Free Bad by Michael Duffy

mind—and once he signed the statement, there would be no going back. Daley was a man looking for redemption. He told Jubelin some stories about his life, how he’d been in gangs since the age of fourteen. His recent experiences had given him the chance to reflect on the direction of his future.
    As a bikie, Daley had been a recognised expert on surveillance matters and police methodology. He’d done a lot of research and had made his own listening devices, and it seemed to the detectives that this sort of activity might have developed his intrinsic wariness. Some of his fears seemed extreme, and yet maybe there was a basis for them. He said for a while that helicopters were hovering near his house, and described one as being quite distinctive. The police later found Anthony Perish often hired helicopters from a company in western Sydney, and one of them matched the description given by Daley. It was the only helicopter of its kind in the city.
    Once the detectives decided Daley was telling the truth, the entire investigation became focused on the Perishes. The police spent a lot of time talking to colleagues from Seabrook, which had now wound up without finding out who had killed Anthony and Frances Perish. Their work had been referred to the coroner for an inquest.
    Albert Perish had continued to act strangely in the years after his parents’ murders. He told Seabrook many things,including that the deaths had been predicted in a dream he’d had, and that the killer was a dark-haired stranger he’d seen about the property. He also said the murders were linked to Yugoslavian politics (in fact his parents had not been politically active) and, alternatively, had been carried out by a hitman hired by a group of solicitors. In 2001 he told the New South Wales Crime Commission that he had been defrauded of timber royalties over his property at Coolongolook and that his sister Elena and one of the detectives from the police murder investigation were involved. None of this was true.
    For the detectives of Seabrook, and now Tuno, the problem of motive for the grandparents’ deaths remained. Although multiple informants claimed that while in jail Terry Falconer had admitted to involvement in the murders, either by doing them himself or assisting someone else, it was all hearsay: police could not find anyone to whom he had actually said this. There were practical problems in finding out: Falconer had shared cells with some two hundred other prisoners in seven jails. And why would he have killed Anthony and Frances Perish anyway?
    Other persons of interest were even less helpful. On 27 February 2002, investigators had attempted to interview Andrew Perish about his movements on the day his grandparents were killed. He told them to ‘Fuck off.’
    In September 2002 the rest of Terry Falconer turned up. Detective Glenn Williams of the Newcastle Crime Scene Section was called to a property on the Hastings River near Wauchope. Owner Ellen Old had found a blue package on the riverbank and opened it with a hacksaw, a decision she probably regretted. This bag was the same as the previous six,except it had no chicken wire around it. When an autopsy was conducted, the bag was found to contain all the remaining body parts except the teeth and lower jaw, which have never been found.
    Following Strike Force Seabrook’s report, the coronial inquest into the grandparents’ deaths recommenced on 8 October 2002, an extraordinary nine years after the murders. On 30 June 2003 Deputy State Coroner Carl Milovanovich announced an open verdict—Anthony and Frances Perish had been killed by a person or persons unknown. He blamed this disappointing outcome on the initial police investigation, which was ‘deficient in many ways’. Opportunities to gather forensic evidence had been missed. The investigators, he said, had ‘disregarded all their training, and there is a feeling they adopted an attitude that