The Matriarch Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  1 Seeds by the Wayside

  2 Roots of Evil

  3 When I’m Asleep It’s Still Open

  4 Stone Walls Do Not . . .

  5 Going Down

  6 Bent Cops, Dogs and Soldiers

  7 Charnel House

  8 Strange Screams of Death

  9 Walsh Street

  10 Venus Bay

  Epilogue

  Family Tree

  Chronology

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  In loving memory of my wife, Ann

  Prologue

  The year 1988 was particularly significant in the annals of crime and its detection in Victoria. In October, two young police officers were executed in a cold-blooded outrage that changed forever the relationship between Victoria Police and the Melbourne underworld. Two of the four men charged with, and acquitted of, the murders of Constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, were Victor Peirce and Trevor Pettingill, sons of crime matriarch Kathy Pettingill.

  Six months earlier, in April 1988, Kathy Pettingill had fled the killing fields of suburban Richmond for the remote, ocean-side hamlet of Venus Bay. The impetus for her flight was the horror of what went on in the charnel house where another son, serial killer Dennis Allen, tortured and murdered his victims, while presiding over a $70,000 a week drug empire.

  In 1996, the first edition of The Matriarch, Kathy’s authorised biography, was published. At the launch, she told the gathered media she would have killed Dennis herself had he not died as a result of his massive amphetamines habit.

  Since the book’s publication, Kathy’s story has rarely slipped from public view. Several filmmakers attempted, and failed, to convert her story to celluloid. Eventually one succeeded. Animal Kingdom went around the world, garnering awards and impressive box office receipts. So much so that a televised spin-off was launched in America, and is currently in its fourth season. But Kathy hated it. After seeing the original film in Melbourne soon after its release, she vented her disgust at Jacki Weaver, nominated for an Oscar for her performance as ‘Smurf’, whose character was based on Kathy.

  ‘Jacki Weaver and I have only one thing in common,’ she told the Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun. ‘Neither of us can act.’ The reason for her loathing of Weaver’s performance? ‘She kept kissing her sons on the mouth. I never did that.’

  Meanwhile several magazine articles and TV true crime series featured Kathy and her family, including a Netflix version, which saw a British production crew spend weeks between her home in Venus Bay and the back streets of Richmond. A scholarly, two-part treatise on The Matriarch, written by author Guy Savage, appeared online shortly after the release of Animal Kingdom. ‘If Zola were alive,’ wrote Savage, ‘he would be fascinated by Kathy Pettingill’s story, and the issues of hereditary. He’d be on the first plane to Australia collecting material for his next series of novels.’

  Twenty-two years after the first publication of The Matriarch, this new edition demonstrates Kathy Pettingill and her chilling story are not going to go away any time soon.

  Adrian Tame

  Introduction

  Kathy Pettingill is at the wheel of her old brown Falcon, her head of grey, curly hair barely visible, as she heads down the main street of Venus Bay. She and her car are a familiar sight in this tiny holiday resort on the remote southeast coast of Victoria. She’s on her way to pick up the mail, and the paper, or maybe to check the refuse tip for treasures like the fridge or settee she salvaged there last year. If it’s a Wednesday she’ll be heading further afield— another thirty kilometres into Inverloch for her beloved bingo. It’s been eight years since she moved down here and, with a few exceptions, the locals have stopped referring to her as ‘that wicked woman’. Their conversations no longer come to an abrupt halt when she walks into the local store; one or two have even been inside her modest, spotlessly clean cottage hidden behind the dunes, and sampled her famous boiled fruit cake.

  Kathy’s sixty now, and her memories of murder, heroin dealing, prostitution, torture and betrayal are just that . . . memories. Before age fades them for ever and they drift out to sea with the mists that sometimes swirl over the village, she needs to marshall them together one last time: line up the ghosts and exorcise them once and for all.

  Because that’s what this is all about—the re-examination of a life that has juxtaposed unspeakable brutality with deep loyalties, that reveals occasional glimpses of a nature so callous that there should be no place for the irrepressible humour, warmth and sheer resilience of the other Kathy Pettingill. Let there be no mistake—here is evidence of all the depravity that earned her the nickname ‘Granny Evil’, but equally of an uncrushable spirit which instinctively leaps to the defence of the weak and oppressed.

  The public perception of Kathy Pettingill, gleaned from decades of newspaper headlines, courtroom battles and vindictive gossip, sees her as the matriarch of a family steeped in vicious and often lucrative crime. Local legend has it that when she bought her cottage at Venus Bay she opened the boot of her car and thrust the asking price in a bundle of crumpled notes into the arms of the town’s real estate agent. The truth is she paid a $20 holding deposit.

  So where do public perception and private reality diverge? What is it behind those eyes, one glass, the other fiercely alive, that has created the legend? In simplest terms there are two catalysts for the reputation Kathy and her web of relatives have earned as possibly the most infamous criminal family in Australian history. The first is her son Dennis Allen, and the second is the execution of two young police officers in a crime that has become known as the Walsh Street murders.

  * * *

  Dennis was Kathy’s first-born son and, depending on whose version is believed, he murdered between five and thirteen people. He also built a drug-dealing empire over a five-year period which earned him an estimated $70,000 a week; he was linked with names like New South Wales’s notorious rogue policeman Roger Rogerson; he tried to blow up a coroner’s court building where an inquest was being held into the death of one of his victims; he used a heavy calibre automatic rifle to try to shoot a police helicopter out of the sky when its night lights annoyed him; he flew the Jolly Roger outside his inner suburban home, and he once dismembered a Hell’s Angel with a chainsaw.

  But these are not the only reasons a cult following has grown around Dennis’s memory since his bizarre death in 1987. The delicious shudders that mark the raising of his name in after-dinner discussion around the candle-lit dining tables of South Yarra and Toorak have more to do with the legends surrounding his black, sadistic humour. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that halfway through chainsawing Anton Kenny’s legs from his body, Dennis wiped the bone and gristle from his brow and mimicked the words of a popular television commercial for the State’s favourite beer, Victoria Bitter . . . ‘Matter of fact I’ve got it now’. What the ad, and Dennis, referred to was a raging thirst earned by ‘pulling a plough’. Certainly it’s true that Dennis broke off from his work with the chainsaw to quench his thirst with a couple of beers before finishing the job.

  In an age where Hannibal Lecter and his serial killing peers have replaced James Bond and similarly wholesome figures in our celluloid fantasies, a fascination—some would say an unhealthy obsession—has evolved around the subject of evil. Dennis has his place somewhere in this obsession, but evil, like all things, is a question of degree.

  Most of us would agree that the ultimate evil of our time was the system of death camps created by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. It has been said that when the Allies finally extinguished the ovens and ended the slaughter at Auschwitz, they found the birds had stop
ped singing and the grass wouldn’t grow. The evil wouldn’t go away. Well, the birds sing and the grass grows profusely on the vacant lots in the back streets of Richmond where Dennis committed his murders and sold his heroin. So how much further down the scale of evil does he take his place?

  Certainly somewhere well below those monsters of twentieth century mass murder like John Reginald Halliday Christie, or the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. Each of us probably has a different idea of men like Christie and Sutcliffe. Brett Whiteley, for instance, captured the evil of Christie in a series of unforgettable canvases. But I gained an insight into the psychology of the mass murderer when I was still quite young, from Ludovic Kennedy’s book on Christie, Ten Rillington Place.

  I felt that the essence of Christie’s evil wasn’t that he had intercourse with at least three of his victims while they were dying, or even that he cut off their pubic hair and kept it, long after their deaths, in a tin box. Illogical as it now seems, I was most repulsed by the image of what lay behind the wallpaper in the charnel house that was 10 Rillington Place in West London. A new tenant had moved into the house on 24 March 1953, a month after Christie moved out, leaving behind the bodies of six of his eight victims. The unfortunate newcomer was checking the walls when he came across what seemed like a hollow spot. He peeled back the wallpaper to reveal a broken cupboard door. With the aid of a torch he peered through a hole in the wood and found himself staring at a naked human back. That was my first realisation of pure evil, that glimpse of flesh through a hole in the wall of a grimy West London slum. After the police had dragged the bodies out from behind the walls, under the floorboards and in the garden, the house was pulled down and the street renamed Rustyn Close. But for me that image of evil would never go away.

  Does a place become evil? Whether it is a room, a house, a street, or even a geographic feature, what is it that transforms it forever into something stained by the horror and suffering inflicted there? Sometimes it is not the place itself that comes to represent the legacy of that horror. It can be something else altogether, like the shadowy security camera shot of two eleven-year-old boys leading two-year-old James Bulger by the hand from a Liverpool shopping centre to his brutal death on a railway line.

  Or it can even be something someone said. When Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was being questioned by police about Helen Rytka, one of his thirteen victims, he described how he had hit her from behind with his favourite weapon, his ballpein hammer. Helen was an eighteen-year-old prostitute who sometimes used an old woodyard to conduct her business in some pathetic semblance of privacy. After repeatedly smashing her skull with the hammer, Sutcliffe dragged her, still alive, into a far corner of the yard, where he propped her against a wall and raped her as she was dying. It is hard to think of a more explicit expression of evil than the way in which Peter Sutcliffe described the experience to police: ‘She just lay there limp. She didn’t put much into it.’

  The level of obsessive self-absorption demonstrated by these words provides a glimpse of something even more chilling than the view through the hole in the wall at 10 Rillington Place.

  So where is Dennis’s place amid all this horror? It should be said at the outset that he was a criminal first, and a murderer second. He killed because of his lifestyle. Life around him was cheap—deaths from drug overdoses were commonplace. He always had a loaded gun on hand—if it had been a set of knuckle dusters or a cosh, perhaps his victims might have escaped with maimings or severe beatings. He was almost permanently in a state of drug-induced paranoid rage—he generally killed because of some perceived threat or insult. Where Christie and Sutcliffe killed alone and in the dark, Dermis did his slaying in front of an audience in broad daylight. Christie and Sutcliffe preyed on the weak, choosing either sick or defenceless woman as their targets; Dennis’s victims included a Hell’s Angel and convicted thugs known for their brutality.

  None of this, in any way serves as a justification for his awful record of violence and death. It merely puts it into perspective, and perhaps helps to explain why his life and deeds contributed so much to the aura surrounding Kathy and those close to her.

  * * *

  It’s almost beyond belief that one family could spawn a multiple killer like Dennis and then, only eighteen months after his death, find itself the focus of Walsh Street, the most callous crime in Victorian history. These two factors combined to create a public perception of the family as something beyond evil.

  In October 1988, two police officers in their early twenties were executed in cold blood in Walsh Street, a leafy by-way in one of Melbourne’s most affluent suburbs, South Yarra. It was an atrocity that would change the way the criminal justice system operates in Victoria. The involvement of two of Kathy’s sons, a daughter, a grandson and a daughter-in-law in events surrounding the murders earned the family a permanent place among the nation’s most feared lawbreakers. Not even Ned Kelly and his gang inspired the same hatred among the state’s police force as Kathy’s boys. And yet this infamy was achieved despite her two sons, Victor and Trevor, securing acquittals on charges of having shot down the two young police officers in cold blood.

  It is perhaps the ultimate price Kathy and her family have been forced to pay for Dennis’s misdeeds that his brothers’ innocence is today seen as almost irrelevant. The result of their trial was somehow not the point. It was the sequence of events leading up to the verdict, the treachery and betrayals by blood relatives and the allegations of brutal, uncompromising warfare between the family and the police that captured and then repelled public interest.

  During the two and a half years of Walsh Street, between crime and acquittal, Victorians peered in fascination and horror through a window into a world beyond their worst imaginings. These were people who had not merely placed themselves outside the laws and customs of normal society—they had simply failed to recognise the existence of any such bounds.

  Just as Walsh Street intensified the enmity between the State’s police force and the underworld, it split Kathy’s family into two irreconcilable camps. On one side were Victor and Trevor, charged with the murders; on the other were their sister Vicki and her son Jason as the prosecution’s two key witnesses. Victor’s wife Wendy fell somewhere between the two. She began as the prosecution’s brightest hope of securing convictions: her evidence at the committal hearings condemned Victor out of his own mouth and, as a bonus, unveiled all the horrors of Dennis’s evil reign in Richmond. But after eighteen months, $2 million and countless hours of police time guarding her since she entered the witness protection scheme, Wendy did an about-face and refused to repeat her evidence at the trial. Today Wendy is exiled from the family, and Vicki and Jason are lost and gone forever.

  At the end of the $30 million debacle that Walsh Street became, there was only one of three conclusions to be drawn. Firstly, the acquittals represented an appalling miscarriage of justice caused by a combination of Wendy’s duplicity and the subsequent inability of police to put together a convincing case, thus allowing four guilty men to go free. Secondly, as is Kathy’s unshakable conviction, the police decided within hours of the crime that her family and their associates were responsible, set out shaping the facts to fit the theory and, in the process of failing to do so, destroyed the lives of a number of innocent individuals. The third possibility is that, based on their early enquiries and their previous knowledge of the four accused, the police genuinely believed they had caught the murderers.

  Whichever version prevails, the nature of the crime and its implications for both the police and the underworld in Victoria ended once and for all the subtle checks and balances that keep ongoing hostilities between the two sides from brimming over into outright warfare. And if that sounds extravagant, consider the following: when the jury returned after six days of deliberation, delivering their findings in favour of Victor, Trevor and their two co-defendants, a message went out across all police radio channels:

  ‘The verdict in the Walsh Street
trial was all four not guilty, repeat not guilty. All units are warned, keep yourselves in control.’

  However justified and even necessary this admonishment may have been, given the circumstances, it does not preclude the asking of one simple question. How, exactly, did the broadcaster of the message expect his listeners, custodians of law and order, to react?

  And what of the call, by then State Premier Joan Kirner, for the community to remain calm in the wake of the verdicts? Warning against a ‘frenzied reaction’, Kirner said:

  Vendettas are not appropriate. This is a time for calm reflection, and that’s what I would be expecting the Police Minister to be doing. It must be hard for the whole community to come to grips with the very long trial, long deliberation, and no result. Either you’ve got faith in the justice system or you haven’t.

  More recently, in November 1995, seven years after the murders, the state’s chief commissioner of police, Neil Comrie, put Walsh Street into historical perspective. Speaking at a press conference called after the latest in a series of police shootings which were beginning to erode public confidence in a police force long regarded as the least corrupt and most stable in the country, he said about Victoria’s criminal underworld:

  It’s an environment that has existed in this state, which perhaps hasn’t existed elsewhere. The fact of the matter is that from 1985 to 1988 there were a series of events in this state that involved such things as the Russell Street bombing, the Walsh Street execution of two young constables, the Queen Street and Hoddle Street massacres, and a number of other serious assaults and shootings of police officers. Had that trend continued there is no doubt that the criminals would have taken over this society, because they were in no fear of the police, and no fear of the law, and were prepared to murder and do whatever else was necessary to push their cause.