Loose Units: The Podcast
The Fingerprint Genius - Part Two
The year is 1970, and our renowned fingerprint expert is about to help close the book on a sadistic killer on the run. Part two of John and Paul's look at a forensics legend is here.
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- Broadcast on:
- 09 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
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Hi everyone, I'm, well, it's obvious. I'm John Behoven and I was a cop back in the 80s in Sydney. And I'm Paul Behoven John's son. I'm an author and I wrote two books about dad's time as a cop. The first five seasons of Lucian had spanned my time in general duties, forensics. My time as a firefighter and even my stint running a funeral home. This season we're visiting the locations of Australia's most notorious, baffling horrific crimes and looking at what happened there. From Snowtown to the family, from the Morehouse murders to haunted highways. This season of Lucianates is your go-to guide to the worst crimes in Australian true crime history. Welcome to Lucianates, the shadow files. Hello and welcome to Lucianates, the shadow files. Now last week we were looking at something Barry Faye did. Barry Faye was a contributor to the Australian police journal and also a kind of mentor to dad in the industry. And he was a fingerprint expert. He was a forensics genius. And last week we began looking at a case in the Australian police journal in which Barry Faye was talking about one of the cases where he entered a small toilet block and was dealing with a woman's body. Dad, you described the body in some detail last week and we talked a little about Barry. We talked about his relationship with your dad, which was interesting, your relationship with your dad. And we sort of built the story of who Barry was somewhat. Before we launch into the actual crime and where it went, I just want to give people a quick recap. So a woman's body is found in a toilet block. It's in a terrible state. There's four cubicles, a small powder room, a little narrow hallway, and Barry found latent prints in every room. He found a hand print on a bench near the body. Now, there were also kind of various assorted prints in the area. They took 32 photographs of latent fingerprints. And what's a latent print, by the way? The print that's left at the scene of a crime that you can then bring it up after the event, using various powders, et cetera. Okay. But once the fingerprinting is happening, once the 32 photographs taken, the police do a canvas of the area. They don't get anywhere with this. But at this point, the newspapers find out about it, as you mentioned. And I think a witness came past and said she went past the toilet block at about 3.30 p.m. the day of the murder and saw the toilet attendant speaking with a man, and then they did a sketch of the guy, right? It turned out to be one of the detectives. Yes. And that was, I found that absolutely incredible. So obviously Barry's done his job, taking the fingerprints, I've done a canvas that had a false start with the accidental police sketch of the police officer. And now, this episode, I believe we jump forward four months. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we jump forward four months to a crime that takes place in Blacktown, sort of out of Western Sydney. And without labeling a particular suburb in a certain way, let's just say that during the 70s and 80s, if you were a serving police officer, as I was, and you pulled over a car in North Sydney, which is very affluent, if you found out that the driver, who you clearly had a reason to pull them over, and they said they were from Blacktown, that is a red flag. Well, I think there's obviously, there's socio-economic stuff going on there. You've talked before in both books, actually, and on the podcast about how a degree of profiling just happens when you're in the police. But I actually wanted to just quickly say, whenever we do a time jump of four months to add, there might be a temptation of listeners to go, well, what were the police doing in the interim? They were doing a lot. They were into, yeah, they were canvassing people. They talked to about 500 people. They talked with construction workers working in the tunnel that was being built nearby. They got their fingerprints. I think it was a volunteer basis, but they got their prints. They talked with women who had been using the toilet block at the time, hoping that they'd have some sort of, because you know, women are using the powder room where the body is found. I mean, it seems like anyone who entered that room in the vicinity would have been in danger, but there were calls in the newspapers. It seems like they did all, or a fair bit of the due diligence over that period, right? And the premier at the time, Robert Askin, who we could do a whole series on him, he offered a fairly substantial reward. It was $5,000. I know that doesn't sound like a lot. That's a bloody house deposit at that point, isn't it? That's quarter of a house on the Northern beaches of Sydney. So if you sort of flip into today's sort of valuations, which are completely off the chart, and we all know that, but you'd be talking around about $250,000 reward, bananas. And clearly, that's, you know, reward money is meant to bring people out of the woodwork. But also in that same, I believe in that same sort of press onslaught, they talked with a consulting psychiatrist who was working with the New South House government who said something that you told me before, and I found striking. What did he say? He said that if this person was not caught, they would definitely kill again, because it was a, it was a murder that represented extreme sadism, because we did mention that we don't find out why until later, but he took a, he used the knife, her knife, and he cut the section out of her breast. And, you know, we'll come to that. But that's, you know, that was more than likely done post-mortem. Well, the body was found in February of 1970. So while this is happening, so the, the exact quote from this guy in the paper is, "This man will go on killing unless he is caught quickly. There is no doubt he is a dangerous psychopath. He is not satisfied with killing alone. He wants to make sure he gets maximum publicity. His impulse is to kill inflicting as much pain as possible. And in fact, he'd already killed someone by this point." Well, Paul, that's the problem, because, okay, um, the problem with the crime scene and latent prints, Barry manages to get a partial, um, hand, a couple of fingers. That's not enough. It, it, it's the, the job, and I did it. I used to spend days searching latent prints, where you'd be looking at fragments. It, it is a true needle in a haystack. And of course, the thing is that you don't know whether any of the latent prints that you've got are from the offender. Right. Then even if they are from the offender, they might not be, the offender may have never been arrested. And in this particular case, that was the case. He had no criminal record. So four months later, they find a woman in her late 40s dumped in a ditch on the side of the road near Blacktown. Her injuries are horrific. She's been strangled. She's been, um, bound. She has had her ribs broken and her face, um, her head. I mean, I'm reluctant to say stomped on and kit, even though that is actually what happened to her. But we find out about the house, the wives, later on. And I was Ella Avis Sullivan. She was 56 years old and she lived on Derwent Parade in Blacktown. Um, she was found just after, by the way, like, when I think of a body being found in a crime scene, dad, I think because of fictional narratives, I always place it at nighttime for some reason. This was the 7th of June and it was 12.50 PM. So just after lunchtime, and she's found in, um, Rudy Hill in this state, the idea of finding a 56 year old dead in that state during the day, I find so profoundly. And it's also important. It was an area that was not, didn't have a lot of housing, but important to note that her pants had been pulled down. So one would be thinking, um, that it's also a crime with a sexual, um, sort of inclination, which again, will come to that. But yes, that's right to think that. Now nearby, they find a 1966 Holden. Now I want you all to just remember 1966 Holden. Okay. This is so fascinating. That's a relatively new, obviously this is 1970. This is a pretty new car. Yeah. And it's a certain type of car. Um, my parents had a 66 Holden. They were very, very, there were they're probably hundreds of thousands of them, but I'm, but I'm looking at the 66 Holden. It's, uh, some of them have got that lovely sort of Venetian blind finish. It's a very iconic car, but they were very popular, but very common back then and very affordable. They find it nearby. It's got a lot of blood and they can ascertain on the balance of probabilities, pre DNA that the victim had been attacked in this car, which can then indicate, um, all sorts of other things, which we're not going to talk about now, because we're going to wait. So the offender, the heats on, he knows the heats on because there's a reward, um, in a, in a Woolworth's car park on the weekend, um, very close to the time of the, the second murder, we say second murder. It's not the second murder for the police because they're not related. Right. They have no information. Well, it's not in the, it's not in the same area. It's just, it, it is a murder that has occurred in Sydney, but then they find out that the Holden, the 66 Holden, had been stolen from a Woolworth's car park on the weekend. But this time, they've got witnesses. They do an identity. And you, you are privy call to the pictures. You can see the identity, um, sketch. And then you get to see something that is as things transpire. It's an, it's a photograph of our fender. But we don't know, the police don't know this at this stage. They're just collecting information, intel. They have another couple of witnesses come through. And then they get some, some very interesting intel to say that one of these Holden's, so I just want you to remember that every single car, yep, this particular person steels, is always a 1966 Holden. We it's very tempting for me to sort of take you to the reasons why, but I'm not going to at this stage. So our fender, remember that, that what happens is with the white Holden and with the blood in it, they get some incredibly good latent prints. Okay. But the latent prints they get from the Holden, they are simply latent prints and they can give them a cursory inspection at the fingerprint bureau. But again, there's no reason for them to tie them to the murder of the bathroom attendant four months prior at the park near Sydney University. Now, our fender, this is the sort of thing that if you had 20 good Hollywood writers in a writing room, they would be hard pressed to come up with what I'm about to tell you. He steals another car. You know what sort of car he steals? 66 Holden. Yeah. They're everywhere. How does he? Oh, okay. Look, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to tell you how he does it. Just quickly, you've talked a few times about the way you steal cars, right? Yeah. Now, I've watched you use packing tape. Yes. To shimmy it under the window and then pull the pin up on a car that you'd lock the keys out of, right? Yeah. I've seen you do it for strangers. This is a kind of childhood flashback thing. The idea of hot wiring a car seems like a very practical, but very silly skill. Did I tell you about the time a couple of years back, there was a spate of people who were using USB sticks to hack smart cars, right? So car theft is an interesting thing to me. This is a 66 Holden. I figure the reason, okay, I would guess that the reason he's stealing this make of cars, because he knows how to effectively steal this make of car. Is that a... I'm going to drop a massive spoiler here. Are you sure? I want to, because it's going to just, it adds to the bizarreness of this story. It turns out that he actually owns a 67 Holden, and it's at his mum's house. Okay. Okay. Yeah. What he does, and I tip my hat to him, and I've never heard of this, and in my time in the police force, I never became aware of what I'm about to tell you, but unwittingly I may have been involved with certain criminals in terms of arresting them, and I just don't know whether this ever occurred to us at the time, but what he did, he removed the ignition from his own Holden, and of course it's got a key in it, hasn't it? Because it's his key. And so he uses this, so it's so simple. Every single car that he breaks into and cars back then were so easy to break into. Yeah. He would then simply pull the ignition, and they were pretty sort of flimsy. He tear it out of the dashboard. He would simply connect, I imagine, two wires to his own, you know, mechanism. Yeah. Push it back in the hole, and it's already got a key in it, because it's his key, which he can remove, and he just starts it. It's an organ transplant. It's brilliant. It's so clever. That is... Okay, so the reason he's stealing the cars is because he has access to that car. He removes the ignition kind of housing, and he takes theirs out, puts his in. He has carte blanche to steal. I'd love to tell you at this point in the story how many he stole. Hold on. Your instincts are correct. So this is so exciting and terrifying. So I'm curious, when they find the car, is that ignition and housing... Has he put the old one back? No, it's just gone. So does that not reveal? It reveals something, Paul, if you're looking for it. But when you're dealing with stolen cars, when I joined in 1980-81, they were averaging around about between 50 and 60,000 stolen cars a year in Sydney. Metro. Metro. It was insane. And that's why they developed the crime of joy-riding. That's what it was called. Joy-riding. They couldn't possibly charge everyone with stealing cars off stealing cars because to steal something means you want to permanently deprive the owner of it. But a lot of people, if they wanted to get home at two in the morning, they'd just steal a car. They had no intention of keeping it, so hence the the offensive joy-riding. Okay, so he decides to leave the state. This is the part where I talk about the Hollywood writers' room. He crosses the border into Queensland. He goes to a pub on the outskirts of Brisbane. He's got his stolen car. And the thing about the stolen car is that any police officer that would look down would not see anything unusual because he's inserted the mechanism back where it belongs. He befriends this guy in the pub and our offender, get ready for this. He goes in a raffle at this pub. And guess what? He wins a chicken. It's a chook raffle. When he wins the chicken, it's a raw chicken. You've seen these. Yeah, it's a meat raffle. It's all raw. It's all uncooked. But this particular guy that he's pretty friendly with says, "Well, how about you come back to my place and we can cook up the chicken?" And the offender says, "That's a great idea." Now, our offender had they both had a fair bit to drink. So the offender hops in the passenger seat of the car that he'd stolen in Sydney. The other guy who's intoxicated hops in the driver's seat. And they're heading back to this guy, this sort of newfound friend's house to cook the chicken and they get pulled over by the police. The police are doing what police used to do in the 60s and 70s. They didn't have random breath testing. You would simply follow a car. Believe in me, I did this probably a thousand times. And you would simply observe the way they were swerving from left to right. And that was an indicator that they were on the balance of probabilities intoxicated. They pulled the car over, they're speaking to the driver, and they arrest the driver. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile unlimited! Premium wireless! Heavy to get 30, 30, 30, get 30, get 30, get 20, 20, get 20, 20, get 20, get 20, get 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speed slower above 40 gigabyte CD tail. Hate your crime fans. Tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your prime membership. After all, ads shouldn't be the scariest thing about true crime. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com/addfree true crime. That's amazon.com/addfree true crime to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. It took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry. Finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier. At bluenile.com, you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from bluenile jewelry experts who are on hand 24/7 to answer questions and the ease and convenience of shopping online. For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with code listen at bluenile.com. They leave the passenger with his chicken in the car. Why would you? You don't arrest passengers, do you? They didn't do a vehicle check, of course, back then. And our fender is sitting in the passenger seat and he thinks, I've got to get out of here. So he bolts and he goes into a YMCA house. He leaves the car. But around about two hours later, some police are driving past, see the abandoned Holden thinking of course it's the driver that they've arrested. They do a vehicle check and guess what it comes up stolen from interstate. It still doesn't mean anything but they cleverly and I tip my hat to them. They get the fingerprint guys from Brisbane and they go and dust for latent prints. They find some really good prints on the rear vision mirror. Yeah, there's certain places within a motor vehicle where you just have to sit in the seat as a fingerprint operative and imagine that you're the driver. What would you touch? One of the classics when you get into a car is you adjust the rear vision mirror and you generally leave a fantastic thumbprint right on the glass which can last for months. Meanwhile, our fender is checked into the YMCA. He then steals a few cars. Would you hazard a guess as to what type of cars he steals? I don't think I need to. I think it's implied but correct and he steals the 66 Holden's because they're everywhere. He then is about to do an armed robbery on a TAB. That's for people that aren't in Australia. That's a sort of a betting agency that primarily back then used to do the horses, the trucks and the dogs. Still around. Yeah, still around. Yeah. And he manages to rob the TAB of approximately $800 which is a lot of money. And he then leaves or they don't know actually where he goes but what happens is a fingerprint guy checking in the latent prints in the Brisbane office of their fingerprint bureau. He all of a sudden, because remember that the latent prints taken from the crime scene of the first victim at the park, the attendant, those latent prints, because they were very good images, were sent to all the fingerprint bureau's agencies around Australia. So every single fingerprint guy, girl, he's sitting at that desk and for some reason or other, he's going through these prints taken at this Holden and then because he knows that it's a Holden in Sydney, you're using the Commission of Certain Offences and because it's a serious crime now because they've got the latent prints from a 66 Holden, they believe was used in the Commission of the murder of this woman because they found her blood and things in it. And then all of a sudden Paul, this fingerprint technician in Brisbane, makes the match and all of a sudden he's looking at fingerprints that were also seen and taken from the first murder on the bench. Remember how Barry would have gone in saw those prints on the wooden seat and her head was just below and he figured out that the offender may have touched this bench to have enabled him to stand up. He's used one hand and all of a sudden they've got a correlation between the fingerprints in the Holden in Queensland, fingerprints in the Holden from the, now we know the second murder in Rudy Hill and they've got the same prints at the scene of the murder in the in the, you know, the public toilets near the University of Sydney. Then they managed to find a bag because what happened was the offender when he left the Holden in Queensland, he left a bag and inside the bag he left some papers and he left a receipt from the YMCA that he'd paid for in his own name. They then found out in one of the bags they found army discharge papers saying he'd been discharged from the army in Melbourne and it had his full name, they then got in touch with Melbourne, they then get a photograph of him, the offender and then it's on for young and old. They know who he is, they know he's committed at least two murders, horrific murders in the army and he's in the army, he's come out of the army, he's at the time, I'm quite sure he was 22 years of age, they go to his house and his mother's living there, they go out into the garage, what did they find in the garage, the Holden? His own 1966 Holden, and guess what's missing, the fucking ignition, correct, it's taken out, so the car clearly doesn't work. His name's Bruce Douglas Connell by the way, what I would like to say something I missed out on is that when he was when he committed the armed robbery in Brisbane, yeah, he's getaway car was a 1966 Holden, the problem is you can imagine being, it's a manual car, it's got sort of three on the tree they call it, like the gears are up on near the steering column, yeah, almost steering column, I used to have one and they were as rough as guts in three years and they were just, you know, they were just classic '60s antiquated, I mean there are people listening that would swear by that type of fun, they're very rare these things. I would love one, I mean they're beautiful cars, but that's by the by, yeah, yeah, so what happened was he took off with such force and he doesn't know the history of the cars he's stealing, turns out that this one had a clutch problem and he blew the, he literally burnt the clutch out trying to escape from an armed robbery, it's comical, so he leaves that car, so they're getting these all these cars and they're back at the mother's house, they then start to make inquiries and they find out that when he was a teenager, he was arrested quite a few times, but never ever charged, never fingerprinted for what, what was he arrested for? For exposing himself to middle-aged women, oh my god, and for being a peeping Tom and it turns out from a very early age, he was a predator, he was a sexual sadist and potentially would have become one of the most infamous dare I say serial killers and rapists that Sydney had ever seen, but due to extremely good police work and a series of unusual happenings, they managed to find out who he was and they knew that he he'd sort of, they assumed that he'd come back to his, to his local area and again a fingerprint technician or possibly a fingerprint expert goes to the house where the mother is and interestingly Paul, they dust for fingerprints on the outside window ledgers of the mother's house where he lives and they find a set of prints belonging to him which proved, because they were very fresh, that he had in fact tried to enter the family home by way of a window, which means he may not have had the key or he did not want to disturb or alert his mother because he probably thought the mother may know and things that things were unraveling and the police do something very interesting, they do what's called a radial search, so they start in the wee hours of the morning and they simply use lots of patrol cars and they work out in ever expanding circles and around about two hours into the search, they come across, you know what sort of car they came across, yeah parked and the windows were all foggy and he's asleep in the car, living in the car, sleeping in the car, living in the car and they, it was regarded as an extremely dangerous arrest, fully armed officers, they smashed the window that was adjacent to him reclining on the back seat and on the floor was a sauna of shotgun, so he was ready to kill or be killed, yeah, he, he, he, they clearly sort of woke him up, shocked him, he came, there were no dramas, they took him back to Blacktown police station and they, they put it to him that he had murdered the woman in the park and he, he was quite surprised, they had managed to, to figure out that it was him but then he made an admission that he had actually murdered the other woman as well and he explains to the police that what happened was on the day he was actually out on the prowl, he'd approached a 15 year old girl with the intention of raping and probably murdering, this 15 year old, he approached her twice in his 66 Holden, yep, at this point I'd like to say to you on the listeners they, they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he had stolen more than 166 Holden's over a course of time, okay, that's extraordinary, I mean that's, that's prison time in love itself, yeah, and he was using him in the commission of offenses, they find, they find out through lengthy questioning because he makes a lot of admissions that he had in fact bashed and beaten a lot of women, then he approaches this woman, this is the second victim four months after the first murder, she is at a bus stop, she's heading to the train station, he approaches her, she doesn't know him, she says, no, I'm not gonna get in your car but then he says, and she sort of hangs around and then she said, this is sad, she says to him, look, would you mind giving me a lift to the, to the railway station, she gets in the car, she's got a bag, handbag, he then drives her into her side street, he tries to kiss her, she's very scared, he then beats her about the head, he strangles her, she doesn't die, he then drags her out of the car, gets her in the back seat, strangles her again, and then he drags her body out of the car, and that's when, and going back in time in the podcast, he then kicked her ferociously about the head, jumped on her ribs, just completely, and he attempted to have sexual intercourse with her but he couldn't get an erection, because we don't know why, it's a sex thing, he's a sadist, right, it's a, yeah, okay, and I'm gonna save till the very end what he said to the judge, but he goes to jail, he then goes to court, it took the jury 20 minutes to find him guilty, he then turned to the judge and made a fairly remarkable and if not bizarre statement, he said to the judge that he the most enjoyable aspect of killing these women was watching looking into their eyes as he strangled them, oh my god, yeah, and then there are 12 prisoners that have been taken into court, two lines of six, they're all handcuffed, and they don't know how this happened, but he managed to escape, he gets away, he's running from the court, he runs into the CBD, he's being pursued by two prison waters, they lose him, they examine forensically the handcuffs, they were locked, they were the right, they'd been put on correctly, they have no idea how he got out of them, but he did, and the first thing the authorities do, and I think this was a very good call, is they notify the arresting detectives, the police that arrested him, and the detectives, they're aware now that he's on the run again, and they know that this particular offender has this sort of desire to continually go back to where he knows, an area that he knows, which is Blacktown, and he takes refuge, and the police don't know this at this stage, but he takes refuge in an abandoned railway yard, and weirdly, an ex-school friend of his is walking through the abandoned railway yard and recognises him, but also knows, because of the publicity that he's wanted, he would have known that he had committed these atrocious crimes, would clearly have known that he shouldn't be sort of free, and they call the police, they surround the train, where he's sort of camping rough, and they re-arrest him. Now, that's an incredible story, Paul. It's bonkers. I mean, imagine if he hadn't have won the chicken. Imagine if he hadn't won the chicken. Yeah. Oh boy. What's amazing is I'm looking at the photos of Barry Faye, and I've read just like you have his account of this, and first of all, he writes really well. It does really speak to his character the way he writes, I really enjoy his, it's not storytelling, it is, you know, for lack of a bit of some forensic, but the idea that they finally catch this guy, I mean, it's absolutely incredible stuff. So they've got his fingerprints, they've caught him, his words when they catch him, because he's caught with a rifle, and they tell him to throw it down, and his last words are, "I'll go easy." But at that point, he has confessed to so much, they've got him dead to writes, but it's amazing looking at how vital forensics and fingerprinting was, right? And how, if you put your hand on something and forget you did it, that can come back to screw you later on, and that is still a vital part of police work. So my sincere thanks to Barry Faye for his career to the Australian police journal to you, dad. What a wonderful story, really, I mean, wonderful in terms of, you know, revelatory and well told, not in terms of what happened to these poor people, but that's the way true crime goes. Listen, we're going to be back at the tail end of this week with loose units, loose ends. Dad and I just want to say from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Loose Units, The Shadow Files. I'm a writer and dad's an ex cop, and it's an odd pairing, but we think it's a good one. So if you enjoy the show, do head across to Apple Podcast or Spotify and leave us a five star please, rating and review, or just tell your friends about the show. We hope you enjoy it. Also, if you want to listen to the audiobooks of loose units and electric blue, if you're not a big physical reader, you can sign up for Audible and you can listen on audible.com. In fact, in electric blue, dad features towards the end in a really fun way. So enough plugging, we're going to be back at the end of the week with loose ends and we've got loads more wonderful stuff coming up soon, true crime wise. Stay safe and we will see you all very, very soon for more loose units. Bye, everyone. Cheerio. [Music]