Carmen, Ken, Steven, Joanna, Reg - Five Sydney Murders
I was talking with Carmen. The welcome rain was pouring down on Sydney’s George Street, and the wind was wintry. Carmen was sitting on a folded cardboard box for warmth. The cardboard notice in front of her said: “Homeless and nowhere to sleep. Please give your spare coins.” A scattering of coins about her could have topped at about fifteen dollars. Underneath her cardboard seat was probably another fifty dollars. Carmen is about 83 years of age. I knelt down on the footpath in front of her. I had learnt years ago never to speak to beggars or street people while standing above them looking down. It is too intimidating. I said, “Carmen, it is Gordon Moyes of Wesley Mission. It is too cold and wet for you to be on the street today.” I gave her a card on which there was printed an address not far away. She said curtly, “I know who you are. You always tell me your name.” I continued, “I want you to go there. They will have a hot meal ready for you and a bed for tonight. It is too cold and dangerous for you to be out tonight.”
She replied, “I don’t need that. I’ve got my own flat in Phillip Street.” She was lying of course. They haven’t had flats in Phillip Street for at least fifty years, certainly not for an aged, homeless woman. The high-rise apartments nearby start at over a million dollars. I have seen Carmen in a doorway in the lane behind the Menzies. Perhaps she meant that. Thanks to the Department of Housing, Wesley Mission leases a large number of units for frail, aged homeless people and we have good staff who care for them. But Carmen won’t go. She has a mental health problem, and is addicted to sleeping in the open. That is an addiction like a drug or alcohol addiction. It is very hard to break. She will die one night of hyperthermia or else be murdered for the money she has. Either way, she will be lucky to rate one line in a newspaper.
Over the road, outside Westpac, Ken is sitting on a council seat. His legs are wrapped in a blanket. He too will sleep on some cardboard. He too is begging. He is about forty and could go up to our 90 bed Edward Eagar Lodge for the night. It is warm and comfortable and the food is good. He tells me it has been a good day. People are more generous when it is raining. He is carrying a large amount. He does not trust the banks. He is in a battle with the public Trustee over the proceeds of the sale of his mother’s house. He does not need to sleep in the open or beg, but he does because although articulate and knowledgeable, he also suffers from a mental condition, and probably is not on any medication. His hair and beard are long and unkempt. He comes into Wesley Mission to use the toilet and have a talk. He too refuses any attempt at alternative accommodation and meals. I will ring his sister later and let her know he is OK. I tell him once again, he must not sleep on the streets – it is too dangerous, especially as he has had a good day with income. I tell him bluntly I don’t want him to end up like Steven. But Ken knows it will never happen to him.
Whenever I think of Steven Seymour, tears well up in my eyes. Every morning since 1987 for the next 7 years Steven met with me for a cup of coffee or tea. In 1987 when our head office was in temporary accommodation in George Street while we were building our large new Wesley Centre in Pitt Street, Steven Seymour would appear at the door of Wesley Centre waiting for me to arrive. In those days he used to come in and have an early cup of tea with the LifeLine counsellors who had been on duty all night. Then he learnt that he could come in to Wesley Centre and meet with the early arriving members of our restaurant staff. Every day they would give him a free breakfast and a cup of coffee.
By the time I had arrived he was full of good food and tea and coffee. He would wait just where I park my car and then accompany me to my office. Steven would spend the entire day with us and would find out where I might be going during the day. Steven was of medium height with dark hair and a scraggily beard. He always carried over one shoulder, a bag containing all of his possessions. He had several teeth missing and the rest were a mixture of green and black and white. He had lived for 16 years in the Gladesville Psychiatric Hospital and then in a lodge at Leichhardt.
Steven was addicted to the streets. No one could get him away from the streets and whenever we found him a better place of accommodation he would only stay a night or two before he would come back to sleep somewhere around the streets. Steven was a gentle man. He was very clean in his personal habits but very timid and fearful that people would bash him at night. He had the conflict of being afraid of being on the streets at night, and desiring deeply to sleep out under what he called the “Starlight Hotel” rather than indoors. Several times while he has sleeping on the street or in a back alley or in a doorway he was robed of his few possessions.
Many times he was bashed up by young hoodlums who found him a very easy target because he could not strike back. In the seven years that I knew him Steven never drank alcohol, he never smoked and he never took any illegal drugs. He was just a gentle child of a man.
When he was born, he was born with an intellectual disability and he was born into a dysfunctional family. I found out later that his sister had left home at 15. A brother had left home in his early teenage years and the life between his mother and father was one of alcohol abuse and physical violence. Steven somewhere slipped through the cracks and as a boy ended up in the Gladesville Psychiatric Hospital. Upon de- institutionalisation which occurred after the Richmond report, Steven was one of those people sent out into the community into a house where he would be looked after. The fact was the boarding house proprietor took the money but did not look after Steven and after a while Steven was on the street and I suspect the boarding house proprietor was still receiving money to care for him.
When we moved into our new building in Pitt Street Steven moved with us. Every morning, early while it was still dark Steven would be waiting for the first person to arrive, which was usually one of our cooks or chefs from Wesley Restaurant to open the doors. Our staff would let him in because he was no trouble and because they liked to give him a cup of tea and some breakfast.
On Tuesdays, Steven knew I would go to Rotary and he would be there waiting for me to come down in the lift from my office and there he would be waiting with his bag with all his possessions hooked over one shoulder and he would walk with me down to the Rotary Club of Sydney meeting in the Hotel Menzies. He would lope along beside me skipping from foot to foot and saying over and over again “You’re my friend aren’t you Gordon? You’re my friend” I kept reassuring Steven I was his friend.
When I got to the hotel I would say that I had to go to my meeting and Steven would quite naturally peel off and lope over to Wynyard Park where he would sit in the sun until an hour and a quarter later he’s be waiting at the front doors of the Hotel Menzies for me to exit. Then he would lope along beside me and we would talk all the way with Stephen saying over and over again “You’re my friend Gordon aren’t you? You’re my friend” I always assured Steven that I was his friend and we always made sure he had a few dollars in his pocket and that he was able to get some lunch.
In 1994 Steven’s birthday came around and the staff at Wesley Centre gave him a birthday party complete with cake and candles and gave him the gift of a wrist watch. It was not a fine delicate gold watch, that wasn’t Steven. It was a large ostentatious brightly coloured plastic watch with battery and hands. He was so proud of his big watch that he wore it constantly. The watch had cost us less than $20.
No one ever accepted responsibility for Steven but in 1992 through the miracle of the radio station when I told something of Stevens life, his sister who had long lost contact with him recognised I was talking about her brother and she made contact with me, I reunited brother and sister after twenty years. That’s when Steven found out that both his mother and father had died some years earlier. However I would love to tell you that his sister took and extra responsibility for Steven, but the fact was that having made contact with him she no longer wished to be in contact.
In 1994 I was rung very early one Saturday morning. The constable from the Surry Hills police station told me that Steven had been attacked in the early hours of the morning and had been robbed of his watch. He had run away from his assailant who was seen to chase him and eventually catch him and then savagely kick him to death. They told me it was hard to recognise his face. The only way the police were able to find someone to identify him was that when they went through his bag of possessions they found several photographs of me cut from our Wesley Mission magazine.
The police recognised me and rang to ask if I could come and identify him. Beverley and I quickly went to where the body of Steven was. It was hard to recognise him owing to the swollen and beaten nature of his face. There was no doubt about it, it was Steven and he had been robbed and kicked to death for the sake of a watch worth less than $20.
Over the road several stories up two cleaners were completing their tasks when they saw the assault. They came down and gave a very good description to the police of the assailant. I met with the police on a continuous basis over a period of several months but no one has ever been arrested and charged with his murder.
I told Steven’s story the following Sunday night on my radio programme and indicated I wanted to hold a service in Wesley Church in his memory and I wanted people to say to the community that we cared for a disabled homeless man like Steven. I was overwhelmed. Flowers arrived from all over the state and more than 300 people attended an incredible service of tribute and praise to one of God’s very special frail children.
I guess most people walking by street beggars or homeless people do not realise that the basic problem with most street people is not lack of accommodation or meals. In fact those are both available, although not in plentiful supply and sometimes we do run short. But sleeping in the open is to make frail and mentally ill people extremely vulnerable. I know many of them get a steady stream of coins from begging, and that some of them spend that on drugs, alcohol, and poker machines. But many don’t. And it is that bit of money that may cost them their lives.
Like Anthony Wood who slept in Regimental Square off George Street. He slept in front of the Royal Australian Regiment monument, on a few sheets of cardboard using his sneakers as a pillow.
Late one Tuesday night someone smashed his head in with a hammer. It may have been done by the young man who was loitering in nearby Martin Place, through the old GPO colonnades, and filmed on the Street video. But no-one was able to identify him.
Or it could have been the same person who had used a hammer to kill another homeless man Keith Kettley in the same manner in the Domain Car Park, while some twenty others slept nearby. Cheap wine not only dulls the body from feeling the temperature, but stops the ears from hearing nearby trouble.
In one nine-month period four others were bashed to death. The murdered victims all died as they slept, were bashed with heavy blunt implements, and suffered mental illness or alcoholism.
Joanna Franklin was only 30. She was a Victorian suffering from schizophrenia who slept on a mattress in an alcove at the rear of shops in Wattle Place, Ultimo.
Later that same month, on a Saturday, council rangers found the body of Adam Murray, his head bashed in with a blunt object while he was in his sleeping bag on the lawn of the Robbie Burns garden at the Domain. Murray, 59, was a former Victorian art dealer and computer technician who was known as “The Umbrella Man” because he would construct a tepee from umbrellas for shelter at night. He had spent twenty years sleeping rough. He was an intelligent man who could discuss any subject you liked. Alcohol was his problem, but sleeping rough was his addiction.
Then former ambulance officer, Reg Mavin, 65, was murdered while he slept on a discarded mattress in a grandstand overlooking an oval in Glebe’s Jubilee Oval. Like most of the older men, alcohol was his problem. Younger men and women in the Starlight Hotel usually have mental illness and heroin as their companions.
Homeless people are extremely vulnerable, and usually are the result of some mental illness. I can offer accommodation and food, and some friendship. But we must not be so hung up on matters of privacy rights and self determination that we just leave them as they want to be. The law must be changed to allow some people in society to make decisions for those who cannot make rational decisions for their own health and safety.
Society changed the laws that gave police the right to take a person into custody. Parliament is not of a mind to go back to those days. Many of the old vagrants have told me they remember with fondness, being bundled into the back of a paddy wagon, being taken off to a police cell where they were given a hamburger, a hot cup of tea, a blanket and a mattress in a cell where they were at least warm and safe. So they had to front a magistrate the following morning in an over-hearted courtroom. That usually only meant a wagging finger and a lecture which at least filled in the morning of another winter day.
There has got to be a better way. But my friends on the street as well as those in the Parliament don’t want to know about it either.
GORDON MOYES
