all-hands-on-deck job. Every examiner on duty piled
into the unmarked forensics van loaded with equipment and headed towards the
city.
Sergeant John Moushall was the senior officer on duty; the rest of the crime
scene examiners were senior constables: Wayne Ashley, Allan Nilon, Steve Spargo,
Peter Guerin and Dave Royal. On the trip to the bomb-site, the police officers
could only speculate as to what they would find when they go there. They knew
that a number of people had been injured, they knew that the Russell Street
headquarters had been damaged, and they knew that communications had been
affected because D-24's visual display units had broken down in the force of the
blast and the subsequent power failure. The lines of communications had been
disabled until the emergency generator kicked in, and even now, were not running
at full strength. Windows at D-24 had been shattered and the only things that
saved the operators inside from flying shards of glass were the heavy drapes
that covered the windows.
En route, the crime scene examiners listened to frantic calls over the police
radios. Breathless officers shouted communications back and forth. To the
trained examiners, these panicked communications could sometimes be unreliable,
but from as far away as Fitzroy, they could see the thick black smoke hanging
over the city leaving them in no doubt that they would have their work cut out
for them. Without the benefit of lights and sirens, the unmarked van got stuck
in the bottle-neck of traffic into the city and the officers had time to ponder
this attack on their turf. Someone had targeted them .
When they finally made it through the traffic, the crime scene van headed
straight for the command post which had been set up on the corner of Latrobe
Street and Exhibition - far enough away from the bomb site to be considered
safe. Even so, that area of Latrobe Street was strewn with bits of rubber,
metal, bricks and glass.
At every crime scene, one officer assumes responsibility for overseeing the
operation. Sergeant John Moushall nominated Senior Constable Wayne Ashley to
take charge of the scene. Ashley had six years experience as a crime scene
examiner under his belt and had worked the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires, and
therefore had ample experience with wide-spread devastation.
At the command post, the crime scene examiners were introduced to Bob Barnes
and Peter Kiernan from the Materials Research Laboratories in the Department of
Defence. Barnes and Kiernan were post-blast experts and had been called in by
the SOG in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The two Department of
Defence experts had done a sweep of the site and officially confirmed that the
explosion was indeed caused by a bomb. As the various teams swapped notes and
organised plans of action, the odour of burning rubber hung thick in the air -
even two hours after the explosion.
In consultation with the Department of Defence experts, crime scene examiner
Wayne Ashley agreed that Barnes and Kiernan could work the immediate area around
the bomb site, and he and his men would do everything else. Debris had spread
over several city blocks and the crime scene examiners, with the assistance of
the SOG, would be responsible for its systematic collection and examination.
With debris crunching underfoot, the post-blast team moved in; they could
feel the aftermath before they saw it. The streets of Melbourne looked like a
war zone. The first thing that Wayne Ashley saw as he turned into Russell Street
was the mangled wreck of the bomb car. Stripped of everything but its frame, it
looked like a giant black spider. The second thing Ashley took in was the
blackening of the entrance to the Russell Street police headquarters. Up until
this moment, the concept of the attack on the police had been esoteric. Now,
seeing the shattered windows of the art deco monolith and her blackened façade,
the affront was palpable.
Initially, Wayne Ashley had been a surprised that