Surveillance footage showed two men approach the home's porch, smash the overhead light, break down the door and then leave the house empty-handed a few minutes later.

A neighbour saw the unusual activity and called police, who arrived almost immediately with two dog units.

Members of the dog squad apprehended the two suspects, including the off-duty policeman, nearby.

Sen Det Miechel was mauled by a police dog when arrested and later had surgery for facial injuries.

Among the charges he would face was an allegation he assaulted the dog's police handler.

Hodson was caught shortly after.

He was cowering in a nearby school.

Police found bags full of drugs and money that the pair had thrown over the back fence.

The alleged robbers had obviously planned to collect them later.

Miechel, who had been a policeman for 14 years, was suspended after the suspected burglary.

He claimed he had been mistaken for one of the robbers after he came across them at the house and gave chase.

But Hodson admitted to his role and agreed to give evidence against the detective.

Hodson denied Det-Sgt Dale was involved, but later implicated him in the theft.

Following Miechel and Hodson's arrests police immediately raided the home and uncovered 200,000 ecstasy tablets, three kilograms of MDMA (ecstasy) powder, two kilograms of crystallised methamphetamines known as 'ice', and 5000 LSD tablets.

Also netted were various chemicals, two pill presses and $220,000 cash.

Five people were arrested.

Three of those arrested appeared in court on September 29, 2003.

Azzam Ahmed, 37, his de-facto wife, Colleen O'Reilly, 34, both of Moorabbin, and Abbey Haynes, 23, of Oakleigh East, faced charges including trafficking and possessing commercial amounts of ecstasy and amphetamines.

They did not seek bail and were remanded in custody to face court on January 23, 2004.

A third woman, Louise Kingsey, 28, of Langwarrin, who allegedly gave up her part-time job as a receptionist to be a drug dealer, was charged with trafficking ecstasy and released on bail.

Ahmed was an associate of notorious underworld figure Nik "The Bulgarian Radev.

On the same day, Detective Sergeant Dale (right) from the major drug investigation division gave evidence against three people he had arrested.

Dale, 34, detailed in Melbourne Magistrates' Court the four-month operation that led to the bust.

He said that it was the largest seizure of these types of drugs by Victorian police.

On December 5, 2003, Detective Sergeant Dale and Detective Senior Constable Miechel were arrested and charged by anti-corruption police from the Ethical Standards Division.

They were suspended from the force without pay.

Dale appeared in the same court he had given evidence in two months before - this time in the dock - charged with four offences, including conspiracy to traffic large commercial quantities of ecstasy and ice.

The two policemen, along with Terrence Hodson, were accused of conspiring to burgle and steal from the house on the eve of a planned police raid.

Miechel was charged with 16 offences, including trafficking large commercial quantities of ecstasy and ice and trafficking LSD.

Hodson faced 17 charges, including possessing cocaine and acquiring a handgun without a permit.

Like Dale and Miechel, Hodson was also accused of conspiracy to traffic large commercial quantities of ecstasy and ice.

Senior Crown prosecutor Jeremy Rapke, QC, who headed the Corruption Prosecution Unit, told deputy chief magistrate Jelena Popovic that the police brief against the men would be served by February 2, 2004

Defence solicitor Tony Hargreaves said that, as a policeman, Dale had concerns for his safety in the Custody Centre and asked that he be transferred to a prison.

Mr Hargreaves said Dale would probably make an application for bail the following week.

Maria Stylianou, for Miechel, made a similar request about his custody and indicated that he may also apply for bail shortly.

Hodson's solicitor, Jim Valos, asked that his client also be shifted to prison.

Ms Popovic remanded all three in custody for a committal mention on March 19, 2004.

Dale was sacked from the police force, but successfully appealed to the Supreme Court and later resigned.

The charges against Dale were dropped after the shooting deaths of Terrence Hodson and his wife in May 2004.

The couple were shot "execution-style".

Sources told The Age that Terrence and Christine Hodson were on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs when they were shot in the back of the head.

Their bodies were discovered by their son in the lounge room.

Their two German shepherd guard dogs were locked in the garage, possibly indicating they were killed by someone they knew and let them into the unit before they was ambushed.

Hodson was due to give evidence in the prosecution Dale and Miechel.

Following the execution of Mr Hodson, an Office of Police Integrity report fingered Mr Dale as an "obvious suspect" in the disappearance of Mr Hodson's secret police informant file which ended up in the hands of many of the underworld's heavy hitters.

The report found that the leaked file may well have contributed to Terrence Hodson's murder.

Mr Dale denied any involvement in the drug burglary or the theft of the file.

On October 4, 2004, the Melbourne Magistrates Court heard David Miechel threatened Terence Hodson with a card that depicted actor Al Pacino as a gangster from the movie Scarface.

Miechel allegedly gave the card to Hodson's daughter Mandy about six months before Hodson's death, the court was told.

Prosecutor Damien Maguire said Miechel allegedly gave the card to Mandy Hodson in November 2003 to pass on to her father.

Mr Maguire described the card as a "thinly veiled threat" during his opening of a committal hearing for Miechel before Deputy Chief Magistrate Jelena Popovic.

, who was charged over his alleged involvement in the $1.3 million drug theft.

Pacino starred in the 1983 film Scarface as gangster and drug lord Tony Montana.

Other allegations heard during the first day of the committal hearing included:

· Terence Hodson allegedly told police that his daughter Nicola and her husband, Peter Reed - who was acquitted over the 1988 Russell Street police station bombing - had been involved in a number of burglaries.

· Miechel had been in a sexual relationship with Mandy Hodson.

· Terence Hodson told Mandy to co-operate with the police investigation of Miechel.

Mr Maguire said Miechel allegedly sprayed himself with dog repellent, believing dogs were at the East Oakleigh house, but was later mauled by a police dog.

The court heard that Hodson had become a police informer, reporting to Miechel, in 2001.

Mr Maguire said Miechel had regular contact with the Hodsons and their daughter Mandy, with whom he developed a sexual relationship.

When cross-examined by Miechel's lawyer, Nick Pappas, Mandy Hodson said she was "positive" she had a relationship with Miechel and told the court he had tattoos on his ankle and forearm as well as a tongue stud and belly button piercing.

Ms Hodson also said Miechel had a scar on his thigh from an accident with a chainsaw when he was younger.

She broke down in tears during the hearing. Ms Hodson said her father asked her to co-operate with the police investigation and told her details of the alleged burglary.

She said she knew that her father and her sister's husband, Peter Reed, had had a disagreement, but was unaware of the allegations that Hodson went to the police about the alleged involvement of his daughter Nicola and her husband in several burglaries.

Reed had been jailed on charges of burglary and attempted murder.

On October 7, 2004, Detective Sergeant David Miechel was committed to stand trial in the Victorian Supreme Court.

He pleaded not guilty.

The prosecution withdrew five charges against Miechel and added a further seven including possessing and trafficking amphetamines and ketamine, a veterinary anaesthetic.

Magistrate Jelana Popovic ordered that Miechel face a directions hearing in the Supreme Court.

The acknowledgement came after the ABC revealed that Paul Dale was reportedly seen with an alleged drug boss in Melbourne.

However police still denied there was any clear evidence that corrupt police were involved with gangland criminals.

ABC TV's Four Corners program revealed that police were aware Paul Dale had links to the syndicate headed by notorious drug dealer and underworld murderer Carl Williams but they allowed him to continue managing Hodson, an informer who was spying on that same syndicate.

The ABC also revealed that police had been told of another link between Paul Dale and other high profile alleged criminals.

Police Assistant Commissioner for Crime, Simon Overland (left), said police were investigating that allegation.

It was also reported that in mid-2003 Dale had "assisted" convicted murderer Thomas Ivanovic, a member of the Williams crew.

Ivanovic was jailed in October 2003 over the 2002 road-rage murder of a motorcyclist.

In May 2006 a jury found Miechel guilty of seven charges.

He was remanded to be sentenced in August.

Justice Betty King said, when sentencing Miechel in August 2006, he had been in a privileged position, receiving information about illegal activity which he then used to his own advantage.

"You have sworn an oath to uphold the law and the community has acted upon that oath you swore and placed its trust in you," she said.

"You have abused that trust."

Terrence Hodson's daughter Mandy gave evidence about the close relationship Miechel had with her and her family.

She said the man she affectionately called Dimples had confessed to her, saying: "I did it more for you than for your dad."

She said it was hard to reconcile the devoted, highly motivated officer Miechel had apparently been with the person who committed this crime.

The Supreme Court heard the detective's crew at the drug squad had been investigating the Oakleigh East property and Miechel knew there were large amounts of drugs and possibly cash inside.

The house was going to be raided within days.

Justice King sentenced Sen-Det Miechel to 15 years with a non-parole term of 12.

On March 5, 2007, the Herald Sun reported that police and prosecutors hoped fallen gang boss Carl Williams would help solve the murder of Terry and Christine Hodson in the hope it could reduce his sentence over three other murders.

Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Coghlan, QC, said it was important the Hodson murders were solved.

"Any unsolved murders, particularly any that might involve corruption in the police force, we're very anxious to solve."

Mr Coghlan said Williams' degree of co-operation could help reduce his sentence.

"We're happy to receive as much co-operation as we possibly can, " he said.

"But as the thing stands, we don't actually have anything. He's got to decide. The ball's in his court. He knows the areas we're interested in.

"From our point of view, the rules are the more he co-operates the better he'll do on sentence."

Mr Coghlan said the judge who will sentence Williams -- Justice Betty King -- had made it clear in previous gangland cases that degree of co-operation was a major sentencing feature.

On March 24, 2007, the Age reported that disgraced former drug squad detective Paul Dale is suspected of involvement in the shootings of Terence Hodson and his wife, Christine. 

Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland said that Dale  was a "person of interest" in double murder.

Dale had a firm alibi for the night of the killings. He was in country Victoria, and while there made calls to police colleagues. But investigators are examining whether his activities before the murders may have encouraged criminals to kill the Hodsons.

In another development, The Age revealed that police have asked the Australian Crime Commission to join the murder investigation.

It was the first time the commission has used its coercive powers, under which suspects must answer questions or be sent to jail, to find a link between police corruption and the killing of the Hodsons.

At least one former policeman has been questioned.

Asked if Dale's suspected links with the Hodson murders left a stain on police, Mr Overland said: "Whether it is a stain or not remains to be seen. But it certainly leaves a question … and that is why it is important for us to get to the bottom of this."

He said that investigations into Melbourne's gangland murders and organised crime were not over. "There is a heck of a lot for us yet to do," he said. "So the Hodson investigation is just part of that continuing fight."

An Age investigation into Paul Dale and the Hodson murders uncovered that before Hodson was murdered, Dale asked him to find out where gangland drug boss Jason Moran was hiding, and about his plans to murder his rival Carl Williams. Hodson told corruption investigators he believed Dale was working for Williams, who later murdered Moran.

Dale has denied any involvement in the Hodson murders, and declined to speak to The Age.

In August 2007, Bulletin and Sunday journalist Adam Shand wrote that Paul Dale, by now a former detective, was trying hard to blend in as a country petrol station owner amid continuing claims that he was involved in the execution of the Hodsons.

Rolling north on the Hume Freeway from Melbourne to Sydney you pass hours without encountering anyone who is not hurrying on to somewhere else. 

The freeway is all dual carriageway to the border, bypassing every town from the capital to the Riverina in NSW. Even the sprawl of Albury-Wodonga is now just a mirage of shimmering roofs in the rear-vision mirror as you slingshot over the border.

Of course, beyond the exits a substantial population lives and thrives, but the only outward indications are the tourist boards proclaiming local services or landmarks such as the site of Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan.

Around Wangaratta, you can see the steep, green slopes of the Wombat Ranges where the Kelly Gang holed up back in the late-1870s. It still seems like a good place to hide while the illusion of empty country persists.

Take one of those exits and another picture emerges - of small, tight-knit communities where nothing goes unnoticed, towns where new arrivals are scrutinised and a man's history is difficult to hide. Unless you want to go bush and hide in a cave, the past can come back as easy as a car turning off the freeway.

Bluestone (the weekly Bulletin column of Adam Shand, journalist and author of the fantastic 'Big Shots' - The Chilling Inside Story of Carl Williams and The Gangland War) took the Wangaratta exit this week en route to Sydney to take on fuel and coffee. Parking at a big new service station complex, we watched the proprietor busy with his chores, taking a couple of cents a litre off the display, chatting to people who all seemed to know him.

In his late-30s, the man seemed so self-contained, like he really fitted in here, he didn't have to think about it or put on any face. This rheumy-eyed man with the easy smile seemed a world away from the crime and vice of Melbourne that Bluestone had left behind that morning. That is, until we piped up and introduced ourselves.

In another life, this man had been Detective Sergeant Paul Dale of Victoria Police's major drug investigation unit, a well-regarded officer who, if you believe his accusers, holds the link between Victoria Police and some of the gangland killings.

Dale remains "a person of interest" in the May 2004 slaying of police informer Terry Hodson and his wife Christine. An elite taskforce is probing the killings of the Hodsons and force command has given its customary "we are making progress" comments and nothing more. That is no comfort to Dale.

For the record, Paul Dale told Bluestone that he did not kill the Hodsons, nor order their killing. He says he was in Bendigo the night when someone ordered the Hodsons to kneel on their lounge room floor and then shot them in the back of the head.

"The Hodsons' death was a tragedy," he said.

Paul Dale has never before spoken to the media so no-one ever recorded his feelings on this event. "I was very close to the Hodsons," he said. "I wanted to go to their funerals but I was not allowed to."

He feels wronged and frustrated. He believes that the taskforce will finally exonerate him of the murders and the Victoria Police and the media will let him get on with his life.

At this point, Bluestone must admit that the meeting was no chance affair but a calculated decision on our part.

A week earlier, we received a call from a self-styled investigative reporter from another organisation who tried to convince us that Dale should be number one suspect in a range of deeds most foul. We didn't buy it and still don't. The terms investigative and reporter do not belong in the same sentence. 

Reporters report and investigators investigate. The conclusions of investigative reporters do not stand the same judicial scrutiny as those of proper investigators. The job description is one cooked up by editors looking for a marketing edge. Too often, the term allows assumption to parade as fact.

Victoria Police have been looking at Dale for about four years now and have yet to make anything stick. He says they have interviewed him on half-a-dozen occasions. The only thing proven against Dale so far is that he consorted with criminals involved in the drug trade. Last time we looked, it was in the job description of a cop to hang out with crooks.

But let's recap events that led Bluestone to Wangaratta this week.

In September 2003, Terry Hodson and a serving police officer, Sergeant David Miechel, broke into a home in Oakleigh that was to be the target of a police raid. They stole drugs from the house but they were apprehended fleeing the scene and charged.

In the police station, Hodson rolled over (yet again) and ratted out his police mates, including Dale who, Hodson said, was allegedly in on the burg.

Miechel ended up copping 15 years' jail for his part. Within the next 24 hours, an information report (IR) was stolen from the St Kilda drug squad offices. Paul Dale twice entered the offices during that time. It was nothing unusual, it was where he worked. He denied stealing the report, saying that he did not have access to it.

The IR detailed Hodson's activities as an informer, encompassing much of the information he had given his police handlers. This IR then found its way into the underworld.

Shortly after the murder of the Hodsons, it was leaked to the ABC, which ran excerpts.

Later, anti-corruption fighter Tony Fitzgerald, QC, concluded in a report to the Victorian Parliament that Dale was the likely culprit in the theft of the IR. He also concluded it was possible that the stolen IR was the reason the Hodsons had to go. It seems all so neat: a policeman steals incriminating evidence and then leaks it to underworld elements who then get wind of the Hodsons' tattle-telling. Professional hitmen are despatched to kill the Hodsons, saving the said policeman from charges he was involved in the 2003 burglary.

Sadly, life is rarely ever as straightforward as this. There are so many questions, so few answers and most of them contradictory.

Why did an unnamed underworld figure leak the IR to the ABC shortly after the Hodsons' murder? Did they simply like the reporters or was there another motive? For that matter, why did convicted killer Carl Williams offer the same report to Bluestone a short while before the murder of the Hodsons? Did this have something to do with Williams' relationship with Paul Dale?

Dale openly admits he had regular dealings with Williams as an informant. Another witness has claimed in a statement to the Purana Taskforce that Dale had tipped Williams off when they were about to be raided by police. They used to meet at a local swimming pool because you couldn't wear a listening device in a pool, the witness said.

Williams is a clever and ruthless operator. He has sacrificed others in his circle much closer than Paul Dale. He has had the chance to incriminate Dale to help reduce his 35-year sentence but has so far declined. Why has he stayed shtum? What has he got to lose? Surely putting a cop in jail could only enhance his standing in his world. Dale cannot hurt him now. Maybe the leaking of the report was enough.

Since Fitzgerald's report, it has become a factoid challenged by few that the leaking of the IR confirmed that Terry Hodson was a police informer.

Carl's father George Williams has told Bluestone that this was not true. It was not news. People had known for years that Hodson was a police informer.

Indeed, most of Melbourne's biggest drug villains from the wild and woolly days of the mid-1990s had relationships with police officers. Shopping rivals to the cops was a business strategy and helped to maintain a status quo in the underworld which of course collapsed when Carl Williams began his murderous feud with the Moran faction in 1999.

Around that time, the drug squad, as part of departmental policy, was supplying handpicked informers with precursors for the manufacture of speed as part of its clandestine labs project - 90% of the chemicals supplied to the crooks was never recovered.

Moreover, why would Dale steal the report, leak it to the underworld and then conspire to kill the Hodsons when he would be regarded as the prime suspect?

There seems little doubt that Dale's contact with crooks compromised him but whether it amounts to a motive for double homicide seems a stretch based on the evidence. Perhaps another possibility exists.

Through his own actions, Dale put his career in the hands of a group of murderous villains who then took advantage and stood over him. There were quite a few people with incentives, if not motives, to kill Hodson.

In the Melbourne of 2004, a whim or the promise of a windfall was enough. It was Carl Williams who spoke of killing with an almost corporate detachment. It "was in everyone's interest" he said in court of the killings of Lewis Moran and Mark Mallia. Were the Hodsons not a liability to the interests of many like Williams with their inside knowledge of Melbourne's drug scene? Perhaps Dale unwittingly provided a wonderful opportunity for associates of Williams and Co to deal with the Hodsons?

Paul Dale was clearly not enjoying this trip down memory lane this week but we pressed on anyway. "Is it possible that your informers were standing over you?" we asked.

"Not so much standing over me, but …"

Dale remembered he had something else to do and politely bid us good day. He is rebuilding his life.

When drugs charges against him failed, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon sacked him under her no-confidence powers. Dale successfully challenged the sacking on the ground of procedural fairness that all evidence against him was not made available. He resigned instead. Bluestone hopes that if Dale is once again hauled into court the entire case is presented: how his actions and associations fit into the deeply corrupt, bizarre world of the Victoria Police of the 1990s and early days of the new millennium.

But of course that sort of a proceeding is called a royal commission, and Dale's attendance would be in the role of witness, not defendant.

Convicting Dale in a show trial will provide a scalp for Victoria Police to hold up but not the answers to the questions we as a community should be seeking.