Walsh Street police shootings

In the early hours of 12 October 1988, Victoria Police constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, were dispatched from Prahran police station to investigate a reported abandoned Holden Commodore on Walsh Street, South Yarra, Melbourne. At about 4:50 am, while examining the vehicle, the two officers were ambushed by armed offenders. One gunman shot Tynan with a shotgun while he was seated in the police van; Eyre, though seriously wounded, is believed to have struggled with his attacker(s) before someone removed his own service revolver from its holster and shot him in the head with it. Both officers died at the scene, which was discovered shortly afterward by responding units from South Melbourne, St Kilda and Russell Street.

The killings occurred roughly thirteen hours after Victor Peirce's close associate, Graeme Jensen, was fatally shot by police in Narre Warren during an attempted arrest connected to an armed robbery and murder investigation. Police and commentators viewed the Walsh Street killings as retaliation by members of Melbourne's armed-robbery underworld following a period of a high number of fatal police shootings of suspects.

The investigation, known as the Ty-Eyre Task Force and led by Detective Inspector John Noonan, became the largest and longest-running inquiry Victoria Police had undertaken to that point, running for approximately two-and-a-half years. Investigators linked the shotgun used in the killings, recovered months later half-buried in a golf-course garden bed, to an earlier bungled bank robbery in Oak Park attributed to a group police dubbed the "Flemington Crew."

Four men — Victor Peirce, Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Leigh Farrell and Peter David McEvoy — were charged with the murders. Two other men police believed were involved, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, were shot and killed by Victoria Police before they could be brought to trial; a detective charged over Abdallah's death was acquitted. Jason Ryan, a prosecution witness granted immunity, gave evidence that changed several times before trial. Victor Peirce's wife, Wendy Peirce, initially provided her husband an alibi, then agreed to testify against him as a hostile prosecution witness, but ultimately did not testify; she was later convicted of perjury and served a nine-month non-parole sentence.

At trial in the Supreme Court of Victoria, all four accused men were acquitted on 26 March 1991. In 2005, Wendy Peirce gave a media interview stating that her late husband (who was fatally shot in an unrelated 2002 incident) had planned and carried out the murders. A 2011 book concluded that two of the acquitted defendants, Farrell and Pettingill, played no part in the killings. In 2010, comments attributed to McEvoy prompted calls for a coronial inquest into the deaths of the two constables. The case remains formally unsolved following the acquittals.