Underbelly (14 page)

After twelve tough weeks of marching, running, shooting and other training, she graduated. ‘I was given a silver badge, a notebook and a Bible. I also received a Model 10 Smith & Wesson six-shot revolver, twelve shiny bullets and a set of handcuffs.'

The graduation was the only thing her parents had been proud of in all their lives, she would write. They were both alcoholics, both the children of Gallipoli veterans who had come back from the battlefields as abusive, aggressive men who drank hard and blighted the lives of the next generation. So much so that their only daughter considered herself a survivor trying to escape a ‘white trash' upbringing of which she was ashamed. She had one brother who was much older and played no part in her upbringing.

‘My childhood,' she would write, ‘consisted of people drinking, smoking and sitting around talking rubbish. I have few, if any, childhood memories.'

She grew up on an impoverished poultry farm at Glenorie, north-west of Sydney. Like many children of abusive alcoholic parents, she cared for them more than they did for her. She even called them by their first names, Irene and John, as if they were the children. It made her determined to escape through hard work. She could hardly read
or write until she was nine but when she was eleven, her natural intelligence and drive asserted itself. She took to reading – and was a bright and willing student, motivated by watching the slow-motion wreck of her parents' wasted lives. Ironically, it was her mother's hunger for some sort of second hand respectability that pushed the young Deborah towards joining the police.

‘With my family, I should have ended up a crook, not a copper,' she would say. But, from the time she was a little girl, her mother ‘had always told me I was going to be a policewoman. So many members of our family had been arrested over the years, she wanted to add some respectability. She also had a list of people she wanted to get and she thought if I was in the police, I could get them for her. She held a grudge, did Irene.'

As she grew up, ashamed of her family, she never questioned that she was heading for the blue uniform. ‘Coming from the family I did, I wanted some respectability, too. And I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to go into the force and be a good honest person, a good police officer.'

But none of this, by her own account, stopped her having her own battle with the bottle. Grog was in the blood, usually literally. And she soon found that police work encouraged that. It was part of the culture.

First she was sent to North Sydney, which wasn't as violent or as seedy as the inner city stations, but it had its own hazards. There were twenty women at the station and a lot of casual sex among the police. But she was struck by how badly women were treated in the force.

‘I couldn't understand the derogatory way I was spoken
to by the male police officers,' she would tell reporters. ‘The women were told that we were lower than police dogs. The females were called “police mattresses”.' This made a bad joke of the force's moves to recruit more women, she says. ‘On paper, we were being accepted into the folds of police culture, but we weren't really. I had worked so hard to get there and I was so proud and so determined to be a policewoman. I was the first one in my family to do HSC and then to become a policewoman. I was breaking new ground. (But) I was copping all this abuse …We were nothing more than tokens.'

Perhaps as a backhanded means of protecting her from unwanted sexual attention, the sergeant at North Sydney assigned Deborah to a woman-hating senior constable who made her six weeks with him a misery – but he could be relied on not to put the hard word on her for sex.

It was during her first six weeks of probation, on 28 July 1984, that she showed her capacity for bravery – and learned a lesson in backroom police politics. It happened when she and the senior constable were called to the Harbour Bridge, where a man had climbed over the safety barrier and was standing on a platform, threatening to jump.

Police were standing around, wondering what to do, so Deborah spoke to the man. He told her he hated women. It was a recent development: he'd formed the opinion they were ‘all sluts' because he had woken up to find his best man screwing his bride-to-be at a roadside stop while they were travelling to Sydney to get married. The scene had upset him. But before he jumped, he fancied a cigarette. Deborah offered to take it to him and the would-be jumper agreed that she was the one he wanted to bring it to him.

She was heaved over the barrier onto the platform with the ‘jumper', with nothing but a borrowed packet of cigarettes and a breezy line of chat to protect her – a fact that later led to trouble.

‘We smoked several more cigarettes, which I felt was more likely to kill me than being pushed from the bridge. I gained his confidence, I think, because we spoke the same language and both came from a farming background.'

To the shock of the other police, whose plan had been to wait for the bloke either to jump or get sick of it, she talked him back over the safety rail. So far, so good. But the story wasn't over.

Back at North Sydney station, the broken-hearted bridegroom was stuck in a cell while they wondered what to do with him. Half an hour later, Deborah peered through the flap on the cell door … and saw him hanging by the neck by his belt.

By the time they got the door open and cut him down, he looked dead. But he was only unconscious and came around. The grumpy senior constable gave him coffee and a sympathetic ear. He felt sorry for him.

‘Perhaps,' noted Deborah deadpan, ‘this was why he wasn't charged with trespass on the Harbour Bridge. Or perhaps it's because he was a suicidal male placed in a cell, unsupervised and with his belt and shoelaces.'

So the jumper lived to love another day. And probationary constable Deborah Webb was the heroine of the moment. Or should have been…

A few weeks later, an inspector broke the news that she wouldn't be officially acknowledged for her actions on the bridge. Why? Because they didn't want to get the Cliff
Rescue unit into trouble for allowing her over the rail without a safety harness on. The logic was twisted but unassailable: for her bravery to be recognised, it would be for risking her life by going onto the platform without safety harness, which in turn was a clear breach of correct procedure. Catch 22.

There was no way around it. If she had been shoved off the edge and died, everyone would have been in huge trouble. The way it had turned out, it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. When bravery meets bureaucracy, bravery loses.

Apart from the break-up of her first police romance – with a handsome cop who decided he was a woman trapped in a man's body – there was another reason to remember her time at North Sydney. It was the early morning prison van run.

She and a senior constable would regularly go to Long Bay prison to pick up prisoners for court appearances. Deborah would have to search each prisoner for hidden weapons before they got in the van. Then she would have to sit in a separate locked section at the back of the van to guard the prisoners in transit, an ordeal as they dragged to courts all over Sydney.

On one particular day, she was feeling carsick after dropping off prisoners at three courts when the van suddenly stopped in the street. She opened the door and saw two detectives and four uniforms, guns drawn and looking worried. They hurried her out of the way and then one of the detectives jumped into the van and dragged out a prisoner by the hair and belted him.

She asked the driver what it was all about. She would recall his answer in
Watching The Detectives
.

‘“It's your lucky day,” he told me. “The bloke we dropped off last ratted on that piece of shit. He was charged with killing his wife and two other people. You were going to be next. He's got a replica gun down his pants. You mustn't have found it. He had pulled it out back at the District Court and was going to use it on you when we stopped again.”'

Deborah didn't catch on. Then the old cop explained that the killer had planned to menace her with the replica pistol to force her to hand over her service revolver. And then, he told the other prisoners, he was going to shoot her in the head. Anyone who has shot three people has nothing to lose by shooting another one.

What saved her was that one of the other prisoners had taken pity on her and decided to break the criminal code by dobbing in the would-be killer as soon as he was unloaded back at the previous court, which had prompted the posse to come to the rescue before the van got to the next court.

Deb knew that having a gun pulled on her would have worked. She would have handed over her revolver. It was a lesson – but a confusing one. On one hand she'd learned how dangerous and unpredictable prisoners could be. On the other, she'd learned that treating them like human beings, not garbage, had made one of them take pity on her – and save her life.

She also learned to search people properly. Not that she was ever rostered back on prison van security. She was going to the Cross.
THE Kings Cross Drug Squad office in the mid-1980s was a rat's nest in the station basement. ‘It was a small, underground concrete bunker with no natural light and the
musty smell of damp carpet,' was the way Locke put it later, writing about her first experience of plain clothes work.

In the mornings she walked to work early along Darlinghurst Road, the hardened artery leading to the heart of Kings Cross. The last few hookers still on the street would say ‘I've already paid sergeant (name) today'. Sure enough, as she later wrote, ‘the roster confirmed every time that the bloke they had mentioned had started at seven that morning.'

The old hands at the station had a word for young officers on rotation, gaining experience: ‘woodchucks'. Like many others, Deborah Webb went there because it would look good on her service register. The first thing she noticed was that the older detectives did a lot of whispering and treated the youngsters like rubbish.

The young policewoman found the Cross exciting at night, when it blazed with neon and noise. But the cold light of each new day fell harshly on the Cross. Young girls high on drugs or shaking and shivering as they came down, leaned on walls as the sun rose, waiting for one more ‘mug' to score a few more dollars to buy more drugs: a pitiless and pitiful cycle that all too often ended in premature death.

Most street prostitutes were junkies in 1985 but there were still some old-school professionals … pro pros. Deborah got to know and like two of them, who called themselves Betty and Chantal. Unusually, they didn't touch drugs, which was why they were still functioning – and still fit – in their late 30s. They both wore big, teased-up hair, lots of make up and tight, bright clothes in slinky material. They looked more like actors playing 1960s prostitutes as they stood in their usual pitches outside the Pink Pussy
Cat or Porky's. And they would always be pleased to have a rest from propositioning the passing punters to have a chat with the friendly young policewoman with the reassuring down-home twang of rural Australia in her voice. Deborah's slant on it was that they took a shine to her because she didn't treat them like garbage.

Chantal told her she had three kids in boarding school in Melbourne, and showed her photographs of them. One thing that Chantal told her stuck in her mind – and would figure on the back cover of her book. ‘You're too nice to be a cop, Deb. You speak to us like we're humans, not like the other bastards. When you've been in this job as long as I have you see a lot of pigs come and go. Be careful of the blokes you are working with, they are not nice.'

The Kings Cross detectives took her to a strip club run by a Greek who called himself Stevie Stardust and who looked the part of the shady nightclub owner: shaven head, hairy chest, gold chains and sunglasses. He warned her about a particular detective and then said something that she later recalled as: ‘Get out of here while the going is good, Deb. This is no place for a young girl like you.'

In the mornings, the young cops would walk around stamping on syringes in the gutters to break them so passing schoolchildren would be less inclined to pick them up or re-use them. AIDS was starting to take hold. One morning a teenage hooker told Deb she had the disease. ‘The fear and hopelessness were in her eyes.'

On evening shifts the woodchucks would walk around in small groups. Deb was better at spotting trouble – and offenders – than most of the others, because she was more street smart. She had been a barmaid, her parents were
alcoholics, and some of her cousins were bikies and had been in trouble with the law, so she had a fair idea of what low life was.

One day, a sergeant chipped her for having a long conversation in the street with a bikie parked outside one of the local tattoo parlours. What the sergeant didn't know was that the bikie was her cousin, ‘Hairy Mick'.

Towards the end of her three months at the Cross, she was in the office finishing paperwork while most of the shift were up at the (famous bar) Bourbon and Beefsteak, where the management put on free seafood and drinks for the cops. The phone went. It was the inquiry counter upstairs: there was a young woman there wanting to see a detective.

‘When I walked upstairs I saw the young woman, blonde hair hanging straight down, wearing blue jeans and T-shirt, and with a big gap between her front teeth. Having briefly spoken to her a few times on street patrols, I knew who she was.'

Debbie asked if she could help but the blonde woman dismissed her as ‘just a woodchuck.' She was agitated and distressed and hurried out.

Next day she was found face down in a pond in Centennial Park. Her name was Sallie-Anne Huckstepp and her tragic story – of the well-educated, beautiful and doomed girl – would become part of Sydney crime folklore. Her death was blamed on notoriously violent criminal Neddy Smith and his bent police connections, namely Roger Rogerson, the central figures in the memorable Blue Murder television series.