PART 1: Kangaroo Flat siege 15 years on: Sergeant relives fateful night

PART 2: Kangaroo Flat siege: Smoke was rising from my chest

CRAIG Miller was lying in the ditch alone, injured.

A bullet had pierced his upper right side and while he didn’t know it then, it had lodged in his spine.

Blood was not visible. The only marking on his pristine starched white business shirt was a small dark ring around an even smaller hole.

Miller, a former Senior Detective of Victoria Police, was one of four officers shot during the siege in Kangaroo Flat on October 1, 1999, in which a gunman had barricaded himself inside a house in High Street.

The siege remains the single biggest number of police shot at one scene in Victorian Police history.

Miller has rarely spoken publicly about the shooting before.

For him, the memories of that night of 15 years ago are still vivid; it is something he lives with daily. Not just the physical injuries, but the emotional ones, too. As he speaks his voice shakes. He apologises for stumbling his words. He shakes slightly. He is sharing a very personal account of a horrific incident.

Miller lay in that ditch on High Street alone for about 40 minutes. Waiting for someone to come and rescue him. He was bleeding profusely internally, the pain was excruciating.

''I couldn’t move,'' he says. ''I was laying there with my back to the house, I couldn’t feel my legs, I don’t know why. And that was worrying me, but there was no injury to my legs, I just couldn’t feel them. The only thing I worried about was if he was on the move and I would be shot in the back of the head.

''I had a white shirt on. I had a beautifully washed, nice fluorescent white shirt, well starched.” He laughs. “Unfortunately starch doesn’t stop bullets.”

His colleague Senior Constable Peter Eames was shot minutes earlier, while standing beside him at the front of the house.

Two more colleagues would soon be injured.

A dangerous situation had just escalated. It was a busy road and people were driving and walking directly through the gunman’s firing zone.

Miller had courageously run across the road through the gunman’s line of sight in an attempt to stop the flow of traffic passing the house. His first chance of refuge was a large gum tree, 87 metres across the road.

“I reached the gum tree and I was thinking there would be a lull and I could go south to stop the traffic further away from where the scene was. I actually lent out from the tree – I know now from the site drawing that the homicide squad did that it was 87 metres from the front porch to where I was.

“So this bloke is an extremely good shot and I only exposed part of my body and I felt it hit through the right side of my chest. I knew what had happened, it just hurt immediately. I went to the ground. It was an unmade culvert and I rolled over on my left side into the ditch. The camber of the roadway was protecting me, as long as he was still in the house.

“Then I think it was 30 or 40 minutes before they sent Michala Maskell and Gary Harrison. They came up along the unmade culvert from the south. In the meantime, a nurse, Mary-Ann Beckmans, come out of her house and at much peril to herself she got into the ditch and stayed with me. Another local resident, Harry Stirton, came out and put some sort of coat over me.

“I remember people walking along the footpath and I was lying in the gutter, they were oblivious to what was happening. I told them to get away.

“When Mary-Ann came I felt so much better that someone was actually with me. But I think I even told her to go. Then Michala and Gary both came, they were armed and had police comms, as well, so I could hear what was unfolding. And they just said to hang on; stuff is being arranged for you. I was in a position where it was impossible for anyone to get to me, even a vehicle. So one of the uniformed blokes had the idea that a friend had an armored truck. And I don’t know how you procure an armored truck just like that,” he chuckles.

Beckmans and Stirton are credited with helping save Miller’s life. Beckmans father, Hendrikus would bravely cross the road to let other officers know the seriousness of Miller’s injuries. Stirton later told The Age newspaper that from his house he saw someone hit and flung into a gutter, screaming for help. "Regardless of what was happening, I thought it would be a deplorable situation if that person was left to die alone, or if something could be done to stop the bleeding," he said. He reached Miller and draped his own dark jacket over him to make him less visible to the gunman.

While other officers had heard Miller cry out when he was shot, it was an hour before they could get to him. Gunman John Wason was keeping them at bay.

Miller joined Victoria Police in July 1985 and arrived in Bendigo in December 1995. He was 33 at the time of the shooting. It was the third time he had attended an incident at Kangaroo Flat that afternoon. Fate would have it that the third visit would nearly be his last.

The siege unfolded after Wason called an ambulance, saying his Dad had had a heart attack. When they arrived the mentally disturbed Wason went into a rage. His father had blood on his face and appeared to have been bashed. Police were called to calm the agitated Wason. His father was taken to hospital.

Miller was one of the first police officers at the scene. After Senior Constable Peter Eames had a brief conversation with Wason he opened fire on them. Eames was hit in the chest, the bullet whistled past just centimetres from Miller. As Eames slumped to the ground, Miller instinctively looked around to see who else was in danger.

He saw Superintendent Dave Mansell’s wife sitting in a car nearby. She could easily be a target, Miller recalls of the night.

“Peter Eames had just done the negotiators’ course so we decided to get him to talk to this bloke and try and talk him out. We had been in the house next door trying to call him. The phone was either engaged or off the hook. It was obvious he wasn’t going to come out so (Sergeant) Tony Commadeur said ‘right, get the vests on’.

“My car was parked away so I was going to get one of the vests out of the van. Peter Eames and I were together on the nature strip.

“I don’t recall the bloke coming out first. Eamesy was standing beside me, then all of a sudden I heard this pop and Eamesy hits the deck right next to me.

“Just before that, Mr Mansell, the chief superintendent, turned up with his wife. They had been having tea somewhere close by and they had parked outside the corner house on Bank Street, not in line with this house.

“I knew what had happened straight away as soon as I heard the sound and saw Eamesy hitting the ground. I turned around and I could just see Mrs Mansell sitting in the car and I thought ‘uh oh, that’s the priority’.

“So I ran to the car and I just wrenched her out of the car, I wasn’t very nice about it, but anyway, it had to be done. I took her around the corner and told her to keep going.”

Miller, Superintendent Mansell and Commadeur took cover behind a low brick fence. But the bullets kept coming.

“Tony Commadeur and I were talking about how are we were going to get to Eamesy.

“There were a number of shots, and one of them hit the top of the fence and came very close to hitting Tony in the head. There was a lull and we reached out to grab his boots and that’s when this guy shot him in the leg.

“I don’t know whether we discussed him having had a .22 and a single shot so he might have had time to reload. So we grabbed his boot and dragged him. We were worried about how much damage we were going to do by dragging him but we had to.

“I can still hear all his equipment dragging on the footpath.”

Miller, who was unarmed when he first attended the scene, had grabbed Eames’ revolver as he was being taken to hospital. But being armed did little to save him from being shot. As he lay injured in the ditch he said it was clear that Wason had watched and tracked him as he tried to warn the public.

That night Wason later fired at and wounded Inspector Ulf Kaminski and Sergeant Peter Lukaitis. It was a scene Bendigo had never experienced before.

“We did all we could do at the time, instincts hit in,” Miller says. A subsequent report into the officers’ actions was highly critical of their actions. Miller, in particular, for attending the scene without his firearm.

“I was in the office doing paperwork. It was warm weather and back then detectives were not supposed to wear exposed firearms if they were in a shirt and tie. I made the decision, I was criticised for it by the police review.

“But, if you look at the facts, I was armed at the time I got shot and it didn’t make one ounce of difference. I certainly wouldn’t have been discharging a revolver from 87 metres back at the gunman. With a revolver I would still miss a bus at 87 metres.”

Miller spent weeks in hospital and months in rehabilitation. When he saw his partner, Jacqui, for the first time he joked that he ‘should have ducked quicker’.

A dry sense of humour has helped the couple cope with 15 years of rehabilitation for physical and emotional trauma. Jacqui, he says, ‘is my rock. She is wonderful.”

Surgeons said he was extremely lucky. The bullet had lodged between an artery and the spinal cord. It damaged a vertebra and then lodged in another. Having lain in a ditch for more than hour, he could have bled out. In fact, he was bleeding internally. Having rolled on to his left side ensured no blood would escape his body.

“There wouldn’t even be a gap of eight millimetres,” Miller says, holding out his thumb and forefinger to illustrate the gap. His hands shake slightly. “It was a .22 and a fraction either way and I would have been paralysed or dead.”

Police had heard Wason was armed with other weapons. They didn’t know if anyone  else was in the house. While they contained the situation, they could not take risks in rescuing the injured.  

“In fact it was relayed to one of the sergeants on the way to the scene that the weapon this guy had was a 3038 roundrifle. They were ready to scrub my name off the wall, as I wouldn’t have survived that. Lucky it was a .22.”

He said Michala Maskell and Gary Harrison were brave to crawl along the culvert, as were the Beckmans, Harry Stirton and the officers in the armoured vehicle.

“One of the blokes was Craig Pearse, later a sergeant in Maryborough – we went through the academy together and had always been good friends. He was at home and heard what was going on and said he was coming to get me. He and Mick Palmer were in the truck.

“I had never been in an armoured truck before, it was very confined,” he laughs.

“They had a shot gun and covered off the scene towards the house. The others dragged me into the truck and Michala and Gary were all in the truck and we were gone.

“I was taken to the rendezvous point with the ambos and I can remember just being on my back in the ambulance. I could picture where I was and the last thing I remember was the ambulance started to tilt so I knew I was going up the Arnold Street hill. They gave me a real big shot of adrenaline along the way. I was pretty well knackered.”

Sergeant Craig Pearse later died of a heart attack in 2011 while stationed at Maryborough. His mateship was instrumental in helping Miller through the years of mental and physical trauma that would haunt him.

“We were the best of mates,” Miller says, smiling.

“There was support from certain people. A rehab officer from Broadmeadows was wonderful. Mr Mansell sort of took me on as if he had an injured son... people were just wonderful.”

Miller returned to work, but in the next decade he says the horror of the night kept coming back. He also endured several operations to repair damage to his internal organs. Surgeons initially removed part of his bowel. His ureter was badly damaged. At one stage his injuries turned septic and he was rushed to surgery. Again, it was surgeon Rodney Mitchell who worked to repair the damage.

Miller was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in 2002.

“I didn’t even know what PTSD was,’ he says. “As an officer you do the job and then just get on with it. Some things you see are not that pretty but then it’s on to the next thing not having time to reflect on what you have just experienced.”

He openly says he was jumpy, always anxious and on edge. Thinking that something was going to happen. “I would go past a window and wonder who was behind there, were they watching me.”

Miller says he was lucky to attend a counselling session in Melbourne and later in Bendigo that would help him learn certain mechanisms to cope with the trauma.

“By about 2011 I was not right. And I knew I wasn’t contributing with simple things I could have done years ago and I couldn’t perform those tasks. I wasn’t in a fit state to be at work. Through the police association I was able to do a course at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, which was designed for Vietnam Veterans initially, then the course was converted to police, fire and ambos. It is designed entirely for people who have PTSD and it involves partners. It was 10 weeks and there was a lot of benefit there. It doesn’t suddenly fix you but they can help you understand why you are feeling a certain way.

“I was the only one there with physical injuries, the rest of them were affected emotionally. The common thread was they had been to critical incident after critical incident without any time to reflect on what they had done, as far as debriefing. It banks up until you fall over. It is very sad and it’s happening more and more.”

It was procedure for police to have a debriefing following an incident, however Miller was in hospital at the time. He did, however, attend a later meeting at police headquarters.

But as time went on, debriefing became incidental to what Miller was going through.

“(In 2011) the force decided to retire me because of ill health; I was going to fight that because I had been married to the job and it’s what I knew. Then one day something just hit me to give it up. And I have never been happier.

“It was gut wrenching at the time as I didn’t know anything else and didn’t know if I was going to be looked after with a pension. I had good help with the police association as the force kicked me out the door. It’s like for 26 years you have been carrying a big bag of spuds, then you hand it to someone else and the weight is gone.”

The bullet remains in Miller’s spine. But he isn’t bitter towards Wason or the force.

“I feel no ill will towards Wason. I don’t even know what he looks like. I feel for his mother. She lost her son that night, and later her husband. I know he wasn’t in the right frame of mind that night and he had guns, it was a dangerous combination. That family has a greater burden to carry from it than any of us. I have no sour grapes. It just happened.”

As the siege unfolded over 19 hours, the Special Operations Group entered the house on the morning of October 2. They found Wason dead. He had shot himself.

While the police review was critical of the officers, Miller says he and his colleagues did what they could to the best of their ability with available resources at that time.

“That night was all about looking after each other. No member of the public got hurt; no police member lost his or her life.

“The role of the police is to protect life and these days with the critical incidents of barricades and searches, someone has to go there and do something initially, so you are always going to have to make contact.

“This thing unfolded pretty quickly and it was on. So there’s a period of confusion, a period of containment and then there’s a period of resolving the thing.

“As it turned out all the services there had to sit and wait. The next day they put the cameras in with the SOG. The bloke is dead in the hallway.”

He said while he could deal with the medical issues he was enduring, it was the emotional issues that were causing the greatest angst. The injured officers were initially denied compensation when the-then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett decided to make changes to workers' compensation laws during 2007-2009.

“We were in that gap,” Miller says. He and other officers who had been shot or seriously injured in the line of duty in other incidents in Victoria during that time joined forces to fight for compensation.

“I could understand all the medical stuff but there were other things going on at the time, there was the police review done by Mr (Noel) Ashby, which had been critical of police actions on that night. We had not been entitled to see the review, so we were heading towards a coronial inquest without knowing what was in the report.

“There was a delay in the coronial inquest because the coroner Mr Johnstone was hearing the Linton bushfire one at that time. There was talk of it being held in Melbourne, so we were thinking ‘let’s get on with it.’

“We wanted to know that everything we did was right, there was a period of uncertainty of not knowing that what you did was to the best of your ability.

“With any of these things there’s hindsight. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but what was being said about the actions of those that attended that night was unjustified,” he says about the official review. The push for compensation was to be just as traumatic.

“We had nowhere to go, and I was thinking if this round in my back shifts I may end up paralysed. So I had to think about doing the best I could for myself. There were lots of other policemen and women, nearly 20 of them, that had been hurt during the same period, some of them very nearly killed. I and Peter Eames pushed for compensation and then joined with others … in the end we had a meeting with the chief commissioner, about 20 of us, and our partners and wives. She was horrified to hear what everyone went through. Family and partners were very vocal at that meeting.”

The then Chief Commissioner was Christine Nixon. She met with the injured officers and their families.

“We were looking for an ex gratia payment. A lot of people have different views on whether we were entitled to that. In the end an agreement was settled for all members and that helped me.“ Nixon had listened and announced compensation in November 2001.

Miller says that one of the saddest times since the incident was when Ulf Kaminksi died in 2003 from an unrelated illness.

“It was sad to have lost Ulf. I didn’t know him very well but afterwards we became closer. After his fiftieth he walked us to our car and said he was glad he could call me his friend. It was sad when he died, and then with Pearsey – they were good people.”

While the back pain is a constant reminder of that October night, he remains optimistic about life.

“It still bothers me but - number one I am here and number two I am walking, so if I get back pain it’s not a big problem.

“Emotionally, every time I pass the house, there is a reminder. In fact the first time that Jacqui and I went past, the car beside us backfired. I just about crawled into the foot well of the car. But it gets easier. We laughed at that later on.”

“After spending time at the Heidelberg Repat, I often reflect on our men and women who served in our armed services during wartime. The incident I was involved with lasted one night. I admire the bravery of those people who endured the same type of action night after night. I don’t know how any of them could ever lead a normal life.”

Senior Constable Peter Eames and Senior Detective Craig Miller were awarded the Victoria Police Star in 2001, acknowledging the serious injuries they suffered during the siege. Miller, along with Sergeant Peter Lukaitis and Sergeant Tony Commadeur received Australian Bravery Awards for their actions, as did Mary-Ann Beckmans, Harry Stirton and Hendrikus Beckmans. Senior Constables Gary Harrison, Michala Maskell and Frank Reid received commendations.

An inquest into the siege found John Wason was suffering mental health issues when he shot police and took his own life. There was no criticism by the coroner of police regarding their actions.

“I loved my time in the force. I worked with the most wonderful dedicated bunch of people. Even with what happened, I am walking around, I am alive. I got to see Laura (his step daughter) grow up and have her own little bloke. Jacqui and I have a happier life now. It took a bit of time but I am in a better place.”