Charmed by a killer: The man I thought of as a rogue was exposed as a serial murderer. Despite his narcissistic evil, I still hugged him in the prison yard…

It was late winter, August 2005, and the sky was a brilliant blue over Kirkconnell jail.

I was crossing a prison road and none other than inmate #126198 strolled into view: a killer cop, although not yet labelled a murderer, Roger Caleb Rogerson was among a group of prisoners walking in the sunshine from the activities area back to their cells.

Even here in his prison greens – rather than in his dapper suit propping up a bar, which was where I had last seen Rogerson – Australia’s most notorious dirty detective was instantly recognisable.

The men paused on the road as we approached. I was, after all, in the company of the boss, Kirkconnell’s formidable female prison governor who ruled over 230 male inmates at the facility near Bathurst, New South Wales, 180km west of Sydney.

Cool and composed, Janet Ruecroft had no idea I was about to do what was considered then – and now – unthinkable for a corrections employee. Nor did I.

After all, I had interviewed him, drunk beers with him, covered his court appearances, and shared a few laughs with him over the years.

It only seemed natural to give him a hug, right there in the prison, and exchange a pleasantry before hearing a gasp behind me and turning to see the horrified face of Governor Ruecroft.

I hadn’t been in the job – leading the Commissioner’s media unit – long enough for it to be ingrained in me that the blue (the staff) never touch, let alone embrace, the green (the crims).

Rogerson was locked up at Kirkconnell prison, near Bathurst, New South Wales, in 2005 for lying to the Crime Commission. The year he jokingly described as his ‘sabbatical’ seemed to enliven him – despite a psychiatrist describing him as a ‘broken man’ when he first arrived

But it was a beautiful day and the smiling, affable fellow before me did not fit the profile of a cold-blooded psychopath – a label that would come to define him.

Instead, on that day at Kirkconnell – located in the aptly named Sunny Corner State Forest, which is nevertheless one of the coldest places in NSW in winter – it was old ‘Roger the Dodger’ who crossed my path.

Of course, that was never his real nickname – just a handy moniker for the dark twists his life had taken after burning off a high-flying police career.

He also looked nothing like the supposedly broken man of his doctor’s sentencing submission.

Rogerson had been inside before: In 1990, he was jailed for nine months for perverting the course of justice. He was jailed again in 1992 for three years after unsuccessfully appealing the conviction. 

But the Roger Rogerson heading into jail this time – for lying to a 1999 Police Integrity Commission – was a shadow of his former self, at least according to his doctor.

At his sentencing hearing in late 2004, psychiatrist Dr Michael Clark had told the NSW District Court that Rogerson was pathologically confused and paranoid.

‘Mr Rogerson is normally coherent but [on a recent occasion] he was confused, expressing suicidal thoughts,’ Dr Clark said. 

‘He was nearly psychotic but he was more [in] a delirious psychosis rather than a permanent one.

‘He has been neglecting himself. He’s usually such a dapper sort of person. He was actually in tears.’

Prosecutors privately reckoned Rogerson was ‘acting’, trying it on to avoid a potential maximum five years in prison.

Roger Rogerson as a detective in 1985, a year before the charismatic but crooked cop was drummed out of the force over accusations of ordering a hit on fellow officer Michael Drury

On February 18, 2005, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years, with a 12-month minimum, and packed off in a prison van to Silverwater jail in western Sydney.

Three weeks later, the 64-year-old was off to Kirkconnell – a place some inmates jokingly refer to as the ‘little chalet in the mountains’ where prisoners get to make furniture and train pets for the assistance dogs program.

Maybe the ‘broken’ schtick had just been another of Rogerson’s clever cons – although it was later reported that his year-long ‘sabbatical’ at Kirkconnell had had a reviving effect, and that he taken up Sudoku, even becoming the ‘jail champion’.

I apologised to the ‘guv’ and had to provide a written explanation of my jailhouse gaffe to Commissioner Ron Woodham. I received a sound verbal rubbishing.

Before being drummed out of the force, Rogerson had once been NSW Police’s most highly decorated officer.

The attempted murder of fellow police officer Mick Drury – shot in his own kitchen in mid-1984, probably by hitman Christopher Dale Flannery – had started it.

Drury had a target on his back after refusing a bribe by Rogerson to tamper with evidence in a heroin trafficking trial of the Melbourne gangster Alan Williams. 

It wasn’t until later that ‘Rent-a-Kill’s wife Kath Flannery revealed her by-then-vanished husband and Rogerson had been together on the night in question.

Rogerson was suspended from active service on November 30, 1984. 

In February 1986, sex worker Sallie-Anne Huckstepp was murdered and her body dumped in Busby Pond, Centennial Park, after speaking out against Rogerson and other corrupt cops

After he was charged with conspiring to kill Drury, he was hauled off to Long Bay jail’s reception and induction centre for a night in June 1985.  

Four years earlier, in an alley in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Chippendale, Rogerson had famously shot heroin dealer Warren Lanfranchi.

The boyfriend of sex worker Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, Lanfranchi had worked with Neddy Smith, the physically imposing smack dealer and armed robber whose career as a major gangster was on the rise.

Huckstepp was attractive, well-spoken and smart, and when she called the shooting out as murder – first to internal affairs, then to the media – she set off a firestorm.

On television, she set about exposing the corrupt police to whom she, as a working prostitute and drug addict, made payments.

Most notably on Australia’s 60 Minutes she asserted Rogerson had murdered Lanfranchi and stolen the $10,000 the dealer had been set up by Smith to give Rogerson to make a criminal charge disappear.

An inquest had found Rogerson acted in the line of duty and he was exonerated and commended for bravery. Huckstepp would pay for her courage with her life.

In early 1986, Huckstepp’s body was found dumped in Sydney’s Centennial Park. Neddy Smith would be charged but acquitted at trial of her slaying. 

Nine weeks after Huckstepp’s death, Rogerson was sacked from NSW Police. 

The once-feared cop would eventually be jailed for perverting the course of justice, serving nine months from March 1990, mostly in Long Bay Hospital.

He returned, after a failed court appeal, to serve the balance from 1992 to 1995, in Berrima Jail, the prison known for its crooked cops, bent priests and paedophiles.

By 2005, it became clear Rogerson was heading back inside once again – this time for lying to the Police Integrity Commission. 

Huckstepp said that Rogerson’s shooting of her boyfriend, drug dealer Warren Lanfranchi (pictured), in a Sydney alley in 1981 was murder. Five years later, Huckstepp too was murdered 

My history with him as a journalist goes back to 1989 when I covered his attempted murder conspiracy trial for plotting with Flannery to assassinate Mick Drury.

I remember him being confident in the dock, occasionally witty, calm under cross-examination, mildly explaining away his relationship with killers-for-hire such as Flannery.

‘I had gained a reputation for being able to talk to criminals, some of these hardened criminals, dangerous criminals even… Flannery included,’ he told me coolly.

Rogerson was acquitted and got on with his new life.

After the police force, he started a scaffolding business, which he told me was in many ways more satisfying than being a cop, given his proclivity for ‘tinkering with things’.

When he walked out of Kirkconnell on February 17, 2006, he was reportedly a rejuvenated man, if not rehabilitated.

In the following years, he seemed unstoppable. He wrote an ‘autobiographical memoir’, and many of us in the press trooped along to the book’s launch.

It was held at the Iron Duke in Alexandria, the former watering hole of Rogerson’s old crime partner and later nemesis, gangster Neddy Smith. The hotel was also just a short drive from Dangar Place, where Roger had shot Lanfranchi.

Rogerson used his wit and charm to reinvent himself as a comedy act, along with former Australian Rules footballer Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson and ex-criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read 

Roger Rogerson (right) with Neddy Smith, the gangster to whom Rogerson gave the ‘green light’ to commit crimes and who ultimately turned witness against him and other crooked cops

Rogerson eventually gave up working as a scaffolder when a building collapsed underneath him as he worked on a roof, permanently damaging his shoulder and hip.

In need of money, he once again leaned on his charm.

He took to the comedy circuit with his best material, his own life, and began touring with former footballer Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson and ex-criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read.

One of their tours was called Wild Colonial Psychos, and Rogerson’s natural deadpan humour was a hit – and the narcissist in him loved the attention.

One newspaper took Rogerson out drinking almost weekly, paying for his beers as strangers drawn to his magnetic charm would listen to him tell old crime stories.

Rogerson made some money out of the tours but not enough. He started working in debt collection and, in what would prove to be a fatal pairing, teamed up with another ex-cop, Glen McNamara. 

Rogerson outside the Downing Centre Court with his lawyer in 2004, when he was charged with lying to the Crime Commission which would place him at Kirkconnell jail

As much as Rogerson was charismatic and charming, McNamara was the opposite – grasping, self-important, narcissistic.

And, according to someone who hired him at Rogerson’s behest to sort out the recovery of $4million fleeced in a massive con, he was also useless.

‘Roger called me and told me [McNamara] was looking for work, and that he was his mate and could I help,’ the man said. ‘In the end I fired him.

‘McNamara was absolutely desperate for money. Roger was broke, too.’

THE DOWNFALL

Then came the news that no one who liked Roger – or anyone who knew him to be intelligent and thoughtful – could believe.

On May 20, 2014, a Sydney university student named Jamie Gao, who police knew to be a low-level drug dealer, vanished.

NSW Police announced they were investigating the suspected murder of Gao after examining the 20-year-old’s phone and finding exchanges between him and McNamara.

Detectives charged McNamara with murder and drug supply. The following day, on May 26, a fisherman spotted a body wrapped in blue tarpaulin bobbing in the water off the coast of Cronulla, in Sydney’s south. 

Jamie Gao’s body, wrapped in a blue tarpaulin and tied with rope, was spotted by fishermen off the coast of Cronulla in Sydney’s south on May 26, 2014 

It was Gao. The next day, police went to Rogerson’s Padstow home and brought out the limping former detective in handcuffs and charged him with murder.

It would prove the stupidest of crimes. Observers would later question why McNamara and Rogerson had killed the young man, when they might have got away with a bloodless drug rip-off.

Each would claim the other had fired the gun. Forensics would prove the gun had been placed in Rogerson’s pocket after being fired, but it would also be proven that McNamara had bought the gun weeks prior to the fatal meeting.

‘Glen took the gun to the meeting,’ Daily Mail Australia has been told. 

Between March and April 2014, McNamara met Gao 19 times. On the day before Gao’s death, McNamara took his boat out of storage.

On May 20, Gao was seen getting into a white car at Padstow at 1.40pm when he is believed to have purchased 2.78kg of methamphetamine with a street value of up to $19million.

Jamie Gao, 20, was lured to a Padstow storage unit where he was shot dead in a drug rip-off that ended with his body being dumped at sea

CCTV showed Gao meeting McNamara and Rogerson at a Padstow storage unit at 1.46pm

It also showed McNamara retrieving a surfboard bag at 1.58pm, and then carrying it laden with Gao’s body to a car at 2.18pm.

Rogerson and McNamara then hired a block and tackle and, on May 21, using McNamara’s boat, they dumped Gao’s body at sea.

On June 15, 2016, Rogerson and McNamara were found guilty of Gao’s murder and were both sentenced to life imprisonment.

The conviction allowed some media to press the button on a torrent of stories, describing Rogerson as ‘a serial killer’ who was responsible for seven murders and one attempted murder of which he had been long suspected.

Rogerson had murdered Warren Lanfranchi, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, Chris Flannery and a list of others, the articles asserted.

Rogerson was escorted out of his Padstow home in handcuffs in May 2014 for the murder of Jamie Gao

Rogerson won the right to an appeal against his conviction on the basis that McNamara had bought the gun, or at least one of the same calibre of the fatal rounds inside Jamie Gao, before the murder.

The appeal failed, and Rogerson’s steep decline, this time behind bars at Long Bay’s Aged and Frail Unit, began.

A friend of Roger’s, the private investigator Tim Gamble, went to visit him at Long Bay last November, along with Rogerson’s wife Anne Melocco, his daughter Melinda and her husband.

Mr Gamble had not seen Rogerson for years, and he was shocked at his condition: he was emaciated ‘like out of a concentration camp’ and ‘faded away with dementia’.

‘He had deteriorated very quickly from a blood disease, Anne had warned me, but when I walked in, I was horrified,’ he said.

A limping Rogerson being led in handcuffs and prison greens to a prison van after appearing in court in 2015 on charges of murdering 20-year-old Jamie Gao

‘He couldn’t really move. He was able to talk okay, but he thought I was there to go to the races at Randwick that afternoon for a beer.

‘He couldn’t lift his hand to shake mine. He was absolutely gone. I knew I’d never see him again.’

Rogerson, for decades the quintessential ‘good bad cop’, died on January 21, 2024, a few weeks after turning 83. A convicted murderer.

When he was buried – by the press – in a torrent of disgrace and condemnation, I felt sorry.

A chorus of people who had never met Rogerson, and some who had been mates, pronounced his evilness – which, at the time, I struggled to reconcile with the charming rogue I had once known

One report said theatrically that Rogerson ‘will have to continue to protest his innocence in hell’. Another jeered that ‘The wake could be held in a phone box.’  

Rogerson’s lawyer Peter Katsoolis noted that ‘the prospect of winning the appeal was like life support for the old man’ – but that had failed in 2020.

‘I’ll miss him as a client,’ he said.

In 1981, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp had made the perilous decision to tell all on national TV.

She named Rogerson as a killer, but perhaps didn’t think she would be in his sights, that piercing blue-eyed gaze that didn’t waver but didn’t let you know what he was thinking.

Around 8.45 on the morning February 7, 1986, a jogger ran up to the ranger’s office in Sydney’s Centennial Park to report he’d seen a body floating in Busby Pond.

It was Sallie-Anne.

Neddy Smith allegedly later told a cellmate how he’d strangled her and dumped the body. Many believed the murder had been ‘commissioned’ by Rogerson.

It took 38 years for it to be said that was the probable truth, that Sallie-Anne was right all along. We should have all believed her back then.