Suburban Noir: Crime and mishap in the 1950s and 1960s Sydney

By Peter Doyle

Nothing in the post-war decades reveals the underbelly of Australian life the way police records do. Small time heists. Failed robberies. Runs of bad luck. Payback. Love gone wrong. Drink, drugs, and late-night assignations. Cops doing their job well. And badly. Plausible lies, unlikely truths. Murder and misadventure. In Suburban Noir Peter Doyle— author of City of Shadows and Crooks Like Us— explores the everyday crime and catastrophe that went on in the fibro and brick veneers, the backyards, bedrooms, vacant lots, and pokie palaces of 1950s and 1960s suburbia. Extensive research into forensic archives, public records, and the private papers of the late Brian Doyle (1960s detective, later assistant commissioner of police, and Peter Doyle's uncle) also reveals important new information about two of the most famous crimes in Australian history— the Kingsgrove Slasher case and the Graeme Thorne kidnap-murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781742238531

Peter Doyle

Peter Doyle is a geologist and well known military historian specialising in the impact of terrain on the outcome of battle, particularly in the Great War, as well as the British experience of war. He is Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary War Heritage Group and visiting Professor at University College London. More details can be found at www.peterdoylemilitaryhistory.com.

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INTRODUCTION

–

REAL-LIFE DETECTIVE

My cousin Stephen leads me to the shed behind his home in suburban Kingsgrove, Sydney, to a cupboard at the back. Swings it open. ‘Well, this is it.’ A neat pile of bulging plastic shopping bags, a stack of old-style foolscap ledger books with spines hand-labelled ‘Curtis Murder’, ‘Flockhart Murder’, ‘Slasher Brief’, a couple of large cardboard folders, newspapers tied together with string. There’s a big plastic bag, stuffed with dog-eared papers and photographs, with a label on the outside, written in an old man’s spidery scrawl, ‘CRIME PHOTOS USED FOR TEACHING’.

We take the stuff inside – it’s a few loads – and pile it up on the kitchen table. There are a lot of photos. Few are labelled, but most are unambiguous: corpses, homicide scenes, car accidents, groups of men in suits. Others are more cryptic: a wardrobe stacked with bottles laid side by side, each tightly wrapped in newspaper; the remains of a blown-up fibro cottage; close-ups of a bloodstained piece of linoleum. There are mug shots of the famous jail escapee Darcy Dugan and his accomplice Mears; professional shots of the police Cliff Rescue Squad scaling the rocks at The Gap; a stony-faced motorcycle policeman looking into the distance. There are horrors that border on slapstick: a dead woman with a huge dagger thrust through her skull, her body propped against a pile of hessian bags labelled ‘Parramatta’.

There are a dozen or so tiny snapshots with fancy scalloped edges, showing smiling women in evening gowns posing in messy bedrooms, or at fancy dress balls surrounded by young Roman centurions, or dancing with middle-aged suburbanites.

More photos: open graves, bodies in decay, a corpse slashed in geometric patterns; the body of a boy, covered with blood, in a school uniform.

And there are photographs of the compiler of the archive, Detective Brian Doyle. In one we see him leading the ‘Kingsgrove Slasher’, David Scanlon, into court. That was a career-maker for Brian Doyle, my late uncle.

There’s another bag, simply labelled ‘Bradley’. It refers to what was maybe the biggest criminal case in Australian history to that time: the kidnapping and murder of schoolboy Graeme Thorne, and the arrest and extradition of Stephen Leslie Bradley from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

I well remember as an eight-year-old in 1959 seeing Brian Doyle’s picture in a front-page splash in the Daily Mirror as he perp-walked the Kingsgrove Slasher into Kogarah Police Station. Then a year and half later, his arrival at Sydney airport with young Graeme Thorne’s murderer in tow, which was like the arrival of a pop star. That series of events – the kidnapping of the boy, who was close to my age, then the ransom demand (‘I’ll feed him to the sharks!’), the discovery of the body months later, the ground-breaking forensic and detective work that led to the kidnapper, the arrest in Colombo and finally the murder trial itself, was one of those stories that kept on giving, and it coincided perfectly with young Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the tabloid Daily Mirror.

Murdoch had followed the Slasher case closely, and had realised just how powerful a sales driver a big, protracted crime story could be. A few months after he acquired the Mirror, the Thorne kidnapping dropped into his lap. On day one a cop source tipped off a Mirror journalist that a boy had been kidnapped and a ransom demand made; the well- blooded Mirror newshound immediately saw it for what it was: the crime story of the decade, maybe the century. Murdoch got it too, and with great flourish assigned ten journalists – ‘The Unbeatables’ – to work the story. Within 24 hours of the kidnapping, the fate of the eight-year-old victim, the agony of the parents – who had just won the lottery – had shifted almost totally into the public realm, and would remain front-page material for at least the next year.

In the early stages, Brian Doyle had been just another of the hundreds of detectives trudging around Sydney following up hopeless leads, but as the months passed he found himself drawn nearer to the action, and finally into the centre of the story.

That was in 1960. I clearly remembered savouring the reflected glory at school. It seemed there was little else talked about that year. Classmates, their parents, even my teacher remarked on it.

Those two cases, the Kingsgrove Slasher and the Thorne kidnapping, coming one after another, made Brian Doyle, then a mid-career detective sergeant, the most famous cop in the country, and maybe the first, or one of the first, of the modern style of media cop. Of burly build, square jawed, with a suitably phlegmatic demeanour, he imparted a powerful sense of reassurance. He was, I would learn much later, good with journalists, able to condense complex evidence into tight, lucid nuggets. And he was trusted.

Crime investigation, no details known, c1950

Crime investigation, no details known, c1950

But back then we saw little of Brian and his family. It would be a couple of years before my father bought his first car, and Kingsgrove was hours away by public transport from where we lived. The news and gossip was transmitted via a bachelor uncle who visited both households.

Among Brian’s papers and keepsakes there’s lots of material clearly related to the Bradley case, much of it incidental, such as a photo of Doyle boarding the BOAC Constellation headed for Colombo. He’s looking manfully off into the middle distance, allowing the photographer a profile shot. (Yes, he’s clearly enjoying this.) There’s a small red policeman’s notebook, records of interview (in shorthand), case notes and prosecution briefs, letters, newspaper clippings (a lot of these), notes written on hotel stationery for an after-dinner speech to Ceylonese detectives, a letter from the Police Commissioner congratulating Doyle and his colleague Bateman on the arrest.

Steve helps me take the stuff out to my car. We stand there chatting for a while. He mentions that a lady from down the road recently told him how her long-dead husband had attended a talk Brian gave years ago to the gents of the local St Vincent de Paul Society. At the end of the talk Brian had handed around snapshots of glamorous women in evening gowns. The payoff was that the lasses were all men in drag – public crossdressing was a criminal offence in those days. Brian had used this stuff, Steve tells me, in his talks to the public, to recruits at the police college, to specialist groups. He was considered a good after-dinner speaker. The photographs were a bit of light relief to end the talk with.

I recognise that particular showman’s trick. I had a few old mugshots that I was then using in my talks. Nowadays we’d forbear to so readily turn gender fluidity into comic material, but in Brian’s day it would have played as a gesture of in-the-know urbanity, while carrying a more serious intent, too: this is the sort of vile, disgusting modern social tendency against which we, the police, are so steadfastly holding the line.

We shake hands and I leave.

…

That trip out to Kingsgrove was in 2004. My uncle Brian Doyle had died two years before, at age 83. I had spoken to him only a few times in the previous couple of decades – handshake greetings at family funerals in the 1980s and 90s, then again in 2002, when I called him with a question. It concerned a poisoning case from the early 1950s. I was reading up on the bizarre wave of thallium poisonings for an exhibition I had been invited to curate at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum.

That invitation had come via a suprise phone call, from someone I didn’t know. My employment was precarious at the time: some patchy university tutoring while trying to finish a PhD. During longish breaks from the doctoral research, I was writing crime novels, and I’d been caught up in immersive research for those books, haunting forgotten corners and backstreets of mid-twentieth-century Sydney, reading years and years worth of old newspapers and magazines. Apparently that deep, slightly loony fieldwork had commended me to the museum authorities as a potential guest curator.

So a few months later I found myself probing that strange poisoning craze of the 1950s, somewhat apprehensively calling the uncle I had barely spoken to since I was a child. Brian answered the phone, his voice a deeper, more gravelly version of my father’s. I told him it was me, Peter, Maurice’s son, to which he gave a slow, guarded ‘Yes’. I told him what I was doing, to which he gave another guarded yes, and then I asked him about that case. No, he said flatly, he hadn’t been on that one. I was taken aback. It was before me in black and white in a reputable newspaper. I asked the question again another way, and he repeated, no, not him, not that one. I said, ‘Oh,’ then somewhat lamely I asked if it’d be alright if I was to ring back some time again should I have further queries. He was not encouraging.

I mentioned that exchange to his son Steve two years later, at Brian’s funeral. Steve was surprised. He had been living at Kingsgrove, looking after his frail father at the time, but had obviously been out of the house when I phoned. His father hadn’t mentioned the call. He had bad days, and some OK days, Steve said, and had he known, he might’ve prepared Brian for the call. I didn’t quite get it then, but over the next few years as I was to witness my own father’s decline, I became all too familiar with the patterns of dementia and the anxieties that beset sufferers.

Sometime after the funeral I rang Steve with a question – I was preparing a second exhibition by then, and had come across an article written by Brian in 1949 for the Australian Police Journal. The piece was an insider account of a Sydney murder case back in 1942. In Brian’s telling, an unnamed junior constable had played a small but important role in bringing about a successful prosecution. Yes, Steve knew it well. That young cop in the article had been Brian himself. There was stuff here about it, would I care to take a look at it? Or borrow it, if I wanted? I said I would, and hence that trip to Kingsgrove.

I was to find myself deep in police records over the next few years, researching and preparing that second exhibition, and a book to accompany it. The work by then was centring around some tens of thousands of jumbled forensic negatives held in storage at the Justice and Police Museum, comprising what is now known as the Forensic Photography Archive (FPA). The crime scene photos from early last century I found beyond engrossing, opening a portal to a city at once very familiar to me – the same streets, buildings, flora, the same sandy topographies as now – and also magically exotic. Smoky skies, brooding back streets and dark interiors. The more obvious, expected forensic subject matter – the bloody aftermath of violent crime – was there all right, but less than you might imagine.

Mostly forensic photography is about close attention, a hyper-focus, almost, on commonplace things. By the 1930s crime scene and mugshot photography in Sydney was usually carried out by specialist detectives of the Scientific Branch – back then, all of them men. The names of the individual photographers became familiar; I started noticing stylistic differences in their work, and began to develop preferences for the photographs of certain detectives. Questions arose as to who these detectives were. What sort of men were they? How did they see things – literally, metaphorically? What did they make of the world and the mostly unhappy circumstances they were charged to deal with? And how were these inner, mostly private feelings reflected in the work they produced? During that period I occasionally looked at Brian Doyle’s material, but it was not conducive to casual browsing. There was too much and too little, and what was there was often cryptic: a diagram of a hotel room, an unannotated photo of a decaying corpse, a group of smiling people on a yacht in Sydney Harbour – one of the faces appears to be the US pop singer Frankie Avalon, who toured here in 1958. Brian would have known exactly what everything referred to, and didn’t need the metadata. I have since been able to pin down some of it, but most of the photos remain obscure. (I still don’t know how Frankie Avalon got there.)

Much of Brian’s stuff was simply too detailed, too granular, to gain casual purchase on: files, prosecution briefs, lengthy reports to superiors, careful, exhaustive compilations of evidence, witness statements and so on, scrupulously narrated and full of precise facts and measurements. Brian had a solid professional reputation for action, including dangerous action – at one point, 30 years into his career, he calmly walked into the range of a gunman who was madly firing a .303, to remove the car in which the gunman’s mother-in-law lay murdered – but he was also an early adopter of new forensic techniques. He was among the first intake of students for a new Masters degree in Criminology at Sydney University, and was a keen advocate of continuing education for all police personnel. The bits and pieces he had kept, used in his talks, were both personal career keepsakes and forensic exemplars. This too was a barrier of sorts to my casual delving; it was pre-curated, you might say. So the material sat in my office, not much surveyed.

Details unknown, c1956. Brian Doyle, right

Details unknown, c1956. Brian Doyle, right

Then around 2012 I began looking at the more recent parts of the museum collection, photos from the 1950s and 60s, with a view to staging another, smaller exhibition, one that would include artworks as well. For reasons unknown, that huge collection of photos held at the museum cuts out abruptly at the end of 1964 – the pre-dawn of what we remember now as ‘the 1960s’ and all the cultural change signalled by that term. The Brian Doyle material and the photo collection began overlapping. The project cohered, and started looking like a thing; a feeling almost, a single mood, and one that produced resonances in me, a child of the 1950s.

Surveying that mixed bag of forensic material – the images, file entries, reports, testimony, sworn statements, newspaper articles, court reports and the like, I was continually confronted by the grinding tawdriness, futility, the dead-end small-timeyness of everyday crime and mishap, which would lead quickly to a perception of everyday urban life in general as pinched, bitter and small. For a while the whole project seemed inevitably to be confirming some vague, bleak historical thesis, a melancholy laying bare of the true, but hidden, nature of Australian suburban life. That’s not the whole of what I think now, but the perception has never gone away, either.

Other subsidiary concerns arose, too: the way blokes were back then. How Brian Doyle himself was so like my father in many ways. Or how my own dimly remembered childhood really was, might have been. Or who my parents were as people, how they dwelt in the world that made them, and how they and their friends and their siblings were as young adults. What the next-door neighbours were like. What that rough family who lived around the corner might have been like. Or the Maltese folk across the street. All tangled together. Brian’s world, the police world, my world. The world.

The project became something to do with the shapes of stuff back then, how things were – ashtrays, golf clubs, stockings, sets of cutlery, old cars, frocks, beer bottles, jewellery and doorways, concrete paths and kitchen tables. It was also about things not visible, and things actively concealed. I would pull back, trying to detect in disparate, semi-random bits of evidence, signs or hints of what people may have privately felt, feared, desired, back then, and how those forces in their inner lives sometimes burst violently into actuality. Or produced more evasion, more convoluted modes of misdirection, aversion, shame. If you were to take away the language of the 1970s and 80s, the language of personal growth, self-actualisation, consciousness-raising, recovery, and many different psychotherapeutic practices, all the commonplace ways we have now of describing ourselves, our yearnings, our inner makeup and our transactions with others – take all that away and what you’re left with is what people had in the 1950s and 60s: duty, love, hate, dignity, stoicism, silence. Sport, drink, smokes, hobbies, women’s mags, the Lodge or the parish priest. And a whole lot of stuff then designated as criminal. There were a lot of secrets back then.

Confiscated snapshot, no details known, c1960

Confiscated snapshot, no details known, c1960

And the project was always about the place. The layout of streets, the character of the light, the trees, the sand, the weeds, the sheds, workshops; about the houses: the local version of the early twentieth-century ‘California bungalow’; simple timber cottages with a shallow veranda out front, a long backyard, a few scrappy shrubs here and there, maybe a lemon tree; austerity-era brick veneer houses; or the ‘semi’, the structure split down the middle into two dwellings; and the ubiquitous fibro cottage, built in the tens of thousands in the 1950s to meet the national housing shortage. Asbestos fibro cladding could be easily sawn to shape, the panels hammered onto a wooden frame, the windows and doors bought separately, the whole thing could be put together by anyone who was halfway handy. Cold in winter, stifling in summer, and of course made from extremely toxic material, nonetheless there were, and still are, hundreds of thousands of these in Australian cities and towns.

‘Suburb’ in other parts of the world may have connoted space and amenity, private ease and civic virtue, away from the squalor of the old city centre. Australian cities had plenty of ‘nice’ districts where the respectability seemed to sustain itself. But after the Second World War huge tracts of raw new developments appeared, where life was in some ways less surveilled, generally a bit wilder. In Sydney, a couple of rough rules of thumb continue to apply. The further east or north you go, the more salubrious it gets. South and west, not so much. The big divide is Sydney Harbour and its estuary the Parramatta River, running east to west. North of that, more or less, is solidly middle-class residential. South of that, mixed residential and industrial; there are pockets of gentility, certainly, but they are embedded in literally a couple of hundred square kilometres of sprawl.

Brian Doyle himself lived in Kingsgrove – a modest but respectable burb in what is now the near south-west – and for a period in the 1960s was in charge of Bankstown Police Station. Bankstown is the unofficial centre of Sydney’s south and west.

Crime happens wherever people happen to be, obviously, but one of the strongest senses I have exploring police records is just how much south-west Sydney is there. And how much could be concealed among houses spread along dusty tracks that didn’t lead anywhere much, half-hidden by scraggly gum trees and wattles, separated by vacant lots, empty yards, or in ‘paddocks’ of dead grass and weeds, dotted with rusty car hulks, cast-off bits of iron and rotting timber. It all made for a strange economy of visibility and concealment. And there’s an obvious politics of visibility, in that the troubles of the poor have long been made into spectacle, while the affluent are almost automatically accorded much greater rights to privacy.

But for all that, the pictures, the verbiage, the reports, the evidence – the stories of the crimes of the 1950s and 60s seem to open the aperture wide on Sydney life of the time, regardless of its class divisions. It feels as though they tell the truth. A truth. Part of a truth, maybe.

A modern Australian might note that the names and faces encountered in the police records of the 1950s and 60s – and in this book – are overwhelmingly English, Scottish and Irish. The visual forensic record shows mostly light-skinned, fair-haired folk. The dominant English-speaking culture was then experiencing the earliest stages of what would be very great changes. Refugees and migrants from non-Anglophone Europe, ‘New Australians’, were arriving in large numbers. But the police records show only glimmers of the changes that were underway. That’s not necessarily a good thing: back then many marginalised identities were tacitly considered beneath serious police notice, and remained to some extent ‘off the books’. In their efforts to map and describe what was still being referred to as the ‘bad element’ or the ‘criminal class’, police attention was squarely on Anglo-Celtic working- class men and youths, or on the more middle-class cohorts of pretenders, fraudsters and confidence tricksters. The people they already knew.

Identikit drawing, police training photograph, 1960s

Identikit drawing, police training photograph, 1960s

Crime investigation, no details known, 1950s

Crime investigation, no details known, 1950s

For all the speculation about context, background, the times, the people and the places that delving into these archives prompted in me, sooner or later I would always feel compelled to return to the case itself: the exact events, the facts of the matter, the details. The catastrophe and its procedural and emotional aftermath, the official story- making, sometimes oddly reassuring and calming, other times not so.

Here are some things that this book is not: it’s not a treatise on criminology. Nor is it sociology. Nor history, forensic theory, law, jurisprudence. Nor is it any sort of representative sample of crime and policing in postwar Australia. It’s not a biography of Brian Doyle.

It’s not investigative journalism. It’s not an exposé, nor any sort of overview of organised crime and its entanglements with authority and power. It’s not about knighthoods being sold to Eastern Suburbs property developers. It’s not about bags of gambling money being delivered to Parliament House, or mayors and magistrates and judges being bought off with cash and favours.

It is about crime, but not port and cigars crime, hatched at the big end of town. Most of the matters here are obscure and small time: three men in a pub plotting to rob a club manager of the Saturday night pokie take. Somebody falling off a train in the City Circle tunnel. A young mother putting a breadknife between the shoulder blades of her abusive