Because then they'd swap in. The informer gets out of doing time for the crime that he did, and the bloke who didn't do the crime goes inside.
They would go.
Outside in the morning there would be three inch nails jammed under the tires of their car, so that if you drove the car forward or back, the nails would pierce the tires and flatten them. They drive off around the corner and by the time they've gone, you know, one hundred meters, they hear a massive explosion, kaboom. I'm Andrew Rules, Life and Crimes. It's staggering just how much policing and law and order have changed in a lifetime. And I was reminded of this recently when the names
of Joey and Shirley Hamilton came up. I'm not sure even why they came up, but as soon as I heard those names, those words, I thought of that couple and how famous or notorious they were in the mid to late seventies.
And very early eighties.
For about six or eight years, they were extremely well known in Victoria. They had a sort of an outlaw edge to them that was part Bonnie and Clyde. There was a little bit of Sonny and sher because Shirley was a well known folks singer called Shirley Jacobs before she married Joey Hamilton, the criminal and getaway driver and
all that sort of stuff. And they were an odd couple who made the news for all the wrong reasons, mainly because they became the target of a sustained campaign of harassment and violence that could have cost them their lives and indeed ended up causing them to go on the run. And that is a staggering thing that two people in Melbourne, Victoria were pursued by rogue police blatantly and openly for at least two years and lived literally
in fear of their lives. People might find that hard to believe, but trust me, it's true.
Now.
Joey Hamilton, as I mentioned, he was at Krim. He was a pretty dashing sort of crook, sort of ruggedly handsome bloke. His reputation according to senior police one told me once he said he was a wheelman. He was a getaway driver, which he may well have been, like a lot of other crooks of that time, you know, Russell Cox and Raymond Patrick, Chuck Bennett and a.
Lot of those guys.
He had come up through the boys' homes. He had learned his stuff in the boy's homes because he'd started out as a poor boy on the wrong side of the tracks, had stolen something and it went from bad to worse. Christopher Dale Flannery a lot of these guys kids.
With a bit of dash.
And they got into trouble young and then they would be sent to boys home and then the treatment they got into boys' homes which was uniformly vicious, nasty, brutal, and often sexually deviate. They were often the subjects of sexual abuse and physical.
Abuse these boys.
That turned some of these guys into lifetime crooks, and often very dangerous lifetime crooks. Now Joey Hamilton, Joey Hamilton wasn't a vicious killer. I don't believe he probably didn't mind a fight. I think he probably knew his way around guns. But as a crook, I think probably his go was more to use his brain more than he's braun and he did have some elements of charm and intelligence despite the fact he'd left school at what he
called form two year eight. He could read and write recentably well, and he did have a sort of Native Intelligence, and it was when Shell Jacobs, who is forgotten now, but Shirley Jacobs was a pretty big deal folks singer in Victoria, particularly back in the sixties and seventies.
Shirley Jacobs.
That was a married name. Her first husband's name was Jacobs. She was born and bred in Euroa in Victoria and then was Shirley Gilbert. She was the daughter of a former British Army officer. She was probably the smartest kid in the class at EUROBA.
I think she was a.
Spelling champion, and very good at music and all that sort of stuff, reading, writing music. She's the sort of girl that may well have been, you know, ducks of her class up in the Bush. She comes to Melbourne, she goes to i think a legal and secretarial school for legal secretaries, something like that. And she was vivacious,
good looking, interesting, and she married young. She married a young dentist called Horst Jacobs, who was a respectable dentist who made a good living and all the rest of it. And she had two daughters and might have been Debbie and Jesse. Their names don't matter, but Debbie was certainly one of them. And of course the daughters were born when Shirley was quite young. She later split up with her husband Horst, and she became this folk singer who
used to play on television. She made records, she appeared live at a lot of pubs and little folk festivals and all that sort of stuff. She was quite well known, and it was in the course of this that she became a sort of activist, slightly left of center figure, a bit bohemian, a bit intellectual, a bit against the government type of person. And like a lot of people in that era when the Vietnam War provided a flashpoint, she was someone who beat anti war and anti conscription.
And like a lot of other people of her ilk who lived in the in the suburbs and followed the things that she followed, she had a leaning towards the rights of prisoners and the criminal classes, because prisoners in those days were treated pretty badly, treated violently. They were treated essentially as if they had no rights, and they pretty well were at the whim of the people in charge of the system, that is, the police on the
outside and the prison officers on the inside. And I have to say, looking back on it, that a lot of stuff that happened to people in boys homes and in jails was pretty bad news. Shirley was abreast of all that sort of stuff. She and other musicians would occasionally go into jails and do concerts, you know, the sort of Johnny Cash syndrome. And she went into Penridge one day in the early seventies. I'm going to say
during the beaching. The beach inquiry into the police was nineteen seventy five, and Joey Hamilton had been locked up in Penridge in nineteen seventy three for an armed robbery that he did not commit. He'd been framed. Now, he was a scallywag. He did have form, he had done things in the past, but he was a guy who did not get along with the police because, unlike most crooks in the privacy of a police station an interview room,
he would not do deals with the police. He wouldn't sell out, he wouldn't pay them bribes, which many of them solicited, and he would not sell out other crooks with information. Most crooks would do business with the police if a push came to shove, and Joey Hamilton would not. Sort of his personal code of honor, whatever you call it. He was therefore much hated by the police because he was more of a thorn in their side, and when
they got him in, he would stay silent. He wouldn't talk, he wouldn't give them info and trade and do all the stuff that a lot of crooks used to do. And he especially wouldn't lead them to large cases of cash, which is the main hobby of the robbery squad, the breakers, the consorts, and the major crime squad. In those days, the elites, heavy squads were very inclined to take cash from crooks.
They called it.
Taxing them, and semi officially they would put it in I think they called a slush fund. A slash fund paid for interstate police to come down and be entertained. It paid sometimes for trips into state to pick up other crooks, incidental expenses, whatever, whatever, perhaps used to pay informers informally that sort of stuff. Of course, the slash fund was a good cover story for bet detectives who took cash and put it in their back pocket or under a brick, or put it in their mother in
law's bank account or whatever. This sort of stuff went on, and it went on a lot. It was a cash economy in those days. Joey wouldn't play that game, so they hated Joey. Nineteen seventy three, the detectives in Russell Street drag Joey in and they tell him that they're going to charge him with robbing a Thornberry milk bar. Joey says, well, I wasn't there, I didn't do it. I've got an alibio. I can show you where I was. And they said, well, we don't care what to tell us.
We're going to charge you with it. And we're charging with it because we had this guy here called Eric Houston alias Eric Grant. And Eric Grant was a crook. He was a robber and he was a give up. He used to sell out other crooks all the time. He was a police informer in several states, and he's the sort of guy that is much hated by other
honorable crooks. And Eric Grant because he was an informer, the police wanted to protect him and look after him, and they also wanted to get Joey Hamilton because they didn't like him. So they persuaded Eric Grant, who had done this robbery of the Thornbury milk bar, to say that it was Joey Hamilton and not himself. And it was a neat swap in the informer gets out of doing time for the crime that he did and the bloke who didn't do the crime goes inside. And that's
what happened. Joey Hamilton went into Pendridge charged with an armed robbery, convicted of an arm robbery on very very body evidence, on a statement that he hadn't signed. It was just a complete fabrication. He went in seventy three for eighty years. When the Beach Inquiry started in nineteen seventy five, this was an inquiry a political response to the growing unrest about bent police and rogue police and
police misbehavior. And this inquiry had been brought on by all sorts of things, but mainly by an activist called doctor Bertram Wayner. Now doctor Bertram Wayner had exposed the abortion rackets in Melbourne. He exposed the fact that homicide squad detectives were taking large bribes from organized abortionists. It was a massive underwel moneymaker in those days when abortions were illegal and a little like our tobacco shop problem now.
Because it was illegal, it meant that certain surgeons and doctors could make a lot of money by performing abortions, and other people did them too. Nurses and people with no medical training would procure abortions in mostly unfortunate young women who didn't want to have a baby out of wedlock by and large, and they would pay cash for this.
They would pay.
Hundreds of dollars for an abortion at a time when you know, a laborer might make less than one hundred dollars a week, so this was a cash cow. Abortion hast paid the Bent Police. This led to this sort of corrupt scenario. This persuaded Bertram Wayner and others to point the finger at the Bent Police, and this forced the government of the day, the Hamer State government, to call an inquiry and the head of the inquiry was Barry Beach QC, a Queen's Council. He was a conservative.
He was politically aligned with the Hamer Liberal government, so he was conservative and probably on what we would think of as right wing these days, but essentially a very honest and decent lawyer, upper middle class man with decent instincts to do the right thing by and large, and for him it was like swimming in treacle because he calls witnesses he calls for complaints and complainants to come and give evidence, and he finds that amazingly a lot
of these people who have got complaints against the police are intimidated by police and decide not to give certain evidence. They get sick on the day, or they don't want to talk on the day. He finds that the police that he calls before his tribunal and requires them to give evidence, he finds that I think many of them, perhaps fifty five of them, gave perjured evidence to him. But he also said that many of them had given perjured evidence in trials against people like Joey Hamilton and others.
So this inquiry, it's the old thing about never calling an inquiry unless you know what it's going to discover. What Beach uncovered was a rat's nest of corruption in the Victoria Police, which to some extent echoed what we know what's happening in Sydney the Roger Rogerson Sydney, and in Queensland the russ Hins, Sir Terence Lewis, Brisbane, the Moonlight State, and also in Perth, which was a pretty hot town. So Melbourne was not much better than the
other places. It's just that the corruption he tended to be below the level of superintendents and commanders and inspectors probably, And so we have a situation where Barry Beach's discovering all this bad stuff. One of the bad things he discovers, and the one he really nails home, is that Joey Hamilton was totally framed for this armed robbery back in
seventy three. And because Joey Hamilton is willing to give straight evidence until the absolute truth, fearlessly, and because he can call other witnesses who will support his view of what happened did not Happenoe Hamilton, he's declared by Beats to have been locked up on false evidence, and therefore technically he should have been given a fresh trial. He probably should have been paid a large amount of money
for being locked up under false pretenses. What actually happened was that the government wriggled around it by giving Joey Hamilton a sort of a pardon. They took him out of jail, They paroled him very early and said, well you're out of jail now, you've got to be on parole and report to the parole for eight eight months or something. And they sort of fell between two stills. They didn't give him a fresh trial, they didn't give him a full on pardon, but they got him out
of his cell. And he'd been doing it in h division in Pentridge. He'd been breaking rocks with a hammer, been doing it pretty hard inside before he gets out. I think he got out in seventy six after more than three years. While he is inside, Shirley Jacobs, the Folks singer, does a concert inside, and while she's doing that, she meets Joey. Joey is one of the crimsons setting up the amps or whatever, setting up the chairs or whatever it is, and he makes an impression on Shirley.
He's pretty charming, he's pretty funny whatever. He is a ruggedly handsome sort of bloke, the charm that some crooks had, you know, part conman, worldly, knock about and irresistible to some people who like that sort of stuff. And Shirley fell for Joey, and Joey fell for Shirley. There was a fifteen year gap in their ages. He was in his mid thirties, she was around the fifty mark. But
they were swinging hands seriously. As soon as Joey was released in nineteen seventy six, and in fact they got married, which is why we are talking about Shirley and Joey Hamilton. They actually got married, much to the amusement of her daughters, who were teenagers at the time. But they rubbed along. The older daughter, Debbie was you know, she loved her mother and she'd like to see her mother happy, and so she would turn up and sort of talk to
them and see them. And she told me last week when I found it tracked down, she said that, you know, she was keen to stay in touch with them.
Mum.
Joey she thought was charming and you know, good looking and all that stuff. But she said, I never really trusted him because you know, he had been a crook and I knew he had a volatile temper whatever whatever. And so they rubbed along. But Joey and Shirley they'd get a house in Station Street, Carlton. They immediately become the target because Joey has given this evidence against all
these police. They become the target of reprisals. Then rogue detective, the very ones who had put him inside, they get the nod from their boss, and their boss at Russell Street at that time was Chief Superintendent Fat Harry Bennett. Phil Bennett, known as Fat Harry to everyone. He was a big, jovial, smiling, billy bunter sort of bloke, and he was as rotten as a book chop. He solicited bribes from all over the job. I think perhaps there
was brothel money flowing into him and others. I think there was probably probably had been a party to the abortionists earlier. Maybe whatever was going on that there was an illicit quit in he would get a slice of it.
There were sp bookies.
Around at that time who made sure they were on the right side of the police. They would pay a bit of tax to the police. There were publicans around town who liked to trade after hours later than they should. Police would never pay for food or drink in their pubs, and they would probably slip them cash as well. So there were a lot of rackets like that going on in those days, ranging from petty corruption right through to
the full blown object. Fat Harry Bennett gave the nod to rogue detectives who we won't actually name here because the two I'm thinking of I'm.
Pretty sure are still alive.
But we'll call one mister Phillips, which is not his real name. We'll call one mister Johnson, mister Phillips and mister Johnson. Okay, that is not their real names.
These two fellows were pretty.
Well known around town for various reasons. We can find their pictures on file now because they did get into enough trouble with other bent coppers that their photographs were taken and their stories were told. In the seventies and the eighties, these do they were pretty bad lads, and one of them had.
A big habit of.
Using jelly knite. I don't know if he'd come from a job or from the country or somewhere where he handled jelig nite. In those days, a lot of people were reasonably familiar with explosives and jelly knite, And know in my own family in the country, my father would blow up stumps with jelly knite, and a lot of farmers bought jeli knit and used it and were pretty good at it in a way that probably doesn't happen
now so much. And so it was one of those things that criminals and coppers tended to use in those days. Criminals would use it to blow safees open, blow up in a building then blow up.
In a safe.
Coppers would use it to load up crims.
They would wrap up a parcel of jelly knite and put it.
Under a criminal's Christmas tree and then raid the place and say, guess what you've got Jeli Knight under your Christmas tree and charge him with illegal possession of explosives. They would set little bombs for crooks, blow up their cars and stuff like that. These two Scullywag coppers got the nod to harass Joey and Shirley. Now there were already plenty of coppers harassing Joey and Shirley. They became the targets of this sustained campaign which I mentioned earlier.
They would go outside in the morning there would be three inch nails jammed under the tires of their car, so that if you drove the car forward or back, the nails would pierce the tires and flatten them. Their rubbish spins every week would be emptied and strewn all over the street. They're rubbish strewn everywhere. Their windows or doors would be broken. The police would come around and break into their house under the guise of searching it when they went home. This went on and on. They
would be hassled. If they went to a hotel to have a drink or whatever, they would be hassled, particularly Joey, and they would be told you can't drink here, this is a Coppers pub, and they would grab him and get him arrested for resist arrest, insulting words, all these bogus charges, and he would be taken to a police station, he would be stripped, humiliated, he'd be locked up for hours and then he'd finally be allowed to go home that night.
They did this.
Stuff over and over and over just to teach him a lesson about giving evidence to the Beach inquiry against them. This was highly organized and it was basically tacitly accepted by the police hierarchy to a pretty high level. Now, there's no doubt that the highest people in the pyramid of the police force knew it was happening, but just ignored it, and they chose to believe the crap they
were told, which was this is just underworld shenanigans. Joey's been stood over by crooks whatever, it's nothing to do with us, boss, and that was clearly bullshit. But the chief figures of the police force chose to turn a blind eye to it, and the result of the blind eye was that they had an open slather. And what they did on the Monday morning of August the first, nineteen seventy eight, this is a winter morning, it's a Monday,
it's about twenty past four am. A car and a marked car goes to Station Street, Carlton, near Joey and Shirley's little terrace house brick Terror's house checked by jail with other terrace houses. They're only in a one room wide et cetera. So you are very close to your neighbors. You are living the length of one brick from your neighbors, essentially because through the brick party wall. This car pulls
up past Joey and Shirley's house. These three people in the car, there's two police, the two mister Johnson and mister Phillips, the ones I mentioned not their real names. And there's a third person in.
The car a.
Young reporter, a young reporter from a broad shair newspaper who has recently at that point come down from a country newspaper in the country, and he had been sent up to police rounds to.
Work at Russell Street. As it was all.
The newspapers had offices at Russell Street in those days where they would file their police and crime stories and the police rounds. People inevitably in those days are police
rounds man, although there were some female reporters. Later they cultivated relationships with police, particularly with detectives in the heavy squads who did the big jobs arm robbery's, murders, all that stuff, and they would go drinking with the police at the City Court Hotel, which was just dagonally opposite the old City Courts up there near Russell Street Police station, and in the Police Club, which was just at the
back of the Russell Street police complex. It was in McKenzie Street around the corner and it butted on to the actual Russell Street Police building. When the Police Club was a place where reporters were on remembers and we go there and have a parmajana or whatever and a couple of beers at a bit of a discount, and it was all a very woman fuzzy. But it wasn't woman fuzzy this night because our young reporter from the country who was drinking with coppers and going pig shooting
with coppers and all this sort of stuff. They've invited him to come on this raid. I'm thinking that's how they would have sold it to him, a bit of an early morning raid. Tomorrow morning, meet us at four am or whatever. And he meets them, and he gets in the car with them and they go out to Station Street. The car is parked by one mister Johnson or mister Phillips, and the other one.
Slopes off up the street with a parcel under his coat.
Cold morning, he probably able to cut it, and next minute he comes back a bit faster than he went, runs back to the car, jumps in the car. They drive off around the corner, around the corner, and by the time they've gone you know, one hundred meters, they hear a massive explosion kaboom. And everybody in Carlton heard this explosion because it was big. And they keep driving
and they go somewhere else and keep their heads down. Now, the third bloke in the car, the reporter, I don't know that he was overly happy about this, because when you look back on it, I think he thought, at best, I've been compromised, and at worst, if this had gone wrong and somebody had been injured or killed. I'm actually in a car with the guilty parties of my own. And I think as he has looked back on this incident over the last forty five years, he's probably wished
he hadn't been there. And I rang him last week to ask him and it can give me a straight answer. But he made it clear that it would have been better if he hadn't been there. He also made it clear that he's very happy that no one was hurt, because to be a party to that would have been awful. Now it is a miracle no one was hurt. Jeli Knight is a fairly imprecise thing in the hands of relative amateurs. And you know, the difference between one stick
and two sticks is massive. And if you've got it bound up with tape or something, it compresses it and it makes the explosive force much more damaging with explosives if you compress it. If you put jelly Knight inside a package with binding around it, it's the compression that makes it a bigger, more dangerous bang. Just drop it out in the open space somewhere and it just goes off in the middle of a footy ground.
It's not so bad.
But when you've got it up on somebody's doorstep, and it's got concrete underneath. It's got a wooden door in front of it with glass in it. It's got windows nearby, and little sort of verandas it becomes surrounded by solid objects, and because it's surrounded by solid objects, it reacts against them. When the explosion goes off, it creates damage. And what happened when it went off. It blew an actual crater in the concrete veranda. It blew a crater in the
concree veranda. It blew the front door of Joey and Shirley Hamilton's clean off its hinges and smashed it into matchwood. It smashed all their furniture down their hallway. It threw their German shepherd dog that had a big German shepherd dog that I think probably would have normally slept further down the back of the house.
I reckon.
The dog has heard somebody on the verandah and trotted up to the front door and was at the front door when the explosion went off. That dog was thrown the length of the hallway and he was knocked out. The dog was rendered unconscious. He did survive the length of the hallway, is going to be the length of three bedrooms with so it is about at least ten meters.
It's a long way. It smashed everything up. The amazing thing is this Joey and Shirley normally slept in the front bedroom, which I reckon the police would have known. On this night they did not. I don't know why. They were pretty cagy on this night. They did not sleep in that front bedroom. They slept at the back of the house. And they weren't in the front, they believe.
And I spoke to their next door neighbor today before I sat down to do this podcast, I spoke to the man who lived next door, who had his own story to tell, and he said, he said, I really believe that Joey and Shirley believed that if they'd been in the bedroom in the front of the house, it might have killed them or really badly injured them. He said, the amount of glass that was thrown in at force, for a start, was dangerous. The brickwork was smashed up
around the windows and blew in with debris and shrapnel. Essentially, he said, it was terrible. And this man that I was talking to today, a man called Graham. Graham lived next door with his then wife, Barbara and their little two year old daughter, Ilsa. I think Graham was a teacher and a musician. He was a bit of a guitarist. I am a guitarist. I think his wife was. I think she's an artistic woman. They lived in Carlton, where a lot of those sort of people lived, Musicians, artists,
those sort of people. They knew Joey and Shirley after they'd moved in. They'd sort of met them, and they through the party wall and were reasonably friendly with them without actually going in to visit much because Joey and Shirley realized that because of the police harassment, their neighbors could be injured or hurt, and they used to actually
stay away from their neighbors a bit. Which is interesting that couple Barbara and Graham were in bed their little daughter, Ilsa just a few minutes before the bomb went off, had got out of her crib or her little cot, and she'd totted up the hallway to the front of the house where her parents were and got into bed with them, as little kids often do when they're two years old. She crawled up into bed and within minutes the bomb's gone off. It's like the end of the world.
All the glass in their front door smashes, and he's thrown straight down the hallway shards of glass. Their windows break. In their bedroom and their beds, it is covered with glass. Barbara, the mother instinctively pulls the donner over her little baby two year old daughter toddler, and then she rolls her body over her toddler to protect her. That is her
memory of it. I rang Barbara last week and she told me, and I spoke to her ex husband Graham today, and I have been in touch with Ilsa, who was then two years old and can't really remember it, but they paint a picture of a very frightening thing, Graham said.
He said, I was totally dazed.
He said, I stuck my head out the broken window and said, God, we've been bombed. And he said, as I said it, the guy over the road was walking across the road. It was Percy Jones, who of course was the great Carlton premiership ruckman, who at that stage in seventy eight was a veteran ruckman still playing. I think his third and final premiership was the following year in seventy nine, giant man nearly two meters tall, looked
like a wilde beast. Good bloke, a local publican had a pub around Carlton knew his way around with police and everything. And Percy was instantly out in the street and he's walking across the road and Graham calls out to him, Oh my god, we've been bombed, and Percy says to him, no, you haven't. Have a look next door. And Graham turned his head to Shirley and Joey's place and saw that it was the one that had been bombed, and it was really badly damaged. Branches have been torn
off the trees. There was iron from corrugated iron have been thrown from the verandah across the road and onto the road. Brickwork had been shattered and blown in all different directions. The garden fence, everything was knocked about. It was a real mess and it was quite horrifying. So of course lights and sirens turned up the fibergate or whatever. Everybody's huddled around the street wearing dressing gowns, saying, oh
my god, isn't it awful? And clearly this was part of this campaign of terror waged against Jerry and Shirley Hamilton, and it became clear to everyone. The media realized it, everyone realized what.
It was about.
The police would say, well, there's no evidence of that. Senior police would say, we will investigate this, just as we will investigate any criminal act like this. And of course it was investigated and they found no evidence of police collusion. Amazing really, and so on it went. You would think that after that sort of event that could have killed people, that they would ease up. Jerry and Shirley left Melbourne after that. Their house was essentially half
destroyed anyway. They went to a place called Warbra, which is twenty something kilometers outside Ballarat. It's a long way from Melbourne hour and a half maybe, and they got a farmhouse out and a property there to live in peacefully with their dogs and Da Da Da Shirley could play songs and practice them and they live a quiet life. They have a car, Joey had a car. It was a V eight Aranha. They go to Warboro and they're
living there and the police immediately know they're there. And we know this because there was in fact a policeman transferred from Russell Street to Ballarat. He and others went out to warbur to the new Hamilton farmhouse and broke in the back door and went through the place and checked it over. And this happened a couple of times.
Amazing.
They would send out half a dozen police to go through the place. Half a dozen detectives and senior people they were inspectors and senior sergeants and sergeants would turn up and raid the farmhouse looking for evidence of criminality. Could they find drugs, could they find guns?
Whatever?
And when they couldn't find anything, they'd leave the joint a hell of a.
Mess, which is a very bad habit that police had.
In those days. We know this is true because one of them dropped his police diary in the driveway, and we've got his name here. It's all or been recorded, and that man's diary was left in their driveway and that showed that he at least had been there with others. One day, joe and Shelley have to come to Melbourne for a birthday or some family function. They went down a friend's car. A friend picked them up because there's something wrong with Joey's car, but always had flat tires
because the police would put nails for them. That was one problem. They'd ordered a local garage guy to bring out two tires for the car. Meanwhile, they get a ride with a friend to Melbourne to this birthday. When they get back next day, they stay in Mold and they get back next day the house has been burnt down and their car has been burnt to the ground. The police, it was without doubt the police had come out and rogue police. Of course, they've basically fire bombed
the house using an accelerant. It was clear to the forensic people that went there that an accelerant had been used, that petrol or kerosene or something, and the place was burnt to the ground. And it was quite a nice house. I've seen the photographs of the way it was and just the twisted mess of the way it is now, exactly like the photos we're seeing from Los Angeles. It was like that a fire bomb. That's what happens when
you use petrol or an accelerant. It goes up in the way that that fire recently killed the twenty seven year old woman in the Western Suburbs. When an arsonist used an accelerant on a house, it can and does kill people. It is interesting to wonder about that did they think Joey and Shirley were in the house because the car was there. The car was there, so it looked as if they were home, when in fact they weren't. That is a very interesting question. They were certainly home
when the bomb went off in Station Street, Carlton. They might have thought they were home when the fire bombing happened at Ballarat. We'll never know for sure. They were the two big things that happened. But they were pushed and pushed and pushed at every turn. They were harassed and finally they were fitted up with a package of marijuana and I think a gun as well.
They were loaded up, as the.
Saying went in the police force, with marijuana and a gun and clearly just planted by the police. He used to carry marijuana, heroin and guns in order to do this to lock up crooks. And they did it to Joey and Shirley at Seaford. I think they'd been down at Seafford, maybe Shirley was singing there working there, and that's where they're arrested. They took them back to somewhere they were staying, and amazingly the police found more incriminating evidence and they were charged.
Joey particularly was charged.
With being a felon with an illegal weapon and possession of illegal drugs and he was due to go to court fees or they were due to go to court. Poor Debbie, this is Debbie being the young ish she was in her twenties by now daughter of Shirley. She put up two and a half thousand dollars bail money. Now that was a lot of money at a time when it was about six months pay for somebody who wasn't very well paid.
It was half a year's wages.
From ordinary low base rate bank teller, that sort of money. It was quite quite a lot of money. Two and a half thousand bucks pulled Debbie put up, only to find out within a matter of days that her mother and her mother's husband had gone on the run. They were now Bonnie and Clyde, and they went on the run and they hid up around I'm going to say
near the headwaters of the Murray River, Tom Grogan. They must have got onto somebody who had a holiday house or a farmhouse and they hid and their whereabouts was known to key journalists around the place because they were in touch with those sort of people. And Ian Gillespie, who was an investigative reporter at that time, who he knew the Premier, he knew police in, knew Barry Beach,
and he knew Joey Hamilton. He was a good reporter who knew a lot of people, and he cultivated people, and he had a lot of friends on both sides of the fence. Gillespie worked out where they were and was able to send an intermediary and they sent a camera up there and Joey and Shirley basically shot an interview of themselves talking to camera about their plight, how they had to go on a run to get away from these false accusations and from harassment, etc.
Etc.
And so their case became a bit of a cause celeb It was clear to most people, or to many people, that they were the victims of a campaign. Some people probably thought, well, they deserve it.
You know, they're left. He's there against the Vietnam War. We hade them, he's a crook.
Blah blah blah. And you know, there's a grain of truth in that as well. But it was a very bad thing and increasingly embarrassing for the government. Long story, short, deals are done. The government and the pross cuts, and everybody realized that it's not a great look to be locking people up on such clearly fabricated evidence. Joey has already been let out of Pentridge when it's been found to be a fabricated case, and so he didn't go
back in for any length of time. The jury and Shirley Hamilton story went on because there was a change of government in Victoria to the Cain Labor government in I'm thinking nineteen eighty two. And John Cain was a very decent and honest man, as had his predecessor, decaym had been that as well, but John Cain was of the highest probity, and I think it worried John Cain that the police and others had connived to do such cynical and terrible things to people, and Joey and others,
and a secret agreement was made. Joey Hamilton sued for wrongful imprisonment. Interestingly, a man who was locked up for one night in Victoria at that time wrongly. He shouldn't have been locked up. It was complete balls up. He was an innocent person. He was given two thousand dollars compensation for one night in the cells. Now if you worked out a pro rata two thousand dollars. Newspapers editorialized about this.
They said, this is a.
Big problem for the government. Joe Blocks gets two thousand dollars for one night in the cells, and rightly so if you multiply that by three and a half years for Joey Hamilton, it's worth nearly two million.
Bucks or something. It was a lot.
So Joey Hamilton demands a lot of money, one point something million. And in the end the Cane government made a secret deal. I haggled it down. He didn't get a full on pardon, he didn't get a public apology, but what he got was an ex grasher payment of about twenty six thousand bucks, which it's not much compared to the million bucks, but it was a couple of years salary. At that time, it was a significant amount.
You could buy a very cheap.
House around Melbourne in those days, in the inner suburbs, the lesser inner suburbs in that era, around Maidstone Footscray, those places, you could have bought a house for twenty six grand. It wasn't nothing. And this became a cause celeb because it was given huge publicity. You know, ex Krim gets twenty six thousand in secret payment. Honest John Kain embarrassed by secret deal. Poor old John Kain, who had just been trying to do the right thing and
I think sort of keep everybody a bit happy. He didn't want to make an enemy of the police force, because no government wants to, but he also wanted to do the right thing to some extent by and a woman who had been greatly wronged. And it didn't please anybody. In the end, Joey Hamilton did not get the amount of money.
That he thought he deserved.
The police force were outraged at this pandering to you know, the left and the criminal classes. The right wing of politics agreed with the police, of course, and on it went, and so it became an embarrassing episode for the Kane government, which faded into insignificance over time, as there were a lot of other problems for that government over the following years, big financial problems. That is probably the short version of
the Ballad of Joey and Shirley Hamilton. I have to say that their neighbor, Graham, the teacher who played guitar, told me today that he used to sit in the backyard his backyard, which was just a few feet from their backyard, and play Dylan songs. He was pretty good at it, sing Girl from the North Country and whatever. And Joey was a Dylan fan. He loved Dylan songs.
And he said, sometimes Joey would throw a little bag over the fence with a little bit of dope in it, a joint, and so can you play me another Dylan song? And so Graham would play another Dylan song. And in fact, after the bombing, Graham wrote a song, he wrote literally the song called the Ballad of Shirley and Joey, and he played it to them and they were very touched.
PostScript to the story is that Joey and Shirley, a contrary to what you might think, fifteen years apart, him a crook, so on and so on, they stayed together more or less the rest of their lives. I think they had their ups and downs and little dramas as
you might expect. They're both probably a bit volatile. But when Shirley Jacobs died in November twenty fifteen, not that many years ago, nine years ago, really, she was a very old woman dying in a nursing home in the Inner North and who would turn up every day to visit her and hold her hand and talk to her. But a skinny, little old former crook called Joey Hamilton
her ever loving husband. And that is the end of the story of Joey and Shirley, A sort of a rough and ready love story with bullets and bombs attached. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald's Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to harold'sun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to newspot casts sold at news dot
com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.