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SOURCES:
Dirty
Dozen
By Paul Anderson
Published by Hardie Grant Books (2003)
Fatally flawed: the death of Graeme
Jensen
By John Silvester
The Age
January 4, 2003
Police accused of planting gun in
1988 shooting
By John Silvester
The Age
January 4, 2003
Underbelly 4 More True Crime
Stories
By Andrew Rule and John
Silvester
Published by Sly Ink (2000)
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 Graeme Jensen
Born in 1955, the youngest of
five children, Graeme Russell Jensen
lived with his parents until they split when he was seven.
He was 11 when charged with stealing
from taxis.
A policeman who dealt with Jensen
in the early years wrote: "He is inclined to be smart and is apparently a
show-off."
But at his Children's Court hearing
a welfare officer gave evidence that he was an outstanding athlete and a good
student.
Jensen left school in year nine.
One of his few legitimate jobs was
at a broom factory. He lasted only two weeks.
Jensen saw
his long-term career in crime.
At 14, he and four others used coat
hangers to pull six fur coats, valued at the $2468, through a letter opening in
the door of a Melbourne shop.
At 15 Jensen became one of
Australia's youngest bank robbers when he relieved the National Bank in Fitzroy
of $1363.
The arresting officer this time left
a cryptic note: "This lad, in my opinion, will in the future become a very
active criminal. He requires firm handling."
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In 1977 Jensen was arrested in
Canberra over three armed robberies totalling $70,000.
The arresting officer observed:
"Offender is a very dangerous type of person who, according to his
girlfriends and other persons, always slept with his shotgun loaded under his
bed.
"When arrested also had the
weapon fully loaded in his possession. Warning, will finish shooting a policeman
or some other person he has a dislike to if given an opportunity. Treat with
caution."
Jensen was sentenced to 10 years,
six months, with a minimum of eight for the armed robberies.
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According to underworld figure
Lindsay Rountree, Jensen and his friend Victor
Peirce were convinced police had embarked on a policy of systematically
culling career bandits.
Rountree claimed the two decided to
fight back, vowing to kill two police every time a known criminal was killed by
police.
Perhaps Victor would not have been
so staunch had he known that his wife, Wendy, had an affair with Jensen.
On July 11, 1988,
Jensen was targeted by police for an armed robbery and murder at the Coles
warehouse at Barkly Square Brunswick.
Another criminal, Raymond
John Denning, later claimed the robbery was carried out by underworld
figures Mark and Jason Moran and their running
mates, Russell 'Mad Dog' Cox and Santo
Mercuri.
Armaguard employee Dominic
Hefti was carrying around $30,000 cash through a store room behind the
supermarket when he was confronted by a gunman.
Shots were exchanged and Hefti
was fatally wounded.
The gunman, also wounded escaped
through the supermarket and commandeered a car from a woman at gunpoint.
During a search of Russell
Cox's home, the page of his telephone directory containing the woman's name
and address had been ripped out making it obvious that the group intended to
silence the possible witness.
On October
11, 1988, at about 3.30pm, Jensen was shot dead by police as
he drove out of a shopping centre in Webb St, Narre Warren after detectives
had planned to arrest him over the robbery.
By
the time Detective Sergeant Malcolm Rosenes
reported for duty, on October 11, 1988, Operation No-Name had been under way for
nearly six hours.
Under
surveillance was armed robbery suspect Graeme Jensen at a house in Moray Court,
Narre Warren.
Police
wanted to question him over the Hefti job and take a DNA sample to compare with
physical evidence taken from the Brunswick hold-up scene.
Eight armed robbery squad detectives
had been in position from about 7.30am - but they could not act until they were
sure the man in the house was their target.
What they needed was for the suspect
to come out so they could confirm his identity.
That was the job of the
surveillance police.
They decided to use a textbook
"box intercept" - when Jensen drove off, the detectives would use
three cars to snare him.
A car would pull up on each side, their noses slightly
across the suspect's vehicle.
The third car would block the rear.
That was the plan.
Jensen was no early riser - career
criminals rarely are.
He had breakfast in bed then rose
about midday to watch a movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Rosenes
knew the target well; he was one of a gang of suspected armed robbers, including
Jedd Houghton and Victor Peirce, whom police had been watching since May.
Rosenes
was sitting in a silver Nissan sedan reading his paper when Jensen finally
surfaced at 3.20pm.
Jensen needed a new spark plug for
his lawn mower.
It took him only three minutes to
drive 2.4 kilometres to the nearby shop.
Two surveillance detectives then
wandered into the shop to confirm the suspect was Jensen.
Three unmarked police cars
containing the eight armed robbery detectives cars barrelled in.
But the third car, slowed by passing
traffic, was a few seconds late.
This enabled Jensen to gun the motor
and hit reverse.
Police later gave sworn evidence
that they saw Jensen had a firearm on his lap.
They yelled at him to stop.
He clipped a car as he reversed out
of the Webb Street shopping strip, then flung the automatic into forward.
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One detective yelled: "He's got
a gun."
Two members of the
armed robbery squad fired seven
shots at him as he drove away from them.
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was hit by a shot
gun pellet in the back of the head and died before his car crashed into an SEC
pole.
What happened then remained a
matter of conjecture for years....
An armed robbery squad detective
went to the boot of his car and grabbed a towel.
He gave it to a second detective,
who said he found a sawn-off bolt action .22 rifle next to Jensen's legs.
It was not cocked, not loaded and
the magazine was upside down.
Two bullets were also found on the
floor.
It was later claimed the towel was
used to hide the gun taken from the police car to plant in Jensen's station
wagon.
Police said it was to cover Jensen's
body from public view.
The towel was later destroyed
without being tested for gunshot residue.
Police later claimed
that when they had approached Jensen and identified themselves, he pointed a
firearm at them and attempted
to run them over with his car.
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Next day, two police constables,
Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, were gunned down in Walsh Street, South
Yarra, in what detectives maintain was a payback for Jensen's death.
Victor Peirce, Trevor
Pettingill, Anthony Farrell and Peter
McEvoy (left with Kath Pettingill) were charged with the Walsh Street
murders.
They were acquitted.
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But with regard to Jensen's
involvement in the Brunswick robbery and shooting, the police waiting in Narre
Warren were chasing an innocent man.
Jensen was not even there when Hefti
was killed.
Forensic
tests done after his death, proved that Graeme
Jensen was not the man who pulled the trigger in the robbery and police at the
inquest have admitted that there is
now no evidence to link him to the crime.
Police
representatives at the inquest into Jensen's death claim that he was threatening
police with a firearm at the time he was shot and he was shot in self-defence.
Jensen's
wife said publicly shortly
after his death that the gun the police allege they found in his car was planted.
Counsel for the
family have argued that at the time he was shot Graeme Jensen
was trying to escape from police but posing no threat to their safety.
The two armed
robbery squad members who shot Graeme Jensen refused to give evidence
at the coroner's court on the grounds that it might incriminate them.
Homicide squad
detective John Hill later committed suicide after he had been charged over the shooting.
On
March 31 1990, Det-Constable Alex Cukavac denied stakeout police had acted like
"three wise monkeys" over the shooting of Jensen.
He told the
Melbourne Magistrates Court that he was among a group of police carrying out
surveillance on a Narre Warren house the day Jensen was shot.
He said the team
watched a house believed to be occupied by the convicted armed robber.
Det. Cukavac, who
had followed Jensen with other police when he left the house, said he had not
seen any armed robbery squad detectives enter the car park, nor heard any
messages over a portable radio from the squad before Jensen was shot dead.
Det. Cukavac said he
and his partner watched Jensen from a service station opposite the shopping
centre car park.
Det.
Cukavac agreed with Mr Boris Kayser, counsel for Jensen's relatives, that
surveillance police had not seen shots fired by the armed robbery squad
detectives or were able to say where detectives were standing when the shots
were fired.
"Did
anybody think it would be a good idea to be three wise monkeys over this?"
Mr Kayser asked.
Det.
Cukavac replied: "No."
Mr Kayser then asked Det. Cukavac if any of the
surveillance team had seen the shooting, but had not wanted to get involved.
Det.
Cukavac replied: "I don't know - I can only say what I saw."
Det.
Cukavac earlier told the inquest he was watching the back of a house in Moray
Crt, Narre Warren, when he and his partner saw a blue Commodore station-wagon
leave.
Det.
Cukavac said he parked his car at the service station and watched Jensen's car
while Jensen went to a lawn mower shop.
Det.
Cukavac and his partner began to drive around the back of the service station
when Jensen started to reverse out of the park.
Det.
Cukavac said he heard a volley of shots as they drove through the service
station.
He
thought Jensen had driven up Webb St until he saw Jensen's car against a pole.
The
court had been told the surveillance team's role was to locate Jensen and then
notify the armed robbery squad.
Det-Sgt
Malcolm Rosenes, told the court it was not the bureau's role to become
involved in the actual arrest of a suspect.
Rosenes denied it was a "series of coincidences" that
members of the bureau carrying out surveillance did not see Jensen shot.
As a detective with
the drug squad, Rosenes
was arrested on July 30, 2001 and charged with drug trafficking in a series of
police raids.
He was found guilty and jailed.
The eight
armed robbery squad detectives involved in the Narre Warren raid were later
charged with murder.
They included
serving officers Robert John Hill, Glen Robert
Saunders,
John Hill, Peter Leslie
Butts,
William John Coburn, Jeffery Forti, Rod Grimshaw, Donald Smith and Christopher
Ferguson.
Also charged and suspended over
Jensen was veteran homicide Detective Senior Sergeant
John
Hill
for allegedly impeding the
investigation.
He was charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder in
that he allegedly concealed evidence suggesting police were criminally liable.
The decision to
charge the officers was taken by Mr Bernard Bongiorno, the DPP.
Det Snr Sgt John Hill, committed suicide two
months after he was charged.
He always maintained his innocence
and felt his integrity had been destroyed when he was charged.
All officers made "not
guilty" pleas.
The prosecution made a series of
claims, including that the detectives involved "sought to impede their
prosecution, conviction and punishment by falsely asserting that Jensen
brandished a gun threatening one or more of them as he drove off in his car, and
by placing a sawn-off rifle at his feet in the car to add credibility to the
pretend justification".
In June 1995 the charges were dropped
against all but one officer on the order of the new director of public
prosecutions, Geoff Flatman.
The decision left Det Sgt Robert
Hill,
the detective who fired the fatal
shots, to stand trial for murder alone.
On August 9, 1995 he was found not
guilty of murdering Jensen in the Supreme Court, the jury not even having to
hear the defence case.
It took the jury 18 minutes to
decide the prosecution had not established a strong enough case for the trial to
continue.
It was 2494 days since Jensen's
death.
In his findings, Coroner Hal
Hallenstein said: "There was suspicion and assertion expressed in inquest
that the sawn-off .22 calibre rifle and two .22 calibre bullets had been planted
there by police."
But ultimately Mr Hallenstein
rejected the allegation. ". . . It is hard to envisage anything like those
events unless Jensen had possession of a gun which had been seen by police
members," he said.
"By considering Jensen's
criminal history involving firearms and armed robbery and in the absence of any
evidence of the firearm being seized, retained and planted as alleged, it is
concluded in inquest that the firearm was in Jensen's possession prior to and at
the time of intercept and prior to his fatal injury with resulting vehicle
collision."
Responding to allegations police had
planted a "throw down" weapon - the sawn-off rifle - in Jensen's car
to justify the shooting, Hallenstein found there was no evidence to suggest that
happened.
"The firearm was in Jensen's
possession prior to his fatal injury," the coroner found.
All police officers involved, and
their close colleagues and families, remain infuriated at the laying of the
charges by Bongiorno.
Police later reviewed training
procedures and launched Operation Beacon, a plan to try to avoid police being
involved in fatal confrontations.
Rosenes
would later admit that when he heard shots, "I froze in my position instead
of hightailing it quickly and seeing if Jensen was making a getaway".
But
he soon gathered his composure.
Rosenes
ordered his surveillance team to a meeting.
He instructed them to write notes on
what they had seen so they would have records for the subsequent investigations.
But those notes went missing. They
were never found.
When Rosenes
gave evidence in the Coroner's Court in
March, 1990, he was unable to explain what happened to the missing notes.
At no stage did Rosenes
indicate he had seen anything questionable on
the day Jensen was shot.
He didn't seem overly curious.
On January 4, 2003, legendary
crime reporter, John Silvester, filed a story in
The Age under the heading -
''Police accused of planting gun in 1988 shooting''.
Excerpts as follows:
The Ombudsman is reinvestigating the
1988 police shooting of armed robbery suspect Graeme Jensen after new claims by
a suspended detective that crucial evidence was planted at the scene.
A policeman facing serious drug
charges, Detective Sergeant Malcolm Rosenes,
now claims the gun was planted by police.
Rosenes was in charge of the surveillance unit following Jensen
when the suspect was shot and was a serving drug squad detective when arrested
in July, 2001, and charged with drug offences.
It is believed Detective Sergeant Rosenes
has made a statement over the Jensen shooting to the Ceja taskforce - a police
Ethical Standards Department team investigating allegations of drug squad
corruption.
But Chief Commissioner Christine
Nixon has handed the new claims on Jensen's death to the Ombudsman, Barry
Perry.
When asked by The Age if he was
reviewing the case Dr Perry said: "I couldn't comment."
Ms Nixon also refused to comment on
the investigation.
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