Robinson, and their small son. It’s a heavy-handed affair, and Latorre later complains about the detectives frightening his family. Meanwhile, at the Iarias’ house in Orchard Court, Rocky also cops a rude awakening.