The decoy, the gunman and a 41-year wait for justice

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There was nothing but raw courage and suppressed fear between Pat Brear and a bullet or a shotgun blast to the heart or the head.

He wore no body armour and carried no weapon.

In Victoria’s lonely Upper Murray bushland near Corryong, the detective-senior constable, carrying two jerrycans, trudged towards a fugitive who was armed with a combat knife, three loaded shotguns, three loaded rifles and, it emerged, the fantasy that he was John Rambo, the anti-hero of the movie, First Blood.

A 1984 report of police capturing a fugitive in north-east Victorian bushland near Corryong.

Brear’s single hope was that three police mates, inching through the trees nearby, might grab the gunman he was approaching before a trigger was squeezed.

The fugitive, fresh from terrorising captives across the border in NSW, sat in a stolen four-wheel-drive that was out of fuel but parked in a perfect spot for an ambush.

It was late January 1984.

I reported the news story at the time, and the memory of it was jolted recently by a new manhunt in north-east Victoria’s alpine country following the shooting deaths of two policemen and the wounding of a third when they went to a property near Porepunkah to try to serve a warrant.

Recollection of the events of 1984 – underscoring the mortal danger to which police subject themselves – was further revived by the recent, scandalously belated commendations for bravery awarded to the four former police officers, including Brear, who took on that gunman in the Upper Murray.

Brear, it happens, embodies the cost of fear and mental anguish a police officer faces in the extreme moments of duty.

He has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder for decades, which became so extreme in the years after he exposed himself to peril in the bush, he says he “fell apart” to the point of requiring hospitalisation before quitting policing.

“I left the job then to crawl over a gibber plain of jobs until retirement time” is the way he describes his fate.

On that long-ago day near the Nariel Creek, a tributary of the Murray River in the north-east Victorian Wabba Ranges, Brear acted as a decoy, pretending to be a helpful bushman delivering fuel to the stranded fugitive, all the while exposing himself to potential gunfire.

Hours before, a back-country dog trapper had come across the gunman, whose vehicle had run out of diesel.

The trapper offered to drive into Corryong and return with fuel. Instead, he called the police.

The Upper Murray District was on high alert for what the Albury Border Morning Mail newspaper had described on its front page as a “maniac” on the loose.

A 1984 report of a gunman holding up a young couple north of Albury.

The “maniac” had captured a young couple a few days previously on a farm near Woomargama, north of Albury, tied them up and described in sick detail how he could kill them by inserting a knife between their ribs.

He forced the couple, Roger Whitley and Kate Haynes, to watch a video of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic, The Birds, while he demonstrated his marksmanship by shooting birds out of trees.

Late at night, he rode off on a motorbike to fetch his camping gear from a nearby forest. In his absence, Whitley and Haynes frantically cut themselves free and ran six kilometres across moonlit paddocks to a neighbour’s home.

Their captor, discovering them gone, stole their four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, three shotguns, two rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition.

“I thought he was going to kill us,” Kate Haynes told me shortly after.

I was at the time a reporter on the Border Morning Mail. The stories of the drama and the subsequent manhunt, with pictures by Cathryn Tremain, who tragically died last month, led the paper for days.

Alerted by the trapper’s call, the commander of the Albury Police Special Weapons and Operations Squad, Inspector Albert “Bert” Bennett, hastily assembled his team: Sergeant Peter Beacroft and Senior Constable Dennis Monk. Armed with two 12-gauge shotguns, a .308 sniper rifle and pistols, they set off for Corryong.

There, they teamed up with Brear, of Wodonga Police.

Brear, lacking a ballistic vest, changed into the trapper’s clothes and grabbed a couple of jerrycans, hoping to fool the fugitive.

Police arrest a man after capturing him in the Nariel Valley, near Corryong, north-east Victoria, in 1984.

The little group set off in an old four-wheel-drive, crawling through heavy bush along a rough mountain track by the Nariel Creek. The Special Weapons and Operations Squad team hid in the back, lying on the floor, while Brear drove.

They were soon out of effective radio range, and had no emergency or medical back-up. They were on their own.

Late in the afternoon, they came across the fugitive’s vehicle. He’d used the battery and starter motor to move to the crest of a slope giving him an easy shot at anyone approaching, his loaded and cocked weapons at hand.

Brear emerged with his jerrycans, pretending to be the trapper, pulling his hat low.

The SWOS team quietly slid from the back of their vehicle into the cover of trees, Monk with a rifle and Beacroft and Bennett armed with shotguns.

Bennett carefully circled around to the fugitive driver’s door.

Brear, closing in on the passenger side, saw guns lined up beside the man, one of them pointing at him.

Bennett suddenly approached, aimed his shotgun at the gunman’s ear and roared “make one move and you’re dead”.

“He lost interest in going for his guns about then,” Bennett told me.

Bennett grabbed the man by the throat and dragged him out of the vehicle.

A high-risk, improvised plan that could easily have gone catastrophically wrong turned out to be perfectly executed. (The fugitive, aged 25, later pleaded guilty to numerous charges, including assault and robbery and beating and ill-treating Whitley.)

Yet despite Bennett’s subsequent heated demands that a recommendation for awards be sent up the NSW Police force chain of command, the Albury officers inexplicably received no commendation.

Brear received no recognition from Victoria Police, either, despite – as Bennett pointed out – having been sent on such a perilous mission without a ballistic vest or an extra weapon.

Former police officers Peter Beacroft, Pat Brear and Dennis Monk were finally commended for their 1984 bravery at a ceremony on July 24 this year. Former commander of the SWOS team, Albert Bennett, was also commended, but was unable to attend.

In July this year, 41 years after their high-risk manhunt, following intervention from an officer who investigates historical missions, all four police officers were formally commended for their bravery at a NSW Police ceremony in Albury.

Pat Brear is still waiting for the Victoria Police to consider a years-old submission for a medal for valour.

Today, elsewhere in north-east Victoria’s High Country, scores of highly trained and well-equipped police search for another fugitive.

Unlike the team in 1984, they’re backed by helicopters, dogs and assault vehicles, and all of them are assured police sacrifice will never be forgotten.

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