The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.

Detective see a side of life.

The average person is never exposed her I spent thirty four years as a cop.

For twenty five of those years, I was catching killers.

That's what I did for a living.

I was a homicide detective.

I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys.

Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.

The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law.

The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to.

Some of the content and language might be confronting.

That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.

Join me now as I take you into this world.

Today, I sat down had a chat with recently retired cop Gordon Drage.

As a crime scene officer, Gordon attended numerous murder scenes, drug plantations, and horrific situations such as the Dream World tragedy all people died on a theme park ride and the Sea World helicopter crash, where two helicopters collided midair, killing four passengers.

We talked about car chases, arresting arm offenders, the time he got shot at, domestic violence, matters, sexual assaults, and a whole lot more.

It's everything you'd expect a police officer to experience after working in South Australia and Queensland Police for thirty six years.

We also spoke about what it was like when he opened the first of several barrels containing body parts in the notorious Bodies in the Barrel case in South Australia where twelve people were murdered, six of which were put in barrels.

Gordon saw a lot of horrendous things in his career, and we also spoke about his own mental breakdown, his recovery and what he's doing now supporting the first responders and their families.

He's had an amazing career and this is Gordon's story.

Gordon Drage, welcome to I Catch Killers.

Thank you very much, pleasure to be here.

Well, I always sitting down, I always enjoy I should say, sitting down talking to cops and recently retired cop.

When did you get out?

Just over two years and March of twenty three was money in date?

How you finding life outside?

Busy?

This retirement stuff is busy as let me tell you.

Yeah, well, you retired from Queensland Cops and they've got a mandatory retirement at sixty.

Yes.

Yeah, So once I turned sixty at midnight on my sixtieth birthday, I lost all my magic powers apparently, and I was no good to anyone out.

Yeah, I forget that experience.

It's funny because I don't think it is anywhere else in the country.

I think it's only place in the world.

Yeah, it's still the most bizarre thing I'm aware of.

But they lose hundreds and they're suffering a real crisis now because there are hundreds of police of my age or coming up to my age that have got to go.

So they're having a massive recruiting issue there and their experience is just flooding out the door.

There's a lot of that experience that you talk about.

You can't underplay the importance of the experience.

We haven't had a a good car chase story on my catch Kills for a long time.

In prepping for this, there was a reference to the car chase that you're involved in.

Do you want to just tell us about that.

Early in my career, probably my first twelve months, I reckon it was probably a praation constable.

I'm stationed at Gauler outside Adelaide.

We get the radio call someone shooting as sheep in the area there.

So out we go on the dirt roads and the back blocks of gawler, sheet paddocks everywhere, and we can see across the paddocks there's this plume of dust coming out.

Sure there's a car moving.

Maybe that's our man.

Off we go, let's pull him up, trying to intercept him.

But no, off he goes, So maybe he's our man.

He starts to take off.

So we're just following this plume of dust, and through the dust we come.

And at one point he's turning corners left and right, and he does get to one corner and loses control and he spins a book straight into the chitch on the left side of the road.

So we get out, guns drawn and take him out the car.

And he said, I'm really sorry.

I'm really sorry.

I didn't hit any when they die.

Well, go, what are you talking about, oh, I said, Well, he said, I don't know what got into me.

Said, I just put the gun out the window, put a couple of shots back towards you.

When we had no idea.

Thankful he didn hit us.

But then we said, how does this happen?

What do you to do?

So we went back and retraced our steps, and sure enough there was his twenty two rifle lying at the side the road.

He started out the window and we just haven't seen it in the plume of smoke.

So he's leaving shots that you avoid the rest for foreign shots.

We charged him with the lot.

Well, how do you go at the court?

That's that's a very serious offense.

I think he pleaded guilty.

I never I never went to court on it, so okay, he must have been.

But it was just but I think that I was saying, now, does it count as being shot at if you don't know?

Well, I suppose if you're too stupid to know, that's not that's right.

Except you, I'm probably glad you didn't didn't.

Know, probably just as well.

Yeah, we may have to shoot back.

That's and we talked about policing, and it's a tough, tough gig.

The thing about policing the intensity you can go.

There's always you're always hyper alert, aren't you, Because you can be driving, as you said, out on a country road, enjoying yourself having a conversation with your work partner at the time, and all of a sudden it can go from that to something intense, very much.

I don't think the public fully appreciate no.

I remember another while we're talking firearms again in my early part of my career, before it even gone to gall So we're talking in the first three or four months of my career.

I'm very, very green.

Out of the academy.

We have gone to a job.

Two crews have gone.

Mum says, the son's lost the plot.

He's having a mental episode, he's misbehaving badly.

He's got a firearm.

So we pull up at the address and that's why two crews have gone.

We meet mum at the front door at the gate and near letter boxing.

It's okay, he's got a gun in there.

It's a twenty two, but it doesn't actually have the bolt thing in that.

He can't load it, so you know, he's not got a loaded fararm.

But he's just got this gun he's waving around.

So then we go and we find him in the city in the bedroom and there's this screaming girlfriend in the corner off to one side.

She's just howling in the feetal position in the corner just outside the room, but we can't get to her.

And looking, he said, lying on the bed, and he's got a bloody shotgun because that's not twenty two.

There's a big difference beween it.

As you would know, there's a big difference between a twenty two and a shotgun.

Change and we're going, okay, my mum says, he's got no way of leading.

So there was four of us there, all got guns drawn, and not one of us has shot him, and he's pointing this thing at us, and he's threatening her to kill us, and all of a sudden afterwards, it was one of those bizarre things you go through your training.

So many points a gun at you.

I'm going to shoot them before they shoot me, and not one of us pulled the trigger.

That tom.

We eventually resolved it, and when we did find the twenty two that mum was talking about, it had the bolt in it, It just didn't little the handle.

He just had a screwdriver so he was able to load it.

To the moral stories to any new police that might be listening, do never trust, never trust what mum tells you.

Everything's going to be as it seems, and don't go in with a preconceived idea that you're not dealing with a load of weapon because she said it can't be.

It's difficult, isn't it.

And those split second decisions, and unless you're there, you can't.

And you see people where they are involved in shooting incidents and there's a lot of judgment on did they do the right thing, didn't they do the right thing?

And they're split second decisions.

And all this stuff.

Why didn't they shoot him in the Legally, police do not think that good a shot.

I've been on the firing range, had my target hit by one of my colleagues.

You know, there's some of them really poor shots.

And if police shoot something in the leg it's usually by accident.

Well, I think, and I speak to a lot of people that are caught up.

And as a homicide detective, we had to oversee critical incidents.

So if police shoot, shoot and kill someone or someone dies in the police operation.

But really the training we get is police in firearm use.

Unless you're in a specialist tactical squad or whatever where you're shooting more regularly, it's not not enough.

Really.

I know some people I worked with it, they hated it.

I mean they would avoid it like the plague if they could.

And others myself include I didn't mind it.

You don't get enough.

I mean I don't want what the limits are now, But ninety rounds a year or something.

Yeah, and that's usually structured over one day or a couple of.

Days, over a day, and then it can be two years between your training day or your qualification and the next time you do it, because you've got to do it in the calendar calendar year.

That's right.

But yeah, I've often thought that that we need more training and then throwing the tasers, throwing the OC spray and everything else that comes in the play.

There's a lot of decisions to make that it should be a muscle reflex and training once a week doesn't create that.

No, Well, we were having training, I think we get once a year.

We'd have a three day block.

First day would be maybe a bit of legal stuff, and then you'd be doing your hands a hand, handcuffing techniques, whatever's topical at the time, trying to disarm.

Then tasers.

The group would do taser for one half of the shift and the others would be on the range doing the shooting, and then you swap over at lunchtime.

So then whoever's doing was doing the live fire in the morning will do the taser in the afternoon, and that was it.

That's it then for as you say, potentially eighteen months at least before you get around again if need be.

And the difference, like I did tactical policing where you're shooting a minimum once a month or if not more, and you could also sit on the range and just fire rounds off and so you felt comfortable with the firearm.

But yeah, I think that is something that could could be improved in policing.

What about most people when they talk about bear experiences early days in uniform domestic violence situations gow into domestics, Was that something that you were confronted with?

Oh yeah, all the time.

Because I was working in the northern sumbers of Adelaide, so it was the every sea would have them tougher part to working class people, often lower socio economic occupants.

And now I lived out there too, so I include myself in these groups.

So some of them, of course had very strained relationships and we get called those quite frequently.

But back then when I first started way back in the late eighties, DV wasn't known as DV.

That was just a domestic dispute and argument or whatever they've now called it domestic violence.

But I remember going to one Elizabeth and that was that was horrendous.

We went and saw this lady and as you do, you separate the male and the female.

I had the mail with me getting his version of what was going on, and my partners then come in and said, I need to see you.

And he was talking to the female in the relationship and he said, she's just told me the poured bleach over.

We could swell bleach.

When we walked in, he's poured bleach over and he hit her with a broom.

He really injured her arm, and he said during the whole process, he's actually he's raped her.

Rape in marriage.

Oh gee said Then we had to call the cib in and all those things, and turned out that she actually had a broken arm.

She had her arm broken, bleach poured over, and had been raped, and she revealed a rape some days prior.

And when it went to court, the magistrate just made the front page of the papers because in the whatever it was now in nineteen eighty eight or nine.

Perhaps he had said during his summing up, and I'm sure he didn't mean it to like it, But what the media grabbed on was when he said, sometimes a male a man might need to persuade his wife a little bit yet a little bit of cadeeling, a bit of coercing into sexual activity, thinking, isn't it so you can just imagine that she had her arm broken and yeah, and she had bleach brought over.

That's not that's not sort of subtle curdueling.

It's doesn't fall into anybody's definitely a full play.

No, But look, we're improving, not definitely the way that domestic violence is managed, but we're also seeing the ramifications the amount of people were a killed as a result of domestic violence situations, and that it's quite confronting and it's very difficult early in your policing career to come in there and speak with authority, and that you're talking to people who are probably the same age as your parents all around that, and you're trying to give them relationships advice when you're trying to sort that out yourself.

Yeah, one thing I was very grateful for when I went to apply for the South Australian Police straight from school.

They knocked me back and I was devastated.

Only if I wanted to be a copper.

I had uncle who was a bobby in England, and I don't know why, just what always wanted to be a copper.

There was no other coppers in my family apart from English uncle.

So I got knocked back and they say, now we have to go go off and get some life experience.

I thought, oh terrible, Say anyway, that's what I did.

I went off and by the time I came back to them, I'd had an overseas sort of trip.

I've been in England for a year.

I'd come back.

I was working in the factory, working with the whole owns of different people.

And then I've also got married and had my first daughter was born just before I went and went out of the academy, and and that that served me in good stead.

Because when you get to these things, one of the first things I'll say to you is what would you know?

Are you married?

Yes?

I am your kids yes, So I can answer yes to most of their most of the things I try and tear me down off for somewhat they formed yeah, I do have I do have kids.

I know they can drive you crazy, but you can't be beating the wife up for that sort of stuff, and so it does help.

I think having life experience was beneficial one hundred percent agree.

There's exceptions that people have joined straight from school and they've made stellar careers.

But I always thought that it served well with people who've got a little bit of life experience and spending a couple of years out of school.

So you get not going straight from school in the cops and tell us.

About your career.

Just give us a brief overview of more work than what you did.

I've had a very fortunate career.

I've been very very lucky to be in maybe the wrong place at the right time or the wrong right place at the wrong time, depending I look at these things perspective.

I started my career in nineteen eighty six.

I went into the police Academy in South Australia, came out in eighty seven.

I did fourteen and a half years in South Australia and then when Queensland were recruiting a lot of people, I took the chance then to move to Queensland because my eldest daughter was about to start high school.

It was just timing for the kids.

Well, if they're going to go.

South Australia financially was going very bad at that stage and they closed thirty five state schools a year before the year I left, and stuff like that.

So it just seemed like it was better opportunities in Queensland for them.

So we said, if we're going to go, let's go.

And so that's what we did when we come up to Queensland.

But I started in friendsic because I'd only reasonably reasonably newly married when I first joined South Australia.

They I've always had an interest in photography.

It was a keen photographer ever since I was about fourteen.

I needed to earn more money because the policing in today's probably not so bad, but back then the police pay was pretty ordinary.

So I thought, I'm going to earn more money and I looked around To get more money, I had to get more rank, so I needed to get some stripes.

How do I get stripes?

I look around that, okay, we're going to get promoted.

Getting promoted in general, dudis was really hard because you've got the pyramid effects and you're down in the bottom the basement, if you like, of the pyramid.

You haven't even got to the top.

So yeah, the further you go up.

So I look around.

We've got to specialize, and I thought, what do I want to specialize in?

And then I saw the course advertised for forensics and crime, saying I wants taking photos.

I could probably do that.

So I applied and got on the course and did pretty well on the course, and then I thought, I'll just have it in my back pocket ready for when I do want to have enough general duties.

Totally sick of it, I'll do it then.

So I went back to the station and the senior sergeant at that stage she was doing rosters and things, and we said, he said, you're going off too, forensics in twenty eight days.

What No, no, no, no, that's not the plan.

He said, Well no, he said, you can't do the course.

You can't, you can't go and look, well, i'll be blunting.

You said you can't do the bloody course and not go, He said, especially when you scored as well as you did.

So because I think I may have topped the course, but I'm not a brag, but I did did pretty well, and he said, no, you were to go.

That's it.

That's that's how it is.

You can't do the course, not go, You're you're bloody going, Okay, So off I went.

Changed the direction it did.

So then I find myself on the train trekking into Adelaide and stuff for two or three years.

And then in my first year or so of being in Adelaide working there, they asked me to go and relieve over the forensic second or the physical evidence section, doing more major crimes than the homicides and those sorts of things.

So I said, oh, go, we go at that and went across there.

Originally I think it was going to be for three weeks.

I never left.

Yeah, they sort they kept me and we got stuck into doing comparison work and murders.

I traveled all over the state with it, and then I actually got a bit burnt out, I suppose towards the early mid part of nineteen ninety five.

So then they had a position advertised for the country crime scene people at Kadena on New York Peninsula, which is that little boot like a tiny little miniature Italy when you look at Mappo South Australia, the little boot.

So I went and did.

I went, did about four years there until the girls got to the stage where the eldest was going to start high school?

What are we going to do?

Went to Queensland.

That's it.

Given up on my forensic career.

That was fine.

I've had a pretty good run with it.

And then when I came to Queensland, went to general duties a Broadbeach and had some interesting jobs there, got some good fun.

Cordon armed robber at gun point with his bag of money and his shotguns still on the front seat.

Those were the days when they still chase people.

It was literally cops and robbers when the banks had been robbed.

Wasn't it.

It really was chasing the bad guys.

They had their sawn off shotgun, bag of cash and they're usually a balaclava or something.

It was a very active arm Robert at the time going around knocking off banks all over the Gold Coast.

And one day he's done this robbery at the bank and then he's sped down past the speed camera in his stolen car.

So speed camera guy gets on the radio.

So I've just had this car come through one hundred and twenty of whatever used to go in this way, and it turns out it's the same one that's just left the bank.

And we were just at the broad Beach police station doing typing or something, and we're listening to this chase sort of coming in and sure enough it's coming straight towards us.

So my partner then, who was actually Australia, let's go if we go?

So where we go.

I'm in the passenger seat.

I'm trying to call the chase.

We end up being the lead car mysteriously, and of course your how that was, but Chris could drive.

Sometimes you find yourself in the wrong spot, so.

Chris could drive.

So off we went, and we went the wrong way down some one way streets and things, and yeah, I'm trying to read the signs of the street signs where we're going as you're calling the chase, and of course I get the way he turns down the one street doesn't have a street sign.

That's one only time I've sworn on the radio, so bloody sign.

But it's so funny you say that, because I think a lot of operational police have had that experience when you're in the chain and yeah, something driving there's a bit of pressure, but if you're calling the chase as well, or trying to pick the streets and all that a lot of pressure it can be.

And like an armed robber from it's done the stick up on the bank, they don't give up easily.

So did you did you catch him?

Yeah?

He went down to the end on like the Gold Coast Highway, so it's quite a busy road.

And then he's come up towards red traffic lights.

No surprise if you live on the Gold Coast that we've got red traffic lights and the traffic's starting to build up.

So he's just done the you turn across the traffic islands right and gone to turn and go back the other way.

So my palm driver at the time, Chris, he's done the same thing across we've gone and bugging me dead.

We've crashed into the right side of his car and pushed him into a somebody's front fence up on the Kirby's gone and our police cars sitting up against his drivers door, so he can't even get out.

So we've jumped out around the other side and near he's sitting in the cars, shaken and stirred.

With his bag full of money and the shotgun on the front seat.

So he's been arrested at gunpoint with probably does at other police.

I didn't lost count because you get that, you get the blue haze, you've got that down, the fixed vision that comes on.

How how was the adrenaline from your point of view, seriously at the knee the type of chasers, it's so intense.

Yeah, you're seriously week at the knees.

You get when you when you actually stop, you've got him in cuffs.

You think, okay, do you think my needs are shaking?

I've literally got wobbly legs because the adrenaline is just dumped.

And you yeah, the first couple of times you notice that and you've become aware of it and have an expectation that it's going to be the case.

But yeah, they were.

They were wild times and when the banks are being robbed.

But you think, now if someone were in recording in Sydney, but if someone walking into a bank in Sydney now with a gun and be on the front page of the paper, it was just a regular, regular occurrence.

If they got money from banking, that would be surprising.

Banks don't even kick case like they used to.

Catch up with some old notorious bank robbers and all that noways Jake.

If you guys came out of a tire and stam into a bank, they'd want your password.

You'd have to download a napp.

And I'm sorry we don't have cashier.

Yeah.

All the frauds is are the ones that are making the goal of it.

Can order now, we can order some cash for but we will come back tomorrow at nine o'clock.

How much you need?

So okay?

That gives us a sort of sense of your career and the thirty six years all up and split fairly evenly between South Australia and the Queensland.

As a crime scene officer, how would you describe your wrap?

Just describe your wroth for people.

You know, we watch CSI and we have all different different views.

Just explain what your job is.

That's probably the best way of doing it.

CSI is what people associate with.

We do the photography, We collect bloods, fingerprints.

I did fingerprinting for Schumart Comparisons.

Timemark comparisons, collect bloods, hair, all those bits and pieces along the way, Depending on the nature of the job, would depend how in depth you will go with that sort of stuff, tape, lifting of bodies and objects and things.

And then when I was in South Australia doing the physical fits and things, stuff that's just broken or smash, putting your headlights together, tail lights strong, identify cars, stuff like that.

All that CSI stuff is sort of.

What we did and it's crucial to an investigation.

Looking at from a homicide detective's point of view, some of the most crucial pieces of evidence we got was from the crime scene people and yeah, like you said, footprints and all that.

I recall someone was bashed to death, kicked and kicked, kicked in the head and the shoe print was left on the forehead of the victim and that match identically to the footprint of the shoe.

Yeah, so things like that did if you like that.

Potestrians you get hit by cars that have Carl emblems in their leads is crucial.

Now fairly early in your scene, I think you described it as your first murder and it was one that I've spoken to you before we sat down where DNA came into play.

It was the murder of Mavis Pitt, a seventy five year old.

Do you want to tell us the circumstances surrounding that, because it sounded like a horrendous one.

It was.

It still sicks to me because my first one, partly because of the circumstances.

Mavis was a seventy five year old lady who was just living alone, you know, a little her old style house in Pennington in Adelaide's western suburbs.

Yes, minding her own business was you have tea coffee with her neighbors, and quite regularly was a little the genuine lovely, little old lady from running to gather.

And this was one that was like a stranger.

Stranger murder most of them people, you know, as we know that there's usually I think there's a high percentage known to the victims and stuff like that.

So she was killed by as it turned out, we went in and found her on the laundry floor with her lower clothes missing and hitched up, and she had this absolute look of terror on her face that's still stuck looked in.

There was this just if you can imagine an elderly person who's just been completely shocked, I've just their eyes are wide open and they've got this sort of excla explained look on their face.

That was her lying dead on her laundry floor.

On her back.

We found a hose, the connection from a garden hose in the sink that also became relevant.

So we prosed that process the whole scene and it turned out that the offender was a fellow, David Jarrett.

He was a young young man who was involved in cleaning her roof.

She had had a roof repainted not that many months before, and he'd sort of befriended her then because he was there for him and his team of workmates were there for two or three days.

His job was to clean the roofs and the others with the garp and paint it.

So one of the things when we take lifted her body, there was a lot of these different little tiny globs of paint that came up, but they were only gray greens and sort of orangey ochre color.

Of course, we now know.

That they were the paint colors of the Can you explain the swabbing the body?

I know what you're talking about.

For all, that's a tape lift is where and back in those days we were literally using stick like sticky tape, just twenty mil wire I suppose, and we would get that and we would just take that over the body, clothes and skin whatever we could do the entire surface of the body, and when it stopped being sticky, we then well, just before it wuld stop being sticky, we'd then put them on a glass micro shop slide and we would sometimes take dozens and dozens and dozens of these marks shop slides back and give them to the frensic scientists and they would look over them and that's when they found these globules of paints.

Now, are you looking for a foreign object, looking for anything?

Yeah, you might be a stray here.

In this case, it was a little bits of paint and stuff, but there was at the post mortem they also do you know, vaginal swabs and they take swabs from the mouth and things like that as part of the forensic examination at demortuary.

And from the vaginal swabs.

I believe with this particular case there was semen.

Yes, yep, so that that gave them something to work with and there was.

It turned out when the police did their investigation of the detectives, they had I think they had sixteen or seventeen suspects in the end, some of them were the gang that worked on the roofs and others were just neighbors and people.

So they went and got voluntary samples from most of them and including the suspect, and it turned out he was a he was a match.

It was one of the first times I think South Throw had DNA used in a criminal trial because it was still quite new back then, were talking nineteen ninety two, I think from memory, so we were still quite new in South Australia with that, and they were using a PCR method, which at the time I think South Australia was one of the only states that was doing the PCR method.

Other states were using other amplifications, a different RF something or other, and South Throw it was a bit groundbreaking in that sense.

That they stuck with.

Can you explain PCR to.

PCR is well, in very much Layman's terms, PCR, I think polymace polymace chain reaction.

They essentially take a small small cell or groups of cells and they just replicate it.

They basically clone it a bit like we all know DNA and Dolly the Sheep from all those years ago.

We were all going to be the same, all supposed to look the same, apparently, so that's what certainly got.

They're using that technology, they're able to multiply it until they get enough, or they call it amplification, so but they amplify it to the point where it's then a suitable sized forum for analysis, because you can't allies just one or two selves of decent quantity to be more accurate.

It really was a game changer, wasn't it.

It has been huge, Yeah, and it's lucky to be there in those probably called the golden ears of forensics.

For a lot of it, it made your job even more crucial, like if you missed opportunities to gather in DNA from crime scenes.

But the way you describe that crime and I know it's stuck with you, and it reminds me very similar in a lot of the facts from there.

A case I did very early in my homicide career was the murder of Eileine Cantley.

She was in her eighties and she was sexually soulted in the home.

And I still remember that crime scene and the way that you've described the victim in the one you're talking about, Yeah, they're the vulnerable people, and it's something about something about seeing someone in those circumstances and indeed, a crime of such violence and such a senseless crime that's been committed.

I find too that they're also the same group that's the most disturbed when even have something as simple as I say simple for me, it's fairly straightforward, it's a burglary.

The amount of times I've been to elderly folks houses, particularly ladies who have had their undies draw rifle through.

Yeah, when the cook will just tip out, you know, the running through their undies.

That's like a personal violation for them.

They really that knocks them around for a long time.

Yeah, it really is quite horrendous.

So yeah, yeah, it's just there's something wrong when we can't protect our elderly and the vulnerable, vulnerable like that.

With this particular case with Isiland, can't lay the offender.

PRIVATEA was his surname, and we caught him on DNA and I think that would have been about ninety three to ninety four, and that was the first time that I'd been involved in a case where DNA and it was really it was confronting from a police point of view, well not confronting, but it was something that was hard to comprehend at first, when we were told that the seaman matches with this person, we insisted on going down the lab and let them explain it to us, because we're going what so basically on the information you're providing this that's giving us enough to arrest and charge this person yet most definitely, And then they talk about the statistical analysis, the.

Coming one in eight hundred and ninety thousand.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, that's definite game changer.

And I like the strategy that you're talking about in the murder of Mavis Pit of anyone involved that came into contact with the premises and voluntary the supply of your DNA and it puts the puts the pressure on the offender.

Then it does, and of course he did volunteer a sample.

Yeah, but that became the subject of great debate and appeal and stuff.

A couple of years later, I've learned, but he's still in jail our I believe.

I think he's had a couple of parole applications refused.

But I Believedveri Jarrett is still in jail in Adelaide.

Yeah.

Well, I did a deep dive into it before sitting down and talking with you, and I saw that appeal and also his attempt to get parole.

But yeah, a crime like that, Yeah, I've got an open mind on how people should be treated in prison, and you know all about rehabilitation, but crimes like that, I think society needs to be protected from those type of people.

Been your first murder scene that you worked on and got involved, how did your process it internally?

Like emotionally?

Oh, it was so much happening at that stage.

I don't think I really had time to think about it.

Is that many years ago now, I really can't recall exactly what was going on.

I know it was.

We've used put in a lot of long hours back in South Australia.

Back in those days, there was nothing to spend twenty four hours straight.

You would work the scene until you pretty much just couldn't stay awakening on there plenty of plenty of my colleagues we would they've paid for entire verr anders and things from some of these murders.

They would, you know, they say, oh this this roof, this shed was paid for by.

Some it's cops humor.

But I understand that there's people that I work with I couldn't afford this extension or that it was.

More than for in a particular murd the case, well, we have a big case.

So that's how we worked.

We used to just roll.

And these days now, of course they stop you after twelve or fourteen hours and then put a guard on them.

You'll go home and stead and come back.

But in those days it wasn't uncommon to work straight through.

I don't think we worked that one into the early morning.

I think that was once we got her body out.

That was we're at a locked the house down and come back the following day to do a bit more with it.

Because if I recall correctly, I think I've got the call mid morning, ten o'clockish on the pager.

Back then we had pages.

It was fore mobile phones were common.

So if you're on call, you had the pager, which is a little electric led would come up and so you call the office.

So you ring, you ring the call center, and some anonymous voice would just say, oh, I've got this message for you.

It says do this and do that.

Because it was a third party company they were using, so you just ring the paging company and they would say the messages call the office or call this number, would do this, and they would never tell them exactly what was about, so then you ring track them down from the landline.

I read the cord working as a station constable in uniform detectives that always hand you a number if if you knew this were on this number invariable.

It was the licensed premises down the road.

And I think I can still remember the number of some of those licensed premises because I had to ring it so often.

But the world was a different, different place.

I've openly said that when people talk about the hardest job in the cops, and yeah, there's a whole range of cops.

You know, it can be from tactical policing, criminal investigation, general duties all have to it's a heavy weight that they've got to carry with their responsibility.

But I honestly saying I've said it to every crime scene officer I've had on the podcast, that I reckon crime scene is the hardest gig in the cops in that the long hours that you described, uncomfortable situations like I used to hate the midnight callouts on the cold winter's night and you go, you a crime scene and I'm standing there shivering taking notes, and then we finish what the work we need to do there, then the crime scene left there for the next ten hours, going through and what it can be a horrendous location.

To oh, they can be awful thing and wearing those suits like the actual forensic suits, the hoods and the whole bit.

In South Australia it wasn't as bad, I mean something.

You to wear them in summer and you still sweat.

But in Queensland they are just oppressive.

Queensland somehow it's just horrible because they don't breathe, because they're designed not to breathe, so you literally end up with you you're sweating out leases of water inside these suits.

You take them off and they're literally almost full of water.

They've got elastic cuffs and on the ankles.

I think we've come to terms with the importance of crime scene too, like it is paramount in investigations now.

I'm not sure I've been able to touch too long to know whether it's but is it being properly resourced?

I think so, certainly it seems at the go Coast at the minute, in particular the scenes I've been of late, the police have been extra cautious because they had one where a fellow was found just east in a hotel room, a local hotel, and that one I think didn't embarrass him.

I mean, he's the man's been charged with that since within a few days it was, But the concern was the next one.

We enter that the police have got a crime scene set up and they were all wearing suits and the friendship suits, and we go, this looks a bit over killing and go no after then, Irang incident.

We're being extra careful, so you get a little wake up call every once in a while, but they seem to be very quick at the moment now to declare a crime scene and keep everyone out, which is the safest option.

Of course, because the contamination is a big thing, and this is what until you sort of break it down, you don't really appreciate the importance of it.

And invariably if mistakes are made, that comes out at the court matter when you're being cross examined.

But the contamination in crime scenes too, like as a detective, a detective might go to the crime scene, then speak to the offender and then the offender will be examined and they've got DNA from the crime scene and there's potential contamination from the detective there.

That's right.

Well, the DNA tally you become so great now.

It's involved such a long way from back in the early nineties when we were talking earlier form the Mayvus pit matter, doesn't it that we've got trace DNA now, you know, these two of us sitting in a room, we're sharing some DNA.

We shook hands when we met earlier.

That's a transfer of DNA and they can actually detect those things now, so all that stuff is becoming really critical.

You've almost got a wear a mask to go into any scene and stop breathing.

And we stand on those little plates.

Sometimes you've got shoe marks of the floor shining you got to go in with.

You've got foot boot covers on, you've got a full forensic suit, you've got a cameround your neck or other equipment you're carrying, and you're walking on a ten or twelve inch square plate.

That's just to spend it off the ground, Just see you don't he's trying to tiptoe a crossovers.

It's lethal.

Also to reconstruct the crime scene, which is quite often critical come prosecution time or the time it's at an inquest.

What's the developments you've seen because early stages that I saw it was here's a photograph, he's a photograph of the room.

This is where the body was.

And now you're seeing three D recreations.

Oh yeah, it's come on leaps and bounds.

Here.

They've got a thing called Zebie in Queensland.

It was the CSIRO joint thing with one of the universities.

And you walk around the crime scene now and they just have this little wobbly camera that's sort of little square box only about the size of oversized cube.

They just have it on this thing.

They walk around.

This thing is bouncing around ebras like on a soft spring, and that's three D imaging the whole thing.

And they get like a proper three dimensional drawing or diagram of the of the whole room and the bridges and indoors, outdoors, a whole lot.

That's come on, massive amount of stuff.

When I started in Adelaide, we had two blocks who were qualified draftsmen and they were drawing maps and stuff of houses.

They're going to mess them an up and do that.

Now they just go in and they got digital measuring tools.

You just use those and you can whip a room lay and no time at all.

I say, I saw it towards the ladder part of my career and the re creations they can do with crime scenes and how handy that is to prove or disprove some of the facts that.

And we've got we've got blood blood spatter analysis there as well.

From you know, they use trigonometry in some very complex mathematics to measure the length and the angle of the bloods blatter on walls and on floors objects, and from that they can determine exactly what height the person was when the blood was done, so they know if someone was on the floor and they've been kicked or stomped on after they've lost some blood, or if they're halfway down and maybe they're in a headlock and someone's pumbling them, making them determine all that sort of stuff.

Now we're using this very well, like to me, it's complex mathematics, but calculators and they measure all that the stringlines and stuff.

And we had the pathologists Roger Bayart who from South Australia based in South Australia and talking about some of the things that they used to rely on from a pathology point of view.

Now that you can scan the bodies and all that, that's changing the thinking of you know, a stab wound, what the stab wound would look like.

I remember turning up the post more thans with the knife and putting the knife near the people.

That looks like we take a photo with a scale next to it.

Yeah, but yeah, great improvements.

Massive improvement technologies has been great in the forensic field in that sense.

We don't use film anymore and we just keep taking photos now until the memory car gets full, you know, and we can see what we've got.

And when I started there was you had to take the picture on the film and it might be a weak before you found it where it came out, and if it hadn't worked out, you buggered.

Well.

The advantage of saving people going into a crime scene because you want to have a look before the photos were developed or now okay, this is a crime scene that you need less people going in there, less contamination.

I've had men lying dead on a roadway hit run from a car accident, and I've had him identified in twenty minutes.

Just go up and photograph his thumb with the appropriate sticker and things next to it, and then put that in my digital camera, load into my laptop in the car because all the notes now on laptops in Queensland.

Ring the fingerprint office and say, I'm just sent you this job.

Can you rush it through because he's he's dead, he's here, We need to find out where he lives, who he is, and we can do this stuff.

Yep, no worries.

So twenty minutes later they bring me back.

Yes, it's this bloke and he's this high, he's got this color hair and all those things.

I think it's swinging the pendulum in favor of the cops.

Like to get away of a crime is a lot more complicated these days than it was in the past.

Yeah, crooks, you it'll be a lot better now, even just dropping some sweatings and depending on the circumstances, you know, I beat the sweat might be enough for them.

They love wearing their baseball caps or their beanies and they leave them behind.

You might as well just leave me in name and address.

If you can leave me a baseball cap, you know, with a sweat band it or beanie and stuff.

You take your hair in DNA.

Man.

The people have been caught because they've discarded the Bella club or the baseball.

Cap and clean up after yourself.

Another murder that you said that it really left an end packed on.

That was Carline Ward.

Oh, Carline and Adelaide Ward.

She's still unsolved to this day.

I would say she's probably still the most horrendous killing I've been involved in.

Made us pit a side the way that she was killed.

And I won't say because it's still not solved.

I won't say the exact method, but it was brutal.

It was really quite vicious, very very vicious killing of her.

And there was literally a page I reckon it was an a four page long of potential suspects for her.

Because the lifestyle she was leading apart from being involved in drugs, she was a sex worker and doing things like that to try and make ends meet.

It was almost an impossible task to find who killed her.

But there is still a big reward.

If anyone was listening and does have some information, I'm sure the family would like to know.

Oh.

I was up in Queensland.

I thought they'd solved.

At one point I got a phone call from one of the detectives said, I do you remember this job?

Yes, I do.

I took a re' talking about DNA.

I took a small droplet of blood from a pair of shoes.

Apparently at that scene he told me this.

I couldn't remember it, and they had to analyzed and they had come up with a potential suspect from that drop of blood.

But then I've heard nothing more, so I think nothing came from that.

Maybe the personal applause will excuse at that stage, but yeah.

Well she I think she was thirty five years old and I was found there by her sixteen sixteen.

Years that's right.

Yeah, he was a subject at one point, and then of course a number of his friends.

But remember the house had no power.

She was doing it very tough, like no light bulbs in half the house, you know, we had to keep moving light bulb.

We bought our own lights in to do that, and of course back in those days there were just those big collision lights we had to bring in which generate heat, and that didn't assist the Fingo Breau.

When they came in after us to do it, they said they probably dried out some of the prints a bit because of the heat in the room.

But you have no choice.

You can't work in the dark completely.

Given given the things that you've seen and without because it's SEL's unsolved, so we won't break down the details of what you know about the crime scene.

But what was it about that crime scene that stuck with you?

I think it was just the brutality of it, just the way that her house had been wrecked, and how she was presumably a lady, it was doing it very tough and wasn't but she her lifestyle was in that sort of general field of associates.

It's just one they've never been able to solve.

But her house just a all every day what are you having in Sydney Housing Commissioner isn't generally public housing?

Public housing in one of these public housing type things.

I think at one point when I was photographing, went to the toilet and didn't even have toilet paper.

It was just you know, squares of newspaper cut up and sort of stuff.

She was doing things really pretty tough.

And light bulbs.

She must have either been moving around and just didn't bother any lights in the house.

Half the light bulbs were missing.

It's sad, strange house.

Some things just stick with you.

We've got a lot of murders to talk about.

But other type of work that you do as a crime scene officer plantations, you houses.

Yeah, in the early days of certainly in South Australia, we used to go all over the state looking for mainly cannabis s crops.

Back in those days they were growing in glasshouses.

You go to the northern Sumbers of Adelaide and there was a lot of families would have glasshouses growing cucumbers and tomatoes and things.

But sometimes every second row would be a row tomatoes and the next row would be cannabis, and just all through and you'd be talking forty to fifty meters long some of these things, and there was just one hundreds and hundreds surprise tomatoes.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, So they were often massing in that.

And then you know some wild crops in the national parks and just people just find big paddocks for forest areas, they just grow them in there.

I'm going to the bottom of the orp Pinsuer.

At one time there's been a fire and the Rural Fire Service had gone in and put the fire out and they'd traced it back, so they found this makeshift camps up.

This caravan had old kerosene fridge, so the kerosine fridge was the reason it had caught from the bush.

Fried started and there were ten or nine, nine hundred and something of these little jiffy pot seedlings, all in trays, all spread out in different enclosures with rabbit fences around them and stuff like that.

I thought, well, that's that's interesting.

So it was just on just nearly ten thousands.

I think we've just worked on ten thousand of them.

So we loaded them all up, took them all back, and that obviously became quite a major inquiry some of them.

Some of them looked like they were cannabis, you can tell, and others weren't.

So we made a plan.

We took a representative sample of these trays and I put them in my in my friensic car and I drove it back to Cadana.

It was a two hours two hour drive, and some of them had little little sprouts on them, so I think the following day I drove them to Adelaide to the botanists and said, tell me what these are.

And they had a look at them and he said, I can't tell exactly what they are.

I said, why not, They're plants.

You're a botanist.

Tell me that's what you do.

You're a botanist, you know.

You tell me you spent tell me you spent all these at university.

You can't have what these are?

The little he said, No, he said, because there's a He said, there's a certain point in a plant's life where it could be anything, which I didn't know about.

Perhaps it's like human embryates.

But these little things were so small he couldn't tell me.

I said, okay, So he said, grow them and yeah, bring them back a bit more mature and I'll have a crack.

How is your drug dealing going?

Well, that was the thing.

So I went back and told that to my detectives, and then they made inquiries and the drug squad had said, well, you will get you a permit.

You can get a research permit.

Oh okay.

I just had these in my exhibit room and watered them and kept them going.

Then I spoke to the superintendent, Dennis Edmonds his name, he's passed away now, poor man.

He rang me.

The detective superintendent of the drug short rings me up and he says, I've got this permit we can get you just need to keep growing them, so I'll get the permit, okay, no worries.

And then I think you may have rang me.

The followers rang someone and said the permit's been approved.

It's all good.

You're good to go.

You've got a research permit, okay.

So I suddenly I become a research well, I've become a research researcher person for the for the summer, for the euro draining these things.

So I've warded these things diligent.

I've kept little notes on it and stuff all the way through.

And then I've had to go on holiday.

So I've left strict instructions with the station senior sergeant.

I need to come in every two days and just a little bit of water in these things.

Just make a note here on.

All the your South Australia.

So we thought it were bad in New South Wales and Queensland have had their times.

So I've had my two week holiday wherever I was gone for and I've come back and these things in there they're looking like proper little plants and you can start seeing.

I can see they're something look like cannabis leaves.

Some of them have died.

But if you look at my garden, and I'm not a good gardener, at the best time.

So out of this, I think I had sixteen or thirty of them or something.

So I've taken them.

Then straight back to the botaners and okay, now Tommy, he said, yep, they are cannabis.

It's fantastic, Thank you very much, go back, let them die.

That was it until the court case when and you would have had this.

You're getting the witness box and you're sitting there and you're answering these questions and you suddenly the penny drops on which way the defense are starting to go with.

They're trying to lead me down the path.

I'm thinking they're going to have a crack at me for being a drug dealer here because I've never physically seen this permit.

So you've done that, I said, yeah, I did.

I said, did you see the permit?

No?

Do you know the contingents of the film?

I said no, But Superintendent he rang me and he told me id right, yeah.

So it turned out during the judgment of I think they got convicted there was no issue with that, but there is a seven page judgment that names me and at the time seeing this agent Spencer as technically we have cultivated cannabis.

Against the control some active we're actually I'm a drug grower.

We of course we all make we all make mistakes, but as long as you learn from your mistakes.

Working South Australia covering the big area and there's a lot of remote locations and your work country areas.

Car accidents too that were the ba and to me they rocked me more than murder scenes car accidents.

I think it's just that it can happen to anyone.

Tell us about some of the car accidents.

Remember before I joined the police, I was a volunteer firefighter in the Country Fire Service there and because we were living near Gaula mostly rural, so there were a lot of dirt roads hence the shooting incident, those sorts of things, and there was I think it was a little small Ford laser back in those days.

Had about four or five young teenage people at fifteen sixteen year olds and they've run off the road.

This thing's on its roof and it's gone through a fence rolled a couple of times.

So we've gone there to try and cut them out, and we're in there, we're trying to a couple of the guys are trying to cut the thing apart with the jaws of life and that sort of stuff, and we've gone inside this car that comfort some of them, and they literally died in our arms.

A couple of we lost too that night, and inside the car.

I don't know if the others made it or not, but there was just one of those horrendous things.

I'm one of I'm twenty one or two years old at this stage.

To watch these people die in your arms, it's very confronting.

So I suppose it was always destined to be in forensics in some way when you.

Think about that, processing that again, because you see such horrendous things, and you've seen such horrendous things.

I've heard a lot of people say, I'm focusing.

On doing the work.

I've got a role to do, and it might catch up later, but that the particular point.

In time, well, it was usually me.

It turned out, did have my what I call my falling out the tree moment back in two thousand and nine.

That's a nice way of Yeah, the branch snapped and I just fell out the tree, but I climbed back up the Eventually we'll.

Talk about that further.

I don't want people to think it's just because you've lost your drudge trade.

A judge what the judgement compliment?

He told us that it.

Was very the judges involved.

He said that it's not the sort of actions that would revile the public.

He said, in fact, most of it would think it was quite a great deal of common sense judgment judgment.

So he said, I'm not going to take any action about the unlawful stuff, and the evidence will be admitted because that's what they're trying to do.

They could show that we've grown them without the actual permit being properly legally obtained them.

Yes, because we sort of subverted that.

When we can do this, this is common sense, is logical.

Most of the public thought was the right thing, and they judge said the same things.

I'm not throwing out because you know, these guys have used some common sense and practicality.

Because they didn't physically have the permit his hand, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, but yes, technically we did grow drug gun awfully apparently because I didn't have the in my hands.

Yeah, same bit of paper.

Well, I like it when the courts take it very sensible, common sense approach.

I certainly did because I just started in Queensland, I didn't want to get arrested for growing drugs.

I would have finished my Queen's o't carew very quickly.

Although they were desperate for police at the time, well they were, but I was still at the academy, and I think days off from the academy to go and do it.

So I hadn't going back to South Australia and the ten plan flew back a couple of songs from the Academy for different things.

Any other sort of memorable moments in the crime scene and just the day to day I want to in part two we're going to talk about murders, and obviously I'm not going to let you come in here and not talk about you are the person that opened the first barrel and the infamous body in the barrel case.

But any other situations in South South Australia.

There's there's probably heaps when I really think about it, but South Australia was an interesting place to be and I was there in the forensic science area during what I consider the goal old age we had.

The DNA was evolving.

A lot of the guys that were there when I got there had been involved in things like the tru murders in their careers and stuff.

I had some great training mentors, really fortunate in that regard world class.

World recognized some of them in their fields of tourmark comparisons and that sort of stuff, so I was really lucky.

I remember going to Ernabella once.

I got a phone call again, you're on call phone rings at one o'clock in the morning, and I dragged myself out of bed.

You've got a bit of the airport in the one please air wing you earn a bella, okay, thank you very much.

Hung up, they're lying a bet of one thinking where what is Ernabella?

So I couldn't sleep.

So I've got out of bed and I've gone to what was the atlas back then, because we didn't have Google Maps, Google Earth.

So I get the atlass out and look at it a bit.

I think God's right up there at the top end of South Australia.

So sure enough, then I go down to the airport and we get on the plane and fly out, and an Aboriginal fellow there has been killed by someone from the neighboring amateur sort of the community.

And I'd never been in this far north ever in my life.

This is the first time I've been on proper Aboriginal trouble lands, and that in itself was interesting to see the way they were living in the church.

There has got no windows in it, nothing like there's cars have just stopped intside of the road.

They just just left there because no fuel and they had an abridge and laid Then he took he took me under his wings.

He said, come for a drive.

So he took me from drive all we went to the detectives were driving across.

Because you detectives don't get the planes.

They have to drive.

The private jets.

So they've they've driven I think from Marla bore.

We did look up and we see the crime scene.

That's fine above us.

But other than that, you know, we're not bitter, that's.

Right, No, no, no grudges.

No.

I think they had to driving because they were from Marla.

I think they maybe from Port Agusta, had driven a marlor board and then went on their way across.

So we had some some time to kill what we're waiting for them.

So he's taking me for driving.

He took me to this like a look at point.

This one of the high high mountain mounds in the in the town.

And he said to me, he said look over there.

I said look and saying he said, you see them hills over there, those hills on the horizon.

I say, yeah, I can see them.

This is the reason heavy Aboriginal accent.

And he said, that's forty miles inside the territory there is.

I thought, wow, I'm a long way from home.

You are.

I can see forty I can see on the horizon there's forty k's inside northern territory.

I'm almost on the border.

I've never never been that far remote even today.

Still.

Now, that's that's some of the experiences you can have in police in and I make no bones about it.

I tried to promote people that join the police like some of the experiences, and they're not the type of experience you'd get in what let's call a normal job.

All the different experiences that you are going out to a remote community like that and having look around.

It's amazing.

And I've driven a right on Lormark from a lovely winery in Port Lincoln, dran through the hills, through the streets to Port Lincoln, around roundabouts back to the police station, all under a little police escort.

That stops the town.

People stop and look at the mainstream doing I'm driving this broad I'm stolen.

I'd gone to town.

We've been into Port Lincoln to investigate now, stolen cars and vehicles.

You did a lot of work with stolen vehicle I.

Did, yeah in my early years because I had a bit of a car interest.

Myself and one of the other sergeants became the go to people in South Australia to identify stolen cars back then.

Has that has that changed now, like with the way cars are now?

I think so.

I certainly not aware of as much happening.

Certainly in the Queensland context.

They've still got vehicle examiners there, but usually when they've been burnt out and stuff like that.

But we were having a really bad run with the old cars, and I say old, the early model Commodorees and those sorts of things, and the ones before them, the Falcons, back when engine numbers and a lot of were hands stamped and so then numbers were hands stamped or were just journal stuff.

Now it's all dot matrix numbering and computerized and yeah, so we used to do a lot of that stuff.

A welding course there was a real skill to it.

But I remember working with Ade, the squad specialist, and he could just what he could find out from a car.

It blew me away.

It was a real skill.

There was some stuff we resolved in the that we would lose, rather lose a court case than give up some of the methodologies we would use because they were that special.

All manufacturers, they would tell you these things, and they had to track their cars, so they do certain things to them, and you've got to know where these things are and where to look and what they mean, how to interpret some of these little marks.

So rather than give our methodologies that in court, we said we'd lose one or two if need be, but we're not going to tell exactly how we identified that car.

And usually once we've made the idea, we would then go and find the owner that stolen vehicle and say, come and have a look at this car.

And they go, oh, that thing there, that's the scratch from my wife when she hit it with a shopping trolley, or that's my cigarette burn on the front seat, and things like that.

They would identify unique things like that, So we'd often use those statements and say the car's been identified because of this.

Yeah, the methodology wouldn't talk about.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I guess it's like most things in policing homicides, you probably don't give all your methodolog.

It's funny because now everything's readily accessible, is on the on the internet, or shows and all that.

So I think sometimes the crooks think we've got skills that we haven't actually got.

You can use to your.

Advantage, friendship people like that.

The CSI show is great for our reputation.

I have profile lifted dramatically.

We're getting hundreds of requests for you know, to come and talk to just tell us what you do and those sort of things.

And I've had detectives and particularly in Queens and who would sit down with a crook and they go, mate, this guy's from forensics.

He's going to examine you in a second.

You might as well just tell me now.

And sometimes I've actually gone you are all right?

Then I'm not going to admit I've ever said to a suspect you've watched the SI.

Haven't you.

Yeah, And that was what it was all about.

And some of them actually pfferently rolled over and we're going to find it anyway.

But that's good pressure.

Let's cut to the chase.

Legitimate pressure.

Okay, well, we'll take a break when we come back.

I'm going to and as I said, you're not You're not going to get in here without me talking about the baronies in the Barrel case because the horrendous nature of that crime and it's your reference that everyone knows about it.

And then of course that movie Snowtown, which was really captured.

I've got to say, out of movies that I've watched, that's one that it was almost too heavy for to sit through.

It's a hard watch.

It was just so grim.

We talk about that.

There's another interesting case I want to touch on that you responded to, and that was the murder of a former KGB Russian KGB agent.

That's got some twists and twists and turns.

Other things that you did as a crime scene officer, the accident that dream World and the Sea World helicopter crashes that you were involved in as well.

I also want to talk about, and I've spoken to you before and you're happy to discuss it, that eventually this all caught up on you and the battles that you've had for mental health, and also touch on what you're doing now to help first responders and their families.

So plenty to talk about.

That's just scratching the surface.

We'll have a break and we'll be back short