Cover

Contents

Introduction

1 ‘I Forgave My Daughters’ Killer’

2 Who Murdered Sallie-Anne?

3 The Wicked Witch of Kings Cross

4 ‘Darling, you do the renovating and just give me the bills’

5 The Avoca Gold Heist

6 A Trout to Die For

7 Azaria – How Could They Have Got It So Wrong?

8 The Family Law Court Murders

9 The Postcard Bandit

10 The Deadly Love Quadrangle

11 Likely to Offend Again

12 ‘Jockey’ Smith – Cop Hater

13 The Strathfield Massacre

14 ‘Last Resort’ Laurie Connell

15 Australia’s First Bank Robbery

16 Bodiless Murder Convictions

17 Not Your Normal Tourist

18 The Outlaw Folk Hero

19 Rex ‘Buckets’ Jackson and the Prisoner Early-Release Scheme

20 The Mount Rennie Rape Case

21 The Charismatic Crooked Cop

22 Murder Beyond Belief

23 The Suitcase Killer

24 Eddie ‘The Fireman’ Birchley

25 The Frank Butler Murders

26 A Murder Like No Other

27 The Poisoner of Frog Hollow

28 The Glenfield Siege

29 The Joke – The Crimes of Sir Terence Lewis, Police Commissioner

30 The Jimmy Governor Murders

31 Women Serial Killers

32 The Shooting of Arthur Caldwell

33 Getting Away with Murder

34 I Told You I Was Sick

35 The Massacre at Hope Forest

36 The End of Katingal

37 ‘I Want My Mummy’

38 The Legend of Hollywood George

39 Going Out in Style

40 Murder North of Sundown

41 The Port Arthur Massacre

42 George Freeman – King of the SP Bookies

43 Alan Bond – Crook or Hero?

44 The Case of the Smiling Arsonist

45 The Melbourne Police Strike

46 The Infamous Dr Reginald Stuart -Jones

47 The Murder of Ebony Simpson

48 The Deep-Sea Contract

49 A Terrible Way to Die

50 Murder Through the Classifieds

51 The Reputable Firm of Crowley and Buckley

52 The Sins of the Father

53 Horror in the Hamlet of Carcoar

54 The Peter Huxley Scandal

55 Celluloid Serial Killers

Image Section

About the Author

Introduction

In light of the extraordinary success of The Australian Crime File I guess it’s only logical that I would write a Crime File 2. After all, writing books is a big part of what I do for a living. And, let’s face it, it wasn’t as if the chapters were hard to put together, given that I read a ‘Crime File’ – one that I have written during the week – on the Weekend Breakfast Show, the show George Moore and I broadcast from 6am until midday on Saturday and Sunday on Sydney’s Radio 2UE.

Having said that, I would like to point out that many of the stories in this book are a little more out of left-field than those that appeared in the first Crime File. That edition dealt mainly with Australia’s better-known crimes, rather than the unusual or the bizarre. While a few of our more higher-profile cases – Lindy Chamberlain, Alan Bond and the Port Arthur Massacre come to mind – are in this book, you will also find many other yarns from our rich, unlawful history, a history that makes us one of the more unusual nations in the world.

While, sadly, it would have been impossible to write a Crime File 2 without the cases of multiple, serial, mass and child murder, this book also looks at a huge variety of lesser crimes that make up this genre. You will read about illegal SP bookies, bent police commissioners and cops, the day the police went on strike, our first political assassination attempt, the world’s best escapologists, bent entrepreneurs, Australia’s leading abortionist and underworld murders. They are all in here. Plus lots of fascinating historical crimes.

A ‘Crime File’ that I present on air is usually about 1200 words long and takes about seven minutes to read. Lots of the stories included here are the length I wrote them for radio, and exactly as I read them out on air. Others you will find are a little longer and, in some cases, a lot longer. I have gone to the trouble to re-write these as I believe that they are interesting enough to bring them to you in much more detail. The persecution of Lindy Chamberlain is such an example.

I have also included several chapters that have arisen out of my own personal experience and that I would like to share with you. The opening chapter tells how I supported a very brave man named Sandy MacGregor who visited a jail to forgive the man who had murdered his (Sandy’s) three daughters. In The Deep-Sea Contract I tell of my near-death experience at the hands of a marauding mako shark and a gun-totin’ gangster’s minder – both at the same time. And A Trout to Die For is the unusual story told to me about a couple of harmless crooks who try to outsmart the bigger crooks, with disastrous results. Fact or urban legend? You’ll have to decide that one for yourself.

Which brings us to my masterpiece, if I don’t mind saying so myself – Celluloid Serial Killers: The History of Serial Killers in the Movies. Years in the researching, it tells the history of serial killers on the screen throughout the ages and, as a bonus, I give my list of the top ten serial killer movies in history. Given that serial killer movies are either factual (The Boston Strangler, Ten Rillington Place), a mixture of fact and fiction (Wolf Creek, Dirty Harry) or just pure fiction (Se7en, Manhunter), there’s something in here for everyone – even if it’s just to assist you to make up your own list of favourites and compare them with mine, or to help you win a bet at the pub.

Paul B. Kidd

'I Forgave My Daughters' Killer'

In 2001 Sandy MacGregor went to prison to confront the man who shotgun-blasted his three daughters to death. Author Paul B. Kidd was there as the drama unfolded.

‘As I sat waiting to meet the man who murdered my children, I really didn’t know what my reaction towards him would be,’ says Sandy MacGregor. ‘I was incredibly nervous and uptight. Not shaking or anything like that. It was all on the inside.

‘In all of the months I had spent preparing myself for this moment I had never kidded myself that it was going to be easy. But I had imagined, or rather hoped, that it would be a lot easier than this. But now that it was actually happening I was apprehensive of the outcome, frightened of what I might do.

‘I could have stopped it then and no one would have thought any the less of me,’ he says. ‘But there was no turning back now. I had to meet this man and forgive him for what he had done. Not for him, but for me. And then I could be completely at peace with myself and get on with my life.’

As he relaxes in the loungeroom of his Sydney home, Sandy MacGregor is the embodiment of what he teaches: how to manage your life through the powers of your own mind. He sits surrounded by photos of his family – his deceased daughters, their elder brother Andrew, now 36, his second wife Sandra and their family of Ian, 17 and Lara, 19. And this tall, gentle man speaks candidly about the murder of his daughters Lexie, 16, and twins Jenny and Kirsty, 19, and their 19-year-old girlfriend – and how he came to forgive the man who so callously took his loved ones from him.

The early hours of 24 January 1987, are deep-etched in Sandy MacGregor’s memory forever. ‘I was re-married with a young family and my daughters lived with their mother nearby,’ he recalls. ‘The kids and I were extremely close and I was in frequent contact with them. At 2am there was a loud knocking on the door and I answered it to two policemen, who ushered me through to the loungeroom and sat me down. They said they had some terrible news. They told me that my three daughters and a friend had been killed in their mother’s home.

‘My reaction was disbelief. My daughters couldn’t be dead. Only the night before I had called to wish Lexie a happy birthday and talked about the camping trip they were going on the following day for the Australia Day long weekend. It had to be a mistake.’

As they drove Sandy to the scene, the officers explained that a male friend who was going on the camping trip had called several times during the evening and when there was no answer, although the lights were on, he had climbed through a window at 1.10am to find the carnage.

‘When I arrived I embraced my ex-wife Beverley, who had arrived home to the chaos from a friend’s wedding celebration, and we sobbed uncontrollably,’ he says. ‘Beverley wanted to go inside and see what had happened to her daughters but the police took me aside and explained that the girls had been “blown away” with a shotgun.

‘They apologised for being so graphic but said that they had to tell me this as due to the horrific nature of the crimes they wanted my support to keep Beverley from going inside. They said that it was best that we remember our children as they were. Neither of us went inside. I am glad that I didn’t.’

The following day police arrested unemployed student Richard Henry Lawson Maddrell, 27, as he sat on a cliff top contemplating suicide. He had thrown the shotgun in the ocean. A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and high on a cocktail of drugs at the time of the killings, Maddrell had met Jenny MacGregor when she was a student at Wollongong University, 100 kilometres south of Sydney. Maddrell had become infatuated, but over the previous 12 months she had rejected his advances.

Maddrell told police that he had gone to Jenny MacGregor’s house at 9.30 that night with a loaded shotgun. After she answered the door, he marched her at gunpoint into the loungeroom where the other girls were watching television and allegedly said to her, ‘You don’t know how much you have hurt me and screwed me up, but I still love you’, before shooting her in the head at point-blank range. Maddrell then killed the other three girls with five more shots to their heads after stopping to re-load twice.

‘After the murders I was in two states of shock,’ Sandy says. ‘I was either like a zombie, wandering around in a daze, or I was consumed by loathing and hatred. I had a consultancy business in the city and I just abandoned it. All I wanted to do was kill Richard Maddrell. To me he was just vermin – and mad vermin at that – who should be put down.

‘I was approached by a person who said that he could have him killed in jail for me as a favour. And I believe this person could have. But eventually I declined, though I must admit, I did give it a lot of thought.

‘If anyone had told me then that there would come a time in my life when I would be able to forgive Maddrell, I would have said they were crazy.’

Sandy MacGregor’s father was a major in the British Indian army. Sandy was born in 1940 and in 1947 the family migrated to Tasmania. Sandy was the top army cadet at school. After graduating from Duntroon he completed a civil engineering degree at Sydney University.

Sandy commanded the Royal Australian Engineers 3 Field Troop in Vietnam, the first ‘tunnel rats’ to discover the Viet Cong’s secret underground cities in 1966. Back in Australia in 1967 to train young officers about Vietnam, he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery and leadership. He left the regular army in 1968 to work as an engineer, but stayed in the Army Reserve. His marriage to Beverley ended in 1976 and he married Sandra Dewhurst in 1979 and started a new family.

Sandy first encountered the healing powers of the mind when he encouraged his son, Andrew, then 17, to seek alternative treatment for the chronic asthma he’d had since infancy.

‘A couple of bad attacks had landed him in hospital,’ Sandy says. ‘I took him to an Indian doctor who taught Andrew a simple mental relaxation technique, which helped him control the severity of the attacks. And, later on, when Andrew was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident and looked like losing a leg, he used the same techniques to cope with infection and pain and saved his leg.

‘I was convinced there was something in this so Andrew taught me the techniques. I applied them to losing weight and I lost 22 kilograms in six months, without dieting, and could make my pulse disappear and bring my blood pressure down by 20 points,’ Sandy says. ‘Up to the time of the girls’ murders I was meditating daily and had done a course on personal development.

‘After the tragedy, even though I was in severe shock, I did another course and within two months I was meditating again. It was during the meditation that I realised that if I persisted in being consumed with anger, hate and revenge towards Maddrell I would become another of his victims,’ he says. ‘I decided to turn those negative thoughts into thoughts of acceptance, love and forgiveness. I worked on it for up to two hours a day and within six months my head was clear, I had forgiven Maddrell in my mind many times, I felt at peace with myself and I could get on with my life.

‘By now I was convinced of the power of the subconscious and I decided to teach people about it. As a result of an interview on ABC Radio in 1990, when I said publicly for the first time that I had forgiven Maddrell, 300 people enrolled for my seminars. That was really the beginning of my new life.’

Since then he has conducted hundreds of seminars throughout Australia for many thousands of participants, recorded more than a dozen meditation tapes, written numerous books on personal development, one of which, Piece of Mind, has sold over 60,000 copies, and published his memoirs of Vietnam in No Need for Heroes.

‘But in time Maddrell could be freed and it worried me not knowing how I would react if I bumped into him in the street,’ Sandy says. ‘Would I talk to him or would I avoid him? Would I abuse him? Would I react violently? I came to realise that until I found the answers I would go on wondering and he would always be like a monkey on my back.

‘In late 2000, while consulting a spiritual teacher about my concerns, to my surprise he suggested that I could complete the process by seeing Maddrell in prison and forgiving him face to face. I was shocked. The thought had never crossed my mind.

‘But after I thought about it I realised that it was also the opportunity to get all of my questions answered,’ he says. ‘Then the effect on my psyche would be gone and I would be free. But would he see me? I decided to find out.’

In March 1988, Maddrell had been found not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness and detained indefinitely in strict custody at Morisset Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane. After serving four years he was considered sane enough to live among mainstream prisoners and was now in Grafton Gaol, 620 kilometres north of Sydney.

‘Maddrell was contacted through a New South Wales Corrective Services program called Conferencing,’ Sandy says, ‘which brings victims and offenders together for a multitude of reasons, such as venting their anger or giving the offender the opportunity to repent and ask forgiveness. Maddrell agreed immediately.

‘During the four months it took to set up the meeting I worked hard at preparing myself with meditation, mental and physical exercise and prayer,’ he says. ‘With a friend to support me during the meeting, we drove to Grafton and discussed in detail what I wanted to talk about and the questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to get it right the first time as there was no going back and doing it over.’

The meeting’s coordinator, Phil Hartmann from Corrective Services, met Sandy and Paul at the jail and took them inside to the tiny chapel, where six chairs had been set up in a circle in front of the altar. Sandy meditated for a few minutes to compose himself then indicated that he was ready. Psychologist Chris Drayden-Thompson and Reverend Richard Brown led a stony-faced Maddrell, his hands clenched in front of him, into the room. He looked as if there were a thousand other places he would rather be.

‘When I looked up and saw him for the first time I thought: “So this is what he looks like. So this is the bastard who killed my kids,”’ Sandy says. ‘But rather than feel hatred or anger or want to abuse him, as I had dreaded I would when we met, I knew in that face-to-face instant that I could forgive him in the flesh and be free from ever having to wonder about those things again in my life. It was an enormous relief.’

Phil Hartmann introduced Maddrell to Sandy and Paul and they both remained seated. There was no shaking hands. Just nodding hellos. Maddrell was seated opposite Sandy.

At around 170cm, of medium build and dressed in a green T-shirt, tracksuit pants and runners, 42-year-old Maddrell looked younger than his years. He obviously worked out and looked trim and healthy. Atop his high forehead sat a crewcut. He had a pointed nose, no facial hair and his beady eyes gazed out from abysmal, ecliptic cavities. ‘I noticed that there were red blotches around his eyes and I thought, “Good, maybe he’s emotional, it looks as if he has been crying,”’ Sandy says. ‘To break the tension I told him that I was very nervous and asked how he felt. He replied that he was “scared witless”.

‘I told him that I was doing this on my own behalf and that my former wife and my son Andrew were not aware I was here,’ Sandy says. ‘I said that I would like to talk about what forgiveness is all about for me before I forgave him for the murders of my daughters.’

Sandy told Maddrell that he had already forgiven him many times in his own mind, had said it publicly on radio and published it in his book Switch On To Your Inner Strength in 1996. ‘I explained that I teach that if you can forgive in your mind something that has been done against you, it prevents you from becoming hateful and angry. If you don’t, then that hatred and anger will run your life, which would leave you wide open to sickness and disease of the body and mind.

‘I made it clear that my forgiveness did not condone what he had done or trivialise the offence and that I was doing this for myself, not him. If he got some good out of it then that was his good fortune, though I said that I hoped that by forgiving him it would be a good outcome for us both.’

As Sandy spoke Maddrell sat bolt upright with his hands in his lap, not once taking his eyes from him. Apart from the occasional nod in agreement when Sandy asked him if he understood what he was saying, he remained silent and emotionless.

‘I explained that I believed that all humans have an energy that runs through their bodies, which can be seen on a screen when it is measured by an electro-encephalograph, the machine that measures brain waves,’ Sandy says. ‘When you are brain dead the line is flat – the energy is gone. Sometimes that energy comes back in what is known as a “near-death experience” and then it is known as Life.

‘When that energy has gone out of the body some people call it Soul, Spirit, Life-force, Prana, Chi, God or Spark of God. I choose to call it God. I firmly believe that this energy, this God, is in all of us and that we are all joined by it and therefore forgiving is a spiritual act.’

And then after a long pause, Sandy said: ‘Richard Maddrell, I bring to mind that part of you which is joined to me, so whatever I do or say to you in this moment I am also doing and saying to myself. From the God in me to the God in you, I unconditionally forgive you for the murders of my three daughters, Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie.’

As he struggled saying his daughters’ names, Sandy began to weep. If ever there was an opportunity for Maddrell to show any emotion, this was it. He didn’t. Sandy sat and wept for a short time before composing himself. Then he asked Maddrell if he would like to say anything.

Maddrell said he was sorry (the first of six times that he said it) for what he had done and expressed gratitude at being given the opportunity to say it. He was softly spoken and appeared sincere. He said that he never imagined that he could ever hurt so many people so much and have so many people hate him.

‘Then we discussed the things that I had struggled with in my mind and would have been doomed to live without the answers to, if I had not met with Maddrell,’ Sandy says. ‘Things about that horrible night that were deeply painful, but had to be answered so I would never have to wonder about them ever again.’

When he was satisfied that he had put his mind completely to rest, Sandy called an end to the meeting and Maddrell was taken back to his cell. It had been an hour and a half.

‘I walked out into a perfect summer’s afternoon,’ Sandy says. ‘The sun was beaming as if Jenny, Kirsty and Lexie were smiling down on me. I knew they would have been proud of their dad. As I walked from the jail a free man, it was as if I was floating on air. My 14-year sentence was over. The monkey was off my back forever.’

Sandy MacGregor conducts seminars all over Australia helping people to get on with their lives by understanding themselves better through the power of their minds and meditation. For information on Sandy MacGregor’s seminars contact www.calm.com.au.

Who Murdered Sallie-Anne?

Just after dawn on the morning of 7 February 1986, a jogger noticed what he thought was a body floating face down in the lake known as Busby’s Bore, situated on the westernmost corner of Sydney’s Centennial Park. He notified the park rangers, who used a row boat to recover the corpse of a woman wearing blue jeans and a pink skivvy top, which had been rolled up to rest on the top of her breasts.

Police recognised the body immediately. It was one of the best-known underworld characters of the time, 32-year-old Sallie-Anne Huckstepp – heroin addict, prostitute, gangsters’ moll and police informer. Huckstepp had a long criminal history for petty crimes and drug use, and was always in the company of one heavy criminal or another. It was said that she had also had affairs with police officers.

So no one was really surprised that Sallie-Anne had wound up dead, floating among the lilies. Over the years she had been an outspoken police informer on her criminal associates and, according to the underworld scuttlebutt, she was just marking time on the one spot waiting for any one of a long list of villains to see to it that she would never tell on them again. Sallie-Anne was known as a ‘dead woman walking’.

Born Sallie-Anne Krivoshow into a respectable Jewish family in Sydney’s up-market Bellevue Hill in 1954, she was educated at exclusive Moriah College, a private Jewish school. Sallie-Anne married young and had a daughter. After the marriage broke up she retained her married name and began hanging around Kings Cross, using heroin and selling herself to pay for it.

It wasn’t long before Sallie-Anne’s good looks and charismatic personality found her in the constant companionship of the notorious Sydney standover man, armed robber and heroin dealer, Warren Lanfranchi.

When Lanfranchi was gunned down and killed, allegedly in self-defence, in Woods Lane in the inner Sydney suburb of Chippendale in June 1981 by detective Roger Rogerson, Sallie-Anne made the fatal mistake of publicly condemning Rogerson and his criminal associate, underworld crime boss Neddy Smith.

Sallie-Anne told 60 Minutes and the Willesee current affairs programs that when her lover had left home that day to meet Rogerson it was to give him (Rogerson) a $10,000, bribe which she saw him stuff down the front of his pants in $50 notes before he left home. No money was found on Lanfranchi’s body.

At the inquest into Lanfranchi’s killing Sallie-Anne was even more verbal and told the court about dealings that her dead lover had with Neddy Smith and the police. She told the court that Lanfranchi feared for his life after he had attempted to murder a police officer but the gun had failed to go off.

She said that Neddy Smith had arranged the meeting with Lanfranchi and detective Roger Rogerson, and Lanfranchi was to pay a $10,000 bribe and the matter would be forgotten. She said that Neddy Smith had driven Lanfranchi to the meeting with Rogerson at the secluded lane in Chippendale, where Rogerson had murdered Lanfranchi in cold blood and taken the money.

But despite Sallie-Anne’s evidence and open outrage to anyone who would listen, Roger Rogerson was exonerated and she became a criminal pariah. For her own protection Sallie-Anne became the partner of another of Sydney’s most feared and notorious drug traffickers, David Kelleher, whom she referred to as her ‘Blond God’ due to his muscular physique and bleached blond hair.

Together they became quite an item among the criminal milieu of Sydney’s eastern suburbs and Sallie-Anne became what is known in criminal jargon as a ‘koala’ – a protected species. But that was only as long as she was with her Blond God. Without his protection, she was fair game.

So when Dave Kelleher was arrested, thrown in jail and ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment for trafficking huge amounts of heroin, Sallie-Anne was out in the cold. She went back to hooking for a living, only this time with more up-market clients. And being a celebrity of sorts herself, she liked to cater for the celebrities.

But that didn’t dampen her newly acquired media profile as a walking authority on the underworld who wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. She often appeared on current affairs programs and even had a regular column in Australian Penthouse Magazine. Blind Freddy could tell you that Sallie-Anne was long past her use-by date.

Around 11pm on the night of 6 February 1986, Sallie-Anne received a phone call at the apartment she shared with a girlfriend in Edgecliff Road, Woollahra. She left immediately, telling her flatmate she would only be a few minutes. The flatmate suspected that the call was from a drug dealer and that Sallie-Anne was going to collect some heroin.

Dimly lit Centennial Park at night is not the best of places to be on your own, especially if you are an attractive woman, but the lure of the heroin was strong enough for Sallie-Anne to park her car at the unlit Martin Street entrance, which allows pedestrian access, and she entered into the dark. It was also raining heavily. She never came out.

An inquest into Sallie-Anne Huckstepp’s death concluded that she had been strangled by a person unknown. While police had their suspicions, no charges were laid.

Many years later while serving a life sentence for murder, Sallie-Anne’s old adversary, Neddy Smith, began gobbing off to his cellmate that he had murdered her. The cellmate went to police and they wired him up and he recorded the conversations. Everything added up. Smith even said that he hated Sallie-Anne so much that, as he strangled her in the pond, he made sure that she looked into his eyes as she drew her last breath, so that his would be the last face she would ever see.

Smith was charged with Sallie-Anne’s murder and sent to trial in 1995. So convinced were police that he had done it that they had Sallie-Anne’s coffin exhumed in the hope that some of Neddy Smith’s skin would be under her fingernails, which would give them the conclusive DNA proof that would wrap the case up. No such luck.

With only what he had said to his cellmate as evidence, Smith was found not guilty of murder. Neddy Smith has since been found guilty of the 1983 murder of brothel keeper Harvey Jones, and will never be released from prison.

The murder of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp remains open to this day, though police aren’t looking too hard for the killer. They believe that the person who did it is safely behind bars as it is.

The Wicked Witch of Kings Cross

Throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Rosaleen Norton was Sydney’s own real-live witch. An eccentric in the extreme, these days her antics would be treated for what they were, a bit of harmless fun. But, back in those archaic times, the authorities chose to look upon Roie, as she preferred to be called, as the devil’s apprentice and treated her accordingly – to the point where she wound up in court for the most ridiculous offences that today would be laughable.

Like everything about her life, even Rosaleen Norton’s birth was different. She claimed to have been born in the middle of a violent thunderstorm in October 1917, with two blue spots on her kneecap and a grisly strip of hard flesh running up from her waist to her armpit that, according to her, was the unmistakable mark of a witch.

She was born into a perfectly normal home to god-fearing Protestant parents in possibly the least devil-like place on the planet – beautiful Dunedin in New Zealand. When she was a girl the family moved to Sydney and she excelled at drawing and painting at the East Sydney Technical College. She claimed later on in her life that it was here that she became intrigued with the occult and Satanism. She satisfied her passion by reading macabre American paperbacks and classics of the occult by Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe.

Rosaleen also had a flare for writing and, at age 15, her stories and drawings featured regularly in the most popular magazine of the time, Smith’s Weekly. The first articles and illustrations were about normal topics of the day but they became more and more macabre and, when they got too over the top, she was sacked. After her mother died in 1935 she left home and hitchhiked around Australia with her boyfriend, making a living as a pavement artist.

By her late teens Rosaleen Norton could be best described as a bohemian, content to live day to day with her teenage husband in their tiny, dark bed-sitter in Brougham Street Kings Cross, where she would spend the rest of her life. The marriage didn’t last long and now Rosaleen was alone to practise what was her life’s calling – Satanism, black magic, voodoo and the occult.

She made a respectable living modelling nude for artists and privately selling her own paintings, which mainly depicted orgies in a setting that resembled her interpretation of hell. The works showed forbidden sex between naked devil-creatures with long tails, gargoyles intertwined with gargoyles, witches and hermaphrodites.

Before long, the Witch of Kings Cross, as she was now known, became notorious for the ‘sex magic’ parties at her tiny apartment. Those fortunate enough to have been to one told of wild orgies, drug taking and ceremonies where partygoers pledged themselves to the devil. It was rumoured that some of Sydney’s more prominent people attended the orgies and had given themselves over to the dark side.

Rosaleen Norton was a sight to behold as she swanned through the Cross with her worshippers in tow. The flowing black cape with a huge Victorian collar, waist-length jet-black hair flowing in the slipstream, plucked arched eyebrows, pancake make-up, ruby-red lips, elf-like pointed ears, high cheek bones, that accentuated her lecherous smirk, and the pointed vampire’s eye-teeth, made her a sight worth the drive to Darlinghurst just to say that you had seen her. Unfortunately the pong that came off Roie indicated that she didn’t tub too often. But, maybe that was the way witches were meant to smell. I doubt that anyone was game enough to ask her.

In 1945 Roie took up with Gavin Greenless, a young up-and-coming poet from a respectable family of Sydney journalists. All the while she had been painting and, with help from Greenless, she had an exhibition of 47 pastels and sketches at Melbourne University’s toffy Rowden White Library.

Given that the art world was still gasping in horror at William Dobell’s 1943 Archibald Prize–winning caricature of Joshua Smith, it is little wonder that they fainted in shock at the sight of Satan, ghouls and werewolves having their way with naked nuns on the altar in front of the fires of Hades.

The vice squad arrived at the exhibition and took away four of Norton’s works appropriately named Lucifer, Triumph, Individuation and Witches’ Sabbat and charged her with having exhibited obscene articles. Norton went to court and won the case, but a ban placed on the exhibition saw to it that she didn’t sell any paintings. We can only wonder just how much those paintings would be worth today.

In 1951 Norton and her husband jointly produced a book The Art of Rosaleen Norton, consisting of his poems and her illustrations. The book was declared obscene and was banned. In August 1955 Norton exhibited her works at the Kashmir Café in Kings Cross, only to have the vice squad take them away and charge her with breaching the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act. She was eventually found guilty of exhibiting three paintings that were deemed to be obscene and were subsequently destroyed. At the same time she and her husband were fined £25 for their part in taking obscene photographs of what the court classed as ‘unnatural acts’.

In March 1956, Sir Eugene Goossens, the celebrated conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, was arrested as he stepped off a flight from London to Sydney. In Sir Eugene’s bags customs officers found a swag of pornographic material, which consisted of 1166 explicit photographs, films, ribald books and three rubber masks. It was alleged that Sir Eugene was a regular at Rosaleen Norton’s sex parties. He was fined and left Australia in disgrace, never to return.

By now Norton’s reputation as High Priestess of the Witches of Australia was established and through the late 1950s and ’60s she made a living consulting in witchcraft and allowing the believers to have their pictures taken with her alongside a life-size portrait of Pan, her favourite demon.

She did nothing to quash the stories of the sex orgies at her tiny apartment with as many as nine naked guests at a time in grotesque masks and capes lusting over her, naked but for a cat mask, black apron and black shawl, and smoking a hashish joint from a long cigarette holder.

By the mid-1970s Rosaleen Norton’s novelty value had worn off and she was virtually alone, friendless and forgotten and dying a lingering death from colon cancer. Ironically, the ones who took her in to ease her into the next life were the once- dreaded enemy, the nuns at the Sacred Heart Hospice for the Dying. In 1979 the Witch of Kings Cross died, aged 62.

We can only imagine that when Rosaleen Norton knocked on the gates to hell and asked to come in, the devil would have opened them and said, ‘Hello Roie. We’ve been waiting for you.’ And that would have made her very happy.

'Darling, You Do the Renovating and Just Give Me the Bills'

When Coles Myer boss Brian Quinn bought a modest two-bedroom house on a generous block in leafy Templestowe, in Melbourne’s fashionable eastern suburbs, for $440,000 in 1982 he said to his wife, ‘Darling, you do the renovations and just give me the bills’. Little did he realise that the budget they set would be passed in a minute and the house would end up costing a fortune – even by today’s standards – and he would wind up in the clink.

It seemed as though a lot of the money he used for the renovations came from the company Brian Quinn had so brilliantly managed for 36 years. But, loyal employee or not, the shareholders were far from impressed and off he went to the cooler.

At the time of the indiscretions, Brian Quinn was one of Australia’s most liked and respected businessmen, who had started dirt poor at the bottom and ended up at the top delivering healthy profits year in and year out for the only company he had ever worked for in his life. He began sweeping floors in a Coles store in Adelaide in 1956 and over the years worked in every facet of retailing until he was chief executive of a business with an annual turnover in excess of $10 billion per annum on a salary of $1.5 million a year. And worth every cent.

Along the way the boy from humble beginnings was elected to the Board of the Reserve Bank and collected an Order of Australia. When he retired in 1992 he did so with his reputation intact as one of Australia’s most respected leaders of commerce. But there were a few unpleasant skeletons lurking in Brian Quinn’s closet and they would be hung out to dry in the years to come.

When the Quinns bought the house in Templestowe it was with the intention of renovating it into a comfortable family home. Given that they had been described as the perfect couple in that he could earn money like no other and his wife Trenna could spend it as fast – if not faster – than he made it, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven.

And so, with a budget of $250,000, Mrs Quinn set about building their home for them and their young family. Once the shell of the house, which was described as resembling the Palace of Versailles, was finished, the fittings to the house and the external construction began. This included a tennis court and spa, a floodlit cricket pitch and an eight-car garage. More than $250,000 was spent on marble floors and walls and over $100,000 for glass in the windows, and the imported toilet suites cost around $5000 each.

Not happy with the new first floor of the house, Mrs Quinn had it demolished before anyone had set a foot on it and another floor more to her choosing was installed. The airconditioning system was removed and reinstalled at a cost of $242,000 because the vents were visible. The painting bill came to $1 million for a house that was almost entirely wallpapered. Mrs Quinn was said to have run her hand over a wall after a sixth coat of varnish had been applied, only to tell the workmen to rub it down and give it another coat.

Mrs Quinn was also unhappy with the ultramodern kitchen, when she saw a better one in a magazine, so she had it ripped out and updated without so much as a tin of Beluga caviar being opened in it. Unhappy with the shade of the imported marble in one of the guests’ powder rooms, after the tradesmen had spent forever lovingly installing it, Mrs Quinn had it replaced with a different coloured marble more to her choosing and at a cost of more than $100,000.

For six years the trucks kept coming and going from dawn until dusk. At any given time during working hours there would be as many as 20 work vehicles in the street out the front. When it was finished the house and grounds took up five suburban blocks. All together it had cost $6 million. Such was Mrs Quinn’s exquisite taste that eight years later the Quinn mansion sold for just $1.9 million. But for long before the sale of the house, tongues had been wagging that Brian Quinn didn’t have that kind of money to throw around and an investigation into the origin of some of the money that had paid for the renovations was put in motion.

The suspicions were correct. Some of the payments had come from Coles Myer. Marble, granite, gold-plated taps, the marble-floored tennis pavilion, the flood-lit tennis court, guttering, plumbing, swimming pool and crystal chandeliers had been all charged to Coles Myer’s account.

But proving that a man such as Brian Quinn was corrupt wasn’t going to be easy and it wasn’t until April 1997 that the former CEO of Coles Myer and a former Coles Myer national maintenance manager, Graham Lanyon, pleaded not guilty in court to defrauding Coles Myer of $4.6 million between September 1982 and October 1988.

The Crown alleged that on Brian Quinn’s instructions Mr Lanyon was writing cheques and burying the costs in the company books for work allegedly done on Coles projects, when in fact they were payment for the army of workers and mountains of materials coming into the Quinn mansion. In his defence, Brian Quinn’s counsel maintained that as a Coles Myer executive he was entitled to have some improvements to the house paid for by the company. In an act of good faith, Mr Quinn paid back $2.9 million to Coles Myer.

Brian Quinn’s list of character witnesses looked like a who’s who of Australian business and politics. The Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, spoke on his behalf, as did many leaders of commerce and the community at large. They spoke of Brian Quinn’s generosity with both his time and money, his public spiritedness and his selflessness for the huge variety of causes that he supported. But it was all to no avail. He was sent to prison for four years.

Ever the retailer, while he was in central Victoria’s Loddon Prison, Brian Quinn was granted permission to run the canteen, which he apparently did more efficiently and profitably than ever before. His salary was $5.50 a day. He was released after serving two and a half years.

Brian Quinn has always steadfastly maintained he did nothing wrong. Out of prison in 1999, he and his wife moved to Queensland to live. For both their sakes I hope they moved into a brand new apartment and not a run-down house that needed a lick of paint.