Grieving families and former cops have accused state and federal police of covering up institutional corruption and serious incompetence during homicide and missing persons investigations, an inquiry has heard.
The scathing evidence was heard during a NSW parliamentary inquiry into 18 unsolved murders and missing persons cases between 1965 and 2010, chaired by Legalise Cannabis Party leader Jeremy Buckingham.
Serial killer Ivan Milat is suspected to be responsible for a range of murders and disappearances from the early 1970s – significantly more than the seven people he was convicted of killing between 1989 and 1992.
The inquiry will examine whether police failures prevented the cold cases from being investigated properly at the time, and whether the killers could have been identified decades ago.
Among those who gave evidence was Kevin Docherty, the twin brother of 15-year-old Kay Docherty, who vanished alongside her friend Toni Cavanagh from a Wollongong bus stop in 1979.
The inquiry also heard from Steven Rowland, whose sister Keren Rowland was pregnant in 1971 when she was murdered, along with retired detective Hugh Hughes who helped the family with the case.
Co-founders of Search Dogs Sydney, a company that uses dogs to find bodies, Chris D’Arcy and Adele Jago told the inquiry police do not take responsibility for ineptitude and continue to fail Australians.
Both families accused the Australian Federal Police (AFP), ACT Policing and NSW Police of lying to them and intentionally withholding investigation details to cover up their own mistakes.
Mr Rowland told the inquiry his family had faith in the investigation into his sister’s murder until about nine years ago, 46 years after her death, when they decided to look into the matter themselves.
He said they were devastated when they realised AFP barely had any information on his sister’s case, and actively prevented his family from accessing information that was available through other government departments.
The inquiry heard that nine files relating to Keren’s case were placed in the national archives by the AFP and was only accessible to the family if they paid for a freedom of information request.
The family submitted the request, but AFP denied access and refused to tell them why.
Retired detective Hugh Hughes told the inquiry that some of the files were classified as ‘top secret’, which he had never seen before, and there was no explanation why.
Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party member Robert Borsak, who is on the inquiry committee with Mr Buckingham, asked: ‘What do you think AFP is hiding?’
Mr Hughes said: ‘I have no idea, I’m hoping it’s just incompetence.’
‘Keren’s case was the only unsolved homicide filed at the national archives, and it was the AFP who filed it, and I don’t know why they filed it. It was open, we made inquiries, and they closed it and removed it.’
Mr Borsak said he’s never heard of a murder case being filed in the national archives.
The inquiry heard that police refuse to tell the family if there has ever been a suspect in Keren’s case, or whether they DNA tested items found with her body – including a beer bottle.
Mr Hughes said the police’s lack of response to the family ‘doesn’t make sense’, and said institutional corruption was the only logical explanation.
He gave investigation details to two colleagues in the UK who knew nothing about Keren’s case and reviewed the details independently of each other.
‘All three of us say the same thing: We smell a rat,’ he said.
‘Unfortunately, this is where I struggle because I’m hoping all they’re doing is trying to cover up incompetence, but I can’t rule out that it’s something more sinister and they’re trying to hide something greater than corruption.’
Mr Docherty told the inquiry that police told his parents that his twin sister Kay was a runaway, and they never properly investigated her disappearance.
In the weeks after her disappearance, his family received two letters that were supposedly from Kay but Mr Docherty said they didn’t sound like his sister at all.
They were sent from Darlinghurst in Sydney, where Milat was later known to have frequented, and said, ‘We’ve gone away with friends, we’ll be back soon, the job has fallen through, love you, be home soon’.
He said the handwriting did not look like Kay’s, and there were spelling errors that she wouldn’t have made.
‘The first thing police did was send cadaver dogs under my house and tested my DNA, so we’re being treated as criminals,’ he said.
‘They took the letters and said they had to get DNA done, I can’t remember how long it took, but one night they knocked on our door and said they were returning the letter – not the letters.’
He said police lost one of the letters.
Mr Docherty told the inquiry his family didn’t hear from police for 30 years, until they contacted him in 2009 to say they were going to reopen the case, but without any new evidence.
He said multiple witnesses have come forward to police to say they saw Milat around the area where Kay went missing, or that they saw Kay before she disappeared, but those leads were never followed up.
Mr Docherty and former police officer Jeff Dakers, who originally investigated Kay’s disappearance in the ’70s, have now identified an area where they believe her body may have been buried – about 2km from where she went missing.
The area is covered in lantana, which could easily be removed with a controlled backburn and police have so far refused to investigate, the inquiry heard.
Asked why he thought police had stalled their investigation, Mr Docherty said: ‘I thought they were under-resourced, but now I think Milat isn’t here anymore so they think it’s done and over, but for us, it’s never over.’
Milat died in jail in 2019.
He continued: ‘They don’t want to backtrack and be held accountable, because we’re talking 40 years ago, but I guess it’s just going to open another can of worms.
Mr Dakers said that one detective told him the investigation had stalled because the police didn’t have a location, to which he replied: ‘That’s a lie.’
Mr Docherty said his parents died of broken hearts without knowing what happened to their daughter.
Whether Milat was involved in these cases has not been determined, but criminologist Xanthe Weston and criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro told the inquiry it was unlikely.
They listed a number of other unsolved cases where Milat might have been involved.
Co-founders of Search Dogs Sydney, Mr D’Arcy and Ms Jago, told the inquiry police usually reject help from outside organisations.
