AT CLIFF’S EDGE
Inside the mysterious murder of newsreader Ross Warren
In the late 1980s, Ross Warren was fast rising through the ranks of regional TV and on the cusp of landing a career-defining role on Channel Seven in Sydney. But the Wollongong newsreader never lived long enough to fulfil his destiny. Instead, Warren is today the bestknown name of the many people killed during the deadly era of gay hate crimes in Sydney during the late ’80s and early ’90s.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of Warren who, aged 24, went missing from the cliffs south of Sydney’s Bondi Beach on July 22, 1989. His body has never been found. It took 16 years for a coroner to wipe away the years of innuendo that surrounded Warren’s disappearance, including suggestions of suicide or an accidental fall, and instead rule that he
had, in fact, been murdered.
Former police detective turned author Duncan McNab, who investigated the case in his book Getting Away With Murder, says Warren “was very photogenic and a very good-looking young bloke who was attracting attention as a talent to watch in TV and it seemed he was about to get his big break”. Studio 10 presenter Susie Elelman worked alongside Warren at WIN TV in Wollongong during the late ’80s, when she was senior newsreader and Ross the weather presenter. “In TV, you know the people who have the ‘It’ factor [who will] go all the way, and Ross had it,” Elelman recalls. “He was gorgeous, and we were great mates.”
Warren was gay, a fact he kept private in the close-knit Wollongong community. “He was terrified about being outed as being known to be gay in TV in those days could ruin a career,” Elelman recalls. By 1989, Elelman had moved to Seven, in Sydney, as a newsreader, and one day was told by the newsroom boss they had a vacancy for a new weather presenter. “I responded, ‘Have I got the guy for you’! and immediately phoned Ross and told him to get a showreel together and send it to me,” she says.
“A week later, a colleague at WIN Wollongong had cut together a showreel and handed it to Ross as he was leaving for the weekend in Sydney. I was later told Ross said, ‘I will send this to Susie first thing Monday’. Hours later, he was dead.”
On Friday, July 21, 1989, Warren drove to Sydney and ventured out to the gay strip along Oxford Street. At about 2.15am on July 22, he said goodnight to a friend and said he was returning to
stay the night with some other friends in the inner city. Instead, he drove away in another direction, towards the Eastern Suburbs beaches.
Warren later parked his car near Marks Park at Tamarama, south of Bondi, a well-known gay cruising beat that Warren frequented. The next morning, the friends he was supposed to be staying with awoke to find he had not returned. By Sunday, he failed to show up for work in Wollongong to read the evening news. It was then he was reported as a missing person.
“And that is when the horrible stories started,” Elelman recalls. “There were rumours he had done a runner, others claimed he was living in another state and then the tales started that he was depressed and had committed suicide, which made no sense to anyone who knew him.”
It was friends of Warren who first discovered his parked car with his wallet inside, then, on a set of stairs heading down to the rocks, they found his car keys.
Despite these breakthroughs and a number of attacks on gay men in the same area, the police investigation into Warren’s disappearance was over within weeks. Paddington Police deemed Warren had probably “fallen into the ocean” and “there is nothing to suggest that Ross Warren’s disappearance was the result of foul play”.
This didn’t stop his mother, Kay, from demanding a thorough investigation into her son’s case, and undertaking an unrelenting letterwriting campaign to the police that went on for years. One of her letters finally reached Detective Sergeant Stephen Page who, in 2001, began Operation Taradale, a police investigation into the violent assaults and deaths of homosexual men in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in the late ’80s, which eventually led to a coronial inquiry.
On handing down a verdict on March 9 2005, NSW Deputy Coroner Jacqueline Milledge launched a scathing attack on the handling of the Warren case, describing it as, “a grossly inadequate and shameful investigation”. She also found, “Ross Bradley Warren … was a victim of homicide perpetrated by person or persons unknown.”
Says McNab says: “No-one has yet been arrested for the crime ... It still needs a phone call or an anonymous letter from someone who was involved as the last piece of the jigsaw. That’s when the murderers will be locked up for what they did.”