Matthew WILLIAMS

Mysterious death sparks questions

By John Kidman and Sean Berry
August 3 2003
The Sun-Herald

A brief is being prepared for the coroner on the baffling overdose death of a young Sydney police officer, with detectives unable to discount the possibility he met with foul play.

The tragedy has also sparked a crisis of confidence within the force’s elite Special Crimes and Internal Affairs branch (SCIA), following claims that repeat warnings about the constable running off the rails were ignored.

City Central general duties officer Matthew Williams was found dead at his Fairlight home unit on the city’s northern beaches 17 days ago, The Sun-Herald has learned.

Sources close to the investigation say he was discovered by his flatmate – also a police officer – with two isolated needle marks in his arm and a used syringe beside his bed.

Suicide and misadventure have not been ruled out, but detectives are also said to be considering the extraordinary prospect that the 26-year-old policeman was deliberately injected with a lethal dose of heroin – known within the criminal fraternity as a “hot shot”.

Internal affairs and crime scene investigators are understood to have spent almost five hours combing the apartment without finding any further trace of the drugs that killed him or other incriminating evidence.

Williams was thought to have spent the night before he died drinking with workmates into the early hours of the morning.

“There was talk about him heading up to the [Kings] Cross afterwards,” one said on condition of anonymity. “But that’s the last anyone knows about what happened.”

On Friday, senior detectives from Manly, the nearest command to where Williams’s body was found, spent the morning speaking to his parents, Robert and Mary Williams, at their home in Sydney’s inner-west.

The couple is still too distraught to speak about the case.

A spokeswoman for NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said on Friday he was unable to comment on the incident while it was before the coroner.

However, a Sun-Herald investigation has found that Williams had been the subject of a series of police intelligence reports alleging his involvement with party drugs and the inner-city club scene.

Last year, Mr Moroney announced plans to thwart corruption by profiling at-risk officers and intervening to save their careers before they did the wrong thing.

An ongoing audit of internal corruption complaints by SCIA has revealed that hundreds of complaints are not being acted upon.

In Williams’s case, at least one of his colleagues is alleged to have referred to his association with staff at the Cross’s notorious Stripperama, the same club where four off-duty police officers were savagely bashed in June.

Williams’s City Central colleagues spoke warmly of him yesterday.

“He was popular, really popular,” one told The Sun-Herald.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/02/1059480602077.html

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