I was about 12 years old when I met Reno, who became my stepfather, by defacto. Reno will feature in a few posts, so I’ll introduce him here.

Reno Xerri was a short man, I guess 5′ 3″, just slightly taller than my Mum at 5′. Sporting a moustache and a thick crop of hair, styled with Bryll Cream. He usually wore blue Levis, black boots, with heels to boost his height, a red muscle shirt which revealed his tattoo’s, and had a packet of Camel Plain cigarettes tucked into the shoulder, and a comb in his back pocket. His eyes, nestled under bushy eyebrows, had a fire in them like I’d never seen, yet they were like ice at the same time.

Reno was an electronics genius, and he taught me how to make circuits with parts scavenged from old TV sets. He had his own electronics workbench with power supplies and instruments all built in. He used to make tattoo guns for artists all about the place, and struck me as a very clever man. He used to sit at that table and tattoo himself of a night, quite regularly (Which struck me as not so clever). Not that he was any kind of tattoo artist, he was more just doodling random shapes and colours. He even wrote my name in there, amongst it all, and when I asked if it hurt, he ran the needles out of ink, and drew a line on my wrist to show me.

He told me how he was born in Russia, and had come from adversity; he had managed to escape from a Russian prison camp, when he was a boy. He made his escape, but his twin brother, Sven, did not. His twin brother was shot by Russian military during the escape, and Reno had to abandon him, and make his own dash for freedom. He eventually made his way across Europe, to England, and found a couple who adopted him, and later emigrated to Australia, where he found his way into the Navy, earning his trade as an electronics technician. So proud of his Navy career he was, that he had a full chest tattoo, with the word NAVY in large lettering across the top, and two dolphins underneath, surfacing from the ocean.

I had never met such a complex, and interesting individual. How my Mother came to meet him, I’ll never know. But as it turns out, he was seeking shelter at our house. Hiding out really. He was out on bail and due to front court on an assault charge (for beating a bloke near to death with a socket wrench), and had managed to find an ally in my Mother.

My Mum had the talk with me, that I couldn’t go talking about him anywhere. I was to keep quiet. She told me how she was helping him – he’d had a bit of trouble with drugs, and the law, but she would straighten him out. She showed me needle marks in her own arm, just to tell me she tried it, to better understand it, but there wasn’t anything to worry about. Everything would be fine.

It was about this time in life I started smoking.

The ‘bikies and bongs’ lifestyle I was accustomed to had given way to something new. Reno. His tortured past and current struggles became ours also.

He never went to court to face the music. The prospect of jail time proved insurmountable, and he jumped bail. Mum sold the house, that my grandfather built, where I grew up, to move to country Victoria, some 5 hours away, where we could hide from the cops. This meant that I also couldn’t see my Dad, or have contact with anyone. I didn’t speak to family or friends for at least six months. We were officially on the run.

I’m not sure at what time I really knew, but I had found many holes in the stories Reno told me, and I pressed my mother for more information.

As it turns out, the Russian, Reno Xerri, was really Paul Hetherington, from Dandenong, Victoria. He was born in Australia, to English parents. He never had a brother. He was never in the Navy. He didn’t even have a trade. Everything I ever knew about him, was a lie. Paul… bloody Hetherington. Whether mental illness, or drug induced, he was completely entrenched in his made up existence, and I was to never, under any circumstances talk to him about it, and I was to still call him Reno.

After my Mum died, I went to live with Dad, and Reno did come by a couple of times, but then I never saw him again. I’d sometimes wonder what ever happened to him.

Sometime in 1988, while camping in NSW with my mate Leigh, I got my answer. I picked up one of many old Aussie Post magazines that was laying around, and read an article about how a gruesome murder was uncovered. A man was stabbed multiple times, while sleeping in the back of his ute in the Victorian high country, then decapitated. The murderers buried his body in a shallow grave, while throwing his head into an abandoned mineshaft. The mine was re-opened two weeks later, leading to the discovery of this mans head.

Two people were subsequently investigated, charged and convicted for the murder of Paul Hetherington.