Australasian Biker News
Couple's murders tied to bikie death
May 25, 2008
Despite two inquests during which 20 suspects were identified, no one
has been charged with the slayings.
Anthony Perish and his wife Frances.
Anthony Perish and his wife Frances.
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IT IS the murder investigation that has baffled and frustrated police
for 15 years.
Anthony Perish, 91, and his wife Frances, 93, were gunned down outside
their Leppington farmhouse on Sydney's southern outskirts in June 1993.
The Yugoslav migrants had became market gardeners and built a successful
poultry farm.
Police believe their bodies were dragged inside their home and laid out
on their beds. A trail of tissue paper and flammable liquid was strewn
through the house along with a crude timing device that failed to go
off.
Despite two inquests during which 20 suspects were identified, no one
has been charged with the slayings.
However, detectives working with the coroner's office and the NSW Crime
Commission in the past 18 months have been investigating the case in
connection with the 2001 killings of barman Ian Draper and convicted
drug dealer Terry Falconer.
Mr Draper, 37, was last seen leaving work at the Mount Pritchard and
District Community Club in the early hours of August 3 that year.
His Ford Fairmont turned up six weeks later at Bringelly but he was
never seen again.
Four months after the disappearance, Falconer was on day release from
Silverwater prison and employed at a smash repair shop in Ingleburn when
he was abducted by three men posing as police officers.
Within days his crudely dismembered remains began surfacing in the
Hastings River near Wauchope on the NSW mid-North Coast.
The first parcel, wrapped in wire mesh and weighted with rocks, was
discovered by a fisherman. During the following week police dragged five
more bags from the water and a seventh and final was retrieved almost a
year later, in September 2002.
Falconer, 52, had been serving five-and-a-half years for his role in
manufacturing a large quantity of speed. He was also known to be a
one-time associate of the Gypsy Jokers bikie gang.
At the second Perish inquest, in 2003, his name was put forward as a
person of interest by Andrew Perish, a grandson of the murdered couple.
It is not known whether the claim was given much credence as Andrew
Perish was also named as a suspect in his grandparents' deaths and
identified as a former member of the rival Rebel bikies.
But what is now known is that just days before his violent end, Falconer
was visited for a second time in jail by detectives investigating the
Perish murders.
According to a homicide squad source close to the inquiry: "Whether or
not Terry was involved or simply knew something, who knows?
"But he was definitely going to be called to the inquest when he was
killed, so you can draw your own conclusions."
The chief detective on the Falconer case, then sergeant, Gary Jubelin,
told The Sun-Herald in 2003 that the former tow-truck operator's
"knowledge of criminal activities" had been a key factor in his demise.
Yet investigators are understood more recently to have pursued the
theory that he committed the Perish killings and was murdered in
retribution by people unknown.
The Crime Commission set up Operation Oaklands in 2006 to investigate
further the three murders. Commission assistant director Mark Standen
told The Sun-Herald that Mr Draper's "suspected death" had been included
in the reference when it was learnt he had witnessed a fatal hotel
bashing for which Andrew Perish had been charged but acquitted.