Who bombed the Hilton? Read online

  February 1979. Anderson, Alister and Dunn (who will become known as the Yagoona Three) stand trial for conspiracy to murder Cameron. The Hilton bombing accusations are not pursued for insufficient evidence. The jury cannot agree on a verdict and a new trial is ordered.

  August 1979. A second jury finds the three young men guilty of a conspiracy to blow up Robert Cameron and they are sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment.

  Throughout the trials there is growing public support for the Yagoona Three. Their conviction is increasingly reported as a flagrant miscarriage of justice, as a standout example of police corruption involving police ‘verballing’ suspects, i.e. writing their confessions for them. There is also growing suspicion about the credibility of Richard Seary and his role as a police informant. A vigorous movement to free Anderson, Alister and Dunn is mounted.

  September–October 1982. Everything comes to a head at the coronial inquest into the Hilton bombing. It’s a kind of zoo of competing interests. The Yagoona Three use it to discredit Richard Seary and thus highlight the illegitimacy of their convictions. A policeman injured at the Hilton, Terry Griffiths, embroiled in a highly litigious compensation battle with the state government, uses it to promote evidence that points to the culpability of ASIO and Special Branch. Richard Seary uses it to reiterate his 1978 claims about Alister and Dunn confessing to the bombing.

  The inquest is halted and a prima facie case is put forward for Dunn and Alister to stand trial for triple murder. Again, the most sensational case of terrorist triple murder in Australia is not pursued for lack of evidence. The three young men remain in jail for the Cameron murder conspiracy.

  By the early 1980s, the movement promoting the Yagoona Three case as a miscarriage of justice grows exponentially. Evidence emerges suggesting that both Richard Seary and the police were far from reliable and eventually, in response to public and press agitation, the state government agrees to hold an inquiry into the matter. On 20 June 1984, pursuant to the provisions of Section 475 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), an investigation is launched into the convictions of Anderson, Alister and Dunn for conspiracy to murder Robert Cameron.

  1984–1985. The 475 inquiry. This inquiry, headed by Justice James Wood, is exhaustive and detailed. Seary’s role is found to be seriously flawed and there are problems in the police chain of evidence that would indicate reasonable doubt.

  1985. The three men are released, pardoned, and compensated for their seven years in jail.

  1989. A convicted armed robber (and prison escapee), Raymond Denning, attempts to reduce his sentence by telling police that Tim Anderson, a former cell-mate and former friend, had confessed to being the Hilton bomber. Despite the accusation seeming so self-serving on Denning’s part, Anderson is arrested. However, with such flimsy evidence, it seems unlikely that the charges will stick.

  Then, out of the blue, a former Margii, Evan Pederick, having heard about Anderson’s arrest, walks into a local Queensland police station and confesses to being the Hilton bomber. He adds that he had placed the bomb in the bin at the behest of Tim Anderson.

  Pederick is tried for murder (he only pleads guilty to the lesser charge of conspiracy to murder) but the jury finds him guilty of murder nonetheless and he is sentenced to concurrent sentences of 20 years for each murder and 18 for conspiracy.2 He’s given a nonparole period of 13 and a half years.3

  October 1990. Anderson is put on trial and, despite dozens of serious problems in the prosecution case, he is convicted.

  He then appeals his case and wins. Anderson is released. Pederick then appeals his own conviction, on the basis that if Anderson has successfully appealed his case by totally discrediting Pederick’s original confession, then his own conviction must be unsound. He fails in this appeal but nonetheless has his sentence truncated and is released after eight years.

  While this effectively leaves the crime unsolved, this narrative line does seem to indicate an overzealous police investigation — one that refused to let lack of evidence get in the way of a good suspect. Dodgy cops, dodgy informants, innocent young men denied justice. The Yagoona Three become our Guildford Four.

  There is no question that police around the world did and do fabricate evidence and confessions which lead to the imprisonment of the innocent. While the various Alister, Anderson and Dunn trials are proceeding, Lindy Chamberlain is facing her own multiple trials brought by prosecutors convinced she is guilty of murdering her two-month-old daughter, Azaria. A large part of Australian society at this time has concerns about corruption within the state and federal police forces. The conduct of the prosecutions against Anderson, Alister and Dunn seems to prove that their suspicions are well-founded.

  Somehow all these events — from the arrests in Yagoona the night of 15 June 1978 all the way through to the 1989–90 Anderson murder trial and appeal, and including the opening of the Hilton case files to the public in 1995 — act like squid ink. They obscure and distract. Things are not what they seem.

  One of the complexities of negotiating the Hilton archive is that much of it has been ordered to fit the events above, and original documents do not appear in the order in which they occurred or were collected. For example, many of the original witness statements taken in the first few days after the bombing appear in the file box item 9/8112.1 (formerly HB67.1) and are collated specifically for the prosecution case for triple murder against Anderson in 1989–90 and thus are selected for how they support Pederick’s 1989 confession, and not how the files appeared in the original 1978 police investigation. This happens time and time again where fundamental groundwork in the case is stretched and scattered, re-ordered over the long years to serve the agendas of the various trials for both the defence and the prosecution.

  This is not a case one can work backward through time. You have to start again. You have to forget things you think you know. Indeed I begin to suspect that some of the spectacular cock-ups on the part of the police and prosecution teams in Pederick and Anderson’s trials a decade after the bombing are explicitly caused by the fact they didn’t do this.

  One of the most obvious examples is to do with Evan Pederick’s original 1989 confession about attempting to blow up Prime Minister Desai as he arrives at the George Street entrance to the Hilton. Pederick gives a very detailed description of the Indian leader greeting Fraser around 2 or 3 pm on Sunday 12 February as he steps onto the red carpet while Pederick fiddles desperately with his malfunctioning remote control that would (if it was working) have blown up 200 or 300 people. A lengthy investigation and two murder trials (Pederick’s and Anderson’s) are set in motion on the basis that this is fact. However, even the most perfunctory glance at the original police statements and briefings on the day (or indeed the daily newspaper reports) reveal that this is simply untrue. Desai arrived at the Pitt Street entrance at 4.20 pm.

  As soon as this is discovered the police decide that Pederick simply mistook the nut-brown dhoti-wearing Sri Lankan president, Junius Jayewardene, for the similarly coloured and clothed Desai. They run with this until someone checks the arrival times of the esteemed guests and discovers that actually Jayewardene arrived early Sunday morning, so it can’t be him Pederick saw, and they have to shift the facts again. They decide Pederick must have tried to blow up Desai and Fraser and the whole shebang as they were leaving the hotel on George Street at 5.20 pm. The problem here is that by that time, according to Pederick’s confession, he had already fled the scene and was well on his way to Brisbane. These sorts of mistakes in the prosecution case are but a few examples of many. Mistakes that lead to Anderson’s release. The thing is, in neither of these two trials was there even a cursory glance at the evidentiary material discovered back in 1978. Rather than return to the original statements, these later investigating teams relied on the police statements that had been collated for the 1982 inquest — basically material that was relevant to the assumptions about the crime at the time — and everything else was left out.

  So I begin to unpick th
e embroidery. A few things the police of the late 1970s can be relied upon to do is to have dodgy spelling and to poorly black out headings on secret documents. The coarse grain of police issue stationery versus the deep imprint of type from heavy police fingers thudding down on typewriter keys means that holding up the paper against the fluorescent lights in the archives makes it clear whether the document came from ASIO or Interpol or the CIA.

  I unpick and put in chronological order thousands of pieces of paper — lay out the facts as they arrived the first time, unadorned, uninterpreted, flying in from dozens of sources and every corner of the world.

  What really went on? Were the police corrupt? Why did they target the Ananda Marga? Did the conspiracy theorists believe what they wanted to believe? Who did bomb the Hilton?

  The bomb and the bin

  I obsess about where to start — two days before the blast? Ten minutes? Six months? Four years? Who? What? When? Where? I need to lash myself to someone. I need a name. I need that manly hero the helpful TV commissioning editor suggested.

  Norm Sheather.

  Of all the myriad personalities I have encountered in the Byzantine Hilton bombing archive, it is Detective Inspector Norman Sheather of whom I have grown most fond. He arrives pristine in the archives on 13 February 1978, six hours after the bombing — competent, controlled, steady-eyed, a man without agenda or prejudice. It is so easy to think of Australian police from this era as being thick, thuggish and corrupt that it is inspiring to encounter someone who is so transparently good at his job. Norm is still alive — perhaps retired in some hamlet growing roses or ensconced in an inner-city high-rise taking philosophy classes and learning Mandarin — but he too has resisted my entreaties. Never mind. Norm breathes in every line of Item 9/8112.1 and its companion 9/8112.2 containing the original witness statements, the analysis of the bombing, and the ASIO appraisals. He speaks from the volumes that contain his detectives’ running sheets, which lay out his incisive investigative path as he starts to steer the newly minted Hilton task force into the open sea.

  Somewhere just before dawn on Monday 13 February 1978, as the light begins to penetrate George Street to reveal its attendant horrors, Norm Sheather gets a call. He is told about the bombing at the Hilton. There are two dead garbagemen, a number of injured, some badly, particularly a young policeman. There is grave concern for the safety of the assembly of international prime ministers and presidents staying at the hotel. Over 500 soldiers are about to be deployed to protect them. Sheather is to head the Hilton bombing investigation with a team of over 100 personnel.1 This number includes 58 detectives — 15 of whom are experienced homicide investigators. This is the largest police task force assembled in Australia.2

  Fifty-eight detectives, only primitive computers. Suspected terrorist murder. The first in Australia. No clear target. A warning call. Imagine Sheather, conscious of the enormity of all this. Where do you start?

  Prime Minister Fraser’s dream of Australia hosting a secure international political event is poleaxed. The New South Wales Premier Neville Wran summed it up when he said ‘for the first time in our history terrorism against innocent and uninvolved people, has become a fact in our country’.3 Compared to our twenty-first-century age of routine surveillance, CCTV and counter-terrorism laws, those in charge of security at CHOGRM look hopelessly naïve. Shouldering the blame and fielding accusations of incompetence is Superintendent Reginald Douglas, Deputy Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Area, the man responsible for VIPs in all parts of New South Wales (except for VIP living quarters, which are the provenance of the Commonwealth Police). It was Reg and Reg alone who decided that it was not necessary to search the garbage bins surrounding the hotel. Within hours DCS Douglas is facing hostile questioning from the press.

  ‘Why had the bins not been searched?’

  ‘I did not think it was necessary.’

  ‘Do you accept responsibility for what happened?’

  ‘I am in charge of the operation and I must take responsibility.’4

  Sheather needs to be all-seeing and all-knowing. He must simultaneously look backward to recreate every moment leading up to the bomb blast, and forward to chart a focussed way to gather and decipher evidence. Too broad a focus will drown the investigation in detail, as happened during the vast Yorkshire Ripper investigation running at the same time in the UK.5 Too narrow a target, and the temptation will be to fit the facts to the suspect.

  He starts with what he knows to be irrefutable. At 12.42 am on Monday 13 February 1978, William Favell up-ended a garbage bin into the back of a garbage truck outside the Hilton Hotel. Whatever was in the bin exploded on impact. What was in the bin was a bomb. Someone put it there.

  Within hours Sheather sends one part of his team to collect hundreds of witness statements to bring the days leading up to the blast into focus. Another part he gears for the hunt. This pack sniff for suspects.

  This is what they find as they conjure the past.

  The first witness statements come from those who know that garbage bin intimately. Council workers, garbage collectors, street sweepers, truck drivers. Invisible yet constant worker bees managing the tide of city detritus. They have lost two of their own. They have no reason to be anything other than precise and tidy in their accounts to the police. They give Sheather the first key.

  Phillip Morris of the Sydney City Council supplies the detailed schedule of the ‘cleansing service’ route over the days leading up to the bombing.6 At 11.30 on Friday night, 10 February, 48 hours before the bombing, the garbage shift commences. The bins outside the Hilton are emptied at approximately 12.30 am on Saturday by William O’Conner.7

  Sometime between 12.30 am Saturday and 12.42 am Monday, a person or persons place explosive material inside the bin directly outside the George Street entrance to the Hilton Hotel.

  The bin is not emptied again until the blast.8

  This, according to the conspiracists, is evidence of the ASIO/Special Branch plot. That garbagemen were deliberately and consistently stopped from emptying the bin over the next two days by ‘officials — including police’. Regular checking of garbage bins for explosives by police was standard protocol for events such as this — as was using bomb sniffer dogs. What ASIO and Special Branch (completely separate organisations) had done was make and plant their own bomb in the bin (with the assistance of military intelligence) and then made sure that for anything up to 48 hours no one would go anywhere near it. The idea was that they would place a warning call and ‘discover’ the explosives themselves. This would justify the existence of their respective organisations and counter any threats (such as criticism or external investigations) to diminish their resources.9

  I am here to tell you this is absolutely untrue. For an object the conspiracists argue is deliberately kept from being emptied (implying its contents are somehow protected), an enormous number of people are free to shove any number of objects (including an enormous placard) into the bin, lean on it or use it as a convenient seat over a very long period of time. For the conspiracists to be correct, the following have to be lying in their statements: seven garbagemen (including a street sweeper), an accountant, two hippies, a signwriter, a father of two out for the day with his kids, an anarchist and the Hilton commissionaire. They also have to be colluding with each other, the police who have been told to wave away garbage trucks and, one assumes, ASIO and their mates at Special Branch.

  Saturday, 11 am, 11 February. The next garbage shift commences. Neville Alexander Porter, ‘a married man [residing] in Sydney with his wife and family’, a man who has worked for the Sydney City Council for 26 years and as a driver for 25, tells Sheather’s detectives:

  ‘This shift included working in the vicinity of George Street, where the hotel is.’ Neville is working with crewman Terry Sweeney. When they arrive at the Hilton at 1.45 pm, Neville states unequivocally, ‘I could see police and civilians standing near the entrance to the hotel … there were cars parked at the kerb also ca
rs standing abreast forming a second line. I didn’t stop to clear the middle bin, outside the entrance to the Hilton, because I would have had to stop and form a third line of traffic, although I could see that rubbish was sticking out the top of the bin. For the same reason I didn’t clear the bin at the southern end of the hotel.’10

  At 1.45 pm, Saturday 11 February 1978 — 35 hours before the blast — the bin is full.

  When Porter (not the police) rather civilly decides not to halt all traffic on a busy Saturday on George Street, operations are in full swing at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel as staff and security prepare to receive the first guests of the inaugural Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting. This is the ‘biggest diplomatic summit in Australia’s history’ and most expensive political conference Australia has ever hosted.11 The guests include 11 prime ministers and presidents from the Asia–Pacific region who are due to fly in and spend a week discussing issues vital to the region. They represent over 737 million people. It is a big deal, not just because of the size or the cost, but because it marks Australia beginning to think about its identity geographically, as part of the Asia–Pacific. It’s an opportunity for the country to assert its independence rather than always following the lead of its traditional Western allies. For Fraser the event is a potent step in projecting himself as an international statesman. However, it’s a delicate balancing act — with the exception of the notorious New Zealand Prime Minister, Robert ‘Piggy’ Muldoon, none of the other leaders are white. Memories of the White Australia Policy are still fresh and Fraser is at pains not to present the country as the white big brother to other nations of the region.12

  The summit is the inspiration of Malcolm Fraser — who has embraced Australia’s biggest wave of non-Anglo immigration, including the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ — and has taken years to come to fruition. Two days before the official opening the papers have headlines screaming ‘Security Like Fort Knox on Sydney Summit’. The man of most concern to security is the Indian Prime Minister, Mr Desai, who is placed under huge guard. It is alleged that the Indian sect Ananda Marga has been targeting Indian organisations around the world in protest over the imprisonment of their leader, Baba. There is excited reporting in the papers about federal and state police combing lobbies, about police stationed on rooftops, about the special anti-terrorist unit based at the airport.13