The 24-year-old baby-faced killer, Richard Leonard, had the undivided attention of the packed courtroom as he stood awaiting sentencing for the crossbow slaying of landscape gardener Stephen Dempsey at Deep Creek Reserve, a gay beat in northern Sydney’s Narrabeen, and for the frenzied stabbing murder of taxi driver Ezzedine Bahmad at the nearby Collaroy Plateau. Leonard stood and stared blankly at the judge as the sentence –– was read out. No wild outburst. Not even a flash of frozen shock.
Richard Leonard had occasionally been spotted prowling the reserve with his high-powered compound bow, ostensibly to shoot fish, but once menacing a couple of men on a pathway and at another time, a kayaker.We don’t know exactly what happened between Leonard and Dempsey that day – the killer’s defence lawyers claimed sexual provocation, which the jury rejected – but Leonard fired an arrow straight into Dempsey’s heart.
Rolfe has no criticism of the investigation into Dempsey’s murder – the police were already connecting the dots between the two murders when Leonard and Shipley confessed their crimes to a pastor at the Christian City Church at Brookvale in May 1995. In fact, the investigation’s high calibre was an outlier at a time when gay men across Sydney were being killed, and their deaths summarily dismissed by police as suicides or deaths by misadventure.
Finally, in 2018, nearing the 30th anniversary of Scott’s death, the then-NSW police commissioner, Mick Fuller, having accepted the findings of the third inquest – that Scott was the victim of homicide – announced a new murder investigation, and assigned a veteran detective, Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans, to the case. The investigation, called Strike Force Welsford, stretched into the next two years.
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