March 2002 Volume 83 Number 3 "serving the protectors"
The Pursuit of Proof
By Brett Williams

After a fatal hit-and-run smash two years ago, two SA cops faced one of their toughest investigations. Both brought unceasing commitment to their inquiries, but would that be enough to prove what they uncovered?

A young man lay dead in a Hindmarsh gutter in the early hours of a cold June morning in 2000. He had met his tragic end alone, on a dark, quiet street, and without witnesses. But the hit-and-run smash that killed him left clear signs of its ferocity, as well as vital clues to the man’s death.

Droplets of his blood had speckled the top of a white veranda post on the footpath. His shoes lay on the road – one on its side – metres from his body. And scattered around the grizzly death scene, in small quantity, were broken glass and metal debris.

The impact of the smash had left the man with massive internal injuries, which most likely killed him instantly. For police, it left a tapestry of death, mystery and challenge.

And no one would know just how the man died before Major Crash investigators, Paul Friend and Fred Bakker, arrived soon after 2am.

They met two detectives who had arrived just ahead of them. One told Friend she thought she recognized the dead man as a police officer. Her suspicion sent a chill down Friend’s spine. All Major Crash cops live with the fear they could one day find the mangled body of a loved one amid the twisted steel of a car wreck.

To Friend and Bakker’s great relief, the man turned out not to be a cop. They would later find he was a 32-year-old hotel cellar hand.

The two seasoned officers were used to visions such as the one that now lay before them, and so launched themselves into standard practice. That meant closing the road, taking control of the scene and working to maintain crucial evidence.

This was the start of a painstaking examination that, under light rain, would last until daybreak. And, from the outset, neither officer had any doubt the man’s death had involved a car.

Armed with a camera, Friend, then 35, took pictures of every detail, from minute flecks of blood and debris to the man’s shattered body. Bakker, then 36, maintained a running sheet of all activity at the scene.

“I took a photograph of a shoe that was lying in the middle of the road,” says Friend. “You tend to have a sick sensation – this guy was literally knocked out of his shoes, which were further down the road.

“When we moved the body, there weren’t a lot of solid bones in it. The arms and legs were going in different directions. (He had) not much external damage, other than quite a deep gash to the leg and a cut to the head.”

Searching the ground on their hands and knees, the officers found flakes of black paint, a headlight cover and a rear car window with two holes. It seemed a car had struck the man with enough force to fling him through the air over its roof. In all likelihood, his feet then kicked through and pulled out the rear window while he was airborne.

Says Friend: “We knew the (offending) car would have some pretty major damage to it, but at that stage had no idea where it was.”

The officers requested local street patrols to look out for the suspect car, while other police helped with a grid search.

As the early-morning hours ticked by, Friend and Bakker called in other specialists. Crime Scene examiners and collision reconstructionist, Senior Sergeant Graham England, were soon at work on the scene.

But from the grid search came a breakthrough. A police patrol found a black Nissan coupé parked only 500 metres away in the Entertainment Centre. With damage that matched the accident scene and no rear window, this, the officers believed, was the hit-and-run car.

This invaluable find pleased Friend and Bakker. But, sometimes likened to bulldogs in the way they pursued their cases, they now wanted the driver.

Through a registration check, other police urgently traced the car owner, who turned out to be an elderly woman. She said she had given her son use of the coupé that evening, but did not know where he was.

News of his movements, however, reached Friend and Bakker at the scene around 6am. They learned that, through the morning, he had walked into Angas St police station and reported the car stolen.

Not for a moment did Friend or Bakker believe the stolen-car report. That was an alibi they had heard used falsely too many times.

By 7am, the two officers had worked 13 hours straight, were running on adrenaline and wanted to “keep going”. But it was now time to brief their day-shift colleagues, who would continue to investigate.

Friend and Bakker finally knocked off, involuntarily taking the night’s events home in their minds. Bakker – who, at home, thought of the case “a fair bit” – remembers calling his office with “bits and pieces I’d just thought of”.

The day-shift officers found the driver, who claimed he had left a nightclub in the early-morning hours to find his car stolen. With fresh scratches on his face, he that day took part in a videotaped interview and denied any involvement in the smash.

The officers photographed his face and seized the clothes he had worn during the night. Forensic tests would show whether they contained fragments of glass from his smashed windscreen.

Friend and Bakker returned to work the next afternoon and resumed control of the investigation, which would continue for months. Their key objectives were to show that no one had stolen the car, disprove their suspect’s nightclub alibi and prove he was the driver.

When Major Crash mechanics examined the now seized Nissan, they found the front brakes inoperative. This tallied with the absence of tyre marks at the scene. But, most important, the mechanics found no evidence of theft.

Friend and Bakker even called in a locksmith. He found no indication of tampering with either the steering lock or any other mechanism.

The officers’ inquiries also focussed on the nightclub. They interviewed security staff, who could not recall the suspect.

And, as the nightclub had no security cameras, they could make no use of video footage.

“For the rest of the investigation,” says Friend, “we ended up speaking to about 50 Vietnamese people, because the accused was a Vietnamese lad.

“A lot of the Vietnamese people (from the nightclub) didn’t want to get involved. We asked: ‘Why would you want to support him?’ A lot of them then came forward.

“We ended up interviewing 15 or so males and females, who were at the nightclub and knew the accused. All of them said they didn’t see him arrive until after 2:30am, (and) we believed the collision occurred around one o’clock in the morning.

“In a statement I’d taken from a Vietnamese girl, she said he (the suspect) was wearing a sparkly top. But it wasn’t a sparkly top at all – it was the reflection from fragments of glass.

“As it turned out, the clothing he provided was covered in glass, which matched to a 98 per cent success rate. That put him in the car, but not behind the driver’s wheel.”

The officers next enlisted the support of the media. Friend appeared in a TV press interview asking for information from the public. He spoke of the victim as “left in the gutter to die”.

“I became emotive,” he says, “which probably wasn’t good for a professional, but it was just the way I felt. This young man had his life snuffed out very quickly.”

Bakker was equally passionate about “showing this person was the driver”, and felt Friend had done “very well” in the interview.

And, owing maybe to that passion, the media strategy worked. It brought a prized but anonymous witness, who would speak to no one except Friend.

Known only as “Garry”, his information was crucial. On the night of the smash, he saw what he thought was the Nissan hit a Manton St kerb. The car bounced up in the air, he said, and its brake lights did not activate. Garry never saw the victim but might nearly have witnessed his death, before losing sight of the car.

Most of Friend’s contact with Garry was over the telephone. “On one occasion,” says Friend, “I did (meet him in person). I got out of uniform, put on a shirt and met him in a coffee shop.

“He didn’t want anything recorded and didn’t want to give evidence in court. We certainly didn’t push it, and I didn’t want to ‘burn’ him.”

So, with Garry as only a source, Friend and Bakker continued to compile their case. Before their inquiries were over, they would speak to around 90 witnesses and remain in constant touch with the dead man’s parents.

The officers faced a tough time drawing information from their Vietnamese witnesses, who made up most of the 90-odd. Friend took account of their culture, and so understood their reluctance to give information.

Well acquainted with the suffering of loved ones, Friend and Bakker saw – and felt – the parents’ palpable grief. Bakker felt particularly sorry for them, but warns that cops who take on others’ deep sorrow can “go around the twist”.

The hit-and-run case was never the pair’s sole investigation. Friend and Bakker could not suspend their inquiries into other cases assigned to them. So they had to pursue their hit-and-run suspect and deal with about 10 other crash investigations at the same time.

Says Friend: “This one took a bit longer because we had so many external groups – the Crime Scene people and the locksmiths – and the forensic work on the blood, the glass and the fracture-matching. There was a lot more involved in this one.

“We didn’t want to go to court until we had everything we possibly could. The last thing you want is the defence throwing something at you, and you go: ‘Bloody hell! I didn’t think of that’. You need to be thorough.”

And, with all of its burden and endless demands, the job never disheartened either officer. “I can’t remember sitting there thinking: ‘We’re knackered’,” says Bakker. “There was always something to follow up as bits and pieces of the puzzle came in.

“It was complex, because you had to pick information from other information to see whether there was something that could help. (But) the picture got better and better, which gave you incentive to keep going.”

Finally, in late 2000, Friend and Bakker stamped their case file “complete”. The only task that remained was to put their allegations to the suspect. In a “very short and sweet” interview, he refused to answer any questions.

The officers then presented their file for the judgement of the DPP. Bakker was relieved to see the file complete and handed over. But the pair continued to harbour thoughts about its content.

“Even at that stage,” says Bakker, “we were probably thinking: ‘What else do we need? What else should we get? What else?’ ”

But, impressed with the file, the DPP asked for nothing more, and recommended a charge of cause death by dangerous driving.

Through the months of court proceedings that followed, the accused continued to deny his involvement in the fatal smash. But by December last year, he finally pleaded guilty.

For Friend and Bakker, one of their toughest and most complex investigations was over. But the pair’s thoughts remained with the parents, in whose interests they had worked so tirelessly for a guilty verdict.

Both officers had looked with relish toward their court appearances. Their preparation had been meticulous, but they would not now have the chance to impress a jury.

Friend felt somewhat “cheated” out of his opportunity. Bakker was not disappointed, but had looked forward to “showing them how silly the bloke looked for what he was saying”.

“I was happy in some ways that he pleaded guilty,” says Bakker, “because that just showed that we got everything we needed. That seemed to reflect reasonably well on what we’d done.”

Others saw Friend and Bakker’s months-long pursuit of proof as outstanding police work. Their efforts even impressed the Major Crash section’s longest-serving member, Graham England. And, with more than 24 years’ experience in the investigation of traffic fatalities, he was not a man easily impressed.

“They certainly worked at it with determination,” says England. “And, because of the volume of work in the section, they virtually did all of it themselves.

“The way they went about it was quite clever. They thought laterally; they thought of all the different possibilities. They used all the technology that was available, and explored all the different options to put the offender in the driver’s seat.

“With their tenacity, they eventually got a result.” So, sufficiently impressed, England nominated the officers for commendations, which they received in January this year.

To receive such recognition, Friend was “over the moon”. “The problem was only Fred and I got the commendations,” he laments. “We were the centre-pin of a wheel, but there was a shitload of spokes going off from us – people who were feeding us information.”

The award embarrassed Bakker, who felt he had only done “the same stuff everybody does every day”.

“I was more excited when I found out the offender was pleading guilty,” he says. “That was important to me. That’s where I got my fulfilment.”

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