Стрельба на Уолш-стрит: убийство полицейских в Мельбурне (1988)

1988 murders of two police officers in Melbourne, Australia

The Walsh Street police shootings were the 1988 murders of two Victoria Police officers: Constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20. Tynan and Eyre were responding to a report of an abandoned car when they were gunned down about 4:50am in Walsh Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, on 12 October 1988. Four men, Victor Peirce, Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Leigh Farrell and Peter David McEvoy, were charged with murder and later acquitted by a jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria. Two other suspects, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, were shot and killed by Victoria Police before being brought to trial. During 2005, Wendy Peirce, widow of Victor, gave an interview to the mass media. In this interview, she stated that her late husband had planned and carried out the murders and that he was actually guilty as charged.

Since the 1878 attack on three police officers by the Ned Kelly Gang, criminal attacks on police officers were considered as rare events in Victoria. During the period of the 1980s, prior to the Walsh Street killings, there had been a number of random acts of violence committed against members of the Victoria Police. At 1:35am, Kearon and Fletcher stopped a blue and white 1966 Holden with a missing headlight, as the vehicle pulled alongside the officers' divisional van, the driver got out and fired three shots at Kearon and Fletcher with a .223 Leader carbine semiautomatic assault rifle. Thinking it was a burglar, Sergeant Stooke and Constable Steele followed the vehicle and pulled it over and begun to conduct an inspection of the vehicle. A check revealed that the vehicle was registered to a man named Max Clark. As the officers were conducting the inspection, the driver got out of the vehicle and produced a firearm and had shot both officers, wounding them. This period of the 1980s saw a high number of armed robberies being committed throughout Melbourne to a point where they had become a problem for police forces across Australia.

On 12 October, 13 hours after Jensen's death, at 4:39am, Constables Tynan and Eyre were operating a divisional van from Prahran police station when called to an abandoned Holden Commodore left in Walsh Street, South Yarra. At the time of the murders, the call about the abandoned car would usually been answered by police units from St Kilda Road police station, but at the time of the murders, St Kilda Road police station had a shortage of officers on duty and were unable to send a divisional van.

The police investigation was known as the Ty Eyre Task Force, a combination of the two surnames of the officers killed. Detective Inspector John Noonan was the Officer in Charge and it was the biggest investigation Victoria Police had ever undertaken at the time and also the longest running, spanning 895 days. At the height of the investigation, police had hundreds of officers working with the task force to investigate the murders.

Police investigations revealed the shotgun used to perform the murders was the same weapon used earlier in a bungled attempt to blast open a bank door during a robbery at the State Bank in Oak Park seven months earlier. A gang, dubbed the Flemington Crew by police, had robbed at least four Melbourne banks. The robbers, on security CCTV at the Oak Park robbery, had left shotgun shells at the scene. Seven months into the investigation, the shotgun itself was found half buried in an inner city golf course plant bed by a gardener. The shotgun and shells became the single forensic link police had, linking the Oak Park robbery to the same shotgun used in the Walsh Street murders. The case was also covered by Casefile True Crime Podcast on 29 July 2017.