By John Dale
- Rogerson's notorious career in and out of the law
- The story behind the story of Rogerson and McNamara
- Crooks, cops and whistleblowers
When Sallie-Anne Huckstepp received a phone call from convicted drug dealer Warren Richards, an associate of Arthur "Neddy" Smith and Roger Caleb Rogerson, she left her apartment in a hurry, telling her flatmate she would be back in five to 10 minutes.
That was at 10.55pm on on February 6, 1986.
At 8.45am the next day, a jogger ran into the ranger's office behind the kiosk in Sydney's Centennial Park and said he'd seen a body floating in Busby's Pond. Escorted by two uniformed constables, the ranger rowed out into middle of the pond, towed in the body of a female and hauled her, face down, onto the sandy bank. When detectives waiting on the bank rolled her over one of them said: "That's Huckstepp!"
Five years earlier, Huckstepp had appeared on Channel Nine's 60 Minutes and accused Rogerson, then one of NSW's most decorated police officers, of shooting dead her lover, Warren Lanfranchi, in cold blood.
Sallie-Anne Huckstepp talks to the media after the death of her boyfriend Warren Lanfranchi.
Within hours of appearing on television, Huckstepp went into hiding. A contract was taken out on her life for revealing that a cabal of corrupt detectives led by Rogerson was running Sydney's drug trade and disposing of criminals who got in the way.
"Neddy" Smith was later secretly recorded in Long Bay Jail confessing to Huckstepp's murder, but he was acquitted by a jury. For many people, including the prosecutor at Smith's trial, Huckstepp was regarded as the most important police whistle-blower in NSW, but for the mainstream media she continued to be described as a "murdered heroin addict" and "former prostitute".
Those descriptors clung to her well after her death but in recent years there has been a growing recognition of the pivotal role she played in exposing widespread police corruption. A feature film on her life is now being produced by director Sean Kruck and producer Nash Edgerton.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Huckstepp was extremely saleable as far as the media were concerned. Here was this well-groomed, articulate and forthright young woman telling the world she would be killed for speaking out. And then she was.
Debra and Sallie-Anne Krivoshow, later to become Sallie-Anne Huckstepp.Credit: Jack Krivoshow
Her sister, Debra Krivoshow, recalls her earliest memories of her and Sallie-Anne growing up in the 1960s. Their parents, Pat and Jack Krivoshow, divorced when the two girls were less than five years old, their mother left and they were packed off to live with their strict Jewish grandmother in North Bondi. Uncle Ike, Aunt Rose, the grandmother, the girls and their father occupied one upstairs apartment with its two bedrooms and a sunroom.
Krivoshow, a keen photographer, drove cabs at night and enrolled his daughters at Moriah College. According to Debra, who is 20 months younger, Huckstepp was studious and always achieved high marks. "She was strong physically and mentally and never seemed to be frightened of anyone or anything," she says.
Sallie-Anne Huckstepp was found dead on February 7, 1986.
The happiest times, Debra, now 59, remembers were living in Bondi and going to the beach with their Aunt Rose.
A friend of their father's – and a producer at Channel 7 – took six-year-old Sallie-Anne and Debra along with her to work and they appeared on the Johnny O'Keefe Show.
Warren Lanfranchi, who was shot dead in Sydney's Chippendale in 1981.
After Warren's death, Sallie knew that she had a bounty on her head because she spoke out about Rogerson and his gang of criminals. She knew her time was limited.
Debra, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp's sister
As she grew older, Huckstepp was invited to model for Grace Bros and Farmer's catalogues but by then her father had remarried and bought a house in Dover Heights. When his new wife Estelle moved in, she perceived the strong-willed, older girl as a threat. Her stepmother cropped her hair, and took her own daughter to modelling jobs. Huckstepp claimed that her stepmother often struck her across the face with her gold-ringed hands; her stepmother admits to striking the child, but only on the legs and the backside.
Conditions between Huckstepp and her father grew so intolerable that he phoned the Children's Court requesting his daughter's removal from the family home.
When she was 14, Huckstepp was sent to the Minda Remand Centre in Lidcombe and after her release she found work as a waitress at Kings Cross club Whiskey A Go Go.
"My sister got caught up in the criminal system at a very early age," Debra says. "I think the drug abuse was just something that happened to a lot of people in the '70s, there was very little information about drugs at that time and cocaine and heroin were readily available and some people dabbled and for others, the habit became entrenched. I think this happened to my sister. It started as a guilty pleasure and turned into a life-long addiction."
To pay for her habit, Huckstepp began working as a prostitute on Darlinghurst Road and soon came into contact with Vice Squad and Drug Squad detectives to whom she made regular payments.
At the age of 20, Huckstepp was ordered by the courts to undertake treatment at the now notorious private hospital at Chelmsford, under psychiatrist Harry Bailey.
After Bailey's treatment Huckstepp nearly died, says Debra. "She was down to four and a half stones," Debra says. "She couldn't talk, she couldn't walk. They'd given her 14 shock treatments over 15 days."
When Debra flew in from New Zealand she found Huckstepp crawling around on her hands and knees.
"I took my sister and her daughter Sascha back to New Zealand and cared for her for months," says Debra. "She was addicted to Tuinal, a barbiturate they used in high doses to keep her unconscious while they inflicted electric shock treatment on 'the addiction centre' of her brain."
Debra believes that Sallie-Anne was never the same after Chelmsford.
One of the other addicts at Chelmsford at this time was Easybeats singer Stevie Wright. He and Huckstepp became close friends.
"My sister knew a lot of people from the music scene in the '70s and early '80s," Debra says. "There were a lot of drugs being used in the eastern suburbs in those days."
It was through a drugs contact that Huckstepp met the 22-year-old Lanfranchi, recently released from Long Bay and working as a heroin dealer and standover man.
Within two weeks they were living together. Within five months Lanfranchi was dead, shot at close range with a .38 special by Roger Rogerson in Dangar Place, Chippendale: one bullet entering below Lanfranchi's left ear and 14 seconds later a second bullet – the kill shot – entering through the right side of his chest, passing through his heart and right lung.
Two weeks after the shooting, Huckstepp gave a detailed account to Internal Affairs investigators at Police Headquarters of every payment she had made over 10 years to Vice Squad and Drug Squad detectives.
"After Warren's death," Debra says, "Sallie knew that she had a bounty on her head because she spoke out about Rogerson and his gang of criminals. She knew her time was limited."
During the 1981 Lanfranchi inquest, Huckstepp became a media celebrity. Each day of the hearing she was on radio and national television. Her photograph appeared on the front pages of major newspapers.
A coronial inquest found Rogerson shot Lanfranchi while trying to arrest him, but declined to find he acted in self-defence.
Meanwhile, the late Brian Johns, publisher at Penguin, gave her an advance to write her autobiography. She found work as a journalist at Penthouse and with the assistance of author Richard Neville, Huckstepp moved into artist Martin Sharp's house in Bellevue Hill.
"My sister had a very high regard for Martin Sharp," Debra says. "Sallie was fascinated by the other artists who lived there. She felt that she had found her tribe."
When she left "Wirian" she drifted back into drugs and the criminal milieu. She was struggling with her addiction at the time, as she was up until her death. "Being addicted to drugs didn't make Sallie less of a person," Debra says. "It just made her life more of a struggle."
When Huckstepp received that fateful phone call, late at night on February 6, 1986, she was living in Edgecliff. She was 31.
Thirty years on and no-one has been convicted of her murder, but the decision by a Supreme Court jury this week that Rogerson was guilty of murdering UTS student Jamie Gao completes the former detective sergeant's downfall and vindicates the stance that Huckstepp took in warning the public that Rogerson was a cold-blooded killer.
"If there is a lesson that Sallie-Anne would want young women today to take from her life, as short as it was," Debra says now, "is to speak out if you see injustice.
"I love my sister and I want people to realise how brave and strong she was."
John Dale is Professor of Writing at UTS. He is the author of Huckstepp: A Dangerous Life. His latest book is Detective Work.