Top: Bernie Balmer and Arthur Taylor; above: Detective Snr Sgt Dave Yeoman; above right: Detective Snr Sgt Gary Ayres; right: Carl Donadio. Colour images Greg Noakes Photography; black and white image Victoria Police.
“I put my hand down to grab my right leg and my whole hand went onto the bone, but I couldn’t feel any pain.”
Shrapnel from the bomb punctured his lung and split a kidney, but the shock of the blast had numbed his senses. “I went to stand up and get away, thinking there might be a second explosion,” he says. “That’s when I put my hand down to grab my right leg and my whole hand went onto the bone, but I couldn’t feel any pain. I just couldn’t walk.” Still rattled by the blast, Yeoman was recruited on the spot to help contain the scene and restrain the growing crowd. “I ended up down as far as Swanston St and La Trobe,” he says. “I didn’t know about Ange for at least an hour.” Ayres had run from the Police Club and into the cloud of carnage and confusion. As the smoke cleared, his mind turned to the investigation that would soon follow. “Our biggest problem was we didn’t know who had done it,” he remembers. “Was it a crazy? Was it a terrorist? Was it a criminal act?” Within hours, Taskforce Russell was established and an official investigation launched. OCTOBER 2016 POLICE JOURNAL
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Clues and debris had been blown hundreds of metres from the blast site, but the charred wreck of the stolen Holden Commodore had retained a vital clue that would set police on the path to the Russell St bombers. Distinctive drill marks in the car’s chassis – used to remove the VIN number – were identical to that of a stolen car used in an armed robbery on a Donvale bank weeks earlier. That vehicle had been connected to Peter Reed, a car thief and armed robber. Coincidentally, on the morning of the Russell St bombing, Reed had been under surveillance over previous armed robberies, but managed to slip past officers, possibly in the bomb car which, to that point, had no relevance to police. Three weeks after the bombing, as police were preparing to arrest Reed, Angela Taylor died in hospital from her injuries. Inspector Bernie Rankin, the operations manager on the taskforce, recalls that, five days later, on Anzac Day, gunfire rang out in Kallista, as police raided Reed’s home. “It wasn’t until we raided Reid’s home at 22 Alpine Crescent, Kallista,” Insp Rankin says, “when he shot one of the detectives (Mark Wylie), that we then realized there was more to this than simply being the provider of the stolen car. “In fact we found gelignite, detonators and firearms in his house.” The sticks of gelignite had been wrapped in a copy of the Albury Border Mail. The paper had the fingerprints of petty criminal Rodney Minogue on it, and a partial fingerprint of his brother, Craig, an armed robber and thug. Simultaneous raids were carried out on Reed’s brother’s house in Boronia, where clothing from the owner of the stolen bomb car was found, and a house at 12 Harris Avenue, Nunawading, where Reed was spotted by the surveillance team on the morning of the bombing. It soon emerged that the Minogue brothers, low-level crooks with evil ambition, had been living at the Nunawading address. “These guys weren’t regarded as being heavy criminals,” Rankin recalls. “At that stage we knew very little about the Minogues.” Karl Zelinka, a man who, with no criminal history, had been living at the Nunawading house, initially denied knowing the trio but eventually folded under the heat of interrogation and traded information for police protection.