GIST: "Senior detectives, and even the coroner, a big burly man, within a few hours trampled most of the ground and lawn around the car. The two most senior detectives there, Ric Ninness and Lloyd Worthy, supervised operations from alongside the car, about where the assassin would have fired. They called for lights and facilities to illuminate the scene, but from the water police, not the scientific squad. When scene of crime officers arrived, they had trouble getting scores of police, some merely gawking, to stop contaminating the scene, but were ignored or rudely dealt with, including with a statement that the men knew how murders were investigated. A senior officer was said to have said "But he's our mate''. It was hours before the scene of crime men could secure the scene.  A police officers at the crime scene on the night Colin Winchester was murder.
Several cops searched the body. Another removed Winchester's car keys and went back, alone, to search Winchester's office at ACT Police headquarters. This man was, subsequently and briefly, himself to be a suspect in the case, a problem compounded by this solo initiative. Although uniformed police began securing the immediate area quickly, it was hours, and much too late, before detectives thought  of doing anything about traffic going out of the city. By then the murderer could have driven to Sydney. It was recognised that top forensic assistance, beyond the resources of the ACT would be needed. The man the top AFP forensic man wanted, from the Victoria Police forensic laboratory, was not available, and the man sent instead was explicitly one that the top man did not want. When this man arrived, flown up in a special aircraft, he seemed to assume that he was in charge, but hardly impressed. One of the first things he did, ungloved, was to put his hand, and fingerprints, on the roof above the driver's side door. This was to be the expert whose findings about the case have now been almost completely discredited – in part for breaking all of the rules about the collection and examination of forensic evidence......... There were any number of permutations of the Calabrian hitman theories, including ones which put the focus on various present or former NSW Police and their believed involvement with drugs and organised crime, and even some suggestions that some AFP officers had become corrupted by the easy money of the drug trade. Even now, most of the intelligence gathered, and the reports which were based upon it, are subject to strict suppression orders, with police insisting that informants could still be killed if it became public. I first saw most of the suppressed material (copies of which I retain, if in a secure place) 20 years ago, and remain surprised that the public is not allowed to know how strongly the investigators who prepared the reports believed in an organised crime connection. Those pursuing the professional hitman theory were quite convinced that continuing investigations, with more resources, would bear fruit. But while there was a rich web of circumstance and coincidence, and, not surprisingly, a lot of very suspicious activity, the investigators focused on this side of the case were failing to find a smoking gun -- clear evidence pointing unequivocally to someone's guilt. The brief wanted more work, more time, and more investigation. It never got it. A rival team believed it was working on a more workable theory, and pushing to have the national investigation closed down. In this article I have spoken of the "second thing" that police thought. The first thing that they thought, as detectives usually think, was that if Winchester had been murdered, it was probably by his wife."