Underbelly 5 Read online

  He would never have been able to swim to the injured sailor. The pilot dragged him more than 100 metres through the water to Campbell.

  ‘I just saw this bloodless face. I grabbed him and he was like an eel to touch, he was that cold,’ Key said.

  At first he could not get the injured man into the rescue harness, and then he realised his own leg was caught in the steel cable. If the helicopter had tried to rip him from the water, he could have lost the leg.

  Jones held the throttle open to a speed of 150 kmh into the head wind, just to keep the helicopter stationary above the two men. ‘Darryl did a fantastic job to keep it steady.’

  Once all was clear they were finally lifted above the sea. ‘When I saw the belly of the aircraft it was the best feeling I’ve had for a long time.’

  But, less than two metres from safety, the winch froze and left them hanging beneath the bucking helicopter. Finally, Barry Barclay lent out of the open door as far as his safety harness would allow, and dragged Campbell inside. ‘He just put him in a big bear hug,’ Key said. Campbell just kept mumbling ‘thank you’ while the two policeman embraced him, not with the euphoria of the moment, but to try to get some body heat back into the man who was suffering severely from hypothermia.

  A Thornbury bookshop … scene of one of Australia’s most chilling murders. The death of Maria James is still unsolved.

  Peter Raymond Keogh … convicted killer.

  The police sketch of the man who murdered Maria Theresa James. You be the judge.

  Frank MacGregor … missing, believed murdered, for 28 years.

  John Morrow … fled to New Zealand with MacGregor and gave the vital tip.

  The MacGregors … Frank, Andrew, Cathy, Marjorie and Heather. Christina is at the back. Heather was later murdered.

  Brothers … Frank (left) and Andrew.

  George Brown … when he worked as a strapper in Melbourne. Murdered, but on whose orders?

  Phyllis Hocking … and (inset) with her mother. Murdered for her modest estate.

  Phyllis and husband Jack … adopted a son. It would destroy them both.

  Jack and Phyllis … looking forward to a happy retirement. It wasn’t.

  A memorial marking Jack’s conservation work.

  Philip’s son Brent … convicted of killing his grandmother on his father’s orders.

  Philip Hocking … family friends described him as ‘an evil boy’.

  Age did not improve him.

  The first attempt to kill Phyllis Hocking … she escaped this fire in her home unit.

  Philip Hocking … sailing to freedom while his son sits in jail.

  Big Garry Schipper … tossed in the sea during the killer Sydney to Hobart yacht race. He was one of the lucky ones.

  David McMillan (centre) … private school boy who became the only man to escape from the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ jail.

  Vale Frank Green.

  It was time to head for home after the rescue. But the storm would not give up its victims so easily.

  The 160 kmh wind which had brought the helicopter to the scene so quickly, was now a head wind, forcing it to travel as slowly as 40 kmh into some of the gusts.

  Time was not the problem, but fuel was. The big Dauphin swallows a litre of aviation fuel every ten seconds, and while Jones wanted to throttle back to save fuel, he couldn’t because of the headwinds.

  The three-man crew then heard a noise far more frightening than the roar from the waves and scream of the wind. It was the automatic fuel alarm telling them they had a minimum of five minutes left on the fuel tank to one of the engines.

  The trouble was they were still 32 kilometres from Mallacoota. The arithmetic wasn’t on their side.

  Barclay and Key tethered themselves to Campbell, freed the life raft and opened the rear door. They were to wait for the final order from Jones, then they would time their jump to land on the peak of the swells below.

  Jones was then to fly 50 metres upwind to ditch the helicopter away from the others, so that when the spinning rotors smashed on impact, the shrapnel didn’t kill the crew.

  He would then clear the helicopter and drift back to the others. That was what the textbook said, anyway.

  Campbell was unaware he was about to go back where he came from, when the fuel warning to the second engine started to buzz. If they were to jump, they would have to do it within three minutes.

  The American sailor would later say that one of the last books he read before the Sydney to Hobart was The Perfect Storm, the best selling account of a US hurricane, where a rescue helicopter ditched when it ran out of fuel. It was almost exactly the same situation facing the four men in the struggling police helicopter.

  Key didn’t have any moments of deep thought and his life didn’t flash before him. Jones was more concerned about the repercussions of the possible crash than how he would survive it.

  ‘Darryl was worried about how he could do the report on how he sunk the helicopter,’ Key said.

  Then, without warning, they burst out of the storm. The coast in front of them was acting as a giant windbreak and the helicopter – with virtually no weight from fuel – took off.

  Jones was able to throttle back to save precious droplets of fuel. They would not try to make the local airport. At first he decided to land on the Mallacoota beach, but then he spotted the football oval 50 metres inland. A fuel check showed they had around three minutes left when they landed.

  They were not finished. Next day they were back in Bass Strait and rescued four men from the Midnight Special, winching the last on board as the yacht sank.

  Six men were to die in the Sydney to Hobart, but, according to Key, the professionalism, courage and calmness of the sailors caught in unimaginable conditions, meant that many more lives were saved.

  • Additional material from Storm Warning, by Bryan Burrough, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, and Fatal Storm, by Rob Mundle.

  CHAPTER 6

  The invisible man

  ‘It chilled me because of the way his face looked when he said it …’

  THE man who found the bodies is 70 now, the oldest drinker in the public bar of the Plaza Hotel in Townsville. He’s seen and done a lot of things since he left South Otago, New Zealand, back in 1952. But nothing sticks in his memory like the day he played a walk-on part, in a cruel story that haunts the town where two little sisters lived and died.

  He tells it his way. A knockabout carpenter, he’d been building houses for the nickel mines out past Kalgoorlie, then got a bankroll and itchy feet and headed east across the Nullarbor in his new Falcon, camping on the way.

  He’d meant to go home to New Zealand to see his family, but good intentions slipped away as easily as last week’s wages. After a little work at Woomera Rocket Range building a ‘secret’ satellite-spotting post, he turned north.

  First to Coober Pedy, then further into the desert to the Three Ways’, where a traveller has to make a lonely choice. The Adelaide road was behind, narrowing the choice ahead to Darwin and Townsville. He tossed a coin. Townsville it was, via Mount Isa. He arrived late on 27 August, a Thursday, to find the sleepy coastal city in a frenzy, shocked out of its tropical torpor by the worst tragedy since the war. Two sisters had vanished on their way to school the previous morning. Their mother was under sedation, their father half-mad with unspeakable fear.

  The old man puts his glass on the bar, fishes in his coat pocket for two pieces of paper – worn, grimy, folded small – that he’s kept almost half his life.

  It’s the carbon copy of a statement he made to police the day it happened. This is what it says: I am a married man, 40 years of age, at the present time of no fixed place of abode in Townsville, having only arrived from Boulder, Western Australia, on the night of 27th August, 1970.

  About 8.45am on Friday 28th August 1970 I joined a number of other persons in a taxi cab … In company with two other men I was engaged in a search party for two missing girls who had disappeared whilst on thei
r way to school.

  We travelled along the Townsville to Charters Towers Highway and made a search in various places along this road prior to going to a spot near Antill Creek. We parked the car and set off in various directions. I traversed the creek bank and dry creek bed.

  Whilst searching in the creek I saw what appeared to be child’s footprints in the sand. I continued to walk along the creek bed and, about ten yards further on, I then saw the body of a child … in a small hollow and the child was in a more or less sitting, reclining position. I saw that the child was wearing a pair of panties. At this stage I was a distance of approximately 10 feet from the body. The child appeared to be dead. I now know that the body which I located was the body of Susan Debra Mackay.’

  SUSAN was five, the baby of the family. Judith was seven. They were ‘late lambs’, as they say in the bush, born well after two boys and two older girls. They were dark-eyed, olive-skinned and pretty, like many children of the far north, where indigenous, islander and Italian influences have tempered the anglo-celtic majority.

  Bill Mackay kissed his babies goodbye as they slept, when he left for the meatworks before dawn. He never saw them again.

  The Mackays lived in Albert Street, Aitkenvale, a suburb sprawled along the Ross River road, a highway that leads inland from Townsville to Charters Towers and beyond.

  Susan and Judith left home about 8.10am, after their mother, Thelma, got them ready for school. They walked to the corner, turned left into Alice Street, and vanished.

  The girls would have crossed the road to wait at their usual bus stop. But when their brother, Alan, rode past on his bike about ten minutes later, they weren’t there. They weren’t at school, either, but it wasn’t until they didn’t come home that afternoon that the alarm was raised.

  When Bill Mackay got home from work his wife was distraught. He grabbed photographs of the girls and went to the police. By nightfall, police and friends gathered to search backyards in the district.

  Next day hundreds more joined in. The meatworks offered its entire workforce, and police doorknocked every house in the area. By Friday, the search had spread, which is how a wandering Kiwi carpenter, called Richard Tough, and two men he didn’t know, were sent to Antill Creek, a sluggish watercourse meandering across an ugly plain, 25 kilometres south-west of Townsville. It is an empty place where scrawny cattle poke through stunted scrub and feral pigs tear up the barren ground.

  Tough waited by the little girl’s body for an hour until the police arrived. They followed foot prints in a sandbank running along the creek bed, which was almost dry. About 70 metres away, near the opposite bank, they found Judith’s naked body.

  The only mercy was that the pigs hadn’t got to them first. Both girls had been raped and stabbed in the chest. Susan had been strangled, Judith choked from having her face rammed into the sand. It looked as if she had fled while her little sister was being killed, and was then run down.

  Beside the bodies, their school uniforms: folded inside out and placed with an awful neatness. Their shoes, socks, hats and school bags were nearby.

  A senior sergeant cried when he saw it. Another policeman said he wouldn’t go home until they caught the killer. He was as good as his word, staying at Townsville police station day and night, with his worried wife bringing in food and clean clothes. Until he died of a heart attack two weeks later.

  Had he lived, he could hardly have guessed that the case would see his generation out of the force.

  IN the days before drugs multiplied crime, homicides were mostly simple domestic murders, or brawls gone wrong, as easily solved as the average burglary.

  But the motiveless and random killing of two innocent children produced a huge outcry and no obvious culprit. There was intense pressure from the top for a quick arrest, when a slow, painstaking investigation was the best chance of cracking the case.

  From the start, the police’s problem was not that there were too few leads, but too many.

  Townsville was, and is, an army town, and the meatworks had its own blood-spattered corps of itinerant slaughtermen, butchers and boners, not all model citizens. Add meatworkers to a barracks full of soldiers and there were thousands of potential suspects. It was inevitable that the sheer weight of numbers – and of public expectation – would affect the investigation. Local knowledge, sometimes a police officer’s best tool, didn’t help the tedious elimination of hundreds of suspects. Ironically, it might have been a handicap, because it would encourage assumptions about who should be put on – or left off – the long list of people to check. The temptation was to take shortcuts. The risk was that they would miss their man.

  Meanwhile, there was the mammoth job of piecing together witnesses’ accounts – often contradictory, or apparently so.

  A teacher, Judith Drysdale, saw a man driving slowly near the Mackay sisters and staring intently at them. Much later she was able to pick a photograph of the man she saw from a series of pictures.

  Nola Archie, in the grounds of the Aboriginal hostel behind the bus stop, saw two small girls talking to a man in a car. She wasn’t sure of make or model, but agreed it might have been a Holden.

  Bill Hankin was driving a road-roller on Ross River Road that morning. About 8.15 he pulled over near the Aitkenvale school for a smoke and a cup of tea. He noticed a man in a car with two girls in school uniforms; while everyone else was driving children towards the school ‘like ants to a nest’, this man was taking children away from it.

  Hankin had been a driving instructor in the army, and he noted automatically that the driver was thin-featured, swarthy, not tall, and drove badly. He looked middle-aged, with a tanned complexion and dark, wavy hair, cut short. A face like the character ‘Beau’ in the television series Days Of Our Lives, but older, he was to tell police later.

  Around the same time, Neil Lunney was running late for work at the army barracks. Just back from Vietnam, he had a short fuse, and was incensed when a car in front of him sped up and veered to block him when he tried to overtake.

  ‘He tried to put me over the embankment,’ Lunney was to recall. ‘I did my cool. I was going to bumper roll him but, when I got up level with him, I saw the kids in the car.’

  The older girl, on the passenger side, had shoulder-length hair, as Judith Mackay did. The younger one, sitting in the middle, had shorter hair, like Susan Mackay. Both wore green Aitkenvale school uniforms.

  Lunney yelled at the driver, and looked at him hard in case he saw him in the street. He’d been taught recognition in the army; it could mean life and death in jungle warfare. This enemy had high cheekbones, short hair, and ‘Mickey Mouse’ ears stuck out from a narrow skull. Lunney wasn’t so observant about the car, except that it was blue-grey ‘like a battleship’; it wasn’t a Ford but might have been a Holden, and had an odd-colored driver’s door. He did notice two ‘STP’ oil stickers on the rear mudguards, and Venetian blinds in the back window.

  JEAN Thwaite was cleaning a car in the Shell service station she and her husband ran at Ayr, more than an hour’s drive south-west of Townsville, when a car pulled up. It was covered in dust and her memory is that it was ‘dirty white’ or beige color, and arrived between 11.30 and noon.

  The driver was thin, dark-haired, looked to be in his 40s, and wore a faded, fawn or off-white shirt. He seemed preoccupied, and ignored her request to cut the motor while she pumped the $3 worth of petrol he ordered.

  The petrol inlet was on the left side, and she had to open a flap to get at the screw-on cap, similar to her own 1965 EH Holden. This ruled out the car being a 1950s Holden but, unknown to her, was a design feature shared with the Vauxhall Victor, uncommon in country Queensland.

  Thwaite, mother of a five-year-old, took notice of two children in the car. In the back seat, a small girl who looked as if she had been crying asked: ‘Are we there yet?’ In the front seat was an older girl, who said to the driver: ‘When are you taking us to mummy? You promised to take us to mummy.’ Both wore green school
uniforms.

  The driver silently handed Thwaite exact change. By the time she looked up from the till, the car had gone. When she heard next day about the abduction in Townsville, Jean Thwaite was sure she had seen the Mackay sisters, but found it hard to get the local police to take her seriously.

  There was so much information – some obviously contradictory and some apparently so – that the police felt pressured to make choices: to play hunches that one lead was better than another. Unfortunately, they got it wrong about the car.

  Although the descriptions of the car given by Hankin, Lunney and Thwaite varied in details, between them they had enough key information about it to find a driver whom they all described the same way.

  But the police, punting on a description of a car seen near where the bodies were found, concentrated on looking for an early model Holden. Their enthusiasm to find the ‘right’ car rather than to build a picture of the driver caused confusion. As one legal insider was to remark dryly 30 years later, witnesses who first thought they’d seen a Vauxhall ended up signing statements they’d seen a Holden – and an FJ Holden, at that.

  Worse, despite the matching descriptions of the driver – apart from his age – there was no sketch or photofit picture of him published. Instead, the newspapers and television ran pictures of FJ Holdens.