30 years ago, he was deep undercover. Now he helps women find safety

This was before the internet, and local cops didn’t know him. Wilson was constantly being pulled over and hassled by his unknowing colleagues who thought he was “shady as anything”.

“I’d tell them to f— off,” he says. “I had to act tough.”

He recalls the spine-tingling moment he locked eyes with one cop in town, “a bloke I knew from years back”. “I looked at him and he looked at me but out of context, he couldn’t place me, and I just thought: be cool.”

Fourteen months is a long time to keep your cool. Wilson had guns drawn on him, his car was torched and the house he shared with his fellow undercover detective was burgled (including a certain grandfather clock with a trick bottom for stashing cash). How did Wilson do it? He shrugs. “I’m not an angry person.”

Indeed, he’s disarmingly friendly. Lunch is on The Age today but as we order (steak for me and the lamb for Wilson, plus the pub’s famous dim sims to share), Wilson repeatedly offers to buy photographer Joe Armao lunch on his own dime “to keep your receipts in order, Sherryn”. The lunch offer is a first, Armao tells me, in all his years on the job.

As easy as it is to imagine Wilson getting hardened crooks to divulge their secrets, I can also see him sitting down for a cuppa with domestic violence victims in his current job: running security sweeps for vulnerable people. Protective Group, which Wilson started with another ex-detective, Steve Schultze, over a decade ago, is Australia’s only security firm specialising in helping domestic violence victims escape abuse.

While their work is not directly funded by governments, the two Steves (and a staff of mostly ex-cops) work with charities across the country supporting victims. “Whether that’s dashing out to Bunnings and installing locks, or doing a sweep of her car, her phone for trackers and bugs before she goes to the refuge, or her house,” Wilson explains. “We get so many calls for help, but we can usually find the funding somewhere. We look after probably 80 to 120 women a week now.”

As the food arrives, Wilson admits he didn’t have to completely fake it undercover: “I really do love antiques.”

But the job took a toll. He rarely saw his family. His marriage fell apart. He lost touch with friends like Schultze, whom he knew when Schultze worked in homicide downstairs and lived at the end of his street. “It wasn’t like I could go to the police pub on a Friday night.”

After he left the force, Wilson owned and ran a pub himself. Then, 15 years ago, he reunited with Schultze, and decided to go back to investigation. Both men had a brood of kids at home. “And both of us … well, we hate bullies.”

When the Salvation Army was given funding under the Turnbull government to help keep women at risk of violence safe in their homes, the charity turned to the two Steves. And soon refuges and other support services did, too, as well as private clients.

Wilson describes men climbing through roof tiles at night to photograph their ex-partners sleeping; trackers sewn into teddy bears and children’s backpacks, hidden in glove boxes or under cars; and eerie arrays of cameras discovered in ceiling vents.

“Some of these men are lawyers, doctors, they’ll go to jail, get out and do it all over again,” he says. “COVID drove a lot of the technology abuse [as more of life moved online]. It’s really skyrocketed.”

Wilson’s voice shakes as he recalls the vicious assault of a woman outside a supermarket – her ex had tracked her down via her rewards card points.

His team has to be careful, too. The other Steve has been chased off a property with a machete. “I’ve gone to houses and the bloke’s still there hiding under the bed or in the cupboard,” Wilson says. “Perpetrators do not like us.”

At the pub when he tells people what he does now, he inevitably gets an earful from “blokes saying, ‘oh but domestic violence happens to men, too’. I know it does, but you look at the numbers. You’d have to be blind to say it’s not mostly women. And kids. You see terrible things. I can’t make any excuses for my gender any more. I think a lot of blokes have grown up without empathy.”

Not so for Wilson. The eldest of four kids, he grins as he mentions his “square” parents. “Mum’s never had a drink. Dad’s the sort of bloke, he goes to his [favourite] fish and chip shop one night and they wouldn’t give him a receipt. And he thought: ‘Ah, you’re dodging tax.’ So he never went back.”

At home, “there was never an angry word”, but on the job aged 18, Wilson was being called to dozens of domestic violence incidents a day. “And back then, no cops wanted to go to them. The old attitude was ‘she’ll just go back to him’. Victims didn’t have the support they do now. I think it’s changed. I hope it’s changed.”

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Today, Wilson rarely tells clients he used to be a cop. He wears polo shirts, not suits. “Sometimes, they’ll say, ‘you’re the first fella who’s ever listened to me. My ex didn’t, and I don’t feel like his family did or the police or the magistrate did’.”

He’s particularly passionate about helping Indigenous communities. The only women’s refuge in Alice Springs recently called in the two Steves as unrest in the community hit headlines.

“We’re not Batman and Robin flying in to fix it,” Wilson says. “It’s very complicated, but we’ll see what we can do. I’d love to train up some local Indigenous workers in what we do.”

Billions of dollars have been poured into stopping domestic violence since Rosie Batty’s direct appeal for change following the murder of her son nearly a decade ago. “Some things are better, but there’s a lot of talkfests, too,” sighs Wilson. “We wanted to do something practical, even if it’s a Band-Aid.”

He taps his watch. Speaking of practical, Protective Group have also developed an app that turns smartwatches into safety alarms. If a client is in danger and activates the alarm, live audio and video from their watch will be streamed to a 24/7 monitoring centre, which can then call police “with a special alpha code” and brief officers on the perpetrator’s history while they’re en route. “And those recordings have stood up in court as evidence before,” Wilson says.

There’s other evidence he sees on the job, too: holes in plaster where a son has put his elderly mother’s head through a wall. Or blood and scratch marks in the bathroom of a young mum. Forget the high-stakes world of uncover work – how does he keep his cool now, in the face of so much cruelty and fear? Does that idyllic upbringing – church on Sunday and loud family dinners –make Wilson feel more responsibility to protect others?

He puts down his fork, his hand shaking a little. “Yeah, maybe. I got lucky, the home I was born into.

“You go to houses and you look at kids holding onto mum’s arm, and you think … well, it’s just not fair is it?”