McCulloch was not a qualified lawyer and did not claim it. For someone like Roberts, a young man who had already lost an appeal against his conviction and was facing the reality of spending the next 30 years of his life behind bars, was a lawyer of last resort.
The day the jury returned his verdict of not guilty, McCulloch was ecstatic. Few within the Supreme Court had any idea of his involvement. “My part in this story was so small,” he tells The Age. “Without the commitment of his lawyers, his family and [former detective] Ron Iddles, his acquittal could never have happened. “
Jason Roberts is released from prison for the first time in more than two decades after being acquitted of the murders of police officers Gary Silk and Rodney Miller in south-east Melbourne in 1998. Credit: Jason South
Roberts and McCulloch became friends shortly after McCulloch arrived at Barwon High Security Prison, north of Geelong, in 2005. In the morning they went for a run, exercised in the gym, and sat at the same table to food.
His regular teammates included Christopher Hudson, a great motorcyclist who murdered a man and shot two more people with senseless rage in the morning on Bourke Street; Matwali Chaouk, jailed for attacking a member of a rival criminal family in a shooting in Altona; and Daniel “Porky” Lovett, an excellent boxer and gun sergeant in the Melbourne chapter of Hell’s Angels.
McCulloch was older than the others and had spent enough time in prison to understand his desolate reality. He had previously worked with young criminals in the former Turana Boys’ Home. He now mentored in the prison yard, extolling the virtues of staying fit and keeping an active mind.
While in Barwon, he participated in a joint program with Deakin University aimed at deterring adolescent crime. Last year he recounted his experiences in prison with 85,000 British prisoners via BBC National Prison Radio.
McCulloch says Roberts paid a high price, nearly 10 years in solitary confinement, in search of freedom. Credit: Hollie Adams
Around 2007, Roberts began talking to McCulloch about the murders of Silk and Miller. At first McCulloch listened mostly, skeptical of what he was being told. The more he trusted Roberts and the more he learned about Bandali Debs, the unrepentant career criminal who confessed to Miller’s murder, the more convinced he was that while Roberts was not an innocent man, he was not a murderer.
Some days they talked about walks in the prison yard. Other days, McCulloch sat at his desk in the common room, taking notes of Roberts’ memories. “He got to a stage where he gained confidence in me. I think that’s why I finally got the whole story.”
For McCulloch, the most compelling part of Roberts’ story was his readiness to reveal to him two places where guns, duct tape, clothing, and Silk’s police diary were hidden after the murders. Roberts said he knew because, after Debs told him what he had done to Moorabbin that night, he helped him bury the evidence. He also confessed to McCulloch that he carried out 10 armed robberies with Debs in 1998, before the murders.
Roberts said Debs had promised to clarify and support his version of events once his own avenues of appeal were exhausted. Armed with this information, McCulloch organized a delegation of influential prisoners to confront Debs, who was also in the Eucalyptus Unit. Debs promised them, as he had done with Roberts, that he would support Roberts and tell police that the younger man had no involvement in the murders.
Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Agent Rodney Miller.
When Debs was transferred from Barwon to Goulburn’s “supermax” prison to stand trial for another murder, he had done nothing to keep that promise. When he appeared as a witness for the indictment at Roberts’ new trial, it became clear that he never intended to do so.
McCulloch says he urged Roberts to tell his lawyers and eventually the police what he had told him. “To have a chance, he had to clear up the previous lies and cover-up,” McCulloch says. “I said look, there’s only one way to avoid this, but you’ll have to be careful.”
McCulloch advised him how to write his statement. He also told Roberts that once he started talking to the police, he would be taken to solitary confinement, away from the general population, and locked up at 11pm.
Roberts ended up spending almost 10 years isolated. It was, McCulloch says, a high price to pay.
Retired homicide detective Ron Iddles was called as a defense witness at Jason Roberts’ new trial. Credit: Penny Stephens
Roberts made two approaches to police. The first, through attorney Sean Grant, was handed over to police command by then-Chief Commissioner Simon Overland, but no action was taken. In late 2012, he contacted Marita Altman, a lawyer who represented him during his first trial in 2002. Through Altman, came the news of Ron Iddles, a homicide detective who he was nearing the end of his career, which Roberts wanted to clear things up.
Iddles agreed to listen to what Roberts had to say.
Like McCulloch, Iddles treated the revelations about buried evidence as significant. In one place, a boat ramp in the coastal town of Tooradin, only scraps of clothing were recovered after extensive research in the area. At the second location, Toorongo Falls in Gippsland, neither the pistols nor the newspaper were found, but a roll of duct tape was found.
The articles had little probative value, but for Iddles they corroborated Roberts’ version of events. Throughout his investigation, Iddles began to have an idea that, within Victoria police, was taboo: the convicted police killer might be telling the truth.
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McCulloch’s irony is that, perhaps as a result of the help he gave Roberts, he is abandoned in London and, at 73, unable to return to the country where he spent most of his adult life and where his children , grandchildren and great-grandchildren live.
As a noncitizen with a serious criminal record, McCulloch was always vulnerable to deportation. In 2015, then-Immigration Minister Scott Morrison ruled that his visa should be revoked once Barwon was released. McCulloch fought against that decision and in 2017 had convinced Morrison’s successor, Peter Dutton, with the help of the testimony of senior correctional administrators, that he was reformed enough to remain in Australia.
In February 2019, Victoria police provided another secret report to Dutton listing McCulloch’s criminal past and raised speculative allegations about his involvement in unsolved crimes. He also characterized his lawyer in prison as a scam designed to swindle gullible prisoners. McCulloch says almost all of his legal work was done pro bono.
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The police report did not contain evidence of McCulloch’s criminal activity since his release from prison, but it served its purpose. Dutton reversed his decision, and in early 2020, just before the pandemic put international travel on the ground, McCulloch boarded a plane for Britain.
The strongest statement against McCulloch in the police report was that he supported the push, at the end of the Melbourne gang wars, for a royal commission against police corruption. History shows that he had a good cause.
The drug trafficking charges that resulted in McCulloch turning 13 in Barwon were based on an operation involving two police detectives since they were jailed for drug trafficking: Wayne Strawhorn and Malcolm Rosenes . Rosenes alleges in an affidavit that evidence was planted against McCulloch in his apartment. McCulloch admits a previous drug offense for which he also served a prison sentence, but insists he was stabbed in 2005 by corrupt cops.
A special investigator appointed after the Royal Commission of Attorney X to determine whether police should face criminal charges is examining McCulloch’s drug conviction and the circumstances of his deportation.
In his only public comments since he was released from prison, Roberts expressed relief to be reunited with his family. The prison lawyer who helped him pursues the same.
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