Dust mixes with memories in horror chamber

‘Perish looked out of his tree. He was agitated, his pupils were quite dilated. I thought he was under the influence of something. I think he said words to the effect of, ‘All right, let’s get into it.'”

Detective Inspector Gary Jubelin is describing what police were told happened on the night of November 16, 2001, when Terry Falconer was cut up on a remote property near Girvan, on the mid-north coast, his body to be dumped in the Hastings River in seven parcels the next morning.

The source for the account is a man we can only call Witness E. He gave evidence against Anthony Perish, who on Friday was sentenced to at least 18 years in prison for masterminding the killing. Also sentenced last week were Perish’s driver, Matthew Lawton, to a minimum 15 years for murder, and his brother Andrew Perish, to at least nine years for conspiracy to murder.

After Witness E was arrested in January 2009, he told police about Girvan, where he had worked on security for Perish’s drug operation. On March 19, wearing handcuffs, he revisited the property to describe what had happened there. He explained how Lawton and he had driven up from Sydney with Falconer in a toolbox in their ute. After Anthony Perish arrived a few hours later, the men donned protective suits and laid out sheets of black plastic in the shed.

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Perish, who believed Falconer had killed his grandparents eight years earlier, went to work with a handsaw.

When I visited the place recently it had obviously been abandoned for years. It is approached by a hilly 600-metre track that is now impassable to vehicles and still protected by inner and outer two-metre-high mesh fences.

The house’s front door was open, its floors covered in kangaroo droppings. A large grey came hopping out as I approached the building, which still contains the action films the men used to watch after a hard day’s work cooking drugs.

It was a big business.

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Witness E told detectives that 200 kilograms of methamphetamine and ecstasy were produced there in less than a year.

The shed looks harmless enough in the autumn sunshine, offering no hint of the horrors that had occurred there. It is full of old tools, cans of paint. The place was bought by a Perish associate using a false name years ago. Like other property left behind when its owner is jailed – Bruce Burrell’s four-wheel-drive sitting for weeks in Darlinghurst Road, Gordon Wood’s bicycle in the robing room at the Supreme Court – the law doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It covers 49.8 hectares of hilly country, is valued at $315,000 and, according to the Great Lakes Council, $6843.31 is owing in back rates and interest.

Jubelin headed Strike Force Tuno, which brought Falconer’s killers to justice. He recalls Witness E showing police where he had erected security devices such as trip flares, remote-controlled explosives, cameras and various weapons. A machinegun had been set up in an old chook shed pointing at the gate in the internal fence and could be operated from the house by a wire.

Witness E is now serving a long prison sentence. If he gets out – he has cancer – his problems with the law won’t be over. The Sun-Herald can reveal that the Queensland Homicide Squad has issued a warrant for his arrest for the execution of a Gold Coast businessman, Michael Cleaver Davies, in 2002.

Witness E worked as an enforcer for Perish at the time, but police are not saying if Perish commissioned the murder.

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