On the morning of June 4, 2003, Shane Chartres Abbott stood outside his home in Reservoir, a suburb of Melbourne, with his girlfriend. Moments later, he was ambushed and shot dead. The murder of a male prostitute might have been a minor criminal footnote, but Abbott was not an ordinary victim. He was on trial for a gruesome attack on a woman, a case that had already branded him in the tabloid press with a lurid nickname: the Vampire Gigolo.
His killing triggered a police investigation that would cost more than thirty million dollars, send innocent men to jail, destroy careers, and expose the rotten heart of Victoria’s justice system. Seven years after the murder, investigative journalist Adam Shand began looking into the case. To his surprise, he found a man denied justice not once, but twice. Abbott had been a sex worker with a specialty in bondage and discipline, but he had no history of violence.
He was also a father-to-be, a former sales worker, and a man his friends described as normal, charismatic, and deeply thoughtful. He had been charged with a horrific assault on a Thai-born stripper and prostitute referred to only as Penny. On the night of the attack in August 2002, Penny had booked Abbott to her room at the Seville Hotel in South Yarra. It was the fourth time she had hired him.
She later told police she fell asleep and woke to horrific injuries: lacerations, evidence of rape, and a severe wound to her tongue that appeared partially missing. Because Abbott was the last person she remembered seeing, police charged him with the assault. Abbott maintained his innocence. He told his lawyer that when he arrived at the hotel room, an aggressive Asian man answered the door.
Penny seemed tense and unlike herself. Eventually, she told him he was in danger, that he was being set up for a snuff film, and that human traffickers in the sex trade had forced her to recruit a young man to be killed in that room. Abbott said he left around four in the morning and had done only what he was paid for. When he left, Penny was fine.
He was mortified and terrified by the charge, and he began to believe a conspiracy was closing in on him. In personal notes written while preparing for trial, he wrote: “I’m the fall guy for someone else. I have no motive… Someone else was in that room.
Someone else raped Penny and beat her and left her for dead. ” He spoke of judges, police, and politicians involved in something far larger, and he told his lawyer he believed he was being followed. He feared for his life. The day before he was due to give evidence, he told her that when he got in the witness box, all the jigsaw pieces would come together.
He was killed the next morning. Penny had another man in her life: her ex-boyfriend, Mark Adrian Perry. Perry was a peripheral figure in Melbourne’s gangland scene. He had started as a nightclub bouncer, then moved into drug dealing, trading in cocaine, ecstasy, and speed.
Within days of Abbott’s murder, police received calls from members of the public naming Perry as a suspect. The ex-boyfriend of the woman Abbott allegedly raped had an obvious motive. Yet police never brought him in for questioning. They never explained why.
By 2005, the murder investigation had gone cold. Melbourne was in the grip of a gangland war over drugs that had captivated the city for eight years, and police were focused on that carnage. From 2004, a wall of silence began to crumble, and hit men lined up to inform on their former bosses in exchange for deals. One career criminal, referred to as “the Author” for legal reasons, took advantage of this environment.
In a police interview in 2005 on an unrelated matter, the Author opened his hand and displayed a word written in bold letters: “vampire. ” Police knew he was referring to the Chartres Abbott murder, but he said nothing more. A year later, he decided to give more detail. He requested an interview with his back to the camera, which police strangely allowed.
In that bizarre confession, he admitted to murdering Chartres Abbott. He said it was not a contract killing but a revenge killing, carried out for personal reasons after learning Abbott had brutally injured multiple female clients. He claimed he shot Abbott as a favor for a mate, Warren Shea, who was doing a favor for Penny’s ex, Mark Perry. He named a third man as his accomplice: Evangelist Gooses, a boxer already serving life for two other gangland hits.
The Author gave police a list of building blocks to support his story. He said he had watched Abbott’s house from a nearby railway station car park. He told them where to find the murder weapon in Geelong, and police found a gun exactly there. He said Gooses had shadowed Abbott at the courthouse in the days before his death.
His confession led to the most expensive investigation in Victoria’s history, costing more than thirty million dollars. But from the beginning, there was something wrong. Over the next six years, the Author changed or edited his evidence six times. There were many meetings with investigators and more than a thousand phone calls.
Police even supplied him with a street directory to help him recall the murder scene. But the details did not hold. He said he observed the house from a train station car park, but the house was behind a workshop and could not be seen from there. He said he fired two shots from a .
357 revolver, aiming for the chest first and then the head as Abbott ducked. But the Victorian coroner found the bullet that pierced Abbott’s neck was fired from very close range, traveling upward through his throat into the top of his skull. The forensic evidence did not match the Author’s version. Though police found the gun exactly where he said he disposed of it, it was empty.
There were no spent cartridges and no physical evidence linking him to the crime. The Author had also made an explosive allegation: that serving and former police officers were involved in the murder plot. He claimed he had met four police members at a pub in Melbourne before the killing, where Peter Lawler, a serving detective sergeant, allegedly gave him the address for Shane Chartres Abbott. Lawler had been working at the Parana police station on the day of the murder.
Seven hours after Abbott was killed, the Author walked into that station to have a warrant executed. Lawler remembered the visit clearly; the Author was late, so they rescheduled for later that afternoon. Lawler executed the warrant, set a court date, and the Author left. Three years later, the Author claimed that execution of the warrant was part of a plan to provide an alibi.
Lawler was suspended from the police force and investigated for allegedly giving a hit man his target’s address. He was also accused of accepting a cash bribe of fifteen hundred dollars, potentially in view of other officers. The Author further claimed he had met four police members at a pub: Peter Lawler, former detective sergeant Dave Waters, Inspector Robert Hodgkin, and Detective Constable Ben Archbold. All four were accused of being present when Lawler allegedly gave the address that set the murder in motion.
Archbold retrieved his diary and found a watertight alibi: on that date, he was on the reality TV show Big Brother, under audio, CCTV, and 24-hour surveillance. Hodgkin, who had been in charge of the Melbourne West and Carlton police stations with over three hundred staff under him, was relegated to a corner office in the corporate management review division, widely considered the worst job in the force. He walked out the door and never looked back. Lawler and Waters were named in the Age newspaper as being about to be charged with conspiracy to murder, but they were never charged or even arrested.
The allegations were drawn from the word of a known criminal, and the task force established to investigate them was called Operation Briars. The Author understood the power he had over the police. They wanted to prove a link between corruption and organized crime, to avoid a royal commission, and to show they could clean up their own ranks. The Author knew this was what they prized more than anything.
It put him in the driving seat, allowing him to negotiate perks in jail and settle old scores. He was already serving a lengthy sentence for other crimes, so he pleaded guilty to the murder without spending a single additional day in jail. He was in the game, and he was running the show. In 2007, police renewed their interest in Mark Perry, who still had not been brought in for questioning.
He was under surveillance, with results that were at times farcical. In one attempt, police embedded microphones in salt and pepper shakers at a café on the Gold Coast where Perry was meeting Warren Shea. The bugs failed to transmit, leading to a slapstick scene where a senior investigator positioned himself in the next booth, leaning back to overhear the conversation over the clatter of plates and music. They got little.
Perry soon disappeared and became Australia’s most wanted man. Police spent vast sums on surveillance in Thailand, believing he had fled there. In fact, Perry had moved to Perth, living entirely off the grid. He rode a bike, worked menial jobs for cash, paid rent in cash, and never used a phone or credit card.
He evaded notice for six years. His life on the run ended in 2013 when he bumped into an old friend from Melbourne who, perhaps with the million-dollar reward in mind, lured him into a photo booth. The photo reached police, and Perry was arrested in Perth. While Perry was on the run, Penny made an explosive statement to police.
Years after the murder, she had met Perry in a Melbourne pub. After a few drinks, he leaned in close, made his hand into the shape of a gun, and told her he was the one who killed Shane Chartres Abbott. He showed her how he had killed him at point-blank range, the pistol right up underneath his chin. That description fit the forensic evidence in a way the Author’s story never did.
It should have changed the direction of the investigation. Clear evidence discredited the Author’s confession and pointed to Perry as the shooter. But that would have meant discarding the allegations of police involvement in the murder. Investigators chose to stick with the Author’s version.
The conspiracy case, built around Mark Perry arranging for others to do the shooting, depended on the original story standing up. In 2014, eleven years after the murder, Mark Perry, Warren Shea, and Evangelist Gooses went on trial. Waters and Lawler were suspects but never charged. The star witness for the prosecution was the Author, the man already convicted for the killing.
On the day he was due to give evidence via video link from jail, he refused to come out of his cell. A senior detective had to convince him to testify. When he finally did, he faced a searing ten-day examination. The defense found twenty-three instances where his evidence was exculpatory: he would say something, investigators would check, and find it had not occurred at all.
The crown case collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Then, on a crucial point, the Author recanted. He had claimed Warren Shea wanted Chartres Abbott killed. Now he said Shea only wanted him hurt.
The judge pressed him on what “hurt” meant. The Author said it could mean anything from a beating to breaking every bone in his body, but not killing him. With that, the murder conspiracy vanished. The jury returned not-guilty verdicts for all three men.
There were handshakes in the dock, cheers and applause as the verdicts were read. All three were also cleared of manslaughter. The Author went back to jail to serve his other life sentence. He informed the state he would not seek parole and intended to die in prison.
Gooses returned to jail to serve two life sentences. Warren Shea returned home to his family after a two-year sentence for refusing to answer questions at the Australian Crime Commission. Mark Perry declined to tell his side of the story. Penny married, had two children, and lives in Melbourne.
Simon Overland achieved his ambition of becoming Victoria Police chief commissioner but was later forced to resign. Ben Archbold left the police and retrained as a lawyer. Robert Hodgkin received his retirement badge but never received an apology. David Waters and Peter Lawler remain persons of interest in the murder to this day.
Lawler told investigators he knows he did not do it, and what matters is what his friends and family think. He was asked if he missed the force. He said yes, of course. Shane Chartres Abbott’s friends remember him as a great, fun, caring guy, and they wish people did not think of him only as the Vampire Gigolo.
Shane Chartres Abbott and his family never received the justice they deserved. He died before the end of his trial, and the investigation into his murder was completely unsatisfactory. The physical evidence never lies, and it pointed away from the Author’s confession from the start. If the inquiry had followed established principles of investigation, it would have been knocked out within a month.
Instead, it took many years and tens of millions of dollars, and the human toll extended far beyond the murder of one man. The Author’s confession was a stone dropped into a pond, and the concentric rings enveloped innocent people for years. Nearly two decades on, the pieces are still being picked up. The Author has never come clean, and the case remains unresolved.
Until he admits his confession was one big lie from beginning to end, Shane Chartres Abbott, the supposed Vampire Gigolo, cannot rest in peace.