Free The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders by I.J. Fenn

paragraph 11 of his report McCann outlines the McMahon assault again, recording the fact that during the course of the attack one of the assailants told McMahon, ‘I’m gonna throw you over the side’, and started to drag him towards the cliff edge. Initially, McMahon identified 17-year-old Sean Cushman as being the leader of the group of assailants but he ‘has since shown a complete unwillingness to pursue or assist Police with this matter’. As a result, McCann believed there was little to be gained in proceeding with charges against Cushman or his cohorts without the evidence of McMahon.
    Between the writing of the two reports another case had come to McCann’s attention. In January 1987 Raymond Keam was savagely beaten to death outside a toilet block in Alison Park, Randwick. Keam, like the others who suffered similar fates, was homosexual. He was also a karate exponent. At the time of his death, police were concentrating their inquiries on a particular gang of youths although even now, four years later, no arrests had been made, McCann said.
    McCann’s report then goes on to state: ‘In dealing with further aspects of (the various cases examined in his report) certain lines of investigation were taken and it is best clarified by detailing the information gathered under the respective victims’ headings.’
    Under ‘Richard Norman Johnson’ McCann noted that Mihailovic’s parents and solicitor refused to allow Alex Mihailovic the possible opportunity of a sentence reduction by helping the police with their inquiries. Dean Howard, on the other hand, seized the opportunity and had used listening devices to record conversations with several of his fellow prisoners. Howard also indicated that a screwdriver had been used to stab William Allen and that certain individuals had implicated themselves in the killing. The notion of a screwdriver was certainly consistent with the wound reported on Allen’s hand but Howard’s overall evidence is tainted by the fact that one of those he claimed had implicated himself was, according to inquiries made of the Department of Immigration, in New Zealand at the time of the incident whilst another was known to be away in the country. It was apparent that Howard’s poor retentive memory and discrepancies in his various statements suggested that little credence could be given to the accuracy of his allegations so no action could be taken.
    The information, however, would be retained for future attention if further corroboration was forthcoming.
    Under ‘Ross Bradley Warren’ McCann offered two ‘scenarios’. The first relied on the information supplied by a social worker who overheard Adam French telling a fellow prisoner in Keelong Detention Centre that he, French, had thrown a homosexual off the cliffs onto the rocks at Bondi. The social worker, Ann Pascoe, and the second prisoner signed statements to that effect and the prisoner, a 17-year-old thief from Western Australia, agreed to wear a listening device to procure incriminating evidence from French. Unfortunately, the recordings offer only vague or general references to frequent bashings at Bondi, Centennial and Moore Parks. By the time McCann’s report was written, the inmate had returned to Western Australia from where his parents ‘bluntly suggested’ he was no longer prepared to help police with their inquiries.
    Dean Howard had also recorded conversations with French while they were together at Minda Detention Centre. Again French implicated himself, but in only a general way. However, he did admit to having taken a set of keys off one of his victims, searching the man’s brown vehicle and then throwing the keys into the ocean. The victim at the time, he said, had been pushed off a small cliff. McCann stresses that this attack is alleged to have occurred at around 10.30pm and the vehicle was parked near the Bondi Icebergs pool. Both time and place excluded this incident from having any direct connection to Ross