Читать книгу Inside the Law - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 8

Dimitrios ‘Jimmy’ Pinakos

Walking his dogs along Rye’s back beach on a brisk afternoon on Tuesday 18 July 1989, a local man, John Miller, noticed a large package partly buried in a shallow hole near the beach car park. His dogs began sniffing and digging around the edges of the soft hole but Miller became concerned when he got close enough to smell the odour emanating from the bulky parcel. It smelt putrid, like something rotting.

Miller pulled his dogs away and returned home. But the more he thought about the package, its size and its smell, the more he wondered if it contained something sinister. He grew concerned enough to telephone the local police, offering to meet them in the car park and guide them to the find.

Rosebud police station logged Miller’s call at 5.35pm, and two police officers were dispatched to investigate the package. Miller stood waiting in the Rye back beach car park as the police officers arrived.

As soon as the first cop looked down into the shallow hole and saw the protruding tarpaulin, he smelt the odour of decomposition.

Within an hour, two Frankston CIB detectives, Senior Detective Colin Clarke and Detective Sergeant Ray Air arrived on the scene to be assaulted by the smell of the partly buried object. Clarke gently dug some of the sand away and revealed the entire top surface of a large bundle wrapped in a tarpaulin and secured with masking tape. The smell was becoming unbearable. Gently prising the bundle open, Clarke saw the remains of a decomposing human torso.

The CIB detectives set the investigating machine in motion. Homicide, forensics, photographics and coronial services were all notified and duly converged on the car park to perform their respective tasks.

Unwilling to let darkness hamper their work, police called upon the State Emergency Service to provide lighting for what had now become a crime scene.

Melbourne homicide detectives, Senior Constable Mark Newlan, Senior Sergeant Sal Perna and Senior Constable Nigel Howard, made their way to the Rye back beach, half an hour ahead of crime scene examiner Sergeant Brian Gamble.

Gamble worked at the Victoria Police State Forensic Laboratory, in the aptly named Forensic Drive in the outer Melbourne suburb of Macleod. Having worked a day shift, Gamble was on call at home when the job came through.

Gamble’s job was to collect any physical evidence that might help detectives solve their cases. He was required to make sketches of the crime scene, take detailed notes, prepare a written report, and examine the physical evidence – either personally, or by passing it on to the many experts who were employed or at the disposal of the Forensic Science Laboratory.

The wrapped torso found in the sand on the Rye back beach.

Gamble and his fellow officers – senior constables Gary Wheelan and Steve Batten, from the audio-visual section, and Chris Paulett from the photographic section – arrived at the crime scene around 10.30pm to begin a long night of work.

Paulett took photographs of the shallow grave site and the surrounding sand dunes while Wheelan and Batten videoed the scene before any further digging was attempted.

A little after midnight, the torso in its wrappings was transported by state-employed funeral directors to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology mortuary.

Here, a post-mortem examination was performed by forensic pathologist Dr Shelley Robinson who had personally supervised the torso’s removal from its sandy grave.

At the mortuary Dr Robinson made meticulous notes concerning the appearance of the package and noted the presence of maggots within the inner plastic wrapping.

The torso – clearly male from the genitalia – was then laid on the metal slab and visually examined by Dr Robinson while the investigators looked on and Senior Constable Chris Paulet took photographs.

The missing head, arms and legs had been cleanly severed, and despite the dirt and dried blood, a puncture mark was visible in the chest.

When Paulett had finished photographing and Dr Robinson had completed her visual inspection, the torso was washed and prepared for the internal examination.

Robinson cut around the small puncture wound in the chest and pulled open the flesh which devoid of dirt and smeared blood, was a ghostly white colour.

Inside the wound, the doctor found a broken arrow.

The triangular tip was intact but the bamboo shaft was broken in half. The arrow, Dr Robinson informed the police officers, had pierced the right ventricle of the heart and, from the downward angle of the wound, had been fired from above the victim.

A number of maggots inhabiting the remains were sealed in a jar of formalin to be sent to the CSIRO in South Australia, where scientists would test them to find an approximate time of death.

After the post-mortem, Senior Constable Mark Newlan returned to his St Kilda Road office of the Homicide Squad to begin his paperwork – it would eventually fill several large folders. He worked through the night and at 7am received a telephone call from a friend of his who worked at the Prahran CIB, Sergeant Mick Hughes.

Hughes asked Newlan about the Rye case, which he’d heard about on the radio news on his way to work, and wondered if the body might be that of a missing person on his files. Jimmy Pinakos had been missing since April, and if the torso was his, it meant three months had elapsed since he disappeared.

Newlan told his friend that the torso at Rye didn’t look decomposed enough to be three months old. Hughes told him to keep it in mind, nonetheless. Newlan drove back to Rye.

After catching a few hours’ sleep, Sergeant Brian Gamble too returned to the Rye back beach to organise the sifting of sand around the burial site for evidence, and to complete diagrams and reports for the police and forensic files.

Homicide detectives had organised a line search of the beach and the surrounding scrub at first light.

Ironically, despite the number of police searching the dunes along the foreshore, it was another dog, sniffing and digging in an area of bushland near the beach that led police to the second grave site.

The familiar foul odour told searchers that they had found more of the body, and the process of photographing, digging and sifting began again. Another wrapped parcel was soon unearthed.

Mark Newlan spent his morning flying around the crime scene in the Southern Peninsula rescue helicopter so he and other officers could survey and photograph the crime scene from the air. The helicopter landed as soon as news was radioed through that another parcel had been found.

Contained in the new find were two severed hands, two feet, and some other pieces. Wrapped separately in a Safeway supermarket bag, was the head.

In addition to the body parts, police officers found a grey tie with blue stripes, a white and blue pin-striped shirt and a pair of underpants.

Newlan was given the unenviable task of flying back to Melbourne by helicopter clutching the re-wrapped body parts. They landed at the Yarra heliport and Newlan was picked up by police car and taken, with his parcel, to the city morgue.

Laying the parts on the slab, Dr Robinson completed a macabre human jigsaw puzzle. The head, the hands and feet had been cleanly severed. Other pieces were identified as portions of arms and legs.

When she examined the head, Dr Robinson noted the marked distortion of the facial features, but no apparent damage to the brain. The head was then sent to the Royal Dental Hospital in Melbourne for a forensic odontology examination – the teeth would be examined for later comparison with charts belonging to missing persons fitting the general description of the unidentified male.

Dr Robinson later concluded in her report:

1 Identification of the deceased was based on forensic odonatological examination of the head. The head was found separately packaged and situated from the torso, however there is no evidence to suggest that they are not from the same body, although the former was in a more advanced state of decomposition.

2 Decomposition changes obscured some pathological changes, however it is likely that the penetrating injury to the chest (involving the heart) by the arrow was the cause of death.

3 It is also likely that the decapitation and dismembering of the body took place after death, with a sharp instrument such as a band saw, however the exact time or course of events cannot be established on the basis of the pathological findings.

With the second find which included the hands, Senior Sergeant Jim Falloon from the Fingerprint Branch was called to the mortuary. After gaining clearance from State Coroner Hal Hallenstein, Falloon put the putrid pair of hands into a bucket and took them to the Fingerprint Branch offices so the fingertip skin could be removed and printed.

At his office, Falloon gently removed the skin from the fingertips and placed the ridged skin over his own fingertips and carefully rolled them in the ink and onto a fingerprint card.

Unfortunately for everyone working in the 19-storey St Kilda Road building, the smell entered the air conditioning system and wafted through the whole building. As a direct consequence, severed hands and fingers were henceforth banned from the fingerprint offices as a health risk.

Identification from fingerprint comparison and dental records showed the deceased to be Dimitrios Pinakos – known to his friends as Jimmy.

Mark Newlan was able to tell Mick Hughes that his hunch was correct. Pinakos, an insurance agent, had been missing since 20 April but, with the discovery of his body, the web of intrigue surrounding his disappearance began to unravel.

Dimitrios Pinakos was born in Greece in 1958 and immigrated to Australia with his family when he was still an infant. He anglicised his name to Jimmy, left school when he was 18 years old, and worked for a time as an electrician. He eventually bought his own small business.

Jimmy Pinakos began selling insurance in 1987, and it wasn’t long before he created his own corporate agency, Limnos Insurance, operating under the umbrella of the Melbourne Mutual Group.

It was in the offices of the Melbourne Mutual Group in St Kilda Road, that Jimmy Pinakos met the man who would fire a crossbow arrow into his chest, carve his body into small pieces and bury him in the sands of the Rye back beach.

Ronald Lucas began working in the same St Kilda Road building in January 1989 with another corporate agency, also operating within the Melbourne Mutual Group.

Although Ron Lucas did not share office space with Jimmy Pinakos, many people would later tell police that the two knew each other well and had held private meetings in the week before Pinakos went missing.

Ronald Lucas was deeply in debt. He had a habit of borrowing money – to buy cars, a house, a swimming pool, among other things – and making only a few payments before abandoning his financial responsibilities.

Lucas was being pressed for money from a number of sources, particularly from his wife who had set up house in Perth. Lucas had joined her there for a couple of weeks and then moved back to Melbourne. He had instructed her to have a swimming pool put in the backyard with promises to deposit money into her bank account. The money never arrived.

Lucas owed Westpac Bank over $2,000, Diners Club $16,151, Statewide Building Society $80,000 for the mortgage on his Perth home (no payments had ever been made), $5,209 on an unpaid MasterCard debt, and $2,350 on a loan by Lucas and his wife that was still outstanding. He also owed American Express $1,462, and had recently borrowed $47,326 to buy a four-wheel-drive vehicle. True to habit he had only made one payment on the luxury vehicle.

In addition to his debts, Ron Lucas had a penchant for crossbows.

On Tuesday 18 April 1989, colleague Harry Triferis went to Jimmy Pinakos’ office to collect his friend Ron Lucas to drive him home. In the office, Pinakos told Triferis and Lucas of a $60,000 development loan he had access to in a trust account. Access could only be gained if it were used for a mortgage.

Triferis would later say that he had come in on the end of the conversation and that Jimmy and Ron had been discussing the money before he had entered the office.

Jimmy Pinakos did not know that discussing being in possession of large sums of money to a man heavily in debt could be a fatal mistake. Pinakos also had no idea of the conversation that Lucas had with Triferis a few weeks earlier – about how easy it would be to chop up a body and bury pieces in different locations so it would never be found. Triferis himself did not see the significance of the conversation for many months to come.

On Wednesday 19 April, Jimmy Pinakos and his brother William, with whom he shared a house, went to the bank and received a cheque for $60,000 made out to Lucas’ wife. Understandably, William questioned his brother about it and Jimmy told him that he was going to swap it for $80,000 cash that very night.

Later that evening, William phoned Jimmy to ask how the deal had gone. Jimmy told him that it had fallen through because the ‘bloke had turned up dressed in a Rambo suit and armed with a crossbow’. The next morning Jimmy Pinakos took the cheque to work. It was the last time William Pinakos would ever see his brother.

That same morning Ron Lucas was visiting a friend boasting that he was about to collect money owing to him from years earlier. Lucas even promised the friend $13,000 from the windfall.

Jimmy’s hours were numbered.

Lucas met Jimmy in his office in the early afternoon. Harry Triferis’ brother, Peter, saw Lucas leave and expressed his concerns about Ron Lucas to Jimmy.

Peter Triferis would later tell police that at first Jimmy refused to tell him about the deal he was planning with Ron Lucas, but further prompting led him to reveal that Lucas had offered him ‘$80,000 black money for a $60,000 bank cheque’.

Peter Triferis said Pinakos told him how Lucas had turned up the night before armed with a crossbow and claiming his strange Rambo attire was because he had to be careful carrying that much money around.

Pinakos had shown Peter Triferis the cheque and told him that another meeting had been arranged at Lucas’ home at 3 o’clock that afternoon. Although Triferis planned to meet Pinakos back in the office afterwards, he would never see his colleague again.

Jimmy Pinakos instructed his secretary to telephone his mobile phone at exactly 3.15pm and, for reasons he didn’t explain, told her not to worry if he replied with the code word ‘sweet’.

His secretary duly phoned him at 3.15pm, Pinakos answered, told her he had yet to arrive at his destination and instructed her to telephone again at 3.40pm.

At the appointed time, she telephoned again and heard Jimmy say, ‘It was all sweet’. A third telephone call about another matter at 4.30pm, was answered by Jimmy. He said that he was in Springvale. The secretary later told police that he sounded as if he was in fact in his car.

This phone call was the last reported contact anyone admitted to having with Jimmy Pinakos – and he was obviously nervous. He knew what he was doing was illegal, and perhaps the thought of earning $20,000 in one afternoon made him act as if he were in a gangster movie, using code words and disguising his location.

Ronald Lucas was an hour late for a 7.30 meeting that evening, even though his business diary listed no prior arrangements. Lucas had excused his lateness by saying he was held up at another appointment.

It is likely that in those unaccounted-for hours, Ronald Lucas killed Jimmy Pinakos with a cross-bow and dismembered him.

The following day, Lucas didn’t arrive at the office until after midday, and left two hours later for an unspecified appointment.

Concerned about his brother’s uncharacteristic absence, William Pinakos phoned around. One of the first people he contacted was Ron Lucas who admitted that Jimmy had been at his home the day before, but had received an urgent phone call and left abruptly.

After telephoning his wife in Perth to cancel his imminent trip to visit her, Ron Lucas telephoned Harry Triferis and confessed that he was in ‘a lot of shit at the moment’. Concerned, Harry Triferis immediately contacted his brother Peter and related the strange conversation.

Without delay, Peter Triferis went to visit Lucas who, as he would later tell police, appeared to have been crying. Peter Triferis asked about the cause of his worries, Lucas told him he was having money problems and that the bank in Perth was pressing his wife for money.

Triferis raised the subject of the financial deal that Pinakos had mentioned, but Lucas denied knowing anything about it; although he did admit inviting Jimmy over to his house to discuss a loan. Apparently the terms didn’t suit Jimmy and he had left.

When Peter Triferis left Lucas at 7.30pm he bluntly told him there was talk he had killed Jimmy. On his guard, Lucas said that it was impossible because neighbours had seen Jimmy leave his house the previous afternoon. Neighbours later denied this.

That evening, relatives of Ron Lucas arrived at his home to stay. They later told police that Lucas wasn’t home when they arrived at 10pm. It is likely that in the time between Peter Triferis’ departure and the arrival of the relatives, Lucas drove the body to the Rye back beach and buried it in several locations.

If this was indeed the case, then Jimmy’s dismembered body was in the garage when Peter Triferis visited.

Ron Lucas responded to the rumours that he had become a suspect by leaving home and staying with friends in Melbourne for two days. Using a false name, he then bought a bus ticket to Adelaide where he stayed with friends for three weeks.

Two days after Jimmy disappeared, William Pinakos found his brother’s silver Porsche near a house in Prahran that he and his brother jointly owned; the same house where Jimmy had met Lucas dressed as Rambo. The Porsche contained Jimmy’s briefcase which in turn contained the $60,000 cheque.

If Jimmy had been killed for the money, the murderer’s plans had been thwarted. Perhaps he hadn’t completely trusted Lucas and wasn’t willing to hand over the cheque until he saw the cash.

Jimmy Pinakos had been killed for nothing.

A neighbour later told detectives he noticed the Porsche the previous evening around midnight.

Lucas had also abandoned his Holden ute which was found soon after the Porsche. Both vehicles were photographed and examined for fingerprints, blood and any trace evidence that might link Pinakos and Lucas. Nothing of incriminating value was found.

Detectives also searched Lucas’ home in Reservoir and found no evidence that anything untoward had occurred there. The home was full of furniture and the garage was cluttered with tools.

Lucas next travelled to Queensland where he stayed with another friend for over a week before returning to Adelaide, where he began working as a builder. He asked a friend where he could get some jewellery valued, and produced a gold chain and a single diamond. He claimed he had received the jewellery as payment for mercenary work in Malaysia. Both items together were valued at $19,945, but the jeweller informed Lucas that he could only expect to receive $5,000 if he sold them. Lucas decided to keep the jewellery.

The friend became increasingly concerned about Lucas and his strange stories and expensive jewellery, and eventually contacted local police, who in turn contacted officers from the Adelaide Major Crime Squad. Melbourne detectives were notified and flew directly to Adelaide.

Ron Lucas

On 7 June 1989, Lucas arrived home from work to find detectives waiting for him. They had a search warrant and had already searched Lucas’ room finding the gold chain and the diamond, which fitted the description of jewellery belonging to Jimmy Pinakos, who at that stage was still the missing; as well as the bus ticket that Lucas used to leave Melbourne.

Ronald Lucas was taken to the Adelaide Major Crime Squad office and questioned by detectives. Lucas had no satisfactory explanation for having the jewellery in his possession. This gave detectives a reason to extradite him back to Victoria to be charged with theft. Finally, back in his own state, Lucas was charged and bailed to report to the local police station every Monday and Friday.

Five weeks later, John Miller and his dogs discovered the remains of Jimmy Pinakos behind the Rye back beach car park.

The day following the discovery of the two burial sites, Ron Lucas telephoned the Melbourne police officer who had arrested him in Adelaide. He reported seeing a ‘bloke hanging around’ the night before and wanted police protection.

Lucas also casually asked the police officer, ‘What’s the go with the body on the beach at Rye?’ When the police officer asked why he wanted to know, Lucas replied that he was ‘just curious’.

That same morning, Lucas collected wages owing to him from a building site where he had been working and vanished again. He stayed in hiding with a number of friends until February 1990. He bleached his hair blonde, used an alias, told people he was a doctor of biochemistry from Sydney, and began a liaison with the 17-year-old stepdaughter of the friend he was staying with.

Three days after Jimmy Pinakos’ body was discovered, police carried out an exhaustive search at the Reservoir home of Ron Lucas. When detectives had checked the property months earlier, the garage had been full of junk; now it was empty.

Crime scene examiners and a team of forensic science experts focused on the garage with its old carpet and its cement sheet walls. Biologists tested the dirty carpet and walls for the presence of blood. Using Hemastix – a preparation that changes colour when rubbed against a blood stain – marks on both the walls and the carpet tested positive. The experts scoured the garage for any other evidence linking Ron Lucas with the murder of Jimmy Pinakos.

The house in Reservoir had changed hands since Lucas had fled and the new owners had given police permission to examine it. However, even if permission hadn’t been obtained, the Victoria Coroners Act gave investigators the right to “enter and inspect any place and anything in it” and “take possession of anything which the coroner reasonably believes is relevant to the investigation and keep it until the investigation is finished”.

Accordingly, when Gamble and his team discovered splatters of blood on the garage wall, they simply cut out a huge section of the wall and took it with them back to their laboratories. Large sections of the garage carpet were also removed.

From the moment the body was identified as Jimmy Pinakos, Mark Newlan’s investigation led clearly to the doorstep of Ronald Lucas. Suspicion and innuendo became fact.

On the day following the body’s discovery and identification, Newlan went to the Reservoir home and was given the crossbow in its camouflage carry case by a neighbour who had been storing it for Lucas.

The crossbow Ron Lucas used to kill Jimmy Pinakos.

Newlan lodged it at the State Forensic Laboratory where a firearm and toolmark examiner tested the weapon. He found that the crossbow could only be fired after it had been loaded, cocked and with considerable pressure – 4.5kg – applied to the trigger. In simple terms, the crossbow couldn’t be fired accidentally.

Another scientist at the forensic science lab was given documents belonging to Ronald Lucas. He analysed the handwriting on a Diners Club receipt from a Dandenong sporting goods store for the purchase of a Barnett Brand Crossbow and carry case. He identified the signature on the receipt as that of Lucas.

Ronald Lucas was eventually apprehended in Cairns on 19 March 1990 as a result of information given to police by the stepfather of Lucas’ young girlfriend. When Lucas was picked up, he said resignedly, ‘I suppose this is about Jimmy.’

Detective Mark Newlan flew to Cairns the following day. Within 24 hours, following a successful extradition hearing in the Cairns Magistrates Court, he made the nearly six-hour flight by light plane to Melbourne with Ron Lucas.

This was Newlan’s first chance to chat with his suspect. He found Lucas to be an amiable fellow, but with a childish habit of boasting about everything. Looking out the aeroplane window, Newlan asked Ron Lucas if he had ever done any parachuting. Lucas told him that he had made hundreds of jumps. Later, when Newlan spoke of diving, Lucas told him that he was a diving expert. Newlan reflected wryly that it seemed that there was nothing Ron Lucas wouldn’t brag about – except, of course, killing Jimmy Pinakos.

New legal and scientific grounds were broken in the realm of forensic evidence during the murder trial of Ronald Lucas, over the admissibility of DNA testing – specifically for the purpose of linking Jimmy Pinakos with the crime scene in Ron Lucas’ garage.

When Leicester University geneticist Alec Jeffreys discovered the means to isolate the elusive genetic material in 1984, one of the first tests he performed was to see whether DNA patterns were inherited. His tests on family groups clearly showed that half the bands and stripes of DNA of offspring were from the mother and half were from the father.

The Melbourne courts argued this point at length because, owing to the advanced state of decomposition of the body of Jimmy Pinakos, DNA tests could not be conducted on his remains. The prosecution therefore conducted a series of DNA tests on blood samples from Pinakos’ parents and compared the DNA profiles with blood samples taken from the garage. The results showed a 65 per cent probability that the blood in the garage belonged to Jimmy Pinakos – not certain enough for the court to accept as evidence.

It was vital for the conviction of Ron Lucas, to connect him to the body, or the body with his house. There was plenty of circumstantial evidence, but detectives were looking for solid forensic evidence.

Fingerprint expert Sergeant Sean Hickey provided that link by carefully examining the material in which the body had been wrapped. On a piece of masking tape used to bind the tarpaulin, Hickey discovered a clear latent fingerprint. It belonged to Ronald Lucas.

The masking tape, with its still clearly distinguishable fingerprint, held pride of place in a display cabinet at the St Kilda Road Fingerprint Branch offices.

Ronald Lucas was found guilty of killing Jimmy Pinakos. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

A decade into his 20-year sentence, Ron Lucas hit the headlines again when he and another prisoner escaped from the Ararat jail. At around 11.30am on Saturday 16 June 2001, the two scaled a wire fence but were recaptured after farmers reported them roaming through paddocks. They were back in custody before 5pm. Before the escape, Lucas was due for parole in 2006.