Major Crime investigates crimes that are too difficult or protracted for detectives posted in the suburbs. The squad’s main job is investigating murders, while a small group within the squad deals with armed robberies. However, any crime that is serious and causes community concern can be handled by the squad, which is made up of small teams led by a Senior Sergeant supported by two sergeants and four detectives. The two sergeants are senior investigators rather than supervisors.
I was pleased and excited to join the team led by Glen Lawrie who previously had teamed with Peter Foster and become well known as the detective who got James Miller to confess to his involvement in the Truro murders. Glen was relatively young to be a senior sergeant but he was smart and his success in solving the Truro murders would have helped him get his promotion. He was tall and fit — he liked to ride his pushbike home in the Adelaide Hills on occasions and with his fitness and long, shoulder-length hair he did not conform to the image of some older style, hard-drinking detectives in the squad.
I admit I was relatively young and ambitious. I’d wanted to be a police officer for as long as I could remember. Dad was a police officer and I wanted to do the same things that he did. I’d moved through the police ranks after graduating second from Fort Largs police academy.
Like all new graduates, I’d walked beats before being allowed to ride in patrol cars with the more experienced officers. My first brief as a police officer happened when I reported a driver for displaying an expired registration disc on his motor car. Hardly a capital crime! But over the years I learnt the trick to being a policeman. I transferred from Adelaide patrols to the traffic branch and rode motorcycles for five years. The work was a bit boring but I loved riding the bikes — I learned to ride police motorcycles because in the old days it was a stepping stone to detective work. Police motorcyclists rode alone and without radio communications in those years. You learned to be self-reliant and able to operate alone.
My first detective posting was at Holden Hill Criminal Investigation Branch in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. I worked there for a couple of months before being transferred to the detective office at Elizabeth. The districts around Elizabeth consisted of lower socio-economic groups among whom crime was a part of life. I learned the art of investigation, and my experience was given a great boost when I was sent back to headquarters to help with the Truro murders. As a very junior detective, it was exciting to see the Major Crime Squad buzzing with a major murder case on its hands.
I spent about six months in the squad taking statements and following up minor bits of information about the Truro killings. During my time there Alan Barnes was killed, but I was too engrossed with Truro to hear much scuttlebutt about his murder. Detectives working on cases generally keep the details close to their chests to prevent sensitive information being leaked. It’s important that detectives withhold certain bits of information. Occasionally, ‘nutters’ will confess to a crime even though they didn’t do it. If certain bits of information are kept in-house then detectives can tell whether or not a person is actually telling the truth. A person confessing to killing someone and saying they have tied the victim with rope when wire was used signals to detectives that something is wrong.
I returned to the Elizabeth detective office just before Neil Muir’s dismembered body was found in the Port River.
After Elizabeth, I spent a bit of time helping out in the Drug Squad but I wanted to have a go at investigating murders. My appetite was whetted after my secondment to Major Crime and I requested a posting to the squad. When I was transferred there in 1982, one of the sergeants on Glen Lawrie’s team was a senior detective called Trevor Kipling. I called him ‘Kippers’, not only because of his surname but because he liked fishing. He was already working on the Mark Langley case. I had first met Trevor when I spent my first months as a junior detective at Holden Hill. Trevor was a detective in the older style — he liked a drink and had a good sense of humour that brought out his strong belly laugh. He was tall, slightly taller than me, and his black hair had started to grey, complementing his blue eyes, which flashed when speaking to an attractive woman but turned a steel colour when his determination to prove a point came to the fore. Trevor was not university educated like many newer detectives but his high intelligence showed many times in the next few years.
Up to this time different teams were investigating the murder of the boys. The team that was working at the time a body was found usually ended up investigating the murder. Now it was different. There was a growing realisation that the murders of the young men could be linked. Bodies with anal injuries. Bodies being cut up. There were too many similarities to be ignored. The realisation was like a mudslide building into an avalanche. Police inside Major Crime talked more and more about the multiples of missing young men.
To combine the investigations, the team investigating the missing boys came to Senior Sergeant Glen Lawrie’s team. He’d been on a bit of a roll after solving the Truro murders, and while many people had been involved, it was Lawrie who’d managed to get James Miller to talk and take the police to the girls’ bodies that had not been found. Now, Glen Lawrie was about to turn his attention to the series of murdered boys.
Glen was introducing me to the day-to-day work of Major Crime. I went with him to the flat farming land to the north of
