He also agreed that it would be unusual to find hairs on the hands of a person who had jumped to their death. But Morgan agreed that,in his view,the most probable cause of Russell’s death was an accidental fall due to intoxication.

“Personally,I do still feel it was misadventure. But I understand it’s very subjective,and I understand if others see it differently,” Morgan said.

A mother’s pleas

Kay Warren penned a plea to NSW Police in July 1998. Her son Ross,a TV newsreader,had been reported missing in July 1989,aged 25. His friends found his car in Bondi near Marks Park,and his keys were located nearby on rocks near the water’s edge.

A police officer coordinating the investigation into Warren’s disappearance said within days that police were “of the opinion that the missing person has fallen into the ocean in some manner”. Warren’s suspected death was not reported to the coroner.

“As it is now 9 years since Ross disappeared,we feel it is time for a Coroners’ inquest to close the case,” Kay Warren wrote. She was seeking a death certificate rather than an inquest,the inquiry heard.

She received no reply. In April 2000 she wrote her sixth letter,this time to the NSW police commissioner. “It is eleven years this July since my son disappeared,” it began.

A fresh investigation

It was not until Stephen Page,then a detective sergeant,happened upon Warren’s letters that the investigative wheels started turning once again.

“He sent a report,I think first of all to Paddington[police],to try and get it investigated,” Morgan told the inquiry.

In June 2001,Page would be appointed commander of Operation Taradale,an investigation into the death of Russell,the disappearance and suspected death of Warren,and later the disappearance and suspected death of a third man,French national Gilles Mattaini,in the same area.

Mattaini – who,like Russell and Warren,was gay – was last seen on the Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk around Marks Park in September 1985. He was 27.

Two murder findings

The work of Taradale and Page,who left the force in 2004,would be praised by then deputy state coroner Jacqueline Milledge in 2005 as “thorough” and “impeccable”.

Milledge found Russell and Warren died after meeting with foul play. Mattaini had died,she found,and while his manner and cause of death was undetermined,there was a “strong possibility” he died in similar circumstances to Russell and Warren.

Milledge said threats to throw victims off the cliff face “was a modus operandi of some gay hate assailants” around Marks Park at the time of the men’s disappearances and death,and this “strongly supports the probability” all three men died in this way.

A reinvestigation

Despite Milledge’s findings,NSW Police set up the secretive Strike Force Neiwand in 2015 to reinvestigate the three Bondi cases,the inquiry heard. In 2017,Neiwandeffectively reversed the coroner’s findings without speaking to dozens of persons of interest.

Neiwand had alleged in internal police documents that Taradale was infected by “tunnel vision” and had “relied on investigation confirmation bias which was a major factor that ultimately limited the validity of the coroner’s findings”.

Morgan,the investigation supervisor of Neiwand from 2016,agreed at the inquiry that those allegations were unjustified. He said investigators started with an open mind but agreed the strike force ultimately put more effort into finding evidence that might indicate suicide or misadventure than homicide.

Page,who now works in the private sector,told the inquiry:“I think my reputation was absolutely professionally destroyed in those reports.”

The case with ‘zero solvability’

In 2012,a NSW police officer in the unsolved homicide team conducted a review of another cold case,the 1988 death of US national Scott Johnson. She concluded the “solvability” of the case was zero.

The naked body of Johnson,27,was found at the base of a cliff near Manly’s North Head on December 10,1988. A first inquest in 1989 found he died by suicide while a second inquest in 2012 returned an open finding.

Page,who was by this time a former police officer,attended Manly Police Station in March 2006 with Johnson’s brother Steve to seek a reinvestigation of Scott’s 1988 death because of potential parallels with the Bondi cases.

In 2017,then-coroner Michael Barnes concluded after a third inquest that Scott died “as a result of a gay hate attack”. The inquiry heard NSW Police submitted to this inquest that suicide was the most likely cause of death.

Sydney man Scott Phillip White wascharged in May 2020 with murder over Scott’s death. Whitepleaded guilty to manslaughter last month and will be sentenced later this year.

A police review

The inquiry hasheard evidence that as at 2014 senior NSW police officers believed claims relating to the number of gay hate-related murders and bashings in the 1980s and ’90s were exaggerated and unfounded. Against that backdrop,NSW Police set up Strike Force Parrabell in 2015 to review 88 deaths between 1976 and 2000 that had been reported in the media and elsewhere as potentially involving motivations of gay-hate bias.

Parrabell’s 2018 report found evidence of a bias crime in just eight cases. A further 19 cases were suspected bias crimes. There was insufficient information in 25 cases and no evidence of bias crime was found in 34 cases. Two cases were excluded from the review.

A team at Flinders University was contracted to review the work of the police,and academics had been told in tender documents that they would need to take a “collaborative approach”.

The academic team said in the final report that they were “reluctant to endorse” the bias crime indicators used by police.

Dr Derek Dalton,who was involved in the academic review,told the inquiry that in his experience Parrabell had been a “poisoned chalice”.

“I’m not a police apologist. I’ve spent years of my life documenting hate against gay people.”

The inquiry resumes later this month.

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