Jacks and Jokers (34 page)

And as ususal, Lewis’s voluminous holiday reading would not be for pleasure. It would take in the annual reports for police departments across Australia, the Report of the International Conference on Terrorist Devices and Methods, the Australian Police College Manual for Hostage Negotiation and an FBI report on ‘Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots’. The latter may have helped him with Brisbane’s troubling street-march incidents.

But before all this, on New Year’s Day he enjoyed an afternoon at the races at Eagle Farm, betting $50 each way on Decimate (it came second) and $25 each way on Ima Cheeta (it won) before heading home to Garfield Drive and the house in the shadow of the concrete water tower on the hill at Bardon.

At 9.45 p.m. he received a call from R. Dunbar, ‘re John Andrew Stuart found dead in H.M. Prison at 9.37 pm’. A post-mortem examination was expected to be carried out the next day.

On the Wednesday the press reported that the examination had been inconclusive, ‘apart from establishing there was no foul play and that violence had not been used. Pathologists who examined his body yesterday established that all marks and scars on Stuart were old ones,’ the
Courier-Mail
said.

In the report, Assistant Commissioner Brian Hayes, who along with Syd Atkinson had arrested and charged Stuart for the Whiskey Au Go Go murders in 1973, reminisced about the dead criminal. ‘He was given a fair hearing, and a fair trial and made appeals to the highest courts in the land,’ Hayes said. ‘Now he has gone to a higher jurisdiction.’

Stuart had always protested his innocence and said he had been verballed in police interviews. His statement about the Whiskey, compiled by police after his arrest, was unsigned.

On Thursday 4 January 1979, the
Courier-Mail
reported that the Stuart clan wanted a royal commission into the Whiskey murders and Stuart’s treatment in gaol.

‘Stuart’s sister, who asked that her name be withheld, said there were too many unanswered questions on her late brother’s trial, and the circumstances of the fire, for the matter to be left to rest,’ the newspaper said. ‘As long as I’ve got a breath in my body I’m going to push for a royal commission into this matter,’ she claimed.

To protest his innocence during his incarceration, on three occasions Stuart swallowed pieces of wire. He also sewed his lips together with wire to underline that his original confession to police over the Whiskey atrocity had been a police ‘verbal’, or concocted evidence. His self-harm saw him in and out of hospital.

Stuart’s mother, Edna, 65, added: ‘I’m not being fanatical. We still don’t know how he died. I don’t think he committed suicide. He had stomach trouble from all the wire he had eaten. He was under medical treatment all the time.’

The
Sunday Mail
of 7 January declared that an acute heart infection may have killed Stuart. A spokesman for the State Microbiology and Pathology Laboratory told the newspaper that a ‘microscopic examination’ had revealed Stuart possessed a heart infection, possibly the result of a virus, capable of causing sudden death. Suicide had been ruled out.

‘He said chemical tests had shown the only drugs in Stuart’s body were those legally prescribed by the prison hospital and they were in normal quantities,’ the newspaper added.

In the same article, mother Edna Watts declared her son innocent. ‘Johnny told me six months after he started this sentence that he had given his heart to Christ,’ she said. ‘He told me Christ was his witness when he told me: “Mum, I have never killed anyone in my life.”

‘I’m not pretending he was a saint. He fought all his life. But he wasn’t a killer.’ She said she wanted to see her son’s body before the funeral so she could ‘touch him just once’.

On the morning of Wednesday 10 January, a service was held for John Andrew Stuart in the K.M. Smith funeral director’s chapel in Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley. Stuart’s death certificate had been released – it stated he had died of natural causes.

After the service, Stuart’s casket was taken to the Lutwyche Cemetery, where he was buried with his father, David James Stuart (who had died in 1956) in section nine, grave number eleven.

Many, many questions were buried with him.

Operation Jungle

The trail had been cold for 18 months, but it didn’t deter Federal Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook from going after drug dealer John Milligan.

Having flown north to Cairns, Shobbrook and his team immediately began the painstaking task of manually checking hotel and car rental records around the period Milligan was suspected of having taken possession of his parcel of heroin in September 1977.

They soon got a hit. The Narcotics team found a receipt in Milligan’s name for a Budget Rent a Car four-wheel-drive in Townsville. The odometer revealed a sum mileage that was consistent with a round trip from Townsville to Princess Charlotte Bay. Townsville hotel records also indicated a link between Milligan and his associate Graham David Bridge. Bryan Parker’s and Ian Barron’s names were also found on other documents linking them to Milligan during the suspect time period.

The team headed to the little town of Laura, where pictures of the alleged conspirators were identified by Percy Trezise and other residents. In fact Trezise, a former Ansett pilot, offered to fly Shobbrook to remote places in the region where potential witnesses could be interviewed.

The single engine Cessna, however, wasn’t a smooth ride. The plane had an oil leak and other alarming idiosyncrasies. ‘We also found a hornet’s nest in the engine bay; very reassuring,’ Shobbrook remembered.

On a return flight to Cairns with Trezise two things stayed with the drugs agent. ‘Firstly, I recall every hiccup that Percy’s Cessna made (probably a bit of dirt in the fuel line, Percy had explained). Secondly, I became very aware that there aren’t too many level emergency landing areas between Laura and Cairns and that there are a lot of rainforest-covered mountains.’

He could visualise the newspaper headlines: FAMOUS NORTH QUEENSLANDER, AND SOMEONE ELSE, DIE IN LIGHT AIRCRAFT CRASH.

On the positive side, the Jungle team eventually collated enough evidence, they believed, to arrest both Milligan and Glen Patrick Hallahan, farmer of Obi Obi and corrupt former Queensland police officer.

Dear Mr Premier

After Brian Marlin had been rescued by Tony Murphy following the shocking incident at the Cleveland Sands Hotel over by the bay, he transitioned his loyalty from Alec Jeppesen. He was now Murphy’s boy.

‘There is no doubt about it that Marlin and Murphy were really close,’ says Jim Slade. ‘He thought the sun shone out of Murphy’s arse. Murphy was the sort of bloke who could put Marlin in as a bloody spy. This was the sort of person that Murphy was.

‘Also, there is no way in the world that a civilian could have the stamp that Brian Marlin had. Even me, who has witnessed every different kind of arsehole, recognised straightaway – here was an arsehole that learned, he learned that from somewhere. You don’t learn that coming out of a security company or the army.’

Marlin also knew where his bread was now buttered. To underscore his loyalty to Murphy, Marlin made the extraordinary step of writing a personal letter to Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He had met the Premier during the secret meeting at Lennons Hotel during the winter of 1978 with Jeppesen, John Goleby and Ron Camm. And again a couple of months later at the Zebra with Basil Hicks.

On the morning of Saturday 13 January 1979, Marlin had been on the phone to the Premier. Later that day he penned his letter. It included his home address – 60 Beckwith Street, Ormiston, the next suburb north-west of Cleveland. It would be a fuller, and more elaborate version of what he had relayed to Commissioner Lewis in his office in late November of the previous year.

In his missive, Marlin set out in detail the sequence of events which he alleged had taken place since his first meeting with the Inspector in Charge of the Licensing Branch, Inspector Jeppesen, up to and including the commencement of the current departmental inquiry into alleged moiety fund misappropriation.

Marlin’s first target was the former Police Minister under Ray Whitrod – Max Hodges. The police officer had heard that Hodges had attacked him [Marlin] in a recent Cabinet meeting, attempting to ‘destroy my veracity, integrity and character’, and that it was ‘unwarranted, untrue in every detail and nothing more than a deliberate manouvre [sic] intended to refute any evidence I may be called to give in relation to the activities of Inspector Jeppesen.’

Marlin declared that Hodges had aligned himself with officers such as Jeppesen, Basil Hicks, Peter Dautel and other members of the Committee of Eight. He told the premier that any suggestion he had been deliberately placed in the Licensing Branch to gather evidence on behalf of Lewis in relation to Jeppesen was a ‘falsehood’. After expressing his disappointments in Jeppesen and his loss of faith in his senior officer he claimed: ‘It is a very Bitter Pill to swallow indeed when I proved beyond any doubt that he is dishonest and nothing more than a conspirator and a practising fraud.’

Marlin said in no uncertain terms that after Bjelke-Petersen’s meeting with Jeppesen, the latter had become a ‘supreme egotist’. ‘He and inspector Basil HICKS held clandestine meetings in the underground cafeteria of Macdonald and Easts in George Street, Brisbane, they gathered their fellows and laid plans for the re-structure of the administration.’

Extraordinarily, Marlin claimed to have heard some recorded tapes of these meetings. ‘Mr Jeppesen is recorded as having made comments e.g. “I wonder what my Reward will be?”; “Perhaps Basil will get Terry’s job and I’ll get the 5th Assistant’s spot.” And to me he said, “How do you reckon I went with old Joh, did I convince him I’m honest?” ’

Marlin’s conspiracy theories were so completely strangulated and broad-reaching that they were almost comical.

He went on to claim he had evidence that Hicks had indeed slept with the prostitute Katherine James and that the photographs taken of their liaison several years earlier were genuine. This time he introduced Jeppesen into the James fiasco, saying the head of the Licensing Branch had in fact induced a statement from James in Boggo Road prison denying a sexual tryst with Hicks had ever taken place.

Marlin then discussed a secular conspiracy. Jeppesen was a Mason. Hicks was a Catholic and a Mason. Dautel was a Mason in the same Lodge as Max Hodges.

Marlin assured the Premier his change of allegiance had nothing to do with the Cleveland Sands controversy: ‘I respectfully draw your attention to the fact that I had reported Inspector Jeppesen’s activities well before that matter arose.’

At the end of his long tirade Marlin claimed ‘that Commissioner Lewis has been left an unenviable legacy in the wake of the departure of Mr Whitrod, the whole basis of the insurgency by Hicks and Jeppesen is to regain favour and power and there is no doubt in my mind they have utilised every dirty trick in the book to effect this’.

In conclusion he appealed to the Premier: ‘Surely Sir, the time has come for the department to present its case against the Inspector openly?’

What would the Premier have made of such a letter?

While it was a further shot across the bow of Jeppesen, it also revealed that in a little over two years of his commissionership, Lewis’s administration was one that was still seething with factional disputes between those who were pro- and those who were anti-Whitrod.

To Herbert, Murphy and the other corrupt officers, that the epicentre of this brawl happened to be the Licensing Branch – the heart of the lucrative ‘Joke’ – was no accident. Jeppesen and his cleanskins had to be removed. The money-making machine of Licensing had to be operated by friends of the corrupt system.

Marlin dropped his letter to Bjelke-Petersen in the post.

The next day, a Sunday, Lewis noted in his diary: ‘Phoned Supt. Atkinson, he mentioned that P.C. Const Marlin said he had spoken to Premier re Insp. Jeppesen yesterday.’

The rolling campaign against Jeppesen was gaining traction. Inside the Licensing Branch, the heat was on.

Bruce Wilby says the ‘bombshell’ was dropped by Brian Marlin in late 1978. ‘He tried to bring Alec Jeppesen down with the moiety [money scandal],’ Wilby recalls. ‘Marlin made out that Alec was pocketing the money. It was as far from the truth as ever. The rot started.’

Lewis wrote in his diary for 8 February: ‘Hon Camm phoned to say Premier said to transfer Jeppesen.’ Then on Monday 12 February: ‘Saw Hon. Camm re complaint from Auditor-General re Insp. Jeppesen.’ And the next day: ‘Phone call from Hon. Camm’s office re: Cabinet approval for transfer of Insp. Jeppesen. Phoned P.C. Const Marlin re same.’

It was magnanimous of the Commissioner of Police to keep a lowly constable, registered number 3672, updated on the imminent transfer of one of the most senior and experienced officers in the Queensland Police Force.

A Hat is Lost in King George Square

The government’s arcane street-march legislation remained rock solid into 1979, almost 18 months after it had been brought down, and proved a vote-winner for the National Party in the 1977 state election.

Even Bundaberg dentist Dr Harry Akers’ brilliant solo demonstration in the rain with his dog Jaffa, highlighting the legislation as a nonsense, had failed to cease the now familiar dance of police and protestor on the streets of the capital.