The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders by I.J. Fenn

question, but repeated that everything that had been printed about him was rubbish. And then hung up.
    Fitzpatrick left the line open and called Channel 4 and the police in the hope that the call could be traced. The caller, she said, had sounded sober, articulate and in his mid-20s. There had been no background noise.
    There are a number of possibilities to be considered in connection to this call. Firstly, if we assume that the caller was, indeed, Ross Warren (and the articulation, estimated age and polite delivery support this assumption) why call SBS and not WIN4? Hardly a mistake he would be expected to make. And why, if he wanted to stage his own disappearance, make any contact at all? Surely, to disappear effectively, nothing less than total silence would work. Besides which, if Ross Warren had staged his own vanishing act but wanted to say ‘hi’ to anyone, it seems most likely that he would have spoken to his family rather than his workplace, as everyone agreed that he and his family were close.
    The second possibility is that the caller was no more than a prankster, some joker who thought it would be amusing to confuse police by pretending to be the missing man who had occupied so many column inches in the press. This could explain the call being made to the wrong TV station. It could even have been the flight attendant if he was as malicious as Rowan Legge had claimed. But the police didn’t believe the call had been made by a joker. It just didn’t quite work: if someone wanted to create mischief they would have offered more than the few lines reported by Fitzpatrick, more for the police to work with.
    Which leaves the third possibility: that the call was supposed to create a diversion, taking the police away from a more accurate line of inquiry. If Ross Warren had been murdered, for instance, a call from him would shift the focus of the inquiry away from the fact: there would be no point in pursuing a murder inquiry if the so-called victim wasn’t dead.
    No official conclusions were reached by the police: the call could have been made for any one of the above reasons. Privately, however, given that Detective Sergeant McCann of the Homicide Squad had become involved with the case, the third possibility seemed to be given the most credence, despite the continued efforts of some members of the public intent on causing trouble.
    One such person was Arthur Pillon.
    v
     
    In March 1991 Constable Keith Rees was on duty at Warilla Police Station when Arthur Pillon walked in. Rees knew Pillon. He was the proprietor of a local security firm, although Rees and other officers at the station, all of whom knew Pillon well, believed he should never have been issued with a security licence: Arthur Pillon, in police eyes, was ‘of doubtful character’ and had had more than one criminal charge laid against him (the most serious – a sexual offence – eventually being withdrawn when no evidence was offered).
    Pillon’s reason for being at the station on this occasion, however, was to offer information.
    About three weeks earlier, he said, he’d been making a payroll run to a ‘homosexual strip joint’ in the Bondi area when he saw someone he recognised. He’d approached the man saying, ‘I know you. You’re the fella off Channel 4 who’s gone missing.’ The man replied, ‘Get lost. I’ve got my own reasons for disappearing. Now get out.’
    The man, Pillon said, was Ross Warren.
    As with the Rowan Legge information, Pillon’s story was crosschecked for verification and it was found that, according to the local Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officers, there was no known homosexual ‘strip joint’ in the Bondi area. Considering this, together with Pillon’s reputation for ‘big noting’ himself, Rees and the police discounted his story as being nothing more than an attempt to put himself in the limelight.
    In July 2001, however, following his usual diligent approach to the investigation, Steve Page sent a constable