Multiple witnesses to the deadly 1979 Ghost Train fire have come forward to reveal how they saw and heard a suspicious group of males at Luna Park or smelt kerosene, an accelerant.
But instead of following up the many leads, the NSW Police officer in charge, Detective Inspector Doug Knight, dismissed it all.
He cancelled the search for the suspects and swiftly concluded the fire was caused by an electrical fault.
ABC's EXPOSED investigation has unearthed seven overlapping accounts of "youths" or "bikies" seen by staff and patrons at the theme park that night, with key witnesses speaking publicly for the first time.
Some have told the ABC they felt "intimidated" and "hounded" by NSW Police to change their original statements about what they heard and saw.
Their sightings include a group of bearded bikies wearing leather jackets and knee-high boots who rode on the Ghost Train shortly before the fire began, as well as a group of males talking about using kerosene and matches as the train began to smoke.
Here's what these witnesses described in their own words:
But to this day, those males have never been found.
Talk of arson overheard
Les Dowd has a habit of looking over his shoulder.
He often shifts up and down the coast. He takes notice of car number plates. Rather than catch public transport, he likes to walk so he can check who's behind him.
"I'm still scared shitless," he says.
Dowd has never spoken publicly about what he heard and saw at Sydney's Luna Park on June 9, 1979, the night of the deadly Ghost Train fire.
ABC EXPOSED: Andy Taylor
)But after 42 years Dowd has decided to break his silence, telling his story to the ABC's EXPOSED documentary series.
In a nondescript motel room, Dowd sits on the bed with his body twisted away from the camera, looking over his shoulder, keeping one eye on the door.
"I don't know if they're still out there," he says. "Somebody could just stab me in the back … or shoot me."
If they did, he says, "it's just one less witness they have to worry about".
Dowd, then 17, was standing in front of the Ghost Train when the fire erupted. He swears he heard a group of teenage males discussing arson the moment before.
Detectives took a detailed statement from Dowd, leading to a police hunt for the group of five. But hours later he retracted everything he originally told police and the search was halted.
"I was more or less bullied into it," Dowd says of his decision. "I'm always going to regret it."
Everything 'turned arse-up'
Five teenagers made the trip down the hill from the Taldumande youth refuge in North Sydney to Luna Park on Sydney Harbour, free tickets in hand.
After growing up in a dysfunctional family and spending time in a series of foster homes, going to Luna Park was "probably one of the best things I'd ever done when I was a kid," Dowd says.
Walking through the clown face entranceway, Dowd and his friend Tina Shakeshaft headed first to the Ghost Train, then the dodgem cars, then the Big Dipper roller-coaster. Soon after that, everything "turned arse-up".
Dowd and Shakeshaft were standing outside the Magic Shop near the front of the Ghost Train when he saw "five blokes" about 16 to 18 years old, standing a few metres away, wearing denim and jackets.
ABC EXPOSED: Supplied
)ABC EXPOSED
)"They were all huddled together," Dowd said in his original police statement.
"I heard one of them say, 'I spread the kerosene out, and I lit it with a match.' Another one said, 'You're a fool for doing it.' They started running towards the exit."
Moments later, smoke began pouring out of the Ghost Train.
Dowd's friends convinced him to find a policeman, who took down the story in his notebook, before the group raced back up the hill to the refuge.
"I remember them bursting through the door," refuge manager Julie Borger tells EXPOSED. The children were "very excited, hyped, agitated, sure of what they were saying, telling us about the fire".
Later that night Borger and her husband received a call at the refuge. It was the police.
'He's describing arson'
Detective Senior Constable Michael Maher was working the night shift with the Special Breaking Squad when he was called to join the Luna Park fire investigation.
Maher questioned Dowd at North Sydney police station in an interview beginning at 2:40am.
Supplied: Sydney Morning Herald
)Dowd described to Maher one youth in particular: skinny, 5 feet 10 inches tall, with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing brown boots, jeans and a denim jacket, with a gold cross earring in his left ear and a light blue star tattoo on his right earlobe.
Maher said the level of detail was strong and he took the allegation seriously.
"I would not have taken a statement from him if I didn't [take it seriously]," Maher tells EXPOSED in his first public interview about the Ghost Train fire.
ABC EXPOSED
)"He's describing arson."
Maher finished his shift that morning and had no further involvement in the Ghost Train fire investigation.
About 6:00am, police issued a radio call-out alerting officers to look for the group of five young males. But nine hours later, Detective Inspector Doug Knight, who was leading the investigation, called off the search.
'Pressured' to change story
"I've always felt very unhappy about it, knowing that justice hadn't occurred," says Julie Borger, the refuge manager and guardian who accompanied Dowd to his police interviews.
To Borger, Dowd was not a liar, a big-noter or an exaggerator. To her, Dowd was a shy kid trying to do the right thing by telling police what he'd seen and heard.
"For him to come up with a statement is big, you didn't dismiss it," she says.
A second pair of detectives turned up the morning after the fire, wanting to interview Dowd again just hours after his first statement.
Borger remembers police speaking to Dowd — still a minor at 17 — alone in a corridor at North Sydney police station.
"I was excluded," she says.
Before Borger had a chance to talk to Dowd, police took them into a room for the second official interview.
Supplied
)"I had no idea that Les was going to come up with the version that he did," she says.
Dowd was pressed on what he had first told police about kerosene and matches.
"Do you agree you told me earlier that what was contained in that interview was not true?" a detective asked.
"The lot of it isn't true," Dowd said.
At the time, he could give no reason for making up a story with such detailed physical descriptions.
Maher, the detective who took his first statement, says it would be "an extraordinary make-up" to have concocted his story about kerosene and matches as well as the detailed physical descriptions Dowd gave.
Now Dowd tells EXPOSED he felt bullied by police and afraid of physical reprisals if he refused to change his story.
"They could have waved anything in front of me and I would have signed it," he says. "I was scared, because the coppers said they'll probably end up catching up with the people."
He says the police also told him that the fire was caused by an electrical fault.
"It's unbelievable," Dowd says. "They virtually told me what to say."
According to Borger, the police in the interview room were not angry or acting aggressively toward Dowd. But they were "absolutely leading him to say exactly what they wanted him to say".
As soon as Dowd retracted his statement about arson, police charged him with the crime of public mischief. He was placed on a $100 bond.
Meanwhile, police had withdrawn the radio call-out to look for the group of five.
EXPOSED has spoken with one of the detectives present at Dowd's second interview, who says he cannot remember speaking to him alone. He also cannot recall why Dowd was called in for the second interview. The former detective says Dowd was charged with public mischief over his first statement.
He rejects any suggestion of police intimidation or that Dowd was pressured into changing his story.
'Come on, let's split'
Tina Shakeshaft was 14 when she saw the inferno consume the Ghost Train. When the ABC finds her decades later, she's living far away from the place that still haunts her.
She speaks rapidly, her voice cracking with anxiety.
"Most of my life I've always looked behind me and I've always been scared that someone's going to catch up with me," says Shakeshaft, who has never spoken publicly.
Supplied
)Supplied: Sydney Morning Herald
)Supplied: Stanton Library
)"Is someone going to beat the hell out of me because I've actually spoken up and said something?"
Shakeshaft was standing right beside Dowd near the Magic Shop when they saw the group of males.
"All of a sudden it seemed to go quiet," Shakeshaft told police.
"I heard one of them say, 'You shouldn't have done that' — or something very similar. Another one said, 'Come on, let's split.'"
Soon after, smoke began to rise from the Ghost Train.
Shakeshaft — like her friend Dowd — was called back by police for a second interview.
This time round, she says, police began "drilling" her with questions about her friend's credibility. She felt as if she were in trouble, being "hounded" to deviate from her story.
"I do remember feeling kind of, like, intimidated," she says.
"And I wasn't going to say anything that wasn't true."
Shakeshaft did not budge from her initial statement. And while her statement was tendered, she was never called to give evidence at the Ghost Train fire coronial inquest, where she was described as one of 26 witnesses "who take this inquiry no further".
After the fire, Shakeshaft remembers hearing on the news that police had found no suspicious circumstances.
"It was, like, bullshit!" she says. "No-one's hearing us, again."
'Horrified' to learn of the match
Another witness whose statement was tendered but never appeared at the inquest — deemed to "take the inquiry no further" — was Alan Chappell, a staff superintendent at Luna Park.
Chappell told police he had to reprimand a group of youths wearing leather jackets, one of whom was drinking a can of beer.
One of those he described was about 20 years old, 5 feet 8 to 10 inches tall, shoulder length blond hair, with a slim build — almost an exact match for the person Dowd had described that same day.
Chappell tells EXPOSED he is "horrified" to learn of the match.
ABC EXPOSED: Andy Taylor
)"That just corroborates what I said … that there was this guy there," he says.
Elena Juhaszi, a Ghost Train passenger who barely managed to escape the fire, noticed a group of bikies there that night.
According to a law enforcement report obtained by EXPOSED, Elena said she told police she saw "half a dozen bikies, bearded and long-haired, wearing long coats and knee-high boots, drinking cans of beer."
Bikies had been seen at Luna Park before but Juhaszi was concerned by the group she saw emerging from the Ghost Train when she joined the queue.
Juhaszi, who has since died, told authorities "the police had told her that they could not prove that bikies had lit the fire and that she should forget it".
Her then-husband Frank Juhaszi tells EXPOSED that he, too, saw bikies at Luna Park the night of the fire. "I'm 100 per cent — I said that," he says.
But his police statement also contains no mention of them.
"I told the police," he says, "and they never followed up."
The smell of burning kerosene
The Juhaszis weren't the only ones who saw bikies that night.
Albert Bessell, the operator of the Ghost Train, saw every passenger close up as he pushed the buttons to send the carriages in and out.
Bessell was interviewed at the North Sydney police station in the early hours of June 10, 1979 — just as Dowd and Shakeshaft were.
"About 10 minutes before the fire was noticed I saw about nine men and two or three girls who I would describe as bikies go into the ride," Bessell, who has since died, told police.
One he described as being about 30 with a "brown full beard".
He referred to bikies again in a statement to Luna Park management.
"I was a little worried about the bikies that went in just shortly before the fire but I couldn't get in to check on them," he said. "They went in about 10 minutes before the woman yelled 'fire'."
ABC EXPOSED: Andy Taylor
)Frank Boitano, a Luna Park attendant, said in his statement that he saw "a bikie with a very long beard" standing near the train's turnstile.
Boitano has told EXPOSED he also smelt burning kerosene when he was helping passengers escape. But police never asked him about the smell, he said, and it was not recorded in his statement.
In another police statement, 21-year-old Greg Chard told officers he smelt kerosene when he was riding the train, at the origin point of the blaze.
Chard was never called to give evidence at the inquest. And neither Boitano nor Bessell was asked about the bikies they saw around the time of the fire.
'How come they were never told the truth?'
Detective Michael Maher, the detective who first interviewed Dowd, says that until he was approached by EXPOSED, he did not know of all the other witnesses who reported suspicious circumstances.
Now he believes their stories count as corroborating evidence for Les Dowd's original story.
Had he known at the time, he says "I would have taken it up with my superiors and said, 'Hey! Wait a minute. What's going on here?'"
As for Dowd, he has spent years dwelling on what happened with the police investigation and the impact on the parents of the children who died.
"[The police] went and told the parents that it was an electric fault? Excuse the language, but that sucks!" he says.
"How come they were never told the truth of what everyone said?"
In Dowd's eyes, police "cleaned it all up and chucked it under the mat".
Watch EXPOSED: The Ghost Train fire on iview.
Credits:
- Reporting: Caro Meldrum-Hanna, Patrick Begley, Dunja Karagic and Jaya Balendra
- Digital production: Mark Doman and Stephen Hutcheon
- Design: Alex Palmer
- Development: Nathanael Scott
