Novel way to reveal secrets of ‘mafia hit’
Terry O’Donnell believes he knows who really killed Police Commissioner Colin Winchester. Now he’s written a book about it.
By Richard Guilliatt
Lawyer Terry O'Donnell says nearly every salient detail of the novel, from the conversations of the mobsters to the conduct of the police investigation, is drawn from his voluminous files.
The unsolved murder of Federal Police commissioner Colin Winchester in Canberra 32 years ago has long transfixed the nation’s capital, but few people have been quite as obsessed as retired lawyer Terry O’Donnell. As a public defender in the early 1990s, O’Donnell appeared in court for the man who was ultimately jailed for the murder — former public servant David Eastman. Decades later, O’Donnell would painstakingly compile the evidence that resulted in Eastman’s acquittal, after 19 years in prison, and his $7m compensation payout for wrongful conviction.
One might have expected 74-year-old O’Donnell to take it easy after that victory, but the ex-barrister has long nursed a vehement belief that he knows who really killed Winchester, based on his own detective work and a huge archive of police and court files.
Now he has published his own account of the murder, Grass. The fact that it’s a novel — albeit one filled with strikingly familiar characters — reflects the blanket of secrecy that courts have thrown over the case via suppression orders, closed hearings and other legal shields.
O’Donnell describes his novel as “truth telling” drawn from documents the public are prohibited from seeing. He argues that the material reveals Winchester was most likely killed by a professional assassin working for the Calabrian mafia.
“The novel is basically all the stuff that has never seen the light of day,” he says from his home outside Canberra, which he shares with his wife Jenny and a mountain of archival files on the Eastman case. “I see it as a path to the proper investigation of who killed Colin Winchester.”
Colin Winchester was murdered in 1989 in Canberra.
Given the Calabrian mafia’s unforgiving reputation, O’Donnell’s decision to self-publish could be seen as dangerous to his health. Nor will it please the federal authorities, who have spent decades trying to keep a lid on aspects of the Winchester case and its flawed police investigation.
O’Donnell’s novel includes a postscript that delves into that history, and he is hoping to launch a website if he can find a way around the ever-growing list of suppression orders, two dozen of which were added in 2018.
“A lot of the information that’s now suppressed is already available in past National Crime Authority reports, in newspaper accounts and in books on the Calabrian mafia in Australia — it has even been dramatised in TV shows,” he says. “It seems stupid to me that they’re trying to suppress material that is already on the public record. How does anyone know whether they’re going to inadvertently break the law?”
O’Donnell says the plot of Grass is lifted straight from the historical record, even the implausible parts. It is actually true, for instance, that in 1980 a known associate of the Calabrian mafia approached the Federal Police and convinced them to let him grow a marijuana plantation outside Canberra, supposedly to help expose organised crime. Colin Winchester was in charge of that operation, which went haywire when truckloads of marijuana went missing. Eleven people were eventually charged but the case collapsed after Winchester was shot dead in his driveway, prompting the mafia informer — name now suppressed — to withdraw his co-operation.
O’Donnell has copies of extensive police reports in which phone taps and other intelligence pointed to the possibility that Winchester was the victim of a mafia hit. But some of those reports have been kept secret for decades via court orders, and police ultimately focused their investigation on Eastman, a volatile former public servant who was angry at Winchester for failing to stymie an assault charge he was facing. The case against him was circumstantial but appeared to be compelling: he had purchased a gun of the same calibre as the spent shells found at the murder scene; his own solicitor said Eastman had vowed to kill Winchester; a forensic expert linked gunshot-particles in the boot of Eastman’s car to the murder weapon. In November 1995, the troubled 50-year-old was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
O’Donnell was one of many solicitors enlisted to represent Eastman, whose habit of sacking his lawyers and abusing judges created chaos throughout his many court proceedings. Misgivings about the case gnawed at O’Donnell for more than a decade, and he was researching the old case files for a book 12 years ago when he realised he had enough evidence to lobby the ACT government for an inquiry. That inquiry, headed by Acting Justice Brian Martin, dropped a bombshell in May 2014 when it recommended that Eastman be acquitted and released, citing flaws in the forensic gunshot evidence.
During the Martin inquiry, hearings were conducted to investigate the theory that Winchester was assassinated by the Calabrian mafia. But that evidence was heard behind closed doors and has never seen the light of day. Later, during Eastman’s 2018 retrial, the transcripts and exhibits of the Martin inquiry were taken down. By the time the jury acquitted Eastman in November 2018, the presiding judge had issued non-publication orders on 23 names, all but two of them Italian, making the Martin report itself technically in contempt of court.
“The suppression orders on this case go all the way back to the original coronial inquest into Winchester’s death 30 years ago,” says O’Donnell, who argues that Eastman’s wrongful conviction occurred in part because his trial lawyers were denied access to key police files. Thirty years on, he argues that same secrecy impedes real justice being done.
“There were people who had far more motive to murder Colin Winchester than David Eastman, but the suppression of all these documents actually inhibits the proper investigation of them and stymies the pursuit of justice.”
In O’Donnell’s novel, the Calabrian mafia resolves to assassinate a senior Federal Police officer, Detective Chief Inspector Chris Weston, in order to prevent the prosecution of 11 of their brethren on marijuana-cultivation charges. In pursuit of this plan, they enlist the help of a flamboyant Labor politician ‘Al Gresham’, who uncannily resembles the late Al Grassby, former immigration minister in the Whitlam government. A killer named Bill The Blond is hired for the job, shooting Weston dead in his driveway with a .22 semiautomatic pistol, then tossing two spent rifle cartridges onto the ground as decoys.
O’Donnell says nearly every salient detail of the novel, from the conversations of the mobsters to the conduct of the police investigation, is drawn from his voluminous files and from police and criminal sources he is circumspect about revealing. Three years ago, he paid a visit to the home of the now ageing Calabrian-Australian who was the original police informer in the Winchester marijuana plantation case. “He made me a cup of coffee and I ended up talking to him for six hours,” he says.
O’Donnell’s theories about the Winchester murder prompt eye-rolling scepticism among some of the police and lawyers who’ve been involved in the case. Eastman may have been acquitted, they say, but that doesn’t make this elaborate assassination story any more believable. Nor is it likely that O’Donnell’s thesis will ever be tested by a renewed investigation.
Eastman is now 75, living a determinedly quiet life after receiving his $7m compensation, and many of the principal characters are dead or elderly. Few people want to stir up the ghosts of a bungled police investigation from three decades ago.
Whether the book stirs up ghosts of the Calabrian kind does not seem to worry O’Donnell. “I’m not concerned, I never have been,” he says. “If anything happened to me it would be too obvious.”
Grass by Terry O’Donnell is available to download on Amazon.
https://www.theaustralian.com.....au/inquirer/colin-wi
Blow Big Whistles
Delete Comment
Are you sure that you want to delete this comment ?
Blow Big Whistles
Delete Comment
Are you sure that you want to delete this comment ?
Ian Hillery
Delete Comment
Are you sure that you want to delete this comment ?