September 2002 Volume 83 Number 9 "serving the protectors"
The detective
By Brett Williams

Some cops choose career paths that take them into a depraved world of sadistic murder and violent robberies. But one long-serving detective has survived the horrors of that world, and harbours no regret about his career choice.

"Got you… you bastard,” is what veteran Major Crime detective, Chris Chamberlain, thought when he caught some of the state’s most vicious killers. And, of the stick-up merchants he arrested during his days with the Armed Hold-up Squad in the 1980s, “Chambo” speaks with pure contempt.

“I mean, they’re big heroes, aren’t they?” he asks sarcastically. “(Wearing a) balaclava, they go into the bank and hold up some teller. It was great to get them, especially in the latter stages of the (now defunct) Armed Hold-up Squad.”

Among the many innocent he saw brutalized was a female bank teller in 1992. Callous robber, Lawrence Edward Wilson, shot her in the hip with a .357-calibre handgun during a hold-up on a North Adelaide building society. She luckily survived, while Chamberlain a year later brought Wilson back from Darwin to face an Adelaide court. It sentenced him to 17 years’ jail for armed robbery and grievous bodily harm.

Another armed robber once in Chamberlain’s sights fled to Brisbane in 1988. There, as Anthony Bruce Reid continued his spree of violent hold-ups, he blinded a teller whom he shot in the face. A Brisbane court sentenced him to 16 years’ jail for attempted armed robbery and grievous bodily harm. Chamberlain gave evidence in the case.

For four hold-ups Reid had committed in SA in 1988, authorities later transferred him to Adelaide, where he continued to serve time. His accomplice, Mark Pongritz – who Reid had shot during an Elizabeth bank robbery – also served a term of imprisonment.

Chamberlain is now the state’s longest-serving detective, with 37 consecutive years in the field. He is one of the true hard men of major-crime investigation. No hard-core crim could ever rattle him, and nothing he comes up against in his work makes him flinch.

He came from a pre-STAR Group era, when armed detectives carried out their own dawn raids on criminals’ hideouts. And, when desperate offenders pulled guns and fired shots in confrontations, Chamberlain was there with his colleagues – on the front line.

From his days in the now defunct Breaking Squad, he remembers a stakeout he and his colleagues ran on a Regency Park warehouse in the 1960s. Acting on a tip-off of a break-in, the officers set themselves up in vans in the warehouse yard.

Falling straight into their trap, an offender later jumped over a fence and into the yard. Soon after, a shot rang out. But, in the aftermath, no one seemed to be injured.

Back at the police station, Chamberlain prepared to interview the offender, whom he had in custody. Suddenly, he noticed a pool of blood on the floor. “The offender had been shot through the foot,” says Chamberlain, “and he hadn’t said a word… not a word.”

Despite an entire working life through which he has seen the worst of mankind, little moves this 60-year-old, who joined the police force in 1958. Working in some of the toughest areas of policing has, by his own admission, hardened him. He says if one did not “toughen up” in his line of work, one would never survive.

Former colleague and now Police Association president, Peter Alexander, says Chamberlain is a man “not prepared to drop his emotional guard”.

“Chris has a hard exterior,” he says, “and he’d hate to be perceived as anything other than what he portrays. But I’m quite sure he has a view on the nature of the work, and empathy for victims.”

Whatever does strike at his heart, few are ever likely to discover. On such topics, he says little and elaborates on nothing. Only the gut-wrenching tragedy of child murders will he concede has a strong effect on him.

One horrific murder scene – to which he responded with friend and fellow Major Crime detective, Sgt Mick Standing – stirred his emotions five years ago. A man had plunged a knife into his 22-year-old de facto wife 26 times and later shot himself.

But he had also inflicted multiple stab wounds on the woman’s 18-month-old son, killing him as well. Police found the toddler pinned to the floor with a knife the offender had driven straight through his chest.

Standing, himself moved by this vision of horror, saw his seasoned partner’s demeanour transform. “There were a lot of things that happened with him that I hadn’t quite seen (before),” says Standing. “The tone of his voice changed. The way he walked and carried himself changed. Even the way he drove the police car was sedate.”

Standing also saw that Chamberlain was more intense than usual about making a quick arrest. “In some respects, it was his toughness coming out,” says Standing. “In other respects, it was his humanity showing through.”

Chamberlain, a grandfather, concedes that “I hate child murders”. “You know it’s not going to be pleasant if it’s a child,” he says. “You might go to sleep with images of a dead child. They (the images) might recur every now and then when you’re doing an inquiry but, eventually, they go away.”

Although the job has come with its horrors, Chamberlain has, since 1965, revelled in the detective lifestyle. It has allowed him to meet countless people, and travel the nation, albeit to give evidence in interstate courts and extradite the wanted. Of the many criminals he has pursued, all the way through to their long prison sentences, he says he “loved arresting and convicting ’em”.

Most of the murder inquires he led with his colleagues through the 1990s drew national media attention. They included the 1995 arrest and extradition from NSW of Rodney Keith Winters, for the rape and murder of Cheryl Trace at the Edinburgh RAAF base in 1982.

Winters had escaped justice for 13 years through the lack of sufficient evidence. But, as DNA emerged as an essential tool of police work, Chamberlain was able to mount a case against him. So, ready to arrest and extradite Winters, he went to NSW with colleague, Guido Kinsman.

“We walked around to his backyard,” says Chamberlain, “and there he was sitting by his swimming pool with his three children having a barbecue. It was quite a shock to him, I think. We brought him back; he pleaded guilty.”

An SA court convicted Winters of murder and sentenced him to 20 years’ jail.

Two years earlier, Chamberlain had investigated the drowning murder of motorcycle gang member, Cosimo Castelluzzo. A “small-time criminal”, Mark Raymond Smith, and his stepfather, Colin Frederick Turner, had abducted Castelluzzo from Hindley St on New Year’s Eve, 1992.

The pair took him out to sea in a boat from Edithburgh, weighed his body down and threw him overboard – alive. A search for his body, with the help of the navy and its sonar equipment, proved fruitless.

Says Chamberlain: “The body was attached to two metal farm wheels, and we know this because we had a witness (from) on board the boat. We thought: ‘We’ve got to pick up something’, but they couldn’t find it.”

Nonetheless, Smith and Turner each scored life sentences for Castelluzzo’s murder.

Other depraved killers also paid a heavy price through the ’90s, as Chamberlain kept outsmarting them. From his inquiries into the 1995 stabbing murder of North Adelaide restaurateur, Adel Debs, came two life sentences. And, his investigation of the throat-slash killing of homosexual DJ, Geoffrey Plew, in 1998, brought a life sentence to yet another murderer.

So what makes Chamberlain such a success in his field? And, given his great victories over those who would kill, might he be the premier detective?

Mick Standing says that, if Chamberlain is the standard by which others are judged, “we’re all short of the mark”. “He’s streets in front of anybody else,” Standing insists. “Nobody comes close to him. “

Among his peers, he is regarded as the best going around. Detectives with a lot of experience say that, and I think that counts for something.

“We worked on a variety of homicides over a long period, and I just thought his work was brilliant. He’s very astute, determined to see a matter through to the end, and simply unwilling to be second best to any criminal.”

Standing speaks of a man able to carefully connect his observations of a murder scene with vital information he might draw from witnesses. “That’s where his abilities are extremely good,” says Standing.

“And it’s his ability to sum up an offender, and then get into his head; to have him know he’s not going to win. Chambo is so very good at that. He is able to read people, and think in a way in which nobody else would ever think of doing.”

Former Major Crime boss, Chief Superintendent Denis Edmonds, asserts that detectives like Chamberlain “don’t come around very often”. “He’s never lost his focus on what he does, and he lets the politics of the job slide past him,” says Edmonds. “You give him a job, and you know it’s going to get done.”

Major Crime chief of the past seven years, Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm, saw that Chamberlain’s brilliance was never a ticket to a free ride. “The reward for completing a hard job,” says Schramm, “is often to be given an even harder one. This pattern has followed Chris through his career.”

“I went everywhere in Australia, to extradite people and give evidence.”

And that career began 44 years ago, when Chamberlain left his job as an apprentice plumber to join the police force as a junior constable in 1958. Then 17, the former Norwood High School boy had responded to an advertisement for police recruits.

The teenaged Chamberlain had also talked to his then detective neighbour and now retired superintendent, Len Brown. From what Brown had to say about policing, Chamberlain thought it seemed “a reasonable sort of lifestyle”.

After three years of Thebarton-based training, he graduated in 1961. Assigned to a city post, Chamberlain walked beats and worked on the now defunct Minor Patrol. “That was a utility with a cage on the back in the days of six-o’clock closing,” he says. “You’d visit all the hotels and pick up inebriated people.”

Denis Edmonds, on his first day out of training, worked as the “back-seat constable” on Minor Patrol with Chamberlain, who was then his senior. He remembers Chamberlain ordering him out of the car to arrest a drunk in Grenfell St.

Says Edmonds: “I think I was silly enough to ask: ‘What for?’ He (Chamberlain) said: ‘Never you mind. Just go and arrest him’. The bloke was a bit drunk, so that was my first arrest – courtesy of Chambo.

“Later, standing up in the Magistrates’ Court giving evidence, I kind of twigged that it wasn’t appropriate just to say: ‘Look, I don’t know why I arrested him. Chambo told me to’. Anyway, we worked through it, and the defendant was duly found guilty.”

By 1965, the thought of a career in detective work had come to appeal to Chamberlain. His earlier involvement in minor criminal prosecutions had sparked his interest, so he applied for and joined the CIB.

And, once in the CIB, his earlier hunch – that policing would be “a reasonable sort of lifestyle” – proved right. Today, he says his earliest years as a detective were “terrific”. “That’s why I never wanted to leave,” he says. “The lifestyle was great.

“I went everywhere in Australia, to extradite people and give evidence. You met a lot of people, had a lot of freedom and were left to your own resources. It was up to you to bring an investigation to some conclusion.”

Chamberlain worked in the various detective squads of the time – Breaking, Second-hand Dealers, General and Anti-Larrikin – as well as local CIBs, until 1979. In that year, he joined Major Crime, in which he spent eight years with the Armed Hold-up Squad.

“I always enjoyed investigating major offences,” he says. “I didn’t really enjoy the investigation of housebreaks and assaults – the punch in the head at the pub. I liked bigger offences that you could get your teeth into.”

Now, at nearly 61, and despite the satisfaction he has drawn from his work for more than four decades, Chamberlain has decided to retire. But he has set no date, still loves his work and has no retirement plans.

In reality, he would be just as happy if, for another year or two, he had to continue on in the career he says has gone in a blink.

“I suppose I’ll have to go,” he says with seeming sorrow. “You have to make way for these younger fellows, don’t you?”

Mick Standing suspects that retirement for Chamberlain will, in the beginning, be “real tough”. “For 37 years as a detective, he has pitted his wits against some tough crooks,” says Standing. “That’s a big chunk of your life, but he’ll find something to fill the gap.

“He’s not the sort of bloke who’s going to go home and sit in an easy chair, and say: ‘Well, that’s it’. His mind’s too active for that.”

Chamberlain will deal with one last Supreme Court trial – for the murders of Faraz Rasti and Rhiannon Ellul in a Melbourne St apartment in 2000 – and then set a retirement date.

And, as a retiree, he is not likely ever to lose his affection for the detective culture. “I liked the lifestyle,” he says. “I just enjoyed being in the CIB.”

The Chamberlain files

Case 1
Offence: armed hold-up.
Victim: Belair Hotel.
Offenders: Lucciano Santos, Roy Carrion.
Date: February 17, 1986.
Circumstances: Before the hotel robbery, Santos and Carrion had escaped from NSW where they had been serving long prison sentences in Goulburn Jail for kidnapping and armed robbery.
Sentences: Each served prison terms until the early-1990s, when they were returned to NSW to complete their sentences.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Kingsley Robinson.

Case 2
Offence: armed hold-up.
Victims: State Bank, Mitcham, State Bank Colonel Light Gardens.
Offender: Gordon Ronald Forrest.
Dates: March 25, April 11 and May 30, 1986.
Circumstances: Forrest lived in Victoria but travelled to NSW and SA to commit hold-ups. He was eventually arrested in Victoria and extradited to Adelaide.
Sentence: 16 years, eight months.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Peter Alexander.

Case 3
Offence: armed hold-up.
Victims: banks in the western suburbs.
Offender: Anthony Wesley Stone.
Date: 1987 – 1988.
Circumstances: After he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for the bank robberies, Stone was murdered in Yatala Labour Prison in 1989.
Sentence: 21 years.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Chris Patterson.

Case 4
Offence: armed hold-up.
Victims: State Bank, Clearview; Westpac, Woodville; Hindmarsh Building Society, Findon; State Bank, Elizabeth South.
Offenders: Anthony Bruce Reid, Mark Pongritz.
Dates: March 17, April 11, May 13 and June 1, 1988.
Circumstances: Reid fled to Qld where, in an armed robbery on the Graceville Commonwealth Bank, he shot a teller in the face and blinded him. He was sentenced to a term of imprisonment in Qld, but authorities later transferred him to SA where he continued to serve time. In the Elizabeth South hold-up, he shot Pongritz while they were inside the bank.
Sentences: Reid – 16 years (Qld), Pongritz – a term of imprisonment.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Jack Kelso.

Case 5
Offence: armed hold-up, grievous bodily harm.
Victims: Co-op Building Society, North Adelaide and female bank teller.
Offenders: Lawrence Edward Wilson, Gerald Douglas Morrison.
Date: June 26, 1992.
Circumstances: Wilson shot a female teller in the hip with a .357-calibre handgun for taking too long to fill a bag with money. He fled from SA but was extradited from Darwin a year later.
Sentences: Wilson – 17 years, Morrison – 10 years.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Jack Kelso.

Case 6
Offence: murder.
Victim: Cosimo Castelluzzo.
Offenders: Mark Raymond Smith, Colin Frederick Turner.
Date: December 31, 1992.
Circumstances: Castelluzzo – a motorcycle gang member – was abducted from Hindley St and taken out to sea in a boat from Edithburgh. There, he was weighed down and thrown overboard alive. His body was never recovered. The background of the murder remains unexplained, but some evidence pointed to a “hit-for-profit”.
Sentences: Smith – life with 25 years non-parole, Turner – life with 15 years non-parole.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Nick Pippos, Mike Eichner.

Case 7
Offences: murder, armed robbery.
Victim: Adel Debs.
Offenders: Robert Reardon, William Kurt Garve.
Date: March 1995.
Circumstances: Debs was stabbed to death in his North Adelaide Restaurant on O’Connell St.
Sentences: Reardon – life with 34 years, seven months non-parole, Garve – life with 12 years non-parole.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Gerry Feltus.

Case 8
Offences: rape, murder.
Victim: Cheryl Trace.
Offender: Rodney Keith Winters.
Date: December 4, 1982.
Circumstances: Trace’s body was found at the Edinburgh RAAF base, where she had attended a disco. Winters avoided arrest until, with DNA evidence, police were able to charge him with the crimes. In 1995, he was extradited from NSW to Adelaide, where he faced court.
Sentence: 20 years.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Guido Kinsman, Adrian Coxhead.

Case 9
Offence: murder.
Victim: Geoffrey Neil Plew.
Offender: Salvatore Menendez.
Date: August 4, 1997.
Circumstances: Menendez cut Plew’s throat in his (Plew’s) Seaton home. A well-known member of the Adelaide gay scene, Plew was a popular DJ at dance reviews. Behind the murder was a love triangle that had involved Menendez, Plew and a female friend of Menendez.
Sentence: life with 20 years non-parole.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Tony Brain, Mark Roberts.

Case 10
Offence: murder.
Victim: Phillip John McCormack.
Offenders: Brett Stuart Williams, Lawrence Hersbach.
Date: February 3, 1999.
Circumstances: Williams and Hersbach bashed McCormack to death in the driveway of Williams’ southern-suburbs home. Police found McCormack’s body in a grave at Owen on May 27, 1999. All three were small-time criminals involved in the drug trade.
Sentences: Williams – life with 18 years non-parole, Hersbach – life with 16 years non-parole.
Investigating officers: Chris Chamberlain, Gerry Feltus.

PASAweb   Index & Search   Top of Page   Comments   Email to Editor

The Police Journal Online is an official publication of the Police Association of South Australia and is published monthly. Editors of kindred publications can seek permission from the Editor to re-publish any Police Journal Online article. Copyright 2001  The Police Association of South Australia sustance