AUSTRALIAN TRUE CRIME

The Killings called “Walsh Street” arose when police and armed robbers went to war. Both sides, convinced the others started the war, Were righteous in the letting of blood. The packs held sway and the deeds left many casualties, some celebrated but others unrecorded and a bitter legacy. Players were driven but the strongest emotions, sweeping others up in the cruel storm they had created. The criminal justice systems contribution was a fistful of not guilty verdicts.

A Pack of Bloody Animals tells the story of that war. It re-examines the evidence, much of it in the players’ own voices or in previously unpublished interviews with the accused shooters made soon after their acquittal. This big story raised the toughest law-and-order questions of the decade, spills over state borders, provoked grassroots citizen action, and occupied those in the corridors of power, media and the law. Yet the questions, not resolved then, still echo.

“The verdict of the Walsh Street trial was all four not guilty. All units are warned. Keep yourselves under control” – Radio newsflash message to all State police.

• 319 p. : map. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-315) and index. #151124
• Police murders — Victoria
• Murder — Victoria
• Crime — Victoria — History
• Australian
• The Walsh Street police shootings were the 1988 murders of two Victoria Police officers: Constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20.

  Tynan and Eyre were responding to a report of an abandoned car when they were gunned down about 4:50am in Walsh Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, on 12 October 1988.^[1]

  Four men, Victor Peirce, Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Leigh Farrell and Peter David McEvoy, were charged with murder and later acquitted by a jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria. Two other suspects, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, were shot and killed by Victoria Police before being brought to trial.^[2]

  In 2005, Wendy Peirce, the widow of Victor, gave an interview to the mass media. In this interview, she stated that her late husband had planned and carried out the murders and that he was actually guilty as charged.^[3]