The Walsh Street police shootings were the 1988 murders of two Victoria Police officers: Constables Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20. Tynan and Eyre were responding to a report of an abandoned car when they were gunned down about 4:50am in Walsh Street, South Yarra (a Melbourne suburb), on 12 October 1988. Four men, Victor Peirce, Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Leigh Farrell and Peter David McEvoy, were charged with murder and later acquitted by a jury in the Supreme Court of Victoria. Two other suspects, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, were shot and killed by Victoria Police before being brought to trial. During 2005, Wendy Peirce, widow of Victor, gave an interview to the mass media. In this interview, she stated that her late husband had planned and carried out the murders and that he was actually guilty as charged. Background Since the 1878 attack on three police officers by the Ned Kelly Gang, criminal attacks on police officers were considered as rare events in Victoria. During the period of the 1980s, prior to the Walsh Street killings, there had been a number of random acts of violence committed against members of the Victoria Police. In the early hours of 22 November 1984, officers, Sergeant Peter Kearon, 34, and his partner, Constable Graham Fletcher, operating a divisional van, were conducting license checks in the vehicles on Beach Road in Beaumaris. At 1:35am, Kearon and Fletcher stopped a blue and white 1966 Holden with a missing headlight, as the vehicle pulled alongside the officers' divisional van, the driver got out and fired three shots at Kearon and Fletcher with a .223 Leader carbine semiautomatic assault rifle. The gunman then got back in his vehicle and took off, leading Kearon and Fletcher on a short chase along Beach Road, before turning into Tramway Parade and coming to a stop on Oak Street near the Gibbs Street intersection. The gunman then got out of the Holden and fired three more shots at Kearon and Fletcher's divisional van. Kearon received a cut above his eye from flying glass from the van's shattered windshield, while Fletcher escaped injury by taking cover under the van's dashboard. The gunman, 19-year-old Kai "Matty" Korhonen, was a former army recruit from Clayton who was recently dismissed from his job at a car yard, an hour before shooting at Sergeant Kearon and Constable Fletcher. Korhonen shot and killed security guard