Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ Newlan returned to his St Kilda Road office of the Homicide Squad to begin his paperwork – it would eventually fill several large folders. He worked through the night and at 7am received a telephone call from a friend of his who worked at the Prahran CIB, Sergeant Mick Hughes.

      Hughes asked Newlan about the Rye case, which he’d heard about on the radio news on his way to work, and wondered if the body might be that of a missing person on his files. Jimmy Pinakos had been missing since April, and if the torso was his, it meant three months had elapsed since he disappeared.

      Newlan told his friend that the torso at Rye didn’t look decomposed enough to be three months old. Hughes told him to keep it in mind, nonetheless. Newlan drove back to Rye.

      After catching a few hours’ sleep, Sergeant Brian Gamble too returned to the Rye back beach to organise the sifting of sand around the burial site for evidence, and to complete diagrams and reports for the police and forensic files.

      Homicide detectives had organised a line search of the beach and the surrounding scrub at first light.

      Ironically, despite the number of police searching the dunes along the foreshore, it was another dog, sniffing and digging in an area of bushland near the beach that led police to the second grave site.

      The familiar foul odour told searchers that they had found more of the body, and the process of photographing, digging and sifting began again. Another wrapped parcel was soon unearthed.

      Mark Newlan spent his morning flying around the crime scene in the Southern Peninsula rescue helicopter so he and other officers could survey and photograph the crime scene from the air. The helicopter landed as soon as news was radioed through that another parcel had been found.

      Contained in the new find were two severed hands, two feet, and some other pieces. Wrapped separately in a Safeway supermarket bag, was the head.

      In addition to the body parts, police officers found a grey tie with blue stripes, a white and blue pin-striped shirt and a pair of underpants.

      Newlan was given the unenviable task of flying back to Melbourne by helicopter clutching the re-wrapped body parts. They landed at the Yarra heliport and Newlan was picked up by police car and taken, with his parcel, to the city morgue.

      Laying the parts on the slab, Dr Robinson completed a macabre human jigsaw puzzle. The head, the hands and feet had been cleanly severed. Other pieces were identified as portions of arms and legs.

      When she examined the head, Dr Robinson noted the marked distortion of the facial features, but no apparent damage to the brain. The head was then sent to the Royal Dental Hospital in Melbourne for a forensic odontology examination – the teeth would be examined for later comparison with charts belonging to missing persons fitting the general description of the unidentified male.

      Dr Robinson later concluded in her report:

      1 Identification of the deceased was based on forensic odonatological examination of the head. The head was found separately packaged and situated from the torso, however there is no evidence to suggest that they are not from the same body, although the former was in a more advanced state of decomposition.

      2 Decomposition changes obscured some pathological changes, however it is likely that the penetrating injury to the chest (involving the heart) by the arrow was the cause of death.

      3 It is also likely that the decapitation and dismembering of the body took place after death, with a sharp instrument such as a band saw, however the exact time or course of events cannot be established on the basis of the pathological findings.

      With the second find which included the hands, Senior Sergeant Jim Falloon from the Fingerprint Branch was called to the mortuary. After gaining clearance from State Coroner Hal Hallenstein, Falloon put the putrid pair of hands into a bucket and took them to the Fingerprint Branch offices so the fingertip skin could be removed and printed.

      At his office, Falloon gently removed the skin from the fingertips and placed the ridged skin over his own fingertips and carefully rolled them in the ink and onto a fingerprint card.

      Unfortunately for everyone working in the 19-storey St Kilda Road building, the smell entered the air conditioning system and wafted through the whole building. As a direct consequence, severed hands and fingers were henceforth banned from the fingerprint offices as a health risk.

      Identification from fingerprint comparison and dental records showed the deceased to be Dimitrios Pinakos – known to his friends as Jimmy.

      Mark Newlan was able to tell Mick Hughes that his hunch was correct. Pinakos, an insurance agent, had been missing since 20 April but, with the discovery of his body, the web of intrigue surrounding his disappearance began to unravel.

      Dimitrios Pinakos was born in Greece in 1958 and immigrated to Australia with his family when he was still an infant. He anglicised his name to Jimmy, left school when he was 18 years old, and worked for a time as an electrician. He eventually bought his own small business.

      Jimmy Pinakos began selling insurance in 1987, and it wasn’t long before he created his own corporate agency, Limnos Insurance, operating under the umbrella of the Melbourne Mutual Group.

      It was in the offices of the Melbourne Mutual Group in St Kilda Road, that Jimmy Pinakos met the man who would fire a crossbow arrow into his chest, carve his body into small pieces and bury him in the sands of the Rye back beach.

      Ronald Lucas began working in the same St Kilda Road building in January 1989 with another corporate agency, also operating within the Melbourne Mutual Group.

      Although Ron Lucas did not share office space with Jimmy Pinakos, many people would later tell police that the two knew each other well and had held private meetings in the week before Pinakos went missing.

      Ronald Lucas was deeply in debt. He had a habit of borrowing money – to buy cars, a house, a swimming pool, among other things – and making only a few payments before abandoning his financial responsibilities.

      Lucas was being pressed for money from a number of sources, particularly from his wife who had set up house in Perth. Lucas had joined her there for a couple of weeks and then moved back to Melbourne. He had instructed her to have a swimming pool put in the backyard with promises to deposit money into her bank account. The money never arrived.

      Lucas owed Westpac Bank over $2,000, Diners Club $16,151, Statewide Building Society $80,000 for the mortgage on his Perth home (no payments had ever been made), $5,209 on an unpaid MasterCard debt, and $2,350 on a loan by Lucas and his wife that was still outstanding. He also owed American Express $1,462, and had recently borrowed $47,326 to buy a four-wheel-drive vehicle. True to habit he had only made one payment on the luxury vehicle.

      In addition to his debts, Ron Lucas had a penchant for crossbows.

      On Tuesday 18 April 1989, colleague Harry Triferis went to Jimmy Pinakos’ office to collect his friend Ron Lucas to drive him home. In the office, Pinakos told Triferis and Lucas of a $60,000 development loan he had access to in a trust account. Access could only be gained if it were used for a mortgage.

      Triferis would later say that he had come in on the end of the conversation and that Jimmy and Ron had been discussing the money before he had entered the office.

      Jimmy Pinakos did not know that discussing being in possession of large sums of money to a man heavily in debt could be a fatal mistake. Pinakos also had no idea of the conversation that СКАЧАТЬ