Ask around Melbourne or Sydney’s underworld in the mid 1980s who the most dangerous man in the country actually was.
And a lot of hardened criminals would give you the same one-word answer without hesitation.
Not a boss, not a dawn, a hired gun, a man who advertised himself openly to anyone willing to pay.
His ongoing rate, according to people who actually did business with him, was $10,000 for a beating, 50,000 for a killing.
He called that fair pricing.
Good equipment costs money.
He suspected of contributing to at least 14 deaths across two cities.
He was tried more than once for some of the most serious crimes imaginable.
He was acquitted every single time, not because the evidence was weak, but because the specific witnesses who could have made it stick had an unfortunate habit of vanishing before they ever took the stand.
Then on the 9th of May 1985, it was his turn to vanish.
No trial, no body, no arrest ever for whatever actually happened to him.
Just an empty space where one of Australia’s most feared men used to be and a decadel long coronial process that eventually concluded formally that he was almost certainly dead without ever managing to say who was responsible or where.
His name was Christopher Flannry.
Most people who knew him at all knew him by the name that ended up on his own reputation, Mr.
Rentill.
This is a story about how a working-class kid from Brunswick ended up feared by men who genuinely weren’t afraid of much.
And about the specific tangled web of corrupt police, underworld alliances, and mutual self-interest that eventually decided he’d become more dangerous alive than he was ever useful for.
It’s also a story about how carefully this account has to handle exactly the kind of violence Flannry himself was allegedly responsible for.
Because getting that balance right matters here more than almost anywhere else this channel’s coverage has gone.
We’re not going to walk you through how any of these people died.
What matters is that they did, who was allegedly responsible, and what happened or didn’t once [clears throat] the justice system tried repeatedly to hold him accountable for it.
There’s a particular irony worth sitting with before this account even properly begins.
The same corrupt system that let Flannry walk free, case after case for years, eventually turned out to be the exact same system that most likely decided he needed to disappear.
The people who protected him and the people who killed him may well have been drawn from the same small compromised circle.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history from around the world using court records, coronial findings, and verified reporting rather than the kind of underworld mythology that’s grown up around this specific case for the past four decades.
Where something remains genuinely unresolved, and in Flenry’s case, an enormous amount still is, we’ll say so plainly, rather than picking whichever theory makes for the tardiest story.
We start in Brunswick in a genuinely decent, hard-working family that produced, by every account available, one deeply unusual exception to everything they otherwise stood for.
Every true crime account eventually asks the same tired question about its subject, nature or nurture.
With Christopher Flannry, the honest answer is genuinely, frustratingly inconvenient because his own family doesn’t fit the pattern true crime storytelling usually reaches for.
He was born in 1948 in Brunswick, a workingclass suburb of Melbourne, one of three children in a household that by every independent account this research has found was decent, stable, and hardworking.
This wasn’t a home defined by chaos or deprivation in the way origin stories for violent criminals often are.
His siblings went on to live entirely ordinary, respectable lives.
One brother, in fact, became a practicing barrista, the kind of person opposing council might sit across from in an entirely different kind of courtroom than the ones his own brother would eventually spend so much time in.
There’s a genuine discrepancy worth flagging directly because different sources tell this specific part of Flanner’s story differently.
Some accounts describe his father leaving the family when Chris was still an infant, barely over a year old.
Others describe a father who remained present into Chris’s childhood, but who was physically abusive before eventually leaving when Chris was around nine.
This account can’t fully resolve which version is more accurate.
What’s consistent across every source is the underlying shape and absent or damaging father figure and a mother alongside grandparents who took on the bulk of raising him.
Here’s where the story stops being tidy.
If a difficult father explained everything, you’d expect that pattern to show up across the whole family.
It didn’t.
Whatever genuinely difficult circumstances shaped Christopher Flanner’s early years shaped his siblings, too.
Under the same roof, with the same absent or difficult father, the same working mother, the same grandparents filling in the gaps.
They turned out fine.
He didn’t.
This is worth sitting with for a moment because it’s genuinely more interesting than a simpler, more comfortable explanation would be.
Criminologists who studied cases like this one tend to land on the same frustrating conclusion.
Sometimes the specific combination of temperament and circumstance that produces a violent adult doesn’t reduce neatly to any single identifiable cause.
Something in how Flannry himself processed the world around him.
His own particular wiring, for lack of a more precise term, pushed him toward violence and criminality in a way none of his siblings shared.
Despite genuinely similar starting conditions.
What’s documented with real precision is how early that particular wiring expressed itself.
He left school at 14 at the absolute first legal opportunity, having barely made it through his third year.
Within months, he was in trouble with police for breaking into houses and stealing.
A magistrate, treating this as an ordinary first offense from an ordinary teenage boy, gave him exactly the kind of gentle warning first offenders typically receive.
Be good.
Don’t do it again.
We won’t come down hard this time.
It didn’t take he was back in front of a court within a short period.
This time for car theft.
And this is where the story takes its first genuinely consequential turn.
The kind of institutional decision that in hindsight looks less like correction and more like escalation.
The magistrate, less inclined toward leniency the second time around, sent him to the Morning Star boy herm down on the Morningington Peninsula outside Melbourne.
It’s worth understanding exactly what kind of institution this actually was, because the name itself sounds almost gentle, a place for Waywood boys to find their footing.
The reality, according to consistent independent accounts, was closer to the opposite.
This was a genuinely violent, brutal environment, one that functioned less as a corrective institution and more as an accelerant.
A place where boys who went in with relatively minor offenses came out considerably more dangerous, considerably more hardened, and considerably better connected to genuinely serious criminal networks than when they arrived.
Flannery survived it.
Not everyone who went through that specific institution did in the sense of coming out intact rather than fundamentally altered by the experience.
And the moment he was out, he didn’t drift back toward the ordinary workingclass life his siblings had built for themselves.
He went straight back into crime.
And this time, the connections he’d made inside an institution specifically meant to prevent exactly this outcome started paying off in a genuinely different way.
He fell in with families whose names would go on to define Melbourne’s own criminal history for decades.
The Prendergasts, the Can’s names Australian audiences would later recognize from television dramatizations of this exact era.
By 18, he’d graduated in the darkest possible sense into Pentridge Prison, Melbourne’s most notorious correctional facility, a genuinely grim bluest institution that housed the state’s most serious offenders.
He didn’t land there for anything minor.
The specific offense connects to something this account is going to handle with real care.
Consistent with the standard applied throughout, he was convicted alongside an associate of a serious sexual offense against a young woman.
This account isn’t going to describe what that offense actually involved.
What matters is what it represented.
A genuine escalation from property crime into serious personal violence.
At an age when most of his peers were still figuring out what kind of adult they wanted to become.
Pentridge didn’t rehabilitate him either.
If anything, it did to the 18-year-old Flannery exactly what the Morning Star boy’s home had already done to the 14-year-old version, placed him inside the specific concentrated environment most likely to deepen whatever criminal trajectory was already forming rather than interrupt it.
He was held for much of his time there in H division, the wing reserved specifically for the institution’s most difficult, most dangerous inmates.
Consider what that placement alone tells you.
This wasn’t an ordinary prisoner working through an ordinary sentence.
By his late teens, the correctional system itself had already identified him as belonging among the genuinely hardest cases it was capable of housing.
What this account traces next isn’t simply what Flannry did in prison, because that risks becoming a repetitive list of offenses that starts to blur together the further this story goes.
What actually matters moving forward is something more specific.
Exactly how a working-class Melbourne kid run through this particular pipeline of institutions specifically designed to correct exactly this kind of behavior instead emerged as someone the city’s actual established criminal networks considered worth recruiting and what that recruitment actually looked like once he stopped being a teenage offender and started becoming something else entirely.
Here’s a genuinely useful way to think about what Pentridge and specifically H Division actually did for Christopher Flannry’s future career because it reframes something most true crime coverage treats as simple background color into something considerably more analytically interesting.
Prison functioned for him less as punishment and more as vocational training.
Consider what H division actually offered someone with Flannry’s particular temperament.
It wasn’t simply a warehouse for dangerous men, kept separate from the general population for everyone else’s safety.
It was functionally a concentrated network of exactly the people a young, ambitious criminal would most want to know.
Men who’d already built genuine standing within Melbourne’s underworld, tested through their own violence, their own survival of institutions exactly like this one.
Flannry didn’t just serve time there.
He built relationships, learned the specific social rules governing how this particular world actually operated, and crucially established his own reputation as someone genuinely capable of violence rather than simply willing to talk about it.
That distinction matters enormously for understanding everything that follows.
Plenty of young men leave prison having talked a big game inside without the substance to back it up once real stakes are involved.
Flanner’s own later career suggests something different happened during this specific period.
Whatever reputation he built inside H division proved durable enough that established criminal families were genuinely willing to work with him once he was released rather than treating him as simply another ex-con making noise.
He cycled through Pentridge repeatedly across the following years, mostly connected to armed robbery, a genuinely different category of offense than what had originally landed him there, and worth noting as its own kind of escalation.
Armed robbery requires planning, requires trust in the people you’re working with, requires a genuine willingness to use force if a job goes wrong.
Each subsequent stint inside further cemented his standing within exactly the network he’d first built as a teenager.
It’s worth pausing here to address something worth genuine skepticism about because this account has already flagged the general problem Fanny himself throughout his adult career had a well doumented habit of exaggerating his own reputation.
People who knew him described him using a specific colorful phrase, a big showoff, someone who liked being seen and being known in a world where visibility usually gets you killed rather than respected.
That habit matters directly for how this account should treat everything Fanny claimed about himself, including his own later boasts about exactly how many people he’d killed.
Here’s the genuinely useful analytical point.
Though even accounting for real exaggeration, Flanner’s actual documented trajectory through Melbourne’s criminal hierarchy suggests his underlying reputation for violence was substantially real, not purely performance.
Established serious criminal networks don’t typically continue working with someone whose violence is purely theatrical.
The stakes are too high, the trust required too significant.
If Flannry had genuinely been all talk, the specific families and associates this account has already named wouldn’t have kept bringing him into increasingly serious jobs across the following years.
What eventually pushed him out of Melbourne entirely was considerably more mundane than any of the mythology that later grew up around him.
He’d been involved in an armed robbery, and police attention was closing in, specifically enough that staying became genuinely risky.
He did what plenty of people in his position have done before and since he left, relocating across the country to Perth, about as far from Melbourne’s own police as Australian geography allows.
What he did once he got there is worth including specifically because it’s genuinely almost comically inongruous with everything this account has already established about him.
He took a job as a men’swear salesman at David Jones.
It’s worth sitting with that image directly because it’s a genuinely useful corrective to any temptation to romanticize or mythologize this man into something more cinematic than he actually was.
This wasn’t a criminal mastermind operating several moves ahead of everyone around him.
This was a man running from police attention, taking whatever legitimate work happened to be available, who apparently found himself considerably more interested in the store’s payroll than in selling suits.
That specific interest produced the job that would end up defining the entire next phase of his life.
Not because the robbery itself was particularly remarkable, but because of who happened to be part of the teen that eventually caught him for it.
A small mistake this account will trace directly connected him to a specific location in Sydney.
And the detective waiting there when he turned up would go on to become the single most consequential relationship of Flannry’s entire adult life.
That detective’s name was Roger Roger.
Understanding Christopher Flanner’s story properly requires understanding Roger Roger almost as thoroughly because everything genuinely significant about the second half of Flanner’s career runs directly through this one relationship.
Roger was by the time he first arrested Flannry in connection with the Perth robbery already a rising figure within the New South Wales police force.
Genuinely talented, genuinely respected within his own department, the kind of officer younger detectives openly aspired to become.
That specific reputation matters directly for understanding why what came later proved so genuinely shocking to people who’d known him.
This wasn’t a career criminal wearing a badge as cover.
This was by every account a legitimately skilled detective who gradually over years crossed into working directly with the exact criminal networks his job existed to disrupt.
The arrest itself is worth including because of what it reveals about Flannry’s own competence at this stage of his career, or rather the lack of it.
A member of his own robbery crew was caught carrying a small piece of paper with a specific address written on it.
Police simply followed that address in Western Sydney and waited.
Flannry walked directly into their hands.
This is worth holding on to as a recurring theme this account will trace throughout Flanner’s entire career.
For a man whose later reputation suggested genuine criminal sophistication, an awful lot of his actual documented history involves remarkably basic mistakes.
He was extradited back to Perth to face trial for the robbery.
And here’s where something genuinely worth examining directly enters the story.
He was acquitted.
According to some accounts, that specific acquitt wasn’t simply the product of a jury reasonably doubting the evidence.
There are allegations, never formally proven, but persistently repeated across independent accounts of this case, that Flannry paid Roger directly to help ensure the case against him fell apart.
This account has to be genuinely careful about this specific claim because it’s precisely the kind of allegation that’s easy to repeat and genuinely difficult to verify with confidence decades later.
What can be said with more certainty is the broader pattern this specific incident established from their very first documented interaction.
The relationship between Flannry and Roger operated on a genuinely different basis than a simple cop and criminal dynamic.
Whatever the truth of this specific aqu quiddle, it marked the beginning of a professional relationship, using that word deliberately, because that’s genuinely how both men appear to have treated it that would eventually produce the single most consequential and most damaging chapter of both their careers.
It’s worth being precise about what actually made Roger’s own trajectory so genuinely significant beyond his specific connection to Flannery because it establishes essential context for everything this account traces later.
Roger’s own reputation eventually collapsed for reasons entirely separate from Flannry.
Most significantly, a fatal shooting connected to a man named Warren Lenfranche.
An incident that despite the official version being accepted at the time, few people who actually knew the circumstances genuinely believed.
From that point forward, Roger’s own standing within the police force began deteriorating, even as his actual influence within Sydney’s criminal underworld appears to have only grown.
By the mid 1980s, Roger had become something considerably more specific than simply a corrupt officer.
This account’s own research describes him functioning as something close to a consiliary, a trusted adviser and fixer for organized crime figures operating across Sydney.
He was directly connected to one of the city’s most significant heroin traffickers and had reportedly given that same trafficker something close to formal permission to conduct a sustained campaign of armed robberies in exchange for a share of the proceeds.
Roger was eventually removed from the police force in 1986.
What happened to him decades later is worth including directly because it demonstrates the sheer sustained duration of the corruption this account is tracing.
In 2014, close to three decades after his own initial fall, Roger was arrested again, this time in connection with the killing of a young man named Jaime Ga over a drug deal gone wrong.
He was convicted in 2016 alongside a co-acused who was himself a former police officer.
Roger died in prison in 2024, having spent close to a decade of his final years serving time for a killing that took place nearly 30 years after his own career had first begun collapsing.
Here’s what’s genuinely worth understanding about how this specific relationship functioned.
Distinct from either man’s own individual criminal record, Flannry provided the violence.
Roger provided the institutional cover, access to information, protection from investigation, and when needed, the specific kind of insider knowledge that let genuinely dangerous operations proceed with considerably less risk than they’d otherwise have carried.
Neither man on his own would have been nearly as dangerous as the two of them working together eventually proved to be.
That partnership is where this account turns next.
Not simply as a list of individual crimes, but as a genuine working relationship, one that would eventually connect a small-time hired gun to something considerably more serious than anything he’d managed on his own.
The attempted killing of a serving police officer.
Before this account traces the specific crimes that eventually made Christopher Flannry genuinely notorious, it’s worth understanding something that happened first and that shaped everything else he built himself a brand.
Once he’d relocated to Sydney and established himself around the city’s nightclub scene, Flannry started doing something genuinely unusual for someone in his line of work.
He told people openly at the specific venues where Sydney’s underworld gathered exactly what he was available for.
A beating at one price, a killing at another.
This wasn’t whispered careful networking through trusted intermediaries, the way this kind of business typically operates.
It was by every account closer to genuine advertising, a man actively building a reputation through sheer deliberate word of mouth.
There’s a recorded exchange from this period worth including because it captures something genuinely revealing about how Flannry actually operated.
Speaking with a well-known Sydney figure about dealing with a difficult situation, Flannry quoted his own specific rates considerably more expensive for the more serious option and when asked why the price was so high offered a genuinely memorable justification.
Good equipment costs money.
It’s a small, almost darkly comic detail, and it’s worth including precisely because it illustrates something true about Flannry beyond the more mythologized version of him that’s grown up over the decades.
He wasn’t simply a fearsome, silent killer operating in the shadows.
He was by every account genuinely talkative, genuinely showy, someone who treated his own reputation as something to actively cultivate rather than let speak for itself.
This is worth connecting directly to something this account already flagged in its earlier coverage.
Flenry liked being seen.
He liked being known.
And this specific trait, this account will trace across everything that follows, proved to be both the source of his early success and eventually a genuine contributor to his own downfall.
A hired killer who actively advertises himself generates business faster than one who doesn’t.
He also generates considerably more attention from exactly the people whose job is noticing patterns like that.
It’s worth being precise about the specific nickname history here because different accounts place its origin at slightly different points.
Some suggest the Mr.
Rentkill label emerged relatively early, connected to his own bragging in Melbourne.
Others place its actual widespread use later.
Once his activities in Sydney had become conspicuous enough that the label started appearing more formally, including eventually in media coverage.
What’s consistent across every version is the underlying reality the nickname captured accurately.
Funny genuinely operated as exactly what the name suggests, violence available for hire to whoever was willing to pay his price.
There’s a further detail worth including here because it illustrates something genuinely important about the specific world Fenery was operating within during this period.
He worked at various points as a bodyguard for George Freeman, one of Sydney’s genuinely significant organized crime figures at the time.
What’s worth understanding is how differently the two men appear to have viewed that arrangement.
Freeman himself, according to people who knew him, considered Flannry something closer to a nuisance than a genuine asset.
Someone who’d shown up from Melbourne, attached himself to a more established figure, and then spent considerable energy telling everyone who’d listen exactly how important that connection made him.
This account isn’t going to spend much time dwelling on this specific dynamic because it’s genuinely more useful as illustration than as its own separate storyline.
What it demonstrates is the same underlying pattern this account has already traced across Flannry’s entire adult life.
Genuine documented criminal capability combined with a persistent almost self-defeating need for recognition that repeatedly put him closer to exposure than a more careful operator would have risked.
What this account turns to next is where that specific combination, real capability, genuine notoriety, and a documented habit of drawing attention to himself first collided with the formal justice system in a case that would establish the pattern defining virtually every subsequent attempt to hold Flannery legally accountable for anything.
Every major case brought against Christopher Flannry followed a genuinely consistent, genuinely troubling structure and understanding that structure matters more than tracking each individual case as an isolated event.
This account is going to trace the pattern directly using the first major case as its clearest illustration precisely so the following cases don’t need to repeat the same underlying explanation.
The case involved a Melbourne solicitor named Roger Wilson.
According to the allegations that eventually reached court, Flannry and two associates, Mark Clarkson and Kevin Weary Williams, intercepted Wilson while he was driving using a technique worth noting for what it reveals about their own methods.
They impersonated police using a vehicle setup to look convincingly official.
Consider what that specific detail actually demonstrates.
This wasn’t opportunistic, spur-of-the- moment violence.
It required genuine planning, genuine coordination, and a working understanding of exactly what would make an ordinary citizen comply without resistance.
What happened to Wilson isn’t something this account is going to detail.
What matters is what happened afterward.
No body was ever found, and the case proceeded to trial based on the evidence investigators had managed to assemble regardless.
Here’s the part of this story worth genuinely dwelling on because it establishes the template this account will reference repeatedly across everything that follows.
There was a principal crown witness in this case, someone whose testimony was central to actually securing a conviction.
That witness disappeared shortly before the trial.
Not relocated, not simply reluctant to testify.
Genuinely permanently vanished, never seen again by anyone [clears throat] connected to the case.
Without that testimony, the prosecution’s case collapsed.
All three men were acquitted.
It’s worth pausing directly on how genuinely convenient this timing was because convenient barely captures it.
A case built substantially around one person’s account simply loses its central witness at exactly the moment that testimony was about to matter most and the person responsible walks free as a direct result.
This account isn’t going to claim with more confidence than the evidence actually supports that Fenery or his associates were definitely responsible for that specific witness’s disappearance.
What can be said is that this exact pattern, a case building toward genuine legal jeopardy followed by a key witness becoming unavailable at precisely the critical moment, recurs across Flanner’s legal history, with a consistency that stretches the definition of coincidence considerably further than most reasonable people would find comfortable.
There’s a further detail worth including because it illustrates something genuinely revealing about how Flannry himself ultimately got caught in connection with this specific case and it says something worth remembering about him throughout this entire account, his own vanity.
Months after Wilson’s disappearance, Flannry appeared on television giving an interview about an entirely unrelated matter.
Wilson’s own farm manager happened to see that broadcast, recognized Flannry as a man who’d been seen scouting around the property under a false pretext weeks earlier, and reported it directly to police.
That’s how the investigation actually connected to him in the first place.
Not through careful detective work uncovering a hidden mastermind, but through a man who couldn’t resist appearing on camera, being recognized by exactly the kind of ordinary person watching who happened to remember his face.
This is worth holding on to as a recurring theme across this entire account of Flanner’s own documented downfall across multiple separate incidents traces back repeatedly to his own inability to stay genuinely invisible.
A more careful operator with equivalent criminal capability might well have avoided detection entirely.
Flanner’s specific combination of real dangerousness and genuine persistent carelessness about his own visibility is arguably what made him catchable at all, even as it simultaneously made him genuinely difficult to actually convict once caught.
There’s one further detail worth including from this specific case because it establishes something about the sheer almost theatrical bad luck that seemed to follow Flannery throughout his career as he left the courthouse following his acquitt in the Wilson case.
Celebrating what should have been a moment of genuine relief.
Detectives were waiting.
He was arrested again immediately connected to an entirely separate case when this account traces in full detail next.
The second major case connected to Flannry involved a man known within Sydney’s underworld as Lizard Raymond Lockxley, someone who’d relocated to Melbourne for a period after Sydney had become genuinely too dangerous for him to remain in comfortably.
This case is worth including for a genuinely different reason than the Wilson matter.
This account is already traced in detail because it reveals something about Flannry’s own specific psychology rather than simply repeating the same pattern of institutional failure.
This account has already established the underlying motive according to people who understood the relationship between the two men wasn’t primarily about money despite money being genuinely involved.
It was more fundamentally about ego, a specific grievance, a sense of having been disrespected that Flannry apparently couldn’t simply let go of.
What’s genuinely worth understanding is the specific method Flannery used to eventually act on that grievance because it reveals a level of calculated patience that stands in real contrast to the more impulsive attention-seeking version of him.
This account is traced elsewhere.
Rather than confronting Lockxley directly, while tensions remained raw, Flannry deliberately worked to rebuild the relationship, presenting himself as genuinely reconciled, letting Lockxley believe the earlier friction had genuinely passed.
That patience sustained specifically to create the right opportunity ultimately succeeded.
Lockxley never saw what was actually coming.
This account isn’t going to describe what happened once that opportunity arrived.
What’s worth noting is what followed legally.
The case took an unusually long road through the justice system, producing first a hung jury, a genuine failure to reach any verdict at all, followed by a full retrial roughly 2 years later, which ultimately ended in a quiddle.
It’s worth being direct about what this specific outcome, considered alongside the Wilson case this account has already traced, actually establishes about Flanner’s broader relationship with Australia’s formal justice system.
Across his entire adult career, this account’s research has found no record of Flannry ever being successfully convicted of any of the serious violent crimes he was repeatedly formally accused of.
Every single major case ended the same way.
Whatever specific mechanism ultimately produced that outcome, a missing witness, a hung jury, an eventual acquitt after retrial, there’s a genuinely dark, almost sardonic observation worth including here.
One echoed directly by people who studied his case in detail.
Had Flannry actually been convicted of any single one of these serious crimes, he’d likely still be alive today simply because a genuine prison sentence would have removed him from exactly the circumstances that eventually led to his own disappearance.
That’s worth sitting with directly because it reframes everything this account has traced so far.
Flanner’s own repeated legal success wasn’t ultimately protective.
It was in a genuinely significant sense exactly what put him in the position that would eventually cost him his own life.
Free, active, and increasingly regarded by the people around him as someone who simply couldn’t be reliably controlled through the ordinary mechanisms available to a functioning criminal organization.
What this account turns to next moves beyond individual criminal cases entirely into something considerably more consequential.
The specific plot connecting Flannry directly to Roger Roger once again that would eventually target a serving police officer and that would mark the genuine beginning of Flannry’s own transformation from valuable asset into unmanageable liability.
Here’s a detail worth sitting with directly because it’s genuinely unusual even within the broader already unusual story this account has been tracing.
At a seafood restaurant in Sydney, a small group sat down to discuss what to do about a specific problem.
One of them was Christopher Flannry.
One was a heroin dealer named Alan David Williams, someone Flannry had remarkably first met decades earlier as a fellow teenage inmate of the Morning Star boy home.
This account traced all the way back in its opening section.
And the third was Detective Sergeant Roger Roger, a serving New South Wales police officer.
The specific problem under discussion was a detective named Mick Drury, an undercover officer whose testimony represented a genuine serious threat to Williams’ own ongoing heroin trafficking case.
Roger had already attempted a more conventional solution, acting as an intermediary to offer Drury a substantial cash payment in exchange for simply losing his memory about the relevant events once he took the stand.
Drury refused.
He intended to give his evidence fully and honestly, regardless of what that meant for the case against Williams.
What happened next, decided collectively by three men sitting at that same restaurant table, is worth stating directly and without embellishment.
They decided Drury needed to be killed.
It’s genuinely worth pausing on the sheer institutional weight of what this specific meeting represents, distinct from everything else this account is already traced.
This wasn’t simply organized crime figures settling a dispute among themselves the way most of Flannry’s earlier documented history had unfolded.
A serving detective sergeant sat at that table participating directly in a decision to murder a fellow police officer, someone wearing the same badge, working within the same institution Roger himself was still formerly part of at the time.
The attempt on Drury’s life, which this account isn’t going to describe in detail, ultimately failed.
Drury survived, though he required an extended period of hospital care to recover.
What followed was, in some respects more genuinely revealing than the attack itself, the specific way the resulting investigation actually unfolded.
Consider what should have happened, given everything already established.
A serving police officer had been targeted for assassination connected directly to a corruption case involving one of his own colleagues.
This should have triggered an urgent, genuinely thorough investigation.
Instead, according to people who observed it directly at the time, the resulting inquiry was in the politest available characterization suboptimal.
Investigators appeared genuinely confused about who the actual prime suspect even was an extraordinary admission.
Given how directly connected Flannry already was to exactly this kind of contract violence, it’s worth being precise about why this particular investigation struggled so genuinely because it connects directly back to something this account has already established about Roger’s own broader standing.
Colleagues who’d worked alongside him for years, who’d built genuine personal trust with him over an entire career, apparently found it close to impossible to seriously entertain the idea that one of their own could have participated in something this genuinely horrifying.
That specific instinct protecting a colleague, not necessarily through active, deliberate corruption, but through a simple human reluctance to believe the worst about someone they trusted for years, meaningfully slowed an investigation that should have moved with real urgency.
There’s a broader context worth including here because it helps explain why this specific moment mattered so much for what happened to Flannry afterward.
This period represented a genuinely turbulent time for the entire New South Wales police force.
Allegations of corruption were already reaching newspaper front pages.
Politicians were paying genuine sustained attention.
Whatever combination of factors led three men to conclude that killing a serving detective represented a viable solution to their shared problem.
The resulting scandal, once it eventually surfaced fully, only deepened an already serious crisis of institutional trust.
This account turns next to what this specific episode actually did to Flannry’s own position, because it marks a genuine turning point, the moment he stopped being simply a useful, if occasionally embarrassing, hired gun, and started becoming something considerably more dangerous to the people around him.
A man who knew too much, whose own unpredictability suddenly represented a genuine threat to people with considerably more to lose than he did.
Here’s the specific shift worth understanding clearly because it’s the hinge everything else in this account eventually turns on after the attack on Mc Drury.
Christopher Flannry stopped being an asset to the people around him and started being a liability.
That’s not simply a dramatic turn of phrase.
It’s a genuine structural change in his own position within Sydney’s underworld, and it explains everything that follows.
Consider what Flannry actually represented to Roger and Williams once the Drury investigation began genuinely, seriously unfolding.
He was the one who’d allegedly carried out the actual attack.
He was by this point also reportedly using cocaine with increasing frequency.
And people who knew him during this period described him as becoming genuinely erratic, genuinely paranoid, a considerably less stable, considerably less predictable version of the already unpredictable man this account has traced throughout.
Now apply the same cold, self-interested logic this account has already documented Roger operating under.
If Drury represented a genuine problem serious enough to warrant murder, what did an increasingly unstable, increasingly cocaineffected flannery represent a man who already knew directly and personally exactly who else had participated in that same conspiracy?
The specific answer from the perspective of anyone genuinely worried about their own exposure is considerably more dangerous than Drury himself had ever been.
There’s a specific attack that occurred during this period worth including because it illustrates how directly this exact dynamic was already playing out.
As Flannry walked with his wife, their own home came under sudden sustained gunfire.
Nobody was seriously hurt, though Flannry himself sustained a minor injury while shielding her.
He believed he knew who was responsible, blaming a specific rival figure who was later charged and initially convicted.
Though that conviction was eventually overturned on appeal.
What’s genuinely worth noting is who else was reportedly seen in the area in the days immediately following this attack.
Roger Roger himself, who told police when questioned that he’d simply been curious about the kind of damage a weapon like that could actually cause.
He was released without charge.
This account isn’t going to claim with more confidence than the evidence actually supports that Roger was definitely responsible for this specific attack.
What’s worth taking seriously is the genuine mounting paranoia this incident understandably produced in Flannry himself.
A man who now had genuine specific reason to believe that even his own closest criminal associates might be considering removing him.
His response to that paranoia is worth including for what it reveals about his own state of mind during this final period.
He relocated to the Conot Apartments at the time, genuinely one of Sydney’s most prestigious, most secure high-rise addresses, home to wealthy residents and prominent professionals alike.
On its own, this reads as a genuinely sensible security decision.
A high-rise apartment offers real practical advantages for anyone genuinely worried about being targeted.
Here’s the detail worth sitting with directly.
Though, because it captures something genuinely difficult to fully explain, the kot sat directly across a narrow laneway from the criminal investigation branch, the exact police unit where Roger himself was working at the time.
A man genuinely trying to disappear, genuinely trying to minimize his own exposure to people who might now consider him a liability worth eliminating, chose to live literally across the street from one of the very people this account has already established had genuine reason to want him gone.
This account can’t fully explain that specific choice with confidence.
What can be said is that it fits in its own way the broader pattern this account has traced throughout Flannry’s entire life.
A man capable of real, genuine danger, who nonetheless repeatedly made decisions that undermined his own safety in ways a more careful, more genuinely strategic operator simply wouldn’t have risked.
What this account traces next is the final act in this specific chapter.
A killing that occurred just weeks before Flannry’s own disappearance, one that a formal coronial inquiry would later suggest he himself may have been directly connected to.
3 weeks before Christopher Flannery himself vanished, a Sydney underworld figure named Tony Spaghetti Eustace was killed.
This account is including this specific case distinct from everything already traced because of what it potentially represents possibly the final piece of work Flannery himself ever completed.
What’s genuinely worth noting here is Eustace’s own final act.
As he lay dying, detectives pressed him directly for the identity of whoever was responsible.
He refused to answer, telling them in blunt and unmistakable terms to leave him alone, choosing in his own final moments to protect whoever had targeted him rather than name them.
This account isn’t going to speculate about why Eustace made that specific choice, beyond noting that it reflects a code of silence this channel has documented recurring across dozens of separate organized crime cases throughout its broader research.
A genuine deeply embedded reluctance to cooperate with police even when doing so would represent the dying person’s own final opportunity for some form of justice.
What makes this case genuinely significant for this account’s broader purposes is what happened years later once a formal coronial investigation finally examined it properly.
The presiding coroner, reviewing everything available, concluded that the possibility Flannry had been involved in some capacity, couldn’t actually be ruled out.
Investigators themselves apparently believe Flannry was at minimum a genuine hired hand connected to Eustace’s own death.
It’s worth holding this specific finding directly alongside the broader timeline this account has already established.
If Flenry genuinely was responsible, even partially, for Eustace’ death, it means the very last confirmed act of his own criminal career took place just weeks before his own disappearance.
Meaning whatever ultimately happened to him arrived at almost the exact moment he’d apparently completed one more piece of exactly the work that had defined his entire adult life.
This account can’t establish with genuine confidence whether this specific job connects directly to whatever ultimately happened to Flannry himself.
What’s worth taking seriously is the broader pattern.
It represents a man who by this point, according to everything this account has already traced, was already regarded by the people around him as increasingly unstable, increasingly dangerous to their own interests, and who nonetheless, apparently continued actively working right up until the very end.
That’s worth sitting with directly as this account moves toward its final most consequential chapter because it complicates any simple narrative suggesting Flannry had somehow become a passive target simply waiting for the inevitable.
Whatever fear he was genuinely experiencing by this point, and this account has already traced real documented evidence of that fear, he apparently hadn’t stopped working.
The man who vanished on the 9th of May 1985 wasn’t someone who’d retreated entirely from the world that was closing in on him.
He was still right up until the end exactly the person this entire account has been tracing.
Here’s what’s actually documented about Christopher Flannry’s final known movements pieced together from the people who were there.
Because this specific sequence deserves genuine careful attention rather than being rushed through toward whatever theory feels most satisfying.
On the morning of 9 May 1985, Flannry was reportedly planning to visit George Freeman, the same Sydney crime figure this account has already established he’d previously worked for as a bodyguard.
He went down to the basement of the Canort where his own car was parked, only to find it wouldn’t start.
There’s a specific detail worth including here because independent investigation later uncovered something genuinely significant about it.
A small component connected to the vehicle’s ignition system had apparently been deliberately removed.
This wasn’t a random mechanical failure.
Someone, it appears, had made sure Flannry’s own car specifically wouldn’t work that particular morning.
Frustrated, he walked to a nearby location and hired a taxi.
The driver took him to Sydney’s domestic airport.
There’s a genuinely useful detail worth including about why this specific destination made sense.
Given everything this account has already established about Flannry’s own working methods when preparing for a job, he reportedly had a consistent habit of hiring vehicles from the airport specifically, presumably to keep his own personal car away from wherever the actual work needed to happen.
His trip to the airport, in other words, wasn’t necessarily unusual or alarming on its own terms.
It fit a pattern.
The taxi driver who took him there, a former commercial pilot who’d previously flown in Papio Newu Guinea before retiring into driving cabs, later gave evidence at the eventual coronial inquest into Flannry’s disappearance, and by every account proved to be a genuinely credible, observant witness.
He described Fannery as visibly agitated during the drive, talking in his own characteristically boastful manner before being dropped at the terminal with a small piece of genuinely kind, practical advice from the driver himself.
That’s it.
That’s the last confirmed sighting of Christopher Flannry ever by anyone willing to come forward and describe it.
What happened after he walked into that airport terminal has never been definitively established.
Nobody has ever been found.
Nobody has ever been formally charged in connection with whatever happened to him.
It’s worth pausing directly on how genuinely unusual this specific outcome is set against everything this account has already traced.
Flenry himself throughout his entire documented career was consistently repeatedly caught and charged.
His actual conviction rate was zero, but his arrest rate was considerably higher than that specific detail might otherwise suggest.
Whoever was actually responsible for whatever happened to him on the 9th of May, 1985, managed something Flanner’s own many enemies and the entire New South Wales justice system had never managed to achieve while he was still walking around free.
Complete, permanent, unresolved silence.
This account turns next to what investigators and the broader Australian public actually believe happened once Flannry walked out of that taxi and to the formal official conclusion a coronial inquest eventually reached more than a decade after he was last seen.
It took 12 years and a genuinely extended coronial process before any formal official conclusion was reached about what happened to Christopher Flannry.
In June 1997, New South Wales State Coroner Greg Glass delivered his findings, and it’s worth being precise about exactly what those findings did and didn’t establish.
The coroner concluded that Flannry was most probably murdered on or around the 9th of May, 1985.
That’s a genuine formal legal finding, not speculation, not underworld rumor, but the considered conclusion of an extended judicial process specifically tasked with examining everything available.
What the coroner’s findings didn’t include was any specific determination of who was actually responsible or where his remains might actually be found.
That specific gap, a formal conclusion that murder occurred without any accompanying resolution of who committed it, has left more than four decades of speculation to fill the space the formal justice system couldn’t close.
It’s worth cataloging the genuine range of theories here.
Not because any single one can be confirmed, but because the sheer variety itself says something worth understanding about how deeply uncertain this case genuinely remains.
Some theories point toward Roger Roger directly or towards someone acting on his behalf.
A genuinely logical suspicion given everything this account has already established about how directly threatened Roger stood to be by an unstable, increasingly unpredictable Flannry, who already knew far too much about the Drury conspiracy specifically.
Roger himself always denied any involvement and no formal charge was ever brought against him connected to Flannry’s disappearance specifically.
There’s a further detail worth including here because it adds a genuinely important layer of complexity to any simple theory.
Some of the other underworld figures believed to have potentially been involved in whatever happened to Flannry were themselves, according to this account’s research, working as police informants.
People whose own survival within this specific world depended on their willingness to inform on associates whenever it served their own interests.
Consider what this specific detail suggests about how Flannry himself might have been genuinely regarded by the people around him during his final weeks.
If cornered, if genuinely threatened with exposure, would he have given up his own associates just as readily as they might have given him up?
The people closest to him, by this account’s own analysis, appear to have genuinely believed the answer was yes.
Flanner’s own wife offered a further separate theory worth including because it came from the person who presumably knew him better than anyone else still willing to speak about it publicly.
She believed her husband had become, in her own words, cannon foder in Sydney’s broader gangland conflict, killed on a substantial paid contract by a professional killer, working for interests considerably larger than any single personal grievance.
This account isn’t going to definitively endorse any single theory over the others because doing so would misrepresent the genuine persistent uncertainty this case has maintained for close to four decades.
What can be said with real confidence is the underlying logic connecting virtually every serious theory this research has found.
Whoever was responsible had genuine substantial motive connected directly to Flannry’s own accumulated dangerousness to people who’d previously trusted him.
The list of people with real reason to want him gone by this point in his life was genuinely long, considerably longer than the list of people who still had genuine reason to want him alive.
Here’s what’s genuinely worth taking away from Christopher Fener’s story.
Beyond the individual mystery of his own eventual disappearance because reducing this entire account to unsolved crime mystery undersells what’s actually worth understanding here.
Consider the specific institutional failure this account has traced throughout.
This wasn’t a case of a genuinely brilliant criminal mastermind repeatedly outsmarting an otherwise functioning justice system.
This was a case where the justice system’s own internal corruption, specifically its own compromised relationship with a genuinely skilled, genuinely respected police officer who’d crossed decisively into serving organized crimes own interests repeatedly failed to hold a genuinely dangerous man accountable.
Right up until that same corrupted system or forces genuinely adjacent to it apparently decided to solve the problem themselves entirely outside any formal legal process.
That’s worth sitting with directly because it’s a genuinely uncomfortable finding.
Flanner’s own eventual fate, whatever it actually was, likely didn’t arrive through justice in any meaningful sense.
It arrived through exactly the same lawless logic that had protected him throughout his entire career.
The same networks, the same compromised loyalties, simply turning against him once he’d become more dangerous to keep around than to eliminate.
There’s a further dimension worth including here, connecting Flanner’s own specific story to the broader question this channel keeps encountering across its expanding coverage of organized crime throughout the world.
This account is now traced across genuinely different countries and genuinely different eras.
A recurring pattern.
Criminal figures whose own greatest asset, reputation, visibility, genuine notoriety, eventually becomes their own greatest liability.
Once that same visibility makes them impossible for the people around them to continue trusting with sensitive, dangerous information.
It’s worth closing with something genuinely human because this account has otherwise spent considerable time tracing Flannry purely through the lens of his own documented crimes.
He had a wife.
He had children including a stepson.
People who knew him personally, separate from his own criminal reputation, described a man capable of genuine doting affection toward his own family.
A detail worth including not to soften anything this account has already established about him, but because it’s genuinely consistently true of many figures this channel has documented across its broader research.
Violence directed outward towards strangers and rivals doesn’t always preclude genuine warmth directed toward the people closest to home.
That specific uncomfortable duality is worth holding on to rather than resolving into a simpler, more comfortable story.
What ultimately happened to Christopher Flannry remains more than four decades later genuinely unresolved.
Nobody has been found.
No one has ever been charged.
The formal coronial process reached the only conclusion it genuinely could.
That murder almost certainly occurred without ever managing to close the considerably larger, considerably more consequential question of who was actually responsible.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history from around the world using court records, coronial findings, and verified reporting rather than the mythology that’s grown up around cases like this one over the decades.
Where genuine uncertainty remains, and in Flen’s case, an enormous amount of it still does, we’ve tried to represent that uncertainty honestly rather than picking whichever theory makes for the most satisfying ending.
Subscribe if you want to see where this channel’s coverage goes next.
