John Silvester

Photo: Simon Schluter

Most creatures have some redeeming features. Killer Bandali Debs, 58, is the exception.

THE years have not been kind to Bandali Debs. This is partially due to the fact that he knows he is doomed to die in jail.

It may also be due to the fact that he has gangrene of the soul and is nothing but a sackful of human offal. He is rotting from the inside and it shows.

There are criminals who are charismatic, funny, interesting and, quite often, tragic. Debs is none of these things. He is simply evil. Bad to the bone. An oxygen burner who three courts in two states have decided must be segregated from the rest of us – forever.

It took more than 20 years to discover the depth of his malevolence, with the latest revelation taking place in a Sydney court just a few days ago.

Debs believed his low profile made him invisible to police but in the end he was done in by science every bit as cold-blooded as him.

In October 1991 Debs, first with his nephew Jason Ghiller and later with his daughter’s boyfriend, Jason Roberts, committed 38 armed robberies around Melbourne.

They picked soft targets such as large suburban restaurants, terrorised customers and staff and then fled into the darkness. The pattern did not point to any established crooks and as they were unknown in criminal circles there was no chance of an informer creating a breakthrough.

In August 1998 police ran a secret operation, codenamed Hamada, which identified 60 likely targets that might be hit by the armed robbery crew.

Ten were highlighted as the most likely and on that shortlist was The Silky Emperor in Warrigal Road, Moorabbin. Two respected policemen, Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rod Miller, were staking out the restaurant when they pulled over a Hyundai hatchback in Cochranes Road.

Detectives believe Debs and Roberts had made a pact to shoot police without warning if they were ever pulled over, and that is exactly what they did, killing Silk and Miller.

It would take two years for police to build a case strong enough to arrest them. The key breakthrough came when windscreen glass from the crime scene was matched with shards found in a Hyundai owned by Debs’ daughter.

Then listening device material slowly condemned Debs from his own mean mouth. One tape catches him calmly suggesting to his daughter that he might choose to hunt down and kill Rod Miller’s wife and child to sidetrack the taskforce investigation.

To catch a snake like Debs, detectives made sure there was no wriggle room, and from the moment he was arrested he was destined to spend the rest of his days in jail. There were no tainted witnesses or questionable confessions. The case produced by the Lorimer taskforce was clinical, professional and irrefutable.

Now that Debs was no longer invisible, his DNA was added to the national police database, which showed he was even worse (if that was possible) than we imagined.

He was a sexual predator and a thrill killer whose preferred victims were the most vulnerable.

On June 17, 1997, street prostitute Kristy Harty was picked up by Debs, probably on the Old Princes Highway at Fountain Gate, as the tiler was on his way home after a long day at work.

The following day two people walking along a bush track near the Beaconsfield-Emerald Road spotted a blood trail and contacted police, who found the 18-year-old’s body dumped in the bush.

Nearby was a safe-sex pack and an unrolled condom. Police believe that Ms Harty, who had recently been diagnosed with hepatitis, had been trying to act responsibly while Debs insisted on unprotected intercourse.

And then he killed her, pressing the barrel against her left cheek and aiming into the skull.

This was not a panicky decision by a man who did not want his dark side exposed. It was about power and sadism.

One of the Lorimer bugs recorded him instructing Roberts on the best way to kill a woman: ”If you put the rod in the mouth and blew her brains away, when you put the rod in their mouth and close their mouth there’s no noise … I’ve seen it. I’ve done it.” This is Debs talking to his daughter’s boyfriend.

Although she was only a teenager, Kristy Harty had already been beaten down by life. Police found she had provided sexual favours for a cigarette or a lift up the road.

So if Debs had refused protected sex or failed to pay her, she would have accepted it as just another disappointment in a life of disappointments.

But Debs outsmarted himself. If he had worn a condom he would never have been suspected as the killer, but his DNA match was beyond debate. Experts say the sample was 360 billion times more likely to have come from him than anyone else.

Justice Stephen Kaye got it right when he said of Debs: ”This was, most clearly, a callous, craven and senseless murder in cold blood of an entirely innocent, defenceless and vulnerable young woman. The evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion that you murdered Kristy Harty for no other reason than for the sheer sake of it.”

Debs appealed, just to be a nuisance, but lost and headed off to jail to serve his time and die in obscurity. Or so we thought.

In Sydney they entered a DNA sample from a near-forgotten case and guess what? There was a match. This time the DNA sample was found to match less than one person in 10 billion – and that man was Debs.

The case would prove to be a rerun of the Harty murder – only that it happened earlier.

On April 21, 1995, Donna Ann Hicks, 34, was working as a street prostitute in Sydney’s west. She was last seen walking along the Great Western Highway, stopping vehicles, as Ms Harty did on the Old Princes Highway in 1997.

Ms Hicks was picked up by a man driving a dark four-wheel-drive with a rear canopy, which turned left in Archbold Drive. At the time Debs drove a dark blue Holden Rodeo complete with a matching canopy.

The next morning she was found dumped in a ditch. Just as he would do with Ms Harty, he pressed a gun against her head and fired, killing her instantly.

So why was this Melbourne man in Sydney? His mother lived nearby, while phone and bank records placed him in the area at the time of the murder.

Further investigations showed his sister lived near the Colyton Hotel, where Ms Hicks was seen drinking on the night she disappeared. Debs was found to have visited the hotel around the same time, using his credit card to withdraw money.

But in 2008 a Melbourne court refused to grant New South Wales police permission to interview Debs and the prosecution was in danger of stalling.

After all, he had already been sentenced to life with no minimum and so any further prosecutions would only be academic – and expensive.

Police and prosecutors are always being reminded that justice comes at a cost and budgets cannot be stretched.

They could have let the case go but to their great credit, they didn’t. Donna Hicks’ three children deserved answers and so did we. That is the great difference between him and us. We value human life while he doesn’t.

In 2010 he was finally charged and late last year was again convicted of murder.

Experienced police now wonder if they unearthed all Debs’ crimes. Was Ms Hicks the first or were there others who were never found? Certainly Lorimer surveillance teams tracked him regularly driving around St Kilda in the street-worker district, perhaps looking for an armed robbery target or another victim to abduct.

Most creatures have some redeeming features. Vultures purge the African Plains, mould can be turned into penicillin and leeches clean infected wounds.

Bandali Debs, 58, is the exception.

Last week he was sentenced to another life sentence for the murder of Donna Hicks. His posture has changed as he develops the start of an old man’s stoop, his eyes are duller and he looks defeated. The hunter has become the hunted.

He was wearing the same tired, grey mustard suit he has worn in most of his previous court appearances.

He is caught in a time warp. He cannot move on, but we can.