By Caroline Overington, January 2020, The Australian 

 

They used to have this little ritual, back when they were kids: Belinda Smith would wake up, and cheekily knock on the kitchen wall that adjoined her brother Peter’s bedroom, and he’d knock back.

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“We did that same thing every day,” says Belinda, who was about four at the time, while Peter was 20. Then one morning, she knocked, and there was no return.

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“And I knew straight away something was wrong,” she says.

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Her mother, Jean, was distraught, so it was left to her eldest sister, Pamela, to break the news: Peter had died suddenly during the night, on Pitt Street, in Sydney.

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It was 1971.

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“My parents told me that he’d had a sudden brain aneurysm, and nothing could have been done,” says Belinda. “But for 47 years, I wondered. We all did.”

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Peter had been out that night with his best friend, Gary Hall, who had been — still is — like a brother to Pete’s sisters.

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“We were all very close,” he says. “Peter and I attended the same school, Marist Brothers in Eastwood. I had been welcomed into his family, and he into mine. We caught the same bus to school. We played a lot of cricket together. We played side-by-side in rugby, so there was an element of trust, and counting on each other, on the field, too.

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“And we shared a love of music. It was the Vietnam War, so I guess we were protesting. We had long hair, and flared pants, all that. We had an old record player, and we’d swap albums. They cost quite a lot of money in those days, so that kept us going back and forward between our houses: Janis Joplin, and Carole King; Jethro Tull, and Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan.’’

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Gary and Peter both had good government jobs in the city — Peter was with the agency that is now Australia Post — and on Fridays, “we’d come together with other office workers, and we’d have a few drinks”.

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Gary, now 67, vividly remembers the night of Peter’s death, October 22, 1971.

 

“It happened around 10.30pm,” he says. “Hotels in those days closed at 10pm.

I was with him at the pub, and (we) were headed to the Town Hall station to catch a bus home to Ryde, and we stopped at the milk bar on Pitt Street.

 

“We were both merry but not staggeringly drunk. And there was a confrontation and Peter was punched. And he stumbled backward and ended up on the footpath. I went to him, ‘Pete, let’s get up’. And he never got up.

 

“He was lying near the gutter, and I realised he was lifeless. It was absolutely shocking. And the first person who came along was a male, about 10 years older than me, and he looked at Peter, and checked his pulse. There were no mobile phones in those days, but the GPO was directly opposite, and there was a whole line-up of public phones, and this man, he just got up, and ran across the road, and he called triple-0. “By then some other people had come along and they seemed angry and I was worried that I might be set upon, too. The ambulance came and I tried to go with Pete, but I was refused, so I ran, really frightened, to George Street and caught a taxi, straight to Peter’s house.”

 

Peter’s parents, Colin and Jean Smith, were asleep, but his middle sister, Judy, who was then about 13, answered the door.

 

She recalls Gary being “white like a ghost, and shaking”. She immediately woke her parents.

 

“It was after 11pm, so quite late, for the times. And I told them that Peter had been punched, and he had died,” Gary says. “They were distraught.”

 

The Smiths had a relative who was a NSW police officer. They called on him, for help. What happened next is perplexing by modern canon: Peter’s parents resisted a full investigation into their son’s death. “A file was opened but it quickly closed,’’ says Gary.

 

He was never interviewed by police, never asked to pick anyone out of a line-up, nothing like that.

 

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand, except that I knew that Pete’s mum was frail; and his dad, Colin, suffered huge stress from World War II. Today, we’d probably say post-traumatic stress syndrome. They probably couldn’t have coped with a long inquiry, and there was also this sense of: what good could it do? Nothing will bring him back.

 

“And I was only 19, and Pete’s parents were in their 40s and 50s. And it was a different time. I fell into line, and obeyed instructions. Basically, the funeral was held, and that would be that.” Peter’s death was put down to a sudden haemorrhage, with “no suspicious circumstances”.

 

“Pete’s parents made it clear: they wanted no discussion about it,” says Gary. “They did not talk about it with the girls, or anyone.”

But little Judy knew the truth. She had been there, when Gary knocked on the door. She had heard what he had said, about Peter being punched.

“I guess I was about 16 when Judy told me,” says Belinda. “It was a hushed thing. We knew our parents didn’t want us talking about it. And it was years and years after they died that we felt able to make inquiries.”

In 2014, that determination finally got the better of Belinda’s trepidation: she applied to the NSW Coroner’s Court for a copy of Peter’s file.

“When I received the report, I was stunned. According to the autopsy report, there was no aneurysm. Which meant the punch must have killed Peter. We knew we needed to act on this information, but we had no idea where to start. Then we met Hadyn Green.”

 

Green is an adjunct associate professor of forensic science and a retired police superintendent from Western Australia who gives talks on forensics and cold cases. In 2015 he was the guest lecturer on the Celebrity Century cruise ship, when Peter’s sisters were on holiday. Belinda and Judy lined up, to talk about their brother’s case.

 

He remembers the moment. “Most definitely. I mean, with CSI and the crime shows, people do love to talk about this stuff, and you do tend to get people who approach you with things, and some are so off-the-wall, but this story made sense, and after being a police officer 40 years, you can tell whether somebody is genuine.”

 

He asked Belinda: “What information have you got? Can you send it to me? And I was quite nonplussed to receive the file. There was almost no paperwork there. Basic things that should have been in there — photographs of the scene, statements from witnesses — all of that was absent.”

His conclusion: “This hasn’t been done properly for whatever reason.

“I actually joined police in 1971, as a cadet, and things were very different back then, but a homicide was still a homicide,” Green says.

 

He wrote a report. “It outlined my concerns. The areas I addressed were: is this a possible unlawful killing? Was the investigation carried out correctly? Had the inquiry been interfered with in some way? Remembering that absence of evidence is not evidence, it was necessary to make some presumptions. But a natural death, with no cause, that did not look right to me. I went back to family and said: he may have died from the punch. And I encouraged them to keep going.”

 

But going where? Peter had by this point been dead for almost half a century.

 

“Everyone said ‘don’t get your hopes up’,” says Belinda.

 

But one way or another, they had to know.

 

In 2016, Judy wrote to the NSW Coroner’s Court, outlining their concerns — there had been no proper investigation, and witnesses had claimed to have seen her brother punched — and she asked for an inquest.

 

“After a wait of over a year, we were advised that Peter’s case would be referred to the coroner,” she says.

 

In November 2017, the NSW Police Force put Detective Sergeant Phil Hallinan in charge of the brief of evidence. It was the oldest case he’d ever worked on, but he wasn’t daunted.

 

The milk bar in Pitt Street was long gone. But the shopkeeper was still alive, and he was tracked down, as was the police officer who attended the scene; the daughter of the man who had attended to Peter on the footpath; and friends of Peter, who remembered Gary telling them about the punch, the day after it happened.

 

The inquest, before deputy state coroner, Magistrate Elizabeth Ryan, opened on October 29. Gary was called, and for the first time, gave testimony, as to what he recalled. He had been drinking with Peter at the Carlton Rex Hotel, he said. They had wandered, after it closed, down to the milk bar on Pitt Street.

 

The proprietors at that time were Jim Boulougouris and his younger brother Con Boulougouris. They had migrated to Australia from Greece in 1965. Their shop sold milkshakes, cigarettes, Glad-wrapped sandwiches and some hot food. It had been late when Peter and Gary wandered in, both a bit intoxicated. Stepping up to the counter that was facing the street, Peter had accidentally knocked over a chip or Twisties stand. Peter was confronted in the customer service area of the milk bar by both shop attendants.

 

Gary was standing outside the shop urging Peter to join him and move on. A short time later he saw Peter dead on the footpath.

 

Con Boulougouris gave evidence at the inquest. He recalled the night in question — “a young man out on the pavement falling down, grabbing a pole and not being able to get up” — but he did not recall any physical or verbal confrontation inside the milk bar. There is no suggestion the Boulgouris brothers were responsible for Peter’s death, only that Con gave evidence at the inquest.

 

In her summation, Ryan said: “Mr Boulougouris is now aged 80 years and has suffered strokes in recent years which he said had impacted on his memory … there is no basis to conclude that Mr Boulougouris was not giving truthful evidence about what he saw and recollected about the night’s events.”

 

The court heard also from Michael Buckland, head of neuropathology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, who agreed with the findings of a report by a fellow forensic neuropathologist Dr Michael Rodriguez, who had examined the autopsy report from 1971: Peter probably hadn’t died from a spontaneous aneurysm. Probably, he had been punched.

 

Ryan praised the family for their efforts over nearly five decades. It cannot have been easy, going against the wishes of their parents. For complex reasons, they had wanted to keep this door closed. And for different but equally complex reasons, their children needed it open.

“There is a need for me to make a fresh determination as to the cause of

 

Peter’s death,” Ryan said, in sober conclusion. “I find that Peter Smith died from a massive basal subarachnoid haemorrhage caused by a blow to the head (from) a person whose identity cannot be established.

 

“Answers have been found to some, if not all, of the questions that have haunted the family over the years,” Ryan said. “This will not bring Peter back to them, but I hope it gives some comfort.”

It does.

 

Asked about her memories of Peter, Belinda says: “Oh, he was fun. He was intelligent and sociable. He was loved. Peter, or Petey, as I used to call him, meant the world to me and my sisters, Pamela and Judy.

“There was enough of an age gap between us that we never argued as a brother and sister usually would. I was so young when he died, but I remember always waiting in anticipation for Peter to arrive home. He would lift me up in the air … he was such a fun brother to have and he had so much love for me. I adored him.”

 

Pamela remembers Peter as a considerate and caring young man who was academically talented. Judy remembers Peter as a wonderful big brother, teaching her how to ride a bike, skateboard, swim and surf.

“His death took a terrible toll. Both our parents died prematurely. I think it was the shock and grief … by the time I was 18, my family of six had become a family of three.

 

“But our sense of Peter was very strong throughout this process. We never lost hope that we would expose the truth for him. And for Gary. Because we cannot begin to imagine what Gary has been through, witnessing Pete’s death, when he was just 19, and knowing the truth of it.”

 

But Gary has been comforted, too. “I lost something closer to a brother than a best friend when Pete died,” he says. “I’ve always thought, we were building a friendship that would have lasted a lifetime. We would have kept playing sport, kept playing music. I stayed close to his sisters.

 

“I felt powerless afterwards, and when they decided to pursue the matter, 100 per cent, I was willing to back them. And it feels right, to have the truth out. Because he didn’t deserve to die. And I’ve had a strong sense, all my life, of Peter being present. He has always been around me. So this was me, being here for him.”