06 Mr Big | The knife

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It's a windy morning in Melbourne.

I'm standing in a vacant lot near a busy highway in Narrie Warren with a man named Brendan Moore.

We had a task of searching for a weapon.

So we get in the trucks and come here.

In 2009, Brendan was a volunteer with the State Emergency Service.

The day after Glenn's confession in the Crown Casino to Mr.

Big, he and his team were called in.

We were told what we were looking for, which was a knife.

By the main highway, the ground dips down into a drain that runs under the road.

Brendan and a crew of volunteers scoured the area.

The persons said that they'd plunged it into the ground.

The area is covered with weeds and grass.

Two roads intersect and a vacant lot looks over the area.

There's a lot of traffic.

It's an odd place to hide something that you don't want found.

The bottom of the drain was rocky.

There's no Merlins around here, it's only mortals.

And we know that Merlin put the sword in the rock.

Well, none of us can do that.

It wasn't going to be in the rock, so he decided to look in the grass.

I thought

it'll be in the dirt if anywhere.

So I asked for a detector if they had one.

They said yes.

He tried searching a different spot with the metal detector at the top of the steep slope closest to the road.

The detector went off.

Well, it bibed and then I had a good look and it was just this tiny little thing sticking out of the ground.

It wasn't gold,

which it was, but you knew what it was.

It was an old knife.

Brendan put up his hand and yelled out that he'd found something.

The police came over

and

inspected it and then from there

there was more police turn up.

Look, I think they were pretty confident that what was there was it.

They were very happy, put it that way.

Very happy that they'd found it because you could have never found it.

It could be still there, you know.

So suraging the way things, the mop flops, you know, the luck can go with you, we can go against you.

Brendan had found a broken serrated knife next to the drain where Glenn said it would be.

So now the police had not just a confession.

They also had a piece of actual physical evidence.

But two years later, when the case finally made its way into the Supreme Court, there would be questions about how the knife got there and whether it was really the weapon used to kill Mary Cook.

In this episode, the knife and the other evidence against Glenweaven.

I'm Alicia Bridges, and this is Mr.

Big, the latest season of Unravel.

The secrecy around the Mr Big technique means it's hard to know how often it's used in Australia.

But by asking around and looking through court records, I've found more than 20 cases that appear to be Mr Big stings.

On average, that's at least one a year over the last couple of decades.

And there could be more.

Police won't tell me how many times they've used it.

When the sting goes really well, police get more than just a confession.

They get something else to help prove the suspect is guilty.

For example, sometimes the confession includes details that only the killer could know.

Or the suspect will lead police to physical evidence.

In at least four cases in Australia, the suspect has led police to the victim's remains.

That's exactly what happened in one of Australia's most famous and tragic murder cases.

It was a Mr.

Big Sting where it seems like everything went right.

13-year-old Daniel Morecombe had been missing for eight years when police decided to stage a Mr.

Big sting.

On a plane trip, an undercover police officer sat down next to the killer, a man named Brett Peter Cowan.

The cops struck up a conversation, pretending to be a regular guy.

They became friends.

The trap was set.

Brett Peter Cowan fell deeper and deeper into a criminal gang, just like Glenn Weaven did.

And it all led up to a meeting with Mr.

Big that was caught on a secret recording.

I pay good money to a lot of people and I take a lot of risk in doing that to get the information that I need to keep

us safe and clean as a group.

Because ultimately, you know, if the heat's on you, then the heat's on me.

And I can't afford for that to happen, all right?

It had the same hallmarks of the sting against Glenn.

a criminal gang with connections in high places, promising work and easy money.

From the information I've got, all right,

I'm told you've done the Daniel Walkham murder.

I'm told that it's dead set that you're the one who's done it.

And like I said, that doesn't bother me at all.

You know, I can sort things out, I can buy alibis, I can get rid of stuff, all that kind of things that need to be done, I can do.

But I need to know what I need to do.

You know what I mean?

A motto of trust, honesty, loyalty.

A kingpin promising to make the police go away.

So what do I need to fix?

Yeah, okay.

Yes, I do.

Okay, I did it, Cowan says.

And then, crucially, he leads police to Daniel's remains.

In 2014, Cowan was sentenced to life in prison.

He tried to appeal.

He even challenged police use of the Mr.

Big technique in the High Court.

But it was dismissed.

And Daniel Morecombe's parents praised the court for allowing Mr.

Big Sting to continue.

I have no doubt they've made the right decision in this case and congratulations to them for

conceding that the Mr.

Big strategy can be used in future cases because we see it as a good thing.

In Glenn's case, the Mr.

Big Sting also led not just to a confession, but to a crucial piece of physical evidence.

Glenn said he murdered someone with a knife and hid the knife at a drain.

He led police to the drain, and when they looked for a knife, they found one.

Sounds straightforward, right?

Just like the Morecambe case, the police got a confession, but then they were also led to physical evidence.

But at Glenn Weaven's trial, it became more complicated.

Let's go back to the Crown Casino, where Glenn confessed that he'd murdered Mary Cook.

Okay, then what about the knife and the broken bit?

The undercover officer playing Mr.

Big wants Glenn to take them to the murder weapons.

It's a Gulf Links Road.

It's like a little drain.

I thought the whole system's connected on like a drain.

And this is an Ari Warren, as we

Glenn says he buried the knife not far from his parents' place at the drain.

It's exactly what the police want.

I'm gonna need you to go for a bit of a spin, so just watch the piss until we sort that out.

I forget, see you, Glenn, thanks.

Bye.

Mr.

Bigg tells some of the gang members to take Glenn for a drive to the drain.

In the car, Glenn tells the other gang members that he feels a shiver, like someone walked over his grave.

He says he gets the same feeling whenever he passes a cop.

Little does he know, the car is full of cops.

They arrive at Golflinks Road and Glenn shows them the spot where he says he buried the knife.

They mark the spot with a piece of wood, then get back in the car.

Shortly after this, Glenn is arrested.

That same afternoon, a phone rang on the ninth floor of the St Kilda Road Police Precinct.

In those days it was landlights.

Everybody knew everybody's extension.

9865 is the prefix.

for St Kilda Road, but you'd know everybody's extension number.

Alan Birch is a sergeant in the Victoria Police Homicide Squad at St Kilda Road.

On the other end of the line is a lead detective on the Glen Weaven case.

The detective says Glenn has just revealed where he hid the knife to the undercovers, or as police call them, UCs.

Alan jumps in his car with three other police officers and they drive to the drain.

It's late afternoon,

nighttime's approaching, and it's out in the eastern suburbs.

And we arrive at this creek channel type structure that

goes under a road and it was a major road.

I recall we had to ring back and say get the UC to give us better instructions, more detailed instructions because we can't find it.

Alan and the three other officers rummage around for a bit, but they don't find the knife.

It's getting dark, so they take a quick video and some photos of the site and they leave.

The next day, Brendan Moore and the SES volunteers arrive and find the knife.

Alan thinks his work is done.

The police have what they were looking for.

The lawyers would work on the case, and that would be the last he would hear of it.

But he was wrong.

About two years later, Alan was back at his desk in the homicide squad office when he got another call about the case.

Get down here now.

You're required to give evidence.

Well, now I have to get get my suit jacket on.

I have to find a car to drive there.

And it was impressed upon me, do it now.

This time, it was a last-minute request to appear in court as a witness at the trial.

Alan couldn't understand why he'd been called.

He says, as far as he could tell, he'd played only a minor role in the whole thing.

He says he'd never even had to make a statement about the case.

So then my thought process is what possible,

what can turn on anything that I say?

wasn't involved in anything so you so you're thinking to yourself as you're driving along through traffic what is this about he still has no idea when he walks up the steps and into the Supreme Court building so I go in through the first double doors the second the second double doors because a tippy calls my name a chap who runs the court and he will call a witness Alan Birch I'm here sir all right come this way step in the witness box.

Like, there's a jury sitting over there.

There's a bar table.

There's all the media there.

What is this about?

The lawyer asks Alan, did you plant the knife?

At first, Alan says he's not sure what the lawyer is on about.

Plant what?

What?

Plant what?

Cannabis?

Like...

planting trees, planting...

I thought plant as in putting the ground, vegetation in the ground.

Plant.

Of course, what he's actually being asked is, when he went to the drain, did he plant the knife that Brendan Moore and the SES found the next day?

Alan is hit by a flash of anger.

I'm a professional law enforcement officer who is dedicated to solving suspicious deaths in Victoria.

I've rushed here to get into the witness box and you throw that rubbish at me.

It's just f ⁇ ing bullshit.

Once I pass that, now I'm thinking, who the f are you to be saying that about me?

You don't even know me.

I wasn't even involved.

It's shocking to Alan that someone would even suggest he would plant a weapon, would falsify evidence to bolster the case.

But Alan had been called into court to defend himself.

Early in the trial, Glenn's lawyers raised the possibility someone else could have planted the knife.

That could be because after Alan and the other three officers left the drain, nobody set up a crime scene.

So it wasn't guarded by uniformed police overnight.

It was left completely open.

I've spoken to multiple police officers about this, and all of them said it's unusual for a scene like that not to be cordoned off.

Even Alan said it's unusual.

I would expect if he was in custody,

there would be a crime scene set up there.

So a police crime scene has a guard to monitor who enters and who leaves at what time and for what purpose

there will be a guard and that ensures continuity that nothing has happened in the scene and hasn't been altered or interfered with whilst the guard has been there.

Ultimately, he says he doesn't know why the scene wasn't guarded.

But it left an opening for the lawyers to suggest the knife could have been put there by someone other than Glenn.

Alan says on reflection, his work history might have had something to do with why he was being asked about it.

He'd had his fair share of complaints against him during his time in the force.

He says it was just the nature of the work.

Also, Alan had been a member of the disbanded Victoria Police Armed Robbery Squad and its replacement, the Armed Offenders Squad.

The Office of Police Integrity, which is a police oversight body, described members of both squads as having a culture of violence.

It said too many members of the Armed Offenders Squad identified with notoriety and held a belief that the end justified the means.

Years later, a Victoria police officer would allege that members of the squad were complicit in planting weapons, but none of the allegations were ever proven in court.

So, the reputation amongst those who've worked there or know, properly know those who have worked there, the reputation is really good.

From those on the outside,

it's the reputation is is the armed robbery squad

are cowboys,

the wild, wild west,

bash, steal, plant evidence.

Alan says he never saw anyone plant a weapon, and he never planted one himself, including in this case.

I told you at the start that I have to ask you some pretty direct questions.

Yeah, ask away.

Ask away.

When it comes to the knife, like, did you put the knife there?

Did I plant?

No, absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

Ultimately, Alan says that these claims sometimes just get thrown around in the courtroom.

It's an adversarial circumstance.

So it's us and them.

Essentially, that's how the justice system in Victoria is.

I allege you deny.

Also, Alan wasn't alone at the drain that day.

All of the officers who were there were asked about the knife.

All of them said they didn't plant it and they didn't see anyone plant it.

In In their closing statement, the Crown dismissed the suggestion the knife could have been put there by police as nonsense.

They told the jury that it wasn't the tooth fairy and it wasn't the police, so it must have been Glenn.

After police found the knife, they were keen to see if it could be forensically linked with the murder.

So they tested it for DNA, but it came back with nothing.

Next, they tried to compare it to the injuries on Mary's body.

But matching a knife to a wound can be complicated.

And just a warning, in this next section, we're going to talk about the autopsy.

Those are special rooms on the edge of the mortuary where individuals who need to view the autopsy and I'm at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne.

And I'm getting a tour of the observation rooms where police sometimes watch an autopsy.

So this is the police observation room.

So

there's two.

This is a mirror one with the other one is the one that will probably use homicides.

But this is exactly the same.

So the person who is showing me around is David Ransom.

He's a forensic pathologist who's been working at this center for more than 35 years.

This is where Mary Cook was taken when she died.

What a forensic pathologist is trying to do is to recreate the past.

That's our job, to recreate what happened.

People think it's all about the cause of death.

Of course it is.

We need to find out the cause of death.

But actually the cause of death isn't the really big issue when it comes to the court.

What the court wants to know is how did this happen?

What were the circumstances?

David didn't do the post-mortem on Mary's body.

It was another forensic pathologist at the Institute.

And they discovered a single stab wound to the neck.

So you got a 1.4 centimetre injury in the lung itself.

The wound went through Mary's lung.

The team at the the Institute found that the measurement of the wound to Mary's lung didn't exactly match the width of the knife.

The knife was somewhere around six to eight millimeters wider.

But David says there could be a reason for that.

It's a soft, spongy structure.

The lung could be inflated and with breathing in when the stab went in, or it could be deflated.

And so that will change the relative potential size of the injury when you examine it at autopsy, because now you've got a collapsed lung and so on and so forth.

All an expert could say is that it's possible that knife could have caused Mary's wounds.

It can't be ruled out, but it's not a perfect match.

Friends' pathology evidence is rarely determinative.

It is corroboration evidence.

What we're talking about here is corroboration.

So what the pathologist is doing is a very low level corroboration here.

It's possible.

It is not ruled out.

And that's the only level of corroboration there.

Now you might say that's not really sufficient for real, true corroboration, but it goes to the overall weight of reliability of the evidence that is being led via confession or whatever.

Basically, this knife can't be conclusively linked to the crime on its own, but it's part of a body of evidence that built a picture in the case against Glenn.

along with the location where it was found, which seems to be within a couple of meters of where he said it would be.

What are the chances that there just happens to be a serrated broken knife lying around right there on the bank of the drain?

So the side where they found it is actually Golflinks Roadside.

Yeah, it's on the side.

On a cold winter day,

I went back to the drain where the knife was found with Michelle Reuters from the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative.

So right.

Honestly, there's junk everywhere.

It could have, there's just so many places that

junk from building sites, cars, people chucking stuff out of the window could have ended up there.

She was right about the junk.

Michelle says that drain is known for flooding and is regularly scattered with rubbish and random debris.

There's a lot of garbage in there.

It's a slurpy cup and a can of V and a wine bottle.

We found discarded bottles, cans, the pieces of a broken printer that were sort of embedded into the ground under the grass, which was sort of marshy and muddy.

So she says, it's not out of the question that just by chance, the knife the police found wasn't Glenn's knife, it was just a knife.

And she says the terrain isn't the only reason to think that.

Instead of the knife having a broken blade, like Glenn told Mr.

Bigg, it had a broken handle.

It didn't match the description at all of the knife that was found, either in its colour, shape,

and the description of what part had actually broken off was completely opposite.

The description of how it could be found in his talk with Mr.

Bigg, Glenn said

it's never going to be found and he

really pushed it into the ground.

Yet somehow a little bit later, it's almost visible on the surface of the piece of earth where it was found.

And also, there was,

certainly from the forensic examination side, it couldn't be said that the knife fit the wound at all.

The evidence was, you know, sort of ambivalent on that point.

Aaron Powell, there are discrepancies between the way he describes it, but there are things that do add up too.

I mean, he does say that it's broken and he does say that it's serrated edge.

Also,

there is a broken knife in the vicinity of where he says there will be a knife.

Why don't you think that's strong enough?

Because I imagine there would be people who think that the likelihood that there there just happened to be a knife there or that the police put it there is so low versus the likelihood that Glenn actually did put a knife there.

And

that's why it's there.

I mean, Glenn was in the description to Mr.

Big, he said that the tip of the knife broke off.

Like, that is a lot different to the tip of the handle.

because he's insinuating that he thrust so hard that a bit of the blade stuck in.

I mean,

that is a big detail.

Also, Glenn said there was a screwdriver involved, but that was never found.

Incidentally, the lawyers prosecuting Glenn said that all this makes evidence planting look more unlikely.

If you were planting evidence, why wouldn't you plant a screwdriver too?

And why wouldn't you make the knife match Glenn's description perfectly?

In any case, Michelle thinks all these differences between what Glenn described and what was found cast doubt on the physical evidence in this case.

For that reason, she says it's different from the Daniel Morecambe case, where the suspect led police to a body.

I would probably join with Everyone Australia in saying that was a job well done.

I certainly would not say any different.

I have to make it clear that I'm not opposed to the Mr Big technique.

What I'm opposed to is how it's received by the courts.

And while Michelle concedes that the knife was an important part of the Crown's case against Glenn, She says that's only because it was paired with the confession.

Even from the perspective I'm taking, I can see that it has to to be relevant because it's a knife.

So in the end, it becomes part of the narrative that the prosecution is coming together and how well that's sewn up and how much the jury buys it.

Because the jury does buy it.

Yeah.

Like

I think juries are often very persuaded by confessions, you know, particularly when they get to see it in person.

And I think that's highly impactful on juries.

And then that then leads, gives extra liability to the connection with the knife.

And

so if the confession didn't exist, Glenn wouldn't be in prison because there was nothing else.

But there was other evidence in the police case against Glenn.

It's detailed and even confusing at times.

But I'm going to run you through the most important parts of it.

All of it hinges on where Glenn was the night of the fire.

You might remember back in episode two, someone accused Glenn of being at Mary's house the night of the fire.

It was her son, Nathan, and he told detectives that he called his mum at 9.30pm and he heard Glenn in the background.

Nathan actually spoke to his mum that night around 9.30, quarter to 10,

and Mary said, look, Glenn's here now.

It's quite clear that you're there because Mary tells Nathan that you're there and there's absolutely no doubt that you are there.

But when it came time for the trial, Nathan seemed less sure that phone call was on the night of the murder.

And so it was struck out of evidence because the judge said it seemed likely Nathan had mixed up the dates.

But this wasn't the only evidence suggesting that Glenn could have been at Mary's that night.

A witness said they saw Glenn the morning after the fire with a phone.

that was supposed to have been at Mary's house.

The implication was that Glenn had killed Mary, then taken the phone with him when he left.

During the trial, there was a lot of confusion about this phone.

Who had it, who even owned it, what it looked like, and who was making calls on it.

So Glenn's lawyer argued, there was no convincing evidence he ever had the phone at all.

There were other people who said that Glenn wasn't at Mary's house that night.

See, Glenn said he had an alibi, his parents.

Glenn's mum Melody said he was home that night, around the time of the fire.

I was reading all night.

I was reading a Catherine Cookson book.

Oh, Glenn come out at, oh, I don't know, it was half past, nearly 25 past 12 it was, when he came out and he made himself a glass of cordial.

Oh, he said to me, oh, you're still up?

I said, yeah.

And that's how I know it was 25 past 12 because I thought, oh, I don't know, I might go to bed.

And I'm watching him go over to the kitchen and make this green cordial for himself.

And I'm thinking, people I know

who get up during the night and want drinks usually get diabetes later on in life.

What a stupid thing to be thinking of.

But that's what's happened.

Do you think he'd been asleep before that?

Yeah, because we always had the doors open in the passageway.

And

yeah,

when you go past, you can just

see

they're in bed.

I went to bed at exactly 20 past one.

Everything was nice and quiet.

It was just nice to hear all the quietness.

Melody said the next morning she wrote down exactly what she knew about Glenn's whereabouts that night.

She even rewrote her note with Nita handwriting, although she says the notes were basically the same.

I wrote two notes, but the first note, I thought, oh, my writing's not that good.

I'll try and improve me writing, my printing.

And I didn't really use the same wording that I used in my first one.

When it came to the trial, it was sort of like the notes in the alibi didn't exist.

They were not heard about at all in court.

Glenn says he was surprised his lawyers didn't call on his parents during the trial.

So what happened?

We've tried for months to get to the bottom of this, but it's not clear why Glenn's lawyers didn't use the alibi.

Defence lawyers can sometimes be wary of alibis, particularly when they're worried the jury might might not believe them.

It's possible Melody's testimony could have come under attack.

In pre-trial arguments, Detective Ron Idles questioned why Glenn's mum was thinking about an alibi the morning after the fire, before the autopsy even confirmed Mary's death was suspicious.

But Melody says she wrote it down because the police had already started calling her, asking where Glenn was that night.

And then at some point you get a phone call, you hear from the police.

Yes, yes, mid-morning,

the Cranburn police rang.

Then that officer wanted to know who was in my house last night and I told him.

But I thought it very odd that he was asking me like who was in my house.

It was like, well, does he expect someone to be running around lighting fires?

I've asked Glenn's lawyers why they didn't use the alibi in court, but they haven't responded to my questions.

Even if they wanted to explain, they might not be able to, because lawyers have to keep a lot of these things confidential.

Whatever the reason, the alibi was never heard by the jury.

In the end, it seems like regardless of all the other evidence, the whole case relied on one central pillar.

The confession.

Even the judge said, you can't convict Glenweaven unless you think Glen Weaven's confession to Mr Bigg, the final one, was true.

beyond reasonable doubt.

He said, quote, if you are not satisfied about that, then there isn't any other evidence that would enable you to find beyond reasonable doubt that the murder was committed by Glenweaven.

The jury decided that what they heard on this tape was a killer, in his own words, confessing to a murder, explaining in detail how he murdered someone, with what weapons, and where he hid them when he was done.

That's what the jury heard.

And that's what most of us hear when we hear a confession.

Because, after all, would someone ever really confess to a murder they didn't commit?

Well, it seems sometimes the answer is yes.

Next episode: A man who confessed a murder to Mr.

Big, but DNA evidence told a different story.

They had the wrong person.

He didn't do it.

That's on our final episode of Mr.

Big.

If you're liking this season of Unravel, make sure you follow the Unravel podcast to be the first to get new episodes.

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This season of Unravel is hosted and reported by me, Alicia Bridges.

We've been making this story on Gadigal Land and Worjak Nunga Land.

This story was developed in collaboration with the ABC's investigations team.

Our supervising producer is Yasmin Parry.

Producer and researcher is Ayla Darling.

Theme by Martin Peralta and Ashley Cadell.

Additional music by Ashley Cadell.

Sound design and additional music by Hamish Kamilleri.

Monique Bowley is our manager of podcasts.

And our executive producer is Tim Roxborough.

G'day, Unravel listeners.

I'm Matt Bevan.

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