At about 9-15 pm on January 10, 1989, Colin Winchester, the chief of the Australian Capital Territory police force arrived home and climbed out of his car. Waiting in the dark was an assassin armed with a rifle and at point blank range he pumped two bullets into his victims head, killing him instantly.
This was a crime that shocked Australia but the investigation was inconclusive. One suspect was David Harold Eastman, a disgruntled Canberra public servant who had been lobbying Mr Winchester unsuccessfully to intervene in an assault charge he was facing. The police tracked the rifle used to a retail outlet nearby but established no connection with Mr Eastman. There were swirling rumours of international criminal connections being involved in the murder but the case seemed to be going nowhere.
On December 23, 1992, at the end of a massive police investigation and following an inquest that ran for three years, Eastman was charged with the murder. He was found guilty in his first trial in 1995 and spent the next nineteen years in prison until his conviction was quashed in 2014. A judicial enquiry had found that Mr Eastman had suffered a substantial miscarriage of justice, due in part to flaws in the forensic evidence used against him.
When that conviction was quashed the enquiry recommended there be no retrial but the DPP ignored that and proceeded to put the matter before a fresh jury. The now 73 year old Mr Eastman faced an agonising wait - the jury deliberated for more than thirty-one hours over seven days and appeared deadlocked - before finally delivering a verdict of " not guilty ". This trial had lasted five months.
Of course, that is not the end of the matter. David Eastman will again find himself in a courtroom when he sues the state for compensation for those long years spent in a prison cell. The fact that he has been cleared now leaves this murder case unsolved and after such a long passage of time it seems unlikely that a fresh suspect will be unearthed with sufficient evidence to go to trial.
The entire Winchester murder and Eastman conviction draws ire in many quarters. The murder of a police chief is an affront to law and order that urgently requires that a suspect be found and publicly convicted. Many wonder if the DPP went to trial on evidence that would be rejected in any ordinary murder case and if Eastman was the unfortunate victim of an enquiry that demanded immediate closure.
The people who delight in conspiracy theories will have no trouble connecting the murder of a high level cop and the drug trade that was flourishing at Griffith at that time. Somewhere down the track some enterprising journalist is likely to write a book that ties together the Donald McKay murder, the Mafia and the hush money that was paid to law enforcement to look the other way.
It looks like the Winchester murder will forever remain an unsolved crime !
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