Silk–Miller police murders

On the night of 15–16 August 1998, Sergeant Gary Silk, 34, and Senior Constable Rodney Miller, 35, were participating in Operation Hamada, a Victoria Police Armed Robbery Squad operation investigating a series of restaurant armed robberies committed over a seven-year period. The officers were staking out the Silky Emperor Restaurant in Cochranes Road, Moorabbin, in an unmarked patrol car. After an earlier vehicle fled the scene when spotted, Silk and Miller later followed and pulled over a Hyundai Excel hatchback at 12:08am. As Silk approached the passenger side, the driver produced a revolver and shot Silk in the chest and pelvis. When Miller attempted to return fire, a shot fired through the rear window struck him under the arm. The gunman then exited the vehicle and fired a fatal shot to Silk's head. Miller, though mortally wounded, returned fire at the fleeing vehicle and managed to walk back toward the restaurant before collapsing; he told responding officers two gunmen had been involved. He died at Monash Medical Centre later that morning.

The investigation, code-named Operation Lorimer, examined glass fragments left at the scene, which were traced to a specific Hyundai hatchback model manufactured in South Korea. The vehicle was found to be registered to the daughter of Bandali Debs, a known criminal. Ballistics evidence linked bullets from the murders to earlier armed robberies under investigation in Operation Hamada, and indicated two firearms had been used.

On 24 September 2001, Bandali Debs and Jason Joseph Roberts, the boyfriend of Debs' daughter, were charged with the murders of Silk and Miller along with numerous armed robbery offences. Their trial began in the Supreme Court of Victoria on 17 February 2003, and on 23 February 2003 both men were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Separately, Debs was later convicted in May 2007 of the murder of Kristy Mary Harty, and in December 2011 of the murder of Donna Ann Hicks, receiving further life sentences.

Beginning in 2015, and reopened in November 2017, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) investigated alleged misconduct during the original Lorimer taskforce investigation under Operation Gloucester, holding public hearings from February 2019. Roberts's conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in November 2020 after it was found that a police officer, Senior Constable Glenn Pullin, had destroyed his original statement and submitted a backdated one, undermining evidence about the number of offenders. A retrial in 2022, running four months with 90 witnesses, resulted in a not-guilty verdict for Roberts on both murder charges on 11 July 2022, after 22 years in custody. Roberts remained to be sentenced on 10 admitted armed robbery charges. Debs' conviction for the Silk and Miller murders was not overturned.