Murder, Carl Williams and a gun under the table: Inside the career of a ‘killer catcher’

On a quiet Monday, Sol Solomon was banging out a few kilometres on his local gym’s treadmill trying to ignore the ringing phone in his exercise bag on the floor next to him.

Eventually, the curiosity of a homicide detective forced him to stop and take the call.

It was a colleague. “You better sit down. Carl’s dead.”

For Sol, there was only one Carl. Underworld heavy and gangland killer Carl Williams who was to be the star witness into the 2004 murders of police informer Terence Hodson and his wife, Christine.

With the death of Williams the case against former detective Paul Dale and hitman Rod Collins collapsed.

“I was devastated,” says Solomon, who believes more should have been done to protect Williams.

We are sitting at the table of his immaculate home in outer northern Melbourne, with his wife, Mimma, and a table full of clippings and reports that reflects nearly 35 years in the homicide squad.

It is two days before his retirement function for the much loved cop who has taught generations of detectives how to catch killers. He could have filled a function centre, but typically, he planned a morning tea in the office, a counter-lunch with his family then a few beers in the bar.

Solomon was the accidental detective. He was doing a tertiary course that was going nowhere when he saw some police recruitment ads.

“I was at a loose end and wandered into Russell Street [police station]. There was an old, crusty senior constable and I asked about joining,” he says.

“He talked to me for about 40 minutes and at the same time was filling in forms. At the end he pushed it over for me to sign. When I hesitated he gave me a blast asking if he had just wasted his time, so I signed.

“Before I knew it I was at the police academy.”

Stationed at Broadmeadows he saw homicide detectives attending murder scenes. “I saw how polished they were and thought I wouldn’t mind doing that.”

He went to the homicide squad in 1988 for more than four years and returned in 1996 for the next 30.

He has always been prepared to share his learnings with junior colleagues. He regularly drove one home, joking the younger man would give him chewing gum when he wanted Sol to shut-up.

His career is littered with high points, catching contract killers, multiple murderers and solving cold cases. But the death of Williams was a low point.

A key figure in Melbourne’s Underbelly war, Williams was serving life with a minimum of 35 years over four murders and was keen to do a deal in exchange for information on the Hodson killings.

Becoming a police informer was a high-risk strategy, but Williams believed that giving evidence against Dale, a former cop, was not the same as turning on underworld colleagues. It was a fatal mistake.

Two years earlier, Solomon and colleagues took Williams’ statements – how he was the middle man in the Hodson hits and employed veteran hitman Rod Collins for the job.

“Carl was very personable, with an excellent memory for details, which made it easy for us to corroborate much of what he said,” Solomon recalls.

Williams signed up claiming Dale wanted Hodson dead before he could testify that the former detective set up a lucrative drug rip-off the previous year. He claimed Collins did the job, killing Christine because she was a witness.

Police and the underworld knew Williams had many more stories to tell.

“He said that when we had the Hodson case put away he could help us with five or six more murders including Graham Kinniburgh (Kew, 2003), Richard Mladenich (St Kilda, 2000), Michael Marshall (South Yarra 2003), and Willie Thompson (Malvern East, 2000),” Solomon recalls.

Williams was sharing a prison unit with his father, George, and the fearsome Matthew Johnson, but George was about to be released, with Tommy Ivanovic to replace him.

“We told Carl we weren’t happy and thought he was at risk. Johnson was extremely dangerous and Tommy a bit of a snake,” Solomon says.

“He said, ‘There is no way known I’m getting moved, we are all getting on famously. I have spoken to Matt, and he is fine with it [informing on Dale]’.

“He said if he was moved he wouldn’t testify.”

But Ivanovic and Johnson were getting messages from gangsters on the outside and heavy crooks on the inside that they would be tainted for associating with an informer.

‘We told Carl we weren’t happy and thought he was at risk. Johnson was extremely dangerous and Tommy a bit of a snake.’

Sol Solomon, former homicide detective

“I think Johnson thought he would be seen as a hero if he killed Carl, and he would be reinstated inside the prison as ‘The General’,” says Solomon.

Williams was reading the Herald Sun when Johnson walked up behind him and beat him to death with a metal stem from an exercise bike.

Ivanovic had his back to the scene and despite the sickening noise did not turn around and look. That is because he knew exactly what was happening.

Williams was silenced, not because he talked about the Hodsons but because he could have talked about the Mladenich murder and implicated a major drug dealer who was Carl’s former friend.

Dead men tell no tales.

“I will always regret that he wasn’t moved. He would have cracked the shits, but we would have got him back on board.”

Without Williams the Hodson murder charges against Dale and Collins were dropped. (Dale has always maintained his innocence and a jury had previously found he had not lied about being in a secret corrupt relationship with Williams.)

Williams had known Collins for years but had preferred other hitmen for previous jobs.

“But they were dead or in jail, and he went to Collins even though he thought he wasn’t up to it. He jumped at the opportunity,” says Solomon.

Solomon lived with the case for six years and was one of the first at the crime scene. The couple were found face down in the TV room. “They were executed,” Solomon says.

Lawyer Nicola Gobbo was connected to the Hodsons, but doors were shut to the investigators who didn’t know she was a secret police informer.

The homicide investigation eventually became a taskforce. “I worked with some excellent detectives at the Petra Taskforce.”

The faintest shard of light came from an unusual source. “I was sitting here having breakfast reading your story about the Abbey murders, and you referred to The Duke (it was the nickname I used for the hitman).”

Collins and his gang went to the Abbeys’ West Heidelberg house on the night of July 27, 1987. The gang thought it was a robbery, but Collins was after blood.

One stayed in the car while Collins and two others dressed in police uniforms stolen from a dry-cleaner, entered the house.

Collins suspected Ramon Abbey was a police informer, and had pulled out of a planned armed robbery. Collins took him to the garden shed and shot him three times in the head. Before he died Abbey yelled out his killer’s name. Collins walked into the house and shot Dorothy Abbey twice in the head and cut her throat while she sat on the family couch. The couple’s three young children were in the bedroom next door.

When the hitman was searching the house one of the gang told him he had checked the bedroom and no one was there. “He probably saved their lives,” says Solomon.

The similarity with the Hodson killing was chilling.

“Reading your story I had an epiphany. Only that sort of brazen crook (who murdered the Abbeys) could have killed the Hodsons. He had a pathological hatred of police informers.”

He knew Collins was the suspect for the Abbeys and thought if he re-opened the case it might lead to a breakthrough in the Hodson case.

Collins and Solomon had crossed paths in Broadmeadows. Once he sat across the kitchen table from the killer with a search warrant for a firearm.

He didn’t have to look far. Collins had the gun on a rail under the table, pointing at the detective’s stomach.

For years Solomon was one of the few police Collins would tolerate. The killer called him Soli, and would remind him of the gun under-the-table trick.

After charging him with the Abbey murders Solomon spent hours with him inside Barwon prison trying to get a confession for the Hodsons.

“Collins was slippery and manipulative. He was trying to get into my head. Everything he said had an ulterior motive.”

He would drop a few nuggets of information such as a version of who in 1982 killed standover man Brian Kane in the Quarry Hotel.

“He said it was Russell Cox (a Sydney prison escapee who spent 11 years on the run), and a crook who is now dead,” says Solomon.

Typically, Collins wrote himself out of the story.

In 1979 Brian Kane shot professional armed robber Ray Chuck (also known as Bennett) inside the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court.

“Collins and Chuck were like brothers, and Collins vowed revenge,” says Solomon.

Kane’s killers were likely Cox and Collins, but it is a case that will never be solved. Collins was convicted of the Abbeys and died in prison.

Cox did his time for other crimes and has quietly retired.

Next week from the Solomon files: The cold case – a hair sample, and the sting that caught a killer.

Solomon tells the story of Rod Collins on Naked City: Hitmen, Channel Nine.

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