Bandali Debs was a Melbourne tradesman in his forties, a tiler and roof sprayer with a home at Fountain Gate in the city's south-east, who was also an armed robber. Between 1995 and 1998 he killed four people in three separate events. In April 1995 he picked up Donna Hicks, a 34-year-old mother of three working on the Great Western Highway in western Sydney, and shot her in the head. In June 1997 he killed Kristy Harty, who was 18 and from Cranbourne, south-east of Melbourne, and left her body near a bush track at Upper Beaconsfield. On August 16, 1998, two Victoria Police officers, Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller, stopped his car near a Moorabbin restaurant they were watching as a likely robbery target, and both were shot dead.
The police killings led to one of the largest investigations in Victoria's history, the Lorimer Taskforce. It brought Debs to trial with Jason Roberts, a teenager who was dating his daughter, and both were convicted in 2002. DNA taken from Debs after his arrest then linked him to the two women, and he was convicted of Kristy Harty's murder in 2007 and of Donna Hicks's murder in New South Wales in 2011. He received four life sentences.
The police case had a second life. In 2020 Victoria's Court of Appeal quashed Roberts's convictions after the state's anti-corruption commission found that police statements about Senior Constable Miller's dying words had been rewritten and backdated, and that an earlier statement had been destroyed. At the retrial in 2022 Debs gave evidence for the prosecution from a New South Wales prison. The jury found Roberts not guilty of both murders. Debs's own convictions stand.
Bandali Michael Debs was born on July 18, 1953, according to Victoria Police information reported by the ABC in 2014. Some court and press records spell his first name Bendali. Family and friends called him Ben. He was 45 at the time of the police killings, the Court of Appeal recorded.
He worked as a tiler and roof sprayer, and he told the 2022 retrial that he had done work at the Silky Emperor, the Moorabbin restaurant at the center of the police case, years before. He had at least two daughters, Nicole and Joanne, both of whom appear in the record of the police investigation. A man named Malik Debs, described in the Court of Appeal judgment and in AAP reports as his father, was secretly recorded talking with him in 1999; Debs told the 2022 jury that Malik was "like a father to me."
Reporting on his criminal life before the killings is thin. The New Daily, in a 20th-anniversary piece in 2018, described him as an armed robber who had been picking soft targets since 1991. When Justice Stephen Kaye sentenced Roberts for the 1998 robberies in 2022, he spoke of a "cult-like personality around Debs" and said Debs seemed to have a method of recruiting young teenagers to commit armed robberies; Roberts, the judge said, was the last of several.
Donna Ann Hicks was 34 and the mother of three children. Police said she had been working as a sex worker on the Great Western Highway at Minchinbury, in Sydney's west, before her death. Very little else about her life has been published; no family statement was reported in the coverage of the trial or the sentence.
The prosecution case at Debs's 2011 trial, as reported, was that she was picked up outside a fruit market on the Great Western Highway at Minchinbury by the driver of a late-model four-wheel drive. She told a man she was with that she would be back in half an hour. He never saw her alive again. Police later alleged that Debs picked her up in his four-wheel drive on April 22, 1995, had sex with her at Minchinbury and then shot her in the head. Her body was found the next day in long grass near a driveway close to a quarry at Minchinbury. The Crown told the jury that she had been shot from very close range.
The prosecutor, Pat Barrett, said police had carried out a long investigation without result. For fifteen years nobody was charged.
Kristy Harty was a teenager from Cranbourne, on Melbourne's south-eastern fringe. She was 18 when she died; her body was found nine days after her 18th birthday, the local Cranbourne News reported. She was working as a sex worker at the time. The published record says almost nothing more about her as a person, and no statement from her family was reported in the sources found.
In June 1997 Kristy Harty's body was found in scrub beside a bush track at Upper Beaconsfield, in the hills south-east of Melbourne. She had been shot in the head. When Debs was charged eight years later, the ABC reported that she had been raped before she was killed. Debs was charged with and convicted of her murder.
The evidence that came out later placed Debs nearby. He was seen pulling over on the Princes Highway, close to where she had been hitchhiking, the day before her body was found, the Cranbourne News reported. The case went unsolved for years. In 2001 police offered a reward of $100,000 for information.
By 1998 Debs was robbing businesses in Melbourne's south-east with a partner. His daughter Nicole's boyfriend, Jason Roberts, was 17 when he became involved. Roberts later admitted taking part in ten armed robberies with Debs, the first of them when he was 17, and pleaded guilty to them in 2022.
Prosecutors told the 2022 retrial that the robberies began in March 1998. One of them, at a sports store in Noble Park on March 29, 1998, became the subject of a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee in 2025; the ABC reported that during that robbery Debs ordered staff and customers behind the counter and took the store manager into another room. In the robberies as a whole, victims were held at gunpoint, made to lie face down and tied up, and their jewelry, belongings and the takings were stolen. On each robbery at least one of the two men carried a handgun, and on most occasions both did. Debs told the 2022 jury that both he and Roberts were armed every time, and that Roberts's job was to watch the people inside. He called the young man his apprentice.
Victoria Police set up Operation Hamada to catch the pair. The Court of Appeal described the pattern its detectives were working from: premises that were relatively isolated, in the eastern and south-eastern suburbs, that held cash and were vulnerable around closing time. Police stake-outs were running at a number of such places, among them the Silky Emperor, a Chinese restaurant on Warrigal Road at Moorabbin. Police believed that Debs had identified it as a target.
Sergeant Gary Silk was a long-serving officer, remembered, The New Daily wrote in 2018, as a man who regarded his fellow police as family. He was survived by his parents and two brothers. Senior Constable Rodney Miller, known as Rod, had a young family and a wide smile he often tried to hold back. He was stationed at Prahran. He was married to Carmel Arthur, and their son Jimmy was seven weeks old when he died. Both men were in their mid-30s.
Carmel Arthur later asked people to remember them for how they had lived. "We choose to focus not on how they died, but how they lived," she told reporters in 2018. "Two great men."
On the night of Saturday, August 15, 1998, Silk and Miller were in an unmarked car watching the rear car park of the Silky Emperor as part of Operation Hamada. Shortly after midnight they saw a dark blue Hyundai hatchback leave, and they followed it into Cochranes Road, pulled it over and got out.
Two officers in another police car drove slowly past and saw Silk talking to a man standing by the stopped car, with Miller between the two vehicles. They parked about 100 meters further along. Moments later there was a volley of gunfire, then a second volley, and the Hyundai drove past them and out of sight. At least 11 shots were fired.
Gary Silk was found dead on the grass verge. His revolver was still in its holster and his police notebook was missing. He had been shot in the chest, the pelvis and the head. Rod Miller had fired four shots and been hit once. Mortally wounded, he had struggled away from the scene to look for help, and he was found further along Cochranes Road toward Warrigal Road.
As Sergeant Helen Poke held his head, Miller told the officers around him what he could: that Silk was dead, that there had been two offenders, that the car was a dark Hyundai and that one offender had been last seen on foot. He described one as about six feet tall, with dark hair and a checked shirt. "Get them," he said. He was taken to hospital by ambulance and died there. The prosecutor at the 2022 retrial described his dying declarations as "nothing short of heroic."
The taskforce was set up on August 17, 1998, under Detective Inspector Paul Sheridan, with about 25 full-time members and at times more than 30. A reward of $500,000 was offered.
The key physical clue was broken glass near the front of the police car, a fragment of which was stamped with the letter H. After an initial forensic error, investigators matched the glass to a Hyundai, and then to one particular car: a dark blue three-door Hyundai Excel X3, built in March 1997, with a rear spoiler and alloy wheels. It was owned by Nicole Debs. Gunshot residue in the car matched residue on Miller's clothing, and the rear hatch had bullet damage. Debs told the 2022 jury that the windscreen had been shot out during the encounter, and that he had told relatives he broke it by accident with a piece of metal at work.
Because of the early forensic error, the Court of Appeal said, Debs and Roberts were not charged for a long time but were kept under surveillance. Police bugged Debs's house and car, and more than 2,500 covert recordings were made. A detective approached Debs at a supermarket with a statement for him to sign; he refused and believed he was being followed. In recordings with Malik Debs he talked about the night in terms the courts treated as admissions. In conversations with his daughter Joanne, recorded about 18 months after the killings, he raised the idea of killing more police so that "the investigation goes stupid," and of killing a mother and child to send detectives in the wrong direction. Joanne dismissed the ideas and he never acted on them.
Debs was arrested in July 2000 and charged with both murders; IBAC's report gives the date of the charge as July 25, 2000, while a 2017 Latrobe Valley Express account by a former taskforce member gives June 25. Roberts was arrested and interviewed in July 2000, released, and then rearrested and charged in August 2000. Committal proceedings began in September 2001.
The trial, before Justice Frank Cummins and a jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria, ran for about four and a half months. The Crown case rested on the scene evidence and Miller's dying declarations, the Hyundai, the covert recordings, the Hamada robberies and Roberts's police interviews. The Crown's reconstruction was that two men had fired two handguns, a .38 and a .357 Magnum. Both men pleaded not guilty. On December 31, 2002, the jury convicted both of both murders.
Justice Cummins sentenced Debs to life imprisonment with no parole. "Life means life," he told him. Roberts, who had been 17 at the time, received life with a minimum term of 35 years. Both appealed. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals on April 6, 2005, and the High Court refused special leave on November 18, 2005.
On July 20, 2005, Debs, then 52 and already serving life, was charged with the murder of Kristy Harty and brought before the Melbourne Magistrates' Court. DNA found on her skirt linked him to her death. At trial the jury also heard that a gun of the same type as the one used to kill her had been found under his mother's house in 2000.
A jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria found him guilty in 2007. On June 22, 2007, he was given a third life sentence. The judge said the verdict "reinforces the conclusion that Debs is an evil, violent and dangerous man." In August 2008 his lawyer appealed against the conviction and sentence, arguing that the evidence about the gun under his mother's house should not have been admitted because it could not show that he had such a weapon in 1997. Debs did not attend the hearing. The conviction stands; later reports list the Harty life sentence among the four he is serving.
On November 9, 2010, New South Wales police charged Debs, then 57, with Donna Hicks's murder. He appeared at Goulburn Local Court without a lawyer and entered no plea. At his trial in the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney the following year he pleaded not guilty. The prosecutor told the jury that advances in forensic science had produced crucial evidence that brought the case to court. The jury was not told about his earlier convictions.
On December 12, 2011, the jury found Debs, then 58, guilty. On February 24, 2012, Justice Robert Hulme sentenced him to life imprisonment, describing the crime in the gravest terms and saying it showed a complete lack of humanity. He found that Debs had shown no remorse. It was his fourth life sentence.
In May 2014 the ABC reported that Victoria Police regarded Debs as a person who could fit the profile in other unsolved cases. The Chief Commissioner, Ken Lay, called him "probably the worst criminal in Victoria" and "a person with absolutely no regard for human life," and said that some of his detectives looked at old murders and thought, "this fits the Debs profile." Asked about the disappearance in July 1990 of Sarah MacDiarmid, a 23-year-old last seen at Kananook railway station car park in Frankston, Lay would not confirm that Debs was a suspect. "We only need to look at his form," he said. Police said the case remained open and they would not comment on individuals.
From the start Roberts maintained that he had not been there that night. In 2013 he made a statement to Ron Iddles, then a detective reviewing the case, admitting the robberies for the first time. Between 2016 and 2019 he lodged three petitions for mercy, each admitting the robberies but saying that Debs alone had shot the officers. Nicole Debs gave alibi evidence for him and swore affidavits that her father had told her he committed the murders alone. In August 2018 the Attorney-General, Martin Pakula, referred questions about Roberts's whereabouts to the Supreme Court; in October 2019 a judge ordered that Debs be brought from New South Wales to give evidence in person at that inquiry.
Meanwhile the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) had begun, in November 2017, an investigation called Operation Gloucester, after a whistleblower produced an original police statement that was not in the trial brief. Its public hearings ran from February 4 to March 1, 2019. Its special report, in July 2020, did not substantiate the main allegation that a first responder's statement gave a false account, but it found "serious failures by some officers of the Lorimer Taskforce" to disclose relevant information to the prosecution, the defense and the court. It found practices that included leaving offender descriptions out of statements, replacing and backdating statements, fabricating supposedly contemporaneous notes and destroying statements.
A law passed in Victoria in 2019 allowed a second appeal on fresh and compelling evidence, and Roberts became the first to use it. On November 10, 2020, the Court of Appeal (Justices Forrest and Osborn and Acting Justice Taylor) quashed his convictions. It found that Senior Constable Glenn Pullin had made his trial statement about ten months after the killings while presenting it as written about four hours after them, that his original statement had not been disclosed, and that he had given false evidence at the committal about the date. The court called this a "gross and fundamental corruption of the trial process" and ordered a retrial. The Silk and Miller families said it was not the decision they had hoped to hear, "22 long years after Gary and Rod were murdered." Roberts was refused bail and remained in custody.
The retrial began in March 2022 before Justice Stephen Kaye. Roberts pleaded guilty at the outset to the ten armed robberies and not guilty to both murders. The prosecution called Debs.
He gave evidence over several days in early May 2022 by video link from the Goulburn Correctional Complex in New South Wales. He was 68, with thinning grey hair. He told the jury that on the night of the killings Roberts had come to his house after dinner and suggested the Silky Emperor as a target, that he took two handguns from a hidden case and loaded them, and that the two of them drove to Moorabbin in the blue Hyundai. He said that when they were stopped, Miller asked who his passenger was, and he answered that it was Roberts and that they were going to a club. He said Miller asked him to open the boot while Silk spoke to Roberts.
Debs admitted shooting Rod Miller. He said he fired at him from under his arm, through his cardigan, because he feared for his safety, and then pursued him and fired again. He denied shooting Gary Silk. He said he heard shots from where Silk and Roberts were standing but did not see who fired them, and that Roberts then called out to him that they had to get out of there. The prosecution itself disputed parts of his account, including how the shooting began.
Under cross-examination, Debs agreed that after the retrial was ordered he had asked Victorian homicide detectives for a parole date, immunity from further prosecution and a transfer back to Victoria in return for his evidence. Roberts's barrister, David Hallowes, called him "a vile and evil person, a psychopath and a liar" and told the jury he had every reason to lie. Debs rejected the suggestion that he was minimizing his own "low and callous acts." He complained that his evidence was being distorted.
Roberts gave evidence in June 2022. He said he had stayed home that night with Nicole Debs and had found Debs in the early hours on a couch with a gun, and that Debs had then described the shootout to him. He admitted that he had lied to police for years about what he knew. "I lied because Ben killed two police officers," he told the jury. "That's not a small thing."
On July 11, 2022, after the jury had heard 91 witnesses over about three months and deliberated over a weekend, it found Roberts not guilty of both murders. Prosecutors cannot appeal an acquittal. He was released on bail that day. Carmel Arthur was in court and bowed her head as the verdicts were read. The families said they were "absolutely devastated." The Chief Commissioner, Shane Patton, said the force's thoughts were with the Silk and Miller families.
On September 12, 2022, Justice Kaye sentenced Roberts to six years and six months for the robberies, far less than the 22 years he had already spent in custody, so he did not return to prison. The judge said Roberts had been "very much under the toxic influence of Bandali Debs." In April 2025 Roberts settled a civil claim against the State of Victoria over his wrongful imprisonment; the ABC understood the sum to be more than $4 million.
In law, Roberts is not guilty of the murders of Gary Silk and Rod Miller. The only person convicted of them is Bandali Debs.
Debs has been in custody since July 2000. He is serving life imprisonment with no parole for the police murders, and life sentences for the murders of Kristy Harty and Donna Hicks; the ABC described them in 2014 as four consecutive life terms. He faced the Hicks charge at Goulburn Local Court in 2010, and in 2019 a Victorian judge referred to him being in a New South Wales prison. In May 2022 he gave evidence from the Goulburn Correctional Complex.
No report of his release, transfer or death was found when news sources were searched on October 18, 2026. As of the latest reports found, from 2022, he remained in prison in New South Wales.
The public response to the deaths of Silk and Miller led to Blue Ribbon Day, first held the following year and now marked each September 29 as a day of remembrance for police killed on duty, alongside National Police Remembrance Day. The trauma center at Dandenong Hospital is dedicated to the two officers as the Silk-Miller Trauma Centre. Each year St Kilda and Hawthorn play for the Blue Ribbon Cup, and teams from the St Kilda and Prahran police stations play beforehand for the Silk-Miller Cup; the best player in the main match receives the Silk-Miller Medal. Memorial services have marked the anniversaries, among them a gathering at St Kilda police station on the 20th anniversary in 2018 and a Victoria Police Legacy service at Prahran police station in 2023.
The investigation also changed police practice. IBAC recommended in 2020 that Victoria Police rewrite its manual and training on statements and disclosure and audit its practices, and that the government create a legal duty of disclosure similar to the one in New South Wales.
The case was dramatized by the Nine Network in 2011 in Underbelly Files: Tell Them Lucifer Was Here, a television film about the killings and the Lorimer Taskforce.
Proven by jury verdicts, and final: the murders of Donna Hicks (1995), Kristy Harty (1997), Gary Silk and Rodney Miller (1998).
Acquitted: Jason Roberts was found not guilty of both police murders in July 2022 after his 2002 convictions were quashed. At both trials the prosecution alleged that he was present and fired at Silk; the 2022 jury did not accept that case. Debs testified that Roberts was with him; Roberts has always said that Debs acted alone. The only conviction for the killings is Debs's.
Who fired which shot: Debs admitted in 2022 that he shot Miller and denied shooting Silk. The prosecution at the retrial alleged that Debs's revolver fired the shots that struck Silk in the hip and the head. Debs stands convicted of both murders.
Not charged: the disappearance of Sarah MacDiarmid in 1990, where police would not confirm Debs was a suspect; and the death of Adele Bailey, a transgender woman and sex worker who disappeared in 1978 and whose remains were found in a mineshaft at Bonnie Doon, Victoria, in 1995. In 2022 the Herald Sun reported police information reports from 1995 in which a friend of Bailey's linked a man she later identified as Debs to her; police said the investigation remained open. Neither case has led to a charge.
Raised but not proven: during cross-examination in 2022, Debs was asked about other crimes, including a shooting that left a newsagent paralyzed and further armed robberies. He said he did not know whether he still faced prosecution for them. No charge has been reported.
Details that vary between sources: the date of his arrest and charge in 2000 (June 25 or July 25); the date of the first verdict (December 31, 2002, in IBAC's report; January 31, 2002, in one regional newspaper); the length of the first trial (three months, or four and a half); whether Donna Hicks was picked up on the night of April 21 or on April 22, 1995; and the street address of the Silky Emperor (Warrigal Road or Cochranes Road).
July 18, 1953: Bandali Michael Debs is born.
April 1995: Donna Hicks, 34, is shot dead at Minchinbury, western Sydney; her body is found the next day.
June 1997: Kristy Harty, 18, of Cranbourne, is found shot dead near a bush track at Upper Beaconsfield, Victoria.
March 1998: the first of ten armed robberies by Debs and Jason Roberts, then 17.
March 29, 1998: armed robbery of a sports store at Noble Park.
August 16, 1998: Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller are shot after stopping a blue Hyundai in Cochranes Road, Moorabbin; Silk dies at the scene and Miller in hospital.
August 17, 1998: the Lorimer Taskforce is set up.
1999: covert recordings in Debs's house and car.
July 2000: Debs is arrested and charged with the police murders; Roberts is charged in August.
2001: police offer a $100,000 reward in the Harty case; committal proceedings in the police case begin in September.
December 31, 2002: a Supreme Court jury convicts Debs and Roberts.
2003: Justice Cummins sentences Debs to life with no parole and Roberts to life with a 35-year minimum.
April 6, 2005: the Court of Appeal dismisses their appeals; special leave to the High Court is refused on November 18.
July 20, 2005: Debs is charged with Kristy Harty's murder.
June 22, 2007: after a jury conviction, Debs receives a third life sentence.
August 2008: appeal hearing in the Harty case.
November 9, 2010: Debs is charged in New South Wales with Donna Hicks's murder.
December 12, 2011: a Supreme Court jury in Sydney convicts him.
February 24, 2012: Justice Robert Hulme sentences him to life.
2013: Roberts admits the robberies in a statement to Ron Iddles.
May 20, 2014: the Chief Commissioner says some unsolved murders "fit the Debs profile."
2016 to 2019: Roberts lodges three mercy petitions.
November 2017: IBAC begins Operation Gloucester.
August 6, 2018: the Attorney-General refers Roberts's alibi evidence to the Supreme Court.
February 4 to March 1, 2019: IBAC public hearings.
July 2020: IBAC's special report.
November 10, 2020: the Court of Appeal quashes Roberts's convictions and orders a retrial.
March 2022: the retrial begins before Justice Kaye.
May 3 to 5, 2022: Debs gives evidence from Goulburn.
July 11, 2022: Roberts is found not guilty of both murders.
September 12, 2022: Roberts is sentenced for the robberies to time already served.
April 2025: Roberts settles his claim against the State of Victoria.
October 18, 2026: no report of any change in Debs's custody found.