Walsh Street police shootings


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, on 12 October 1988.
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.
During 2005, Wendy Peirce, 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.

Prior events

On 11 October 1988, Peirce's best friend, Graeme Jensen, was fatally shot by police in Narre Warren. Jensen had been under observation by the Victoria Police Armed Robbery Squad, who had planned to arrest him in connection with an armed robbery and murder. Police followed Jensen to a local store. Three cars containing eight detectives attempted to block Jensen in as he left the store; but one of the cars was delayed by passing traffic, allowing Jensen to drive through. Police later gave sworn evidence that they saw Jensen brandish a firearm. Police yelled at Jensen to stop, one detective yelled: "He's got a gun." Jensen was then shot dead. His car crashed into a roadside pole.

Report of an abandoned car

On 12 October, 13 hours after Jensen's death, at 4:39am, Constables Tynan and Eyre were operating a divisional van from Prahran police station when called to an abandoned Holden Commodore left in Walsh Street, South Yarra. While the officers were examining the vehicle, they were ambushed by armed offenders. Constable Tynan was cut down with a shotgun while sitting in the car, and Constable Eyre was seriously wounded. It is thought that Constable Eyre, despite having suffered serious wounds, struggled with the attacker until another person approached him from behind, managed to remove Eyre's service revolver from its holster and shot him in the head with it.
Police believed members of a Melbourne armed robbery gang had organised the murders. In the period up to April 1989 there had been an unusually high number of fatal shootings of suspects by police. The killings of the two police officers were viewed by many as a form of payback by members of the Melbourne underworld.

Ty-Eyre task force

The police investigation was known as the Ty-Eyre Task Force, a combination of the two surnames of the officers killed. It was headed by Inspector Dave Sprague and was the biggest investigation Victoria Police had ever undertaken at the time and also the longest running, spanning 895 days. At the height of the investigation, police had hundreds of officers working with the task force to investigate the murders.

The Flemington Crew

Police investigations revealed the shotgun used to perform the murders was the same weapon used earlier in a bungled attempt to blast open a bank door during a robbery at the State Bank in Oak Park seven months earlier. A gang, police dubbed The Flemington Crew, had robbed at least four Melbourne banks. The robbers, on security CCTV at the Oak Park robbery, had left shotgun shells at the scene. Seven months into the investigation, the shotgun itself was found half-buried in an inner-city golf course plant bed by a gardener. The shotgun and shells became the single forensic link police had, linking the Oak Park robbery to the same shotgun used in the Walsh Street murders. The shotgun and empty shotgun shell casings are on display at the Victoria Police Museum, Melbourne.

Pettingill family

Members of the gangs responsible for the robberies were believed to be Victor Peirce, Graeme Jensen, Jedd Houghton and Peter David McEvoy. The home of Victor Peirce was raided the day following the Walsh Street shootings. Peirce's house was later demolished and the backyard dug up in the search for evidence.

Trial

The trial of the four men accused, Victor Peirce, Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Leigh Farrell and Peter David McEvoy, began in March 1991. The prosecution alleged six people were involved in the planning of the shootings: the accused, Jason Ryan, and the late Jedd Houghton.

Prosecution

Jason Ryan became a prosecution witness in the trial and was offered immunity in exchange for his testimony. Police placed Ryan under the witness protection program and moved him to Mansfield on 24 October 1988 for questioning. His evidence changed a number of times up to the opening of the trial.
Ryan's evidence had implicated Gary Abdallah, Jedd Houghton, Anthony Leigh Farrell and Emmanuel Alexandris. Police were told the party of killers were Jedd Houghton, Peter David McEvoy, Anthony Leigh Farrell and his uncles Victor Peirce and Trevor Pettingill. Houghton was shot and killed during a police raid on the Big4 Ascot Holiday Park in Bendigo in November 1988. Abdallah was fatally wounded during his arrest on another matter in April 1989.
Victor Pierce's wife, Wendy Pierce, also became a prosecution witness and entered the witness protection program. She had previously maintained her husband was with her in a motel all night on the night of the murders; she retracted this alibi in preparation to testify against her husband. But, in a pre-trial hearing, she retracted her retraction and, as a hostile witness, did not appear at the trial.

Not guilty verdict

All four men charged with the murders were acquitted in the Supreme Court of Victoria.
Victor Peirce and Peter David McEvoy were taken back into custody on other charges, yelling "We'll be killed, we'll be killed". Peirce claimed after his acquittal that he was afraid of police retribution and issued a statement in which he professed his innocence and requested "to be left alone to work and prove to the community I am not as bad as police and the press has made me out to be".
Wendy Pierce was charged with perjury, convicted and sentenced to serve 9 months non-parole.

Timeline of relevant events

The Seven Network aired a documentary on the shootings in 2010 titled "Police Under Fire: The Walsh Street Killings". The Walsh Street shootings and the people responsible for them inspired the fictional 2010 feature film Animal Kingdom and the 2011 television docudrama Killing Time. They were also mentioned several times in the 2011 docudrama .
The Walsh Street shootings were a subject of the Screen Australia/Film Victoria documentary Trigger Point, aired by the ABC in 2014, which also documented questionable cases of shootings of criminals by police, and training programmes aimed at reducing such incidents. The case was also covered by Casefile True Crime Podcast on 29 July 2017.