TASMANIA'S SECOND
PATSY:
GUN DEALER TERRY HILL
Two days
after the massacre at Port Arthur in April 1996, gun
dealer Terry Hill of New Town, Tasmania, saw a photo of a
man on the front page of his local newspaper, reportedly
connected with the mass murder. Hill recognized the man
as Martin RYAN who had earlier visited his
dealership, and swiftly contacted police. Unfortunately
for him, Terry Hill was unaware that the Tasmanian
Government had thirty five corpses, one possible suspect,
but no supplier of the weapons allegedly used in the
massacre. It was one of the biggest holes in the
Governments impossible case against Martin Bryant,
but a hole that could be filled in very neatly by
sacrificing Terry Hill on the altar of political
expediency.
On 27 March
1996 Terry Hill and assistant Greg Peck were working at
Guns and Ammo in New Town, Tasmania, when the
door opened and a tall man with long blonde hair walked
in carrying a package wrapped in a towel. Known to Terry
Hill only as Martin, the man muttered that
something was wrong with it and promptly
handed the package muzzle-first across the counter. When
Terry Hill unwrapped the towel he found that
it was an AR10 assault rifle fitted with a
clip containing 15 live rounds of high velocity .308
(7.62-mm NATO) ammunition. Horrified, Hill removed the
clip and worked the action, at which point another live
round ejected from the breech. Martin had
calmly walked into the store with a fully-loaded and
unsafe assault weapon, blissfully unaware he had done
anything wrong. His actions that morning demonstrated
with chilling clarity that Martin had
absolutely no idea how to load, cock, aim, fire, or
unload, assault weapons of any kind.
Despite
this staggering lack of knowledge, thirty two days later
the Tasmanian Government tried to convince the world that
Martin had entered the Broad Arrow cafe at
Port Arthur, and with the panache usually reserved for
top special forces combat shooters, shot 32 victims, 20
of them dead, in less than 90 seconds with a Colt AR15
Commando. After that, the clumsy inept Martin is alleged
to have left the cafe, deftly changed weapons to a
heavier Belgian FN FAL with completely different loading
and cocking mechanisms, and used it to kill or wound
another 25 people. Both weapons were so well maintained
and tuned that neither one faltered or jammed during the
entire 14.5 minute operation at Port Arthur. As proved
scientifically in Was Martin Bryant Really a Lone
Nut Assassin? Parts one and two, written by this
author, whoever prepared and fired those weapons was not
Martin Bryant at all, but an expert combat shooter with
special forces counter-terrorist experience.
Back at
Guns and Ammo in New Town during late March
this was still in the future, as a shaken Terry Hill
stared aghast at the neat pile of high velocity rounds on
his counter. Did Martin have a licence? Yes he did, one
of the newer photographic licences, endorsed for
prohibited and automatic firearms. In a statement to
police Hill confirmed the first name was Martin, and so
far as he could remember, the surname was RYAN. Under the
gun laws existing before the massacre Hill was not
required to write down licence details unless selling a
weapon, and thus did not do so, but he has sworn
statements from other witnesses that Martin produced this
licence in their presence. The Dutch AR10, serial number
001590, was in very poor condition and Hill wanted to
retain it at the shop for safety. Receiving no
instructions for repairs, Terry Hill asked Martin to
return after Easter.
Over the
next month Martin made several visits to Guns and Ammo,
purchasing items that did not require details of his
licence to be recorded. These purchases included several
gun cases and finally, on 24 April 1996, four days before
the massacre, three boxes of Winchester double-x magnum
shotgun shells, code number X12XC. But at no time before
or since did Terry Hill sell Martin any weapons, or
ammunition of .223 Remington or .308 Winchester calibres,
as used in the mass murder on 28 April 1996. Martin had
lived in the New Town area for many years but was not a
regular customer at Guns and Ammo, so why did he suddenly
start purchasing multiple innocuous goods from Terry Hill
in the month immediately preceding the massacre at Port
Arthur?
The most
likely answer in intelligence parlance is that someone
asked Martin to go and buy the various items mentioned in
order to build a legend, designed to ensure
that after the massacre a direct association would be
made between Martin Bryant and a recognized gun-dealer as
the supplier of the weapons used at Port
Arthur. There is other evidence indicating this was the
case. Long before the massacre took place, Martin
Bryants unaccompanied baggage was searched on entry
to Australia and two pornographic videos seized. As the
baggage was literally unaccompanied, anyone could have
placed the pornographic tapes in the suitcase and then
tipped-off Customs about its obscene
contents.
On another
occasion Bryant was arrested on entry to Australia on
information received, and taken to Melbourne
Hospital for an internal examination on the suspicion of
drug trafficking. He was found innocent of any offence
and released. On a third occasion there was an alleged
incident in Hereford, England, which was
reported to the police because Hereford is the home of
the British Special Air Service (SAS). Once again Bryant
was completely innocent of any wrong doing, but by then
the international computers were building a very
convincing legend indeed.
By the date
of the massacre at Port Arthur through no fault of his
own, a computer search would have shown a string of
warning flags indicating that Martin Bryant was a
possible drug trafficker and purveyor of pornographic
materials, and perhaps someone who had shown an unhealthy
interest in the activities of Britains premier
counter-terrorist unit. Add all of that to his frequent
visits to Guns and Ammo during March and April 1996, and
the Tasmanian Police Service would have needed to be
superhuman to resist the implied legendary
proof that Martin Bryant was its man.
Unfortunately
Terry Hill was completely unaware of these computer
manipulations when he did his duty as a responsible
citizen on 30 April 1996, and reported his knowledge of
Martin to police. It was at that point that his life and
the lives of his family started to slowly come apart at
the seams. Members of the police insisted that he must
have sold the weapons and ammunition to Bryant, and made
similar off the record accusations to the
Tasmanian media, but Hill refused to budge. Why on earth
admit selling weapons and ammunition to Bryant when he
had not done so?
That
later sordid attacks on Hill were political initiatives
is beyond question. Terry Hill had a valid gun
dealers licence, and witnesses to the fact that
Martin had shown a valid gun licence to him. He was thus
fully entitled to sell any weapon to Martin without
committing any offence at all under Tasmanian law, and
would have admitted doing so in his statement if it were
true. But it was not true, and Terry Hill was not
prepared to help the police by signing a
statement that amounted to an outright lie.
Things went
quiet for a while and then Hill was interviewed by police
in the presence of a lawyer on 6 June 1996. As he had
always done, Hill maintained that he had not at any time
sold weapons or rifle ammunition to Martin Bryant (or
Ryan) and would not be changing his truthful stand.
Unfortunately pressure seemed to be mounting, perhaps at
senior Tasmanian Government levels, to incriminate Hill
at any cost, and he immediately received a letter from
the attending lawyer, containing the following comments:
...
In a private conversation that was had between the writer
and Inspector xxxxx, Inspector xxxxx made it abundantly
clear that police have very strong evidence to suggest
that you did in fact sell guns to Bryant and unless you
are prepared to in effect change your story, they will
press on and try and find sufficient evidence to charge
you with some offences.
However, it was also made abundantly clear that the
Director of Public Prosecutions is prepared to offer you
an indemnity against prosecution if you are prepared to
accept that you did sell guns to Bryant ...
The
letter was crude and revealing. By saying the police
would press on and try to find sufficient evidence
to charge you with some offences, the writer
admitted that police had no evidence whatever against
Terry Hill. If
they had, in a matter as serious as this they would have
already charged him with one of several criminal
offences. But Terry Hill was never charged at all, making
a mockery of the police threats. That the offer of
an indemnity was guaranteed by the DPP is especially
telling in terms of who was applying the blow torch to
police in an attempt to coerce a false confession out of
Hill. The office of DPP is a political appointment, and
agreement for the indemnity against prosecution was thus
a political decision made by government.
The legal
letter delivered to Terry Hill on Friday 7 June advised
that the Tasmanian Police would be expecting an answer no
later than the following Wednesday, 12 June. There seemed
no point in delaying the matter, so Hill called his
lawyer on Monday 10 June and said there would be no
statement of the sort requested by the police. Terry Hill
also had other things to worry about. His mother, Alma,
was terminally ill and not expected to live for many more
days. On Thursday 13 June, Hill received a call from the
hospital requesting his immediate attendance at her
bedside, and was forced to depart Guns and Ammo
immediately, leaving his wife Dorothy alone to cope with
police who simultaneously arrived at the store to carry
out a snap inspection. And so it was that the
police found a number of technical reasons to revoke
Terry Hills gun dealers licence, while he sat
powerless beside his dying mothers bedside at the
local hospital. Alma finally passed away at 6.03 am the
following morning.
It is of
course possible for any government regulatory body to
find sufficient technical reasons to close down any
business at any time, provided there is sufficient
political will to do so. There is a copy of the
Notice of Cancellation of Gun Dealers Licence
No.54546" on the desk beside me as I write this
report, and it must be said that it records some items
which under normal circumstances might have attracted an
infringement notice calling for action within a specified
time period. But not for Hill. Instead, his licence was
revoked and his livelihood destroyed. Terry Hill would
have been less than human if he had not glanced again at
the legal letter sent to him just one week earlier, which
warned quite coldly that if he did not admit to selling
weapons to Martin Bryant, the police would press on
and try to find sufficient evidence to charge you with
some offences.
More than a
year later in July 1997 the situation was to worsen, but
why all the fuss, and why the continual persecution of
Terry Hill, a man who had every reason to tell the truth
and none at all to lie? The answer lies in the critical
importance of proving that Martin Bryant had access to,
and used, two high velocity assault rifles which could
not be backtracked to anyone on the island of Tasmania or
on the Australian mainland.
The police
had no credible proof at all that Bryant fired either
weapon at Port Arthur; they had no ballistic
cross-matches between the weapons in question and the
bullets found in the victims; they had no fingerprints
proving an association between Martin Bryant and the
weapons, or between Martin Bryant and the Broad Arrow
Cafe where the massacre was initiated.
By
any standard then, the government should have long ago
announced these harsh but accurate facts, and further
announced its intention to hunt down those who did have
access to (and ownership of) the weapons most likely to
have been used in the mass murder.
At the
political level such an honest move would be seen as
quite unacceptable, leaving as it would several
politicians with egg all over their faces. Admitting that
you had locked up the wrong man while the guilty parties
were probably sunning themselves in the Bahamas was
simply too hard and, anyway, who gave a damn about Martin
Bryant? But no matter the blast of continuous media myth
assuring us of his guilt, there was still the impossible
matter of proving once and for all that the two known
assault weapons were Martin Bryants as provided by
somebody. Which somebody? Terry Hill of
course, as Tasmanian Legal Aid finally decided to try and
prove in an unprecedented back door civil
legal action launched on 31 July 1997, when taxpayer
funds were suddenly allocated to a plaintiff to take
action against Terry Hill, a man who has never been
charged with any criminal offence. Cracks were appearing
in the official government version of events, and someone
somewhere was determined to paper them over with taxpayer
bank notes.
For any
government to allow such a desperate and absurd case to
proceed is a deliberate misuse of public funds, and has
the potential to create an incredibly dangerous legal
precedent. The rationale for the civil suit is that the
plaintiff was injured by a bullet fired at Port Arthur,
and is suing Terry Hill for damages for negligence and
breach of statutory duty; for allegedly selling Martin
Bryant an AR15 military-style rifle, a scope, and around
250 rounds of ammunition. For doing WHAT? The
Tasmanian police have already proved via the legal letter
to Terry Hill that there is absolutely no evidence to
support such a claim for, if there was, they would
unquestionably have pressed criminal charges.
Even
if Terry Hill had sold Martin Bryant the weapons, which
he did not, it would have been an entirely legal
transaction on the valid licence that Bryant produced,
where it is the duty of the licensing authority to judge
the suitability of the applicant for the licence, and
thus the right to use those weapons.
Under such
circumstances, allowing this case to proceed would be
exactly the same as allowing a case to be brought against
a licensed car dealer, for selling a car to a licensed
driver, who then drove off and killed somebody in the
street. Once the transaction was complete the licensed
car dealer would no longer be involved. And what about
the farmer who sells wheat to a cereal manufacturer, who
makes a mistake with his production process and kills
someone with a bowl of Wheaty Bran? Do we sue the farmer
for damages and statutory negligence? Of course not,
because we are clearly not as unhinged as some members of
the Tasmanian bureaucracy.
That legal
aid should even be considered in this matter is beyond
the pale because Terry Hill never sold Martin Bryant any
weapons, and probably lost his livelihood because of his
determination to maintain the truth and not provide the
DPP with that vital missing link in the trail of
evidence.
So are all
of you out there going to sit back and let this happen,
funded by hard-earned dollars screwed out of you by a
government elected by the people for the people? No. The
Port Arthur cover-up has gone too far already and it is
time for government to concentrate on hard facts rather
than use taxpayer funds in an attempt to create more pulp
fiction.
Now is the
time for every responsible Australian to call for the
dismissal of the official in The Legal Aid Commission of
Tasmania responsible for authorizing this latest
Orwellian outrage.
Tony
asks: If you find that you agree with a message
presented on this site, please print it out: photocopy it
until you run out of paper, then give a copy to each of
your friends and neighbours not yet lucky enough to have
the Internet !
Visit Tony Pitt's Freedom for
Australia home page
This
article has been published in the national interest. If
even one tenth of the evidence presented by Joe Vialls is
correct then there IS a conspiracy and it is important
that this information be sent Australia wide.
You can
also help by sending a donation to Joe Vialls, 45 Merlin
Drive, Carine, Western Australia 6020. One can be
reasonably sure the government is not going to fund his
investigation or pay his expenses.
palies3.htm
Contents
Copyright ? 17/04/97 by Joe Vialls, 45 Merlin Drive,
Carine, WA 6020
All rights reserved.
Published
by Tony Pitt ([email protected]), 79
Ferry Street, Maryborough, Queensland 4650
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