Police overlooked “compelling evidence” of homophobia in the brutal 1989 Sydney murder of John Gordon Hughes, the New South Wales special commission of inquiry into LGBTQ+ hate crimes has heard.
In an inquiry described as a world first, this week’s hearings focus on seven deaths previously reviewed by NSW police’s strike force Parrabell in 2018.
Hughes, 45, was discovered dead in his Potts Point unit in May 1989. He’d been strangled, bashed and left gagged and bound on a bed. A suspect living in Bathurst at the time – Hughes’ former flatmate Ian Jones – was charged with his murder but later acquitted at a 1992 trial.
Kathleen Heath, counsel assisting commissioner Justice John Sackar, on Tuesday told the inquiry that Hughes was a gay man and low-level drug dealer whose sexual orientation was known to his friends and acquaintances, including Jones.
Initial police reports suggested the motive for the killing was likely robbery, and the Parrabell review found insufficient evidence of any bias crime.
But Heath challenged that conclusion and submitted that a “mosaic of motives” in the case material showed “compelling evidence of LGBTIQ bias”.
These included witness statements in which Jones, now deceased, was quoted referring to the victim as a “faggot”. He’d previously told police Hughes’s flat was frequented by “poofters”, which led Jones to move out.
“It can be hypothesised that Mr Hughes’ status as a gay person made Mr Jones perceive him as a target that would be less protected by police and by the courts,” Heath told the inquiry. She submitted that the finding on Hughes be open.
The inquiry also heard submissions about the 1989 deaths of 36-year-old Graham Paynter at Tathra on the NSW south coast, and 33-year-old Russell Payne at Inverell in the NSW New England region.
Paynter’s body was found on Shelley Beach at the foot of a 50-metre cliff below a staircase to the Tathra headland, jeans around his ankles and jumper over his head.
The case was categorised by strike force Parrabell as having insufficient information to identify any bias crime.
Heath told the inquiry of difficulties in accessing police reports for Paynter. Only a “very limited selection of documents was produced,” she said.
Payne’s body was found in his Inverell unit with the broken end of a television aerial inserted into his penis, his death the result of septicemia. Parrabell did not review the case as a potential homicide.
A lack of archived evidence of prescription drugs and pornography noted by police at Payne’s flat did not allow the current inquiry to shed more light on the victim’s life, Heath told the inquiry.
Reviews of autopsy reports for Paynter and Payne, recently conducted by forensic pathologist Dr Linda Iles, were presented to Sackar.
While Iles reported some concerns with the quality of Paynter’s postmortem examination, she found that his injuries were consistent with the impact of a fall.
With no evidence of suicide, or that Paynter was LGBTQ+, Heath presented proof of his high blood alcohol level, the fact that the staircase at that time had no barrier and the time of his death around midnight.
She said the possibility of the Tathra headland having an outdoor gay beat – a place where same sex-attracted men gather for sexual and other contact – was investigated. The submission of Les Peterkin, a rural-based gay man who fronted the inquiry in November, noted that outdoor beats are common in regional areas.
But no evidence of a beat was found at the place where Paynter’s body was found, Heath said.
Payne’s former brother-in-law Terry Forster submitted a statement that Payne privately came out as gay about a year prior to his death.
Iles submitted that the primary cause of Payne’s death was Fournier’s gangrene, a life-threatening bacterial infection of the perineum.
Her reports on Paynter and Payne should be recommended to the NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages in order for death certificates to be corrected, Heath submitted.
In Paynter’s case, it was recommended his cause of death be recorded as “multiple injuries sustained in a fall from a height in the setting of alcohol intoxication”. In Payne’s case, cause of death was recommended to be recorded as “septicaemia secondary to Fournier’s gangrene, precipitated by a urethral foreign body”.
The inquiry continues this week with reviews on the deaths of William Dutfield, David Lloyd-Williams, Andrew Currie and Brian Walker.
Sackar is due to report by the end of June.
