‘We want justice’: family of man who suffered fatal shotgun wound say death was no accident
It was a crime scene like no other. Jeffrey Brooks had suffered a fatal shotgun wound to the chest, and was slumped in the front seat of a car. The weapon that killed him – an old farm shotgun – was underneath his body. Jeffrey’s hat and a pool of blood were 11 metres away. What happened?
Police appear to have made up their minds very early on the case. “They treated it as an accident,” Jeffrey’s mother Wendy Brooks told Sunday Night’s Denham Hitchcock. “Within an hour they said it looked like an accident.”
Lawyer Peter Boyce believes the conclusion shouldn’t have been so hasty. “It’s easy to say that it was an accident, but all the evidence so far suggests it’s something else.”
In 1991, three men – Paul Stewart, Greg Milham and John Pick – had an ambitious plan to run a crayfish farm in Queensland. It seemed like the perfect opportunity, given that crayfish grow quickly and easily.
Paul was the sales manager of the operation. “I focused on places like the Sheraton, The Marriot on the Gold Coast,” he explains. “They put these crayfish on their seafood buffets.”
The three friends were only investors, so they hired workers to run the farm: a German by the name of Hans Geiger was employed as the manager. His wife Regine, worked alongside him. And finally, there was farmhand Graham Lloyd.
However, there was a problem. The business has 41 dams teeming with crayfish, with more orders then they can handle. It should have been a runaway success – but it wasn’t. Every year for five years, it ran at a heavy loss. To uncover why, the owners decided to hire a young marine biologist fresh out of university – Jeffrey Brooks.
The three farm workers – Hans, Regine and Graham – saw him as a threat.
“He was down working at the ponds one day,” Jeffrey’s father Lawrie recalls. “A shot gun went off and pellets hit the water in front of him. He looked around and there was Hans standing up behind him with the gun. Hans said, ‘Sorry, I was shooting at a bird,’ and Jeffrey said there was no birds around.”
“He just took it as a warning shot, you know – behave yourself or else.”
Jeffrey and his family knew a lot about guns. They had been involved in shooting clubs for generations, they make their own bullets – and most importantly, they pride themselves on gun safety.
Part of Jeffrey’s new job at the crayfish farm involved shooting – mostly scaring off birds that come to eat the crayfish.
Hans had bought a Harrington & Richardson single-barrel break load shotgun made in 1901. Held together with hose clamps, it was falling apart and extremely dangerous. The hammer was known to go off unexpectedly, without the trigger even being touched. It was so dangerous that Jeffrey refused to use it.
Jeffrey complained so much about the old farm gun, the owners bought him a new one – a 12-gauge pump action shotgun.
Jeff used the new shotgun to control the birds. The owners believed they were the reason crayfish numbers were so low – but Jeffrey discovered there was a much bigger problem.
“Jeffrey found out that most of the crayfish were going out the back door for cash sales,” Lawrie explains. “That’s where the thousands of crayfish were going. If you put 10,000 in a pond and you only get 3,000 out, that’s a lot of money going somewhere.”
This discovery was backed up by Paul Stewart. While doing the rounds of hotels and restaurants, he found someone else had beaten him to it.
“When I first started, I was cold calling around the Tweed area,” Paul recalls. “[I] introduced myself, and he told me he had already purchased from there before. They’d been selling to these places prior to me even starting.”
Suspicions fell on the farm workers – Hans, Regine and Graham. To be certain, the farm owners hired a private investigator, Warren Smithers. He took a camera and followed Regine for several days as she dropped off endless boxes of crayfish at hotels and restaurants. He even saw a receipt.
“I think the amount was $6,800-odd dollars for the previous month,” Warren reveals. “That wouldn’t have included the ones that we’d seen delivered to the different places.”
Cash sales and poor breeding practices had run the stocks too low. The farm was closing down; Hans Regine and Graham were sacked. But the workers refused to leave the property, and went to see the owners in a fiery meeting.
“I remember it got heated and Graham demanded his overtime,” Paul remembers. “He slammed his fists down on the desk and stormed out, making a statement that whatever way it took, he was going to get his money.”
On the 13th of March, Jeff arrives early for work. The owners want him to keep the farm running until it’s sold. Hans and Regine are at the manager’s house on the farm. Surprisingly, Graham arrives and joins them at about 9am.
According to police statements, Hans, Regine and Graham are standing near the work shed at about 1.30pm when they claim to hear two gunshots.
Then at about 2pm, even though they’ve all lost their jobs, Hans says he drives into town to run errands for the farm, claiming to return some time after 3pm.
Graham claims this is when he makes a gruesome discovery – Jeffrey, slumped across the front seats of the old work ute. Crime scene photos show the vehicle rolled partway down a dam embankment, the old farm gun is underneath Jeff’s body, and Jeff’s wet Akubra is near a pool of blood over 11 metres away from the vehicle.
Jeffrey’s parents had their suspicions from the very beginning. “When we found out that he had been shot with a gun he refused to use and knew the history of the farm, we thought, oh no, he has been murdered,” says Lawrie.
The owners were also suspicious, and asked police that the death be treated as a homicide. But their plea was seemingly ignored.
In the police investigation, the version of events sees Jeff reach into the ute to grab the shotgun. As he pulls it across the seat, the hammer catches and fires. Jeffs falls backwards, and his hat falls off. Bleeding heavily, he struggles to the ute and slumps across the seats, knocking it out of gear, causing the car to roll back 11 metres.
The workers state this must have happened at about 1.30pm when they heard those gunshots.
However, there’s a major problem with this timeline of events. There was something Hans, Regine and Graham knew nothing about. Unbeknownst to them, Jeffrey made a phone call that day at 1.51pm – 21 minutes after he was supposed to be dead.
The call was to Paul Stewart. “He went into saying that he had found something. He said, ‘I’ve found a book.’ Then he said, ‘I’ve got to go, I can hear someone coming.’ His words to me were: ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’”
Since Jeffrey’s death, Wendy and Lawrie Brooks have gathered a mountain of evidence to prove the police got it wrong, and that their son was murdered.
When any gun is fired, it leaves behind a microscopic powder called gunshot residue, and proves whether a person fired a weapon.
Jeff’s hands were bagged that day for testing – but the coroner was later told not to bother.
No tests were done on any of the farm workers either. Nor were any attempts made to take fingerprints off the gun.
Just as importantly, the final phone call Jeffrey made to Paul was never discussed during the investigation.
Finally, no ballistics tests were ever performed in the case. It could be done now – except the weapon was accidentally destroyed, and is now missing along with a disturbing list of evidence – the x-rays of the gunshot pellets, crucial in proving where the shot came from; and the t-shirt Jeffrey was wearing; and the all-important autopsy photos along with their negatives.
The truth has a strange way of coming out – sometimes by accident – which is how journalist Kate Kyriacou uncovered this story. There have been articles, and even a podcast for the Courier Mail.
“A police officer involved in that original investigation was someone we were writing about,” Kate explains. “The family, Wendy and Lawrie, recognised his name and rang us.”
The officer was, at the time, Detective Sergeant Michael Condon. Today he is the Assistant Police Commissioner in Queensland.
“We just found person after person after person who said to us, ‘I spoke to Jeffrey not long before he died and he was terrified, he was frightened, he thought he was about to be killed,’” says Kate. ‘None of this really was brought up at the inquest, which we found really surprising.”
The coroner wasn’t critical of Condon’s investigation, but plenty of other people were. Dennis Walker was an investigator for WorkCover Queensland. Two years after Jeffrey’s death, he was asked to look into the case to determine what happened.
“I’ve never forgotten about this case all these years. It’s just been something that’s stuck in my craw,” Dennis reveals. “I think the wrong decision was made in the end.”
Dennis was given access to everything: police interviews, notebooks and sketches, crime scene photos, the coroner’s report – and most importantly, the police evidence room.
“We wanted access to the t-shirt if at all possible, and we also wanted to see the x-rays,” Dennis recalls. “The next day, my partner received a phone call from the property officer. He was in a bit of a state, and he said, ‘I can’t find them.’”
Dennis Walker was under pressure to agree with police – that the death was an accident.
“We used the term: not accidental, may involve murder.” Dennis says that wasn’t received very well. “I got a call to go in and see one of the powers that be, and it was just made clear to me – I think the words were, ‘You must stick to the brief.’ I think it’s much more comfortable for them to have called it an accident.”
Because all the evidence is missing, there are major issues with reopening the case. However, Sunday Night can recreate a vital missing piece of the puzzle: using an identical weapon and the process of elimination, it’s possible to determine the distance and trajectory of a gunshot.
Jeffrey’s bullet wound was recorded as being 3 centimetres in diameter. Working with Ben Eu, a gunsmith and ballistics expert, it was determined that the shot was fired 1.4 metres from Jeffrey’s chest from above. From that distance, it was impossible that he could have shot himself accidentally.
Bob Martin is not only a family friend, but also a retired police officer. He believes Jeffrey is down at a crayfish pond when he is confronted by the shooter at the top of the bank. Jeffrey turns when he is shot, which would explain both the location and the direction of the wound. Falling back, he loses his hat and stains the grass with blood, as the shooter walks off. Fatally wounded, Jeff is only just able to return to the ute, which has no handbrake, so it rolls backwards 11 metres from Jeff’s hat.
According to police, there were only three other people on the crayfish farm that day: farmhand Graham Lloyd, manager Hans Geiger, and his wife Regine. The Sunday Night team set out to find them, in the hope they would have some answers.
While investigating their current whereabouts, it was discovered that Hans was declared bankrupt the same year that he was employed at the crayfish farm. Then three years into the new job at the farm, Hans had his bankruptcy discharged or cleared, and he and his wife Regine bought a block of land, to be sold later for a substantial profit. Where did that money come from?
Denham Hitchcock and the team have located Hans after two weeks of searching. He’s now remarried, and 74 years of age. Denham questions him over the sales of crayfish for cash, but he denies it. “On weekends with permission from the owners, I suggested we can make a little bit money selling door sales. That’s it.”
He also denies shooting Jeffrey, and shows little sympathy to his death. “Yeah, he finished his life there. Should I drag it around and drag it around and drag it around when I am not involved? I wasn’t there. My wife was in the house. The only one on the farm was Graham. He must have seen Jeffrey. Ask him.”
Unfortunately, Graham Lloyd was nowhere to be found, and even after discovering Regine’s location, she refused to talk.
While the three workers may have moved on from this story, Wendy and Lawrie still live with it every day. They want the truth.
“The pain in our heart is just incredible, and that will never go away,” reveals Wendy. “We want justice for Jeffrey.”
Reporter: Denham Hitchcock
Producers: Margaret Parker
We requested an interview with Queensland’s current Assistant Commissioner Mike Condon, who led the police investigation that found Jeffrey’s death was accidental. Our request was declined.
Jeffrey’s family have set up a GoFundMe campaign to help costs in seeking justice. Please donate to help with legal fees and other expenses.
Thanks to The Courier Mail for providing additional photographs for this story.
