Fair Cop by Christine Nixon

Author:Christine Nixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522860283
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

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It must have been about this time that I again paid a visit to the Police Association headquarters, arriving on my own, as we were working through the final stages of the 2008 enterprise-bargaining process. The time and date for the meeting had been agreed, but there was no sign of Mullett or the executive when I arrived. They were locked in some backroom in their own talks.

I got my usual greeting at the front desk. ‘Who are you?’ I looked at her. Oh, please. ‘Just let me in.’ The receptionist, a little unnerved, told me she didn’t know where everyone was, and she was on her way home, so perhaps I should come back later. I told her that I had an appointment and besides, she could probably trust me, couldn’t she? I swept through to the executive conference room, made myself a cup of tea, and sat down and waited. When Mullett and company finally stumbled upon me they looked rather taken aback. ‘How’d you find the tea and biscuits?’ asked one of the detectives, suspiciously. ‘I went looking through all the cupboards, didn’t I?’ I said, smiling broadly. They didn’t seem to enjoy the moment nearly as much as I did. Still, over the next few days we finished off our negotiations in an amicable manner and I took a proposal to the government to get signed.

Not long after the election another ‘Kit Walker’ email had appeared in the police computer system, again attacking and defaming Janet Mitchell, and now I asked our Ethical Standards detectives to investigate misuse of the Victoria Police email system. They pretty quickly got a sense of who the culprit was, but initially thought they would never prove it because they thought it was impossible to trace his cyber trail. I took advantage of a dinner party to quiz the husband of a friend—a computer whiz—on this, laying out a hypothetical scenario. He assured me that there was a way to track the emails, so I had him come and talk to our people, and track them we did.

The result was that we found the emails had been sent from an internet cafe in Fitzroy. We went to the cafe, which was run by a less than cooperative individual. He was shown a photograph of the man we suspected was ‘Kit Walker’—serving detective, Mullett loyalist and Police Association delegate Peter Lalor. The cafe owner recognised Lalor and showed detectives to the computer he’d used. It didn’t take long for the computer specialists to get the evidence they needed.

On 1 May 2007 a couple of ESD detectives headed to Malvern police station to interview Peter Lalor about his relationship to ‘Kit Walker’ but, as a later OPI report would reveal, a lively series of events followed. Someone tipped the detective off while the investigators were en route, and shortly before his shift was to start he called in to claim carer’s leave.11 What with one thing and another, he still hadn’t

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