By BELLE NOLAN, Police Life
AN injured man cowers at the scene of a brutal double murder.
A diamond merchant, his wife and son have been gunned down in front of him and he waits, terrified, for police to arrive.
But is all as it seems?
It is December 1996 and police are called to the vicious slaying at a jeweller in Swanston Street’s century Building, in Melbourne’s CBD.
When officers arrive on the eighth floor diamond merchant, a grisly scene confronts them.
Shop owner Lean Thoeun Pin’s lifeless body is lying on the floor.
His 30-year-old son, Vireyuth Pin, has also been shot dead while his wife, Siveng, has been critically injured.
All three were shot to the head at close range.
One of the dead men was also savagely bashed.
The execution-style murder occurred in the main office area of the quiet jeweller.
The door to the office safe is wide open and a number of precious jewels are missing.
The murder weapon, a handgun, lies nearby.
And a 47-year-old man is trapped inside as the shop’s security doors closed on the gruesome scene.
The man tells responding officers a horrific story.
He was in the store at the time of the murders and blacked out after being assaulted by the killer.
It emerges that the man is Manuel Adajian, a fellow jeweller from Endeavour Hills.
Police believe he could also be the sole surviving witness to the gruesome murder, which appears to be an armed robbery gone wrong.
Officers are keen to interview him about what he has seen but the frightened man has other ideas.
Desperate to escape, he initially tries to slip past police but is stopped so officers can take a crucial witness statement.
The Homicide Squad’s Detective Sergeant Sol Solomon attended the scene and took his statement.
“I escorted him out of the building and down the busy street to the police car,” Det Sgt Solomon said.
“He seemed to be holding up pretty well for someone who had just witnessed a horrific murder and had been assaulted himself.
“But I tried to comfort him, telling him he was in safe hands.”
Det Sgt Solomon drove Adajian to the Homicide Squad’s interview room.
The man told the veteran investigator that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But Det Sgt Solomon had begun to smell a rat.
“I searched his pockets and found the keys to the safe.
“When I confronted him about this, he said he wasn’t sure how they got there, he must have grabbed hold of them in all the confusion.”
In his other pocket, Det Sgt Solomon made another telling discovery – empty diamond sachets.
“He gave me the same explanation.
“He said he didn’t know what he was doing and may have grabbed it without thinking.
“It was all starting to sound a bit fishy.”
It was then that Det Sgt Solomon received a phone call from a colleague, which would change the course of the entire investigation.
“He was at the lab processing the video tape containing the store’s CCTV footage,” Det Sgt Solomon said.
“He said ‘Sol, please tell me you still have that guy in custody.’
“I told him I did and he said ‘Thank God – he’s the murderer!’
“It turned out the newly installed CCTV system had captured the entire incident.
“When we played it back, we were shocked to see him shooting the victims and stealing their diamonds.”
Detectives initially kept the discovery under wraps and continued to interview Adajian before playing the footage during the interview.
“It surprised me how cool and collected he was,” Det Sgt Solomon said.
“I’ll never forget his reaction: ‘My God, that’s me’ he said. ‘I’m shooting those people.’
“And he certainly was.
“This happened in the days when CCTV was a fairly limited resource in the investigation of crime compared with today.
“So he didn’t expect that everything he was doing was being filmed.”
Despite claiming to have suffered from a mental episode, which left him with no memory of the murders, Adajian was convicted and is serving a 50-year sentence with a non-parole period of 25 years.
The case is one that still sticks in Det Sgt Solomon’s mind.
“It was a terrible homicide,” he said.
“Three members of a tight-knit family shot in cold blood for nothing more than greed.
“I still can’t believe I casually walked out of the building with the murderer thinking he was an innocent victim,” he said.
“You couldn’t make a story like this up.”
* This article has been reproduced with the permission of Police Life and reporter Belle Nolan.
