All Fall Down (74 page)

In another call, Des Sturgess supposedly told Lewis that he ‘was D. of Prosecutions when Moore and Hurrey charged and know that I never protected paedophiles …’.

Still, the
Courier-Mail
investigation had caused enough public disquiet to warrant official investigation.

It was yet another inquiry Lewis would have to face.

Project Triton

Just as the
Courier-Mail
was peering into some dark corners, revisiting a narrative thread that, on the surface, reached back to the 1950s, the Children’s Commission tabled in parliament its report – ‘Paedophilia in Queensland’. The report looked into the perceived ineffectiveness by law enforcement agencies in the investigation and prosecution of offenders in relation to paedophilia, just as the
Courier-Mail
articles were asserting.

As a result of public debate, the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) informed the Commissioner of the Queensland Police Service, Jim O’Sullivan, on 21 August 1997, that the CJC intended to investigate allegations of misconduct by police. The following day the CJC announced the establishment of a special task force investigation. It became known as Project Triton.

From 1 September the Triton team began their enquiries. Eventually, former District Court Judge Jack Kimmins was commissioned to preside over the investigation’s public hearings.

The terms of reference included looking at whether former commissioner Terry Lewis allegedly kept secret files on possible criminal sexual behaviour by senior public officials for blackmail purposes, and if those files were seized by the Fitzgerald commission of inquiry from safes that were controlled by Lewis.

Another related to whether police had shown inactivity or had orchestrated a cover-up into allegations that children had been sexually abused and murdered during the filming of so-called ‘snuff’ movies in Queensland.

The Kimmins hearings were a sensation, coming a decade after the establishment of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. Queensland had moved on. Terry Lewis was in gaol. Rob Borbidge was Premier. Yet this ugly past was back at the centre of debate.

The inquiry heard that Lewis, when he was commissioner of police, had kept a ‘treasure trove’ of dirt files on the ‘misbehaviour’ of police up to the rank of inspector, as well as confidential files on the sexual activity of ‘prominent figures’, which were kept in a safe in the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB).

Former JAB officers were so concerned about the files, and the prospect of Lewis interfering with any investigations as they claimed he had done over the David Moore scandal, that they broke into the safe and copied the files.

Lewis’s former personal assistant, Greg Early, was called. He said Lewis took files from his office in 1987 when he was stood aside as commissioner by Police Minister Bill Gunn. He said Lewis told him they were ‘personal affairs’.

The next day, Fitzgerald Inquiry officers had raided Lewis’s office. Early said he had ‘never seen’ a number of files Lewis kept, and didn’t know if Lewis had kept a personal file on investigations into male brothels in the early to mid 1980s.

The inquiry further heard that a file relating to investigations into former senior constable Dave Moore had disappeared after it went to then Police Commissioner Terry Lewis’s office.

Senior Sergeant Garnett Dickson was called to give evidence. Dickson said he had at one time briefed the CJC on paedophilia, and made them aware of certain files, and they hadn’t seemed interested in what his investigations had uncovered.

‘I did [so] because the main thrust of the inquiry was people in high places … people in government,’ he said. ‘I mentioned that we had just done a large probe for the BCIQ (Bureau of Criminal Intelligence Queensland) called Probe Egret.

‘Egret related to criminal paedophilia in Queensland. It was as thick as a phone book, that’s the sort of information it contained. But they were not interested in that. They were going to do their own thing.’

Police Commissioner Jim O’Sullivan gave evidence before Kimmins. He said he was unaware whether any ‘dirt files’ had been part of the material seized by his taskforce when it raided Lewis’s office. ‘I was sent to police headquarters on various occasions by senior counsel attached to the Fitzgerald Inquiry with specific tasks,’ he said. ‘I seized material but did not inspect it.’

Lewis himself appeared before the inquiry, having been granted special leave from the St Vincent de Paul halfway house to do so, and denied he had ever kept any ‘dirt files’ on people, nor had he ever obstructed investigations into Moore in the early 1980s.

An earlier witness, former Juvenile Aid Bureau officer Mark McCoy, disagreed. McCoy believed Lewis had done everything he could to make sure no prosecution against Moore went ahead. ‘I felt an eye was kept on us all the time,’ McCoy told the inquiry.

The
Courier-Mail
reported that Lewis appeared much the same as he did before his fall from grace – ‘the sagging features of a glum but not unfriendly bloodhound who used to be the jowl in the Crown of Queensland law enforcement’.

There was further evidence from former police officer Jim Slade in relation to a ‘snuff’ movie he claims to have seen – a film of a child being abused and murdered. Slade was interviewed by inquiry investigators but was not questioned before Kimmins during the hearings. He claimed he had seen the movie and that he believed it was made on the banks of the Brisbane River at Pinkenba.

The inquiry rolled into the New Year. In late January, the CJC reported that it had found no evidence that police had covered up paedophilia, and it had failed to prove that former commissioner Lewis or other officers had in any way interfered with investigations into paedophilia.

In February, the inquiry heard that detectives investigating paedophilia were warned that any search warrants issued on judicial officers had to be vetted first by senior police to ensure they were based on evidence.

In his ultimate final report, tabled in state parliament in September 1998, Kimmins, extraordinarily, found that in the course of his nine-month investigation, ‘not one allegation had substance in fact’.

Kimmins said: ‘… those who prey upon and defile our young and innocent – and those who harbour such deviates – deserve nothing less than the full wrath of the community’s condemnation and the fullest retribution prescribed by law … [but the] public heralding of untested accusations can therefore be considered as heinous as paedophilia itself, particularly where the peddler of an accusation knows or ought to know that the accusation is untested, or worse, is unlikely to have any substance.’

CJC Chairman Frank Clair also echoed Kimmins when he said: ‘It is regrettable that such rumours or scuttlebutt, to use the term that was used by Judge Kimmins, was widely and repeatedly circulated, eventually convincing some of its proponents of its authenticity.’

The
Courier-Mail
, which had a large role in triggering the inquiry, was outraged. It said in an editorial: ‘The “scuttlebutt” which was swept under the carpet by churches, the police and others in positions of authority in the past right around the world, most certainly did not go away in this instance.

‘The rash of cases of paedophilia before the courts in Queensland, relating to crimes committed in the 1960s and 70s, indicates dismissing the “scuttlebutt” as just that – rumour and innuendo unworthy of being taken seriously – merely leaves a generation of children without protection.’

Former deputy premier Bill Gunn fired back at the Kimmins inquiry, saying he had no doubt police had ignored paedophilia in the past.

The whole Kimmins experience left former Paedophile Taskforce officer Kym Goldup shattered. ‘I think they broke Garney [Dickson] as well. They pretty much kept me and Garney apart.

‘The other thing [was] if I said something, they’d say, “Where’s the evidence for that?” There’s a lot of things you know but you can’t get a complainant. Paedophilia is one of those things … you have to find a paedophile first, and then you have to find a complainant. It’s very rare that a complainant comes to you.

‘Garney always used to say to me they pick their mark, they’ll take a kid off the street who is wearing rags, and they’ll buy them the latest clothes and a ghetto blaster and a new skateboard and give them somewhere nice to sleep and so, of course, the kid’s not going to make a complaint.’

Jim Slade was also angry his evidence about the ‘snuff’ movie was not believed. ‘I was interviewed by these two guys from the Kimmins inquiry, and they were young solicitors, and I mean, you don’t send young solicitors to interview a bloody guy who’s done 20 years of undercover, and straightaway I knew that they were just out to trap me, you know?’ says Slade. ‘They weren’t there to find out how, or where I saw it, or anything like that …’

Slade says he later discovered that a civilian and a police officer who provided signed statements to the inquiry supporting Slade’s version of events later recanted their statements. ‘I mean, why would someone make up something about a snuff movie?’ Slade asks. ‘I got a real burn out of that.’

Once again, a commission of inquiry into Queensland paedophilia ended up shooting the messengers – in this case, Goldup, Dickson, journalist Michael Ware and the
Courier-Mail
newspaper. The hornet’s nest kicked up by the charging of former constable Dave Moore and radio personality Bill Hurrey in the early 1980s was still echoing to the present, yet nothing stuck, despite the shadows and whispers.

Goldup says Ware’s articles were spot on, yet his work was torn apart by Kimmins. She adds that the whole truth never had a chance of being exposed in the Kimmins inquiry. She claims the saga ruined her life.

‘I bleed blue,’ she says. ‘I was a career police person. When I joined the police force I was most frightened of the baddies in the street. When I left the police service I was most frightened of the people I worked with.’

Home Sweet Home

In the New Year, Lewis continued to lobby lawyer Des Sturgess. He wanted a pardon, and still he was haunted by the past.

He had a visit from Sturgess on 22 January and they discussed Lewis’s ambitions for a formal pardon or a new trial. He also talked about people he perceived as his enemies: Ross Dickson, Basil Hicks, Lorelle Saunders, John Huey, Jim Slade and Alec Jeppesen. The media personalities he loathed included Chris Masters, Phil Dickie and Quentin Dempster.

Lewis was formally granted home detention from 11 May 1998. The Queensland Community Corrections Board informed him that given his high profile, it was best he didn’t engage in community service. The news sparked a brawl between the ALP and the Borbidge government. Opposition Leader Peter Beattie said that Lewis’s release only six years and nine months into a 14-year sentence was hypocritical and made a mockery of the government’s pretence to be tough on crime. Beattie said Police Minister Russell Cooper had broken the government’s own declaration that serious criminals serve 80 per cent of their sentence. ‘[But here] we have a friend of the National Party, a serious criminal responsible for the corruption of a generation of police,’ Beattie said. He also pointed out that Lewis had never shown remorse or admitted guilt for his corrupt behaviour.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, on the other hand, welcomed Lewis’s release. Hazel Lewis said she was ‘delighted’ her husband was coming home.

Lewis says that upon his release the media was everywhere. ‘I had to go from South Brisbane and the manager there agreed to drive me out to Toowong where the parole office was,’ he recalls. ‘Well, of course, outside St Vinnies at South Brisbane there must have been 40 media waiting for me to get in the car and I wouldn’t talk to them. There were more of them out at Toowong and then when I got out to where Hazel was living, there was a team of them there. But you know you’re not going to gain anything by talking.’

On arriving home, Lewis had a short sleep. He says prison aged him considerably. ‘You’re not doing anything, it’s mind boggling, [you’re not] stretching the mind,’ he says. ‘It’s very routine, mindless, endless.’

On that first night of freedom, Lewis was visited by one of his daughters, and recorded that he had ‘mince, vegetables and pasta’ for dinner. He then settled back to watch some television. He took in the news, and then caught most of that night’s episode of
Heartbeat
, the British police drama set in the fictional village of Ashfordly in Yorkshire.

What may have escaped the scrupulous and attentive notice of civilian Terry Lewis, was that he was set free precisely nine years, almost to the minute, after the airing of Chris Masters’ ‘The Moonlight State’, the investigative report that led to the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

On the night of his release from the halfway house,
Four Corners
broadcast a report called ‘The Country Doctors’, an investigation by reporter Liz Jackson into the secret culture of the International Monetary Fund.

Lewis missed it. He was in bed by 9.30 p.m.