Reasonable Doubt by Wayne Howell

Author:Wayne Howell [Howell, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: homicide, Andrew Veniamin, murder, Bernie Brown, Giovanna Persico, Australian true crime, Warren MacDonald, Claire Margaret MacDonald, David Hookes, bizarre deaths, Mick Gatto, Peter Richard Barnwell, Breatharians, Nicola Spina, Maria Spina, Lani Morris, Luke O’Keefe, strange deaths, Zdravko Micevic, Benji Veniamin
Publisher: Five Mile Press
Published: 2011-12-04T13:00:00+00:00

JUST ANGER

After a day of watching footy and drinking beer, two young men bash a couple of older gay men in a city park. They chase them through the park and pounce when one of the gay men falls. They punch or kick his head, side and hips. When the man’s partner shouts: ‘Leave him alone,’ the attack stops long enough for the man to scramble to his feet and flee to safety. His partner is not so lucky. Pins in his arms and legs – a legacy of falling off a roof eight years earlier – means that he runs like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz and the two fit, sports-loving younger men easily catch him. Then, according to a woman who happens to be watching from the seventh-floor hospital room where her cancer-stricken husband lies dying, the younger men punch ‘the crap’ out of the older man. He slumps unconscious on the road, and dies 11 days later without regaining consciousness.

The fatal bashing of 45-year-old Keith Hibbins just after 7pm on 25 April 1999 seemed to be a particularly gruesome and tragic case of a gay-bashing – but it wasn’t. The excuse 27-year-old John Edward Whiteside and 23-year-old Kristian Peter Dieber offered made it a far more bizarre and much trickier proposition for the justice system.

Whiteside and Dieber admitted bashing Keith Hibbins and his partner of 15 years, David Campbell, but insisted they had not done so because they were gay but because they thought they had just raped a woman. They said they had not meant to kill or even seriously injure Mr Hibbins. They had only hit him because he was trying to escape their citizen’s arrest, because they wear justifiably angry.

• • •

Like tens of thousands of footy fans on 25 April 1999, Whiteside and Dieber went to the big Anzac Day clash between the Essendon Bombers and the Collingwood Magpies at the MCG. Friends of friends, they met at the game by chance. A friend drove Whiteside to the game. Whiteside had woken up late after spending much of the night watching World Cup cricket on the television. Dieber and a group of friends took a train to the game.

Afterwards, Whiteside’s friend offers to drive him home but he decides to have a few more drinks at the nearby MCG Hotel and take the train with Dieber and co. About 7pm, they start walking along Wellington Parade towards the city to have a few more drinks at the famous Young and Jackson’s pub before catching a train to their outer-suburban homes – Whiteside to Stoda Street, Heathmont, and Dieber to Appleby Place, North Ringwood. They walk past the Fitzroy Gardens – home to Captain Cook’s Cottage, a model Tudor village, a conservatory, picturesque ponds, a ‘Fairy Tree’, a couple of fountains, Victorian-style rotundas and lots of brushtail possums. They cross Lansdowne Street and walk on the border of Treasury Gardens, home to a pond memorial to the assassinated US president John F Kennedy.

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