As Jason Somerville entered the police cell in Brisbane, he reminded himself to act natural. Glancing at the other occupant, he casually asked, “Hey, how’s it going?”
He and his new cellmate, Edwin Lewis, struck up conversation. When Lewis, then 32, asked Jason what he was in for, he came up with a story.
“Cops pulled me over and found weed in my car,” Jason quickly lied.
It wasn’t his only fib. In fact, Jason was an undercover cop, and this was his first job.
Lewis was suspected of the murder of a wealthy Melbourne couple, Paul and Carmel Higgins, who were stabbed to death in their home in April 1995.
Lewis, who was dating their daughter, stole their Porsche and hightailed it to Queensland, where he was arrested. But after hours of interrogation, detectives didn’t have a confession, which is where Jason came in.
“I was in a cell with a guy who was a potential double murderer and an expert martial artist, so I acted like a dumb, young criminal and asked Lewis what he was in for,” Jason tells New Idea. “He smirked that
the journalists outside the watch house were for him, and I just let him talk…”
Unaware that Jason was wearing a tape recorder, Lewis confessed to murder.
“Lewis said he’d killed two people and told me to buy tomorrow’s newspaper. Then he bragged, ‘I’m a celebrity, mate,’” Jason remembers.
With the job done, Jason asked the guard outside when he could get his phone call, which was the signal to get him out of there.
Later, in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Lewis was found guilty of the murders and jailed for 26 years.
Jason grew up in Brisbane and joined the police force in 1991. He spent two-and-a-half years living among the Sunshine State’s most dangerous criminals.
They knew him as Michael Bates – a long-haired drifter in a flannelette shirt looking to make easy money. Even old high-school classmates turned criminals failed to recognise Jason.
“I studied acting at school and uni, so I learned to watch the person you’re trying to be and act like they do,” Jason says. “If someone did accuse me of being a cop, attack was the best form of defence. I became that aggressive criminal who didn’t like bad things being said about them.”
Jason lived in run-down share houses and helped bring down a group distributing drugs across Brisbane’s north as well as Vietnamese gangs from Cabramatta, NSW.
On those jobs, he left his family home behind and became Michael Bates 24/7. He became hypervigilant, knowing one slip could lead to a beating or even death.
One of his most dangerous jobs saw him infiltrate bikie gangs in Kingaroy.
Newcomers attracted suspicion in town, so Jason spent weeks drinking at the local pub. Gradually, he made friends and was even offered a room at the home of a senior bikie’s girlfriend.
“Leaving one wrong clue about who I really was in that house could have got me killed,” he says.
Just as he was making inroads, Jason’s boss called and told him to pack his bags and leave, immediately.
“I never found out why I was pulled out. Perhaps the informant we were working with had started blabbing,” he says.
Jason, now 56, returned to general policing, but the undercover work took a toll. His marriage ended, and Jason was left with a form of PTSD.
Now in recruitment, he has written a book about his life, Undercurrent (Big Sky Publishing, $36.99), which is out July 28.
“I can still pick a drug deal from a mile away, and all these years later I’m always looking at people to see if someone out of the blue will say, ‘I remember you,’” he says.
“But I’m proud of the work I did. Some dangerous people were taken off the streets and that made a difference.”
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