by Gary Jubelin
The saddest part is when Jim and I attend the funeral. Even with us present, there are only half a dozen mourners. The two of us make up a third of James’s funeral procession.
Months pass and we’re still no closer to solving the case. It really pisses me off. It feels like Jim and I are the only two who care about James Kelly.
* * *
Years later, as a Homicide Squad detective, I will come back to this killing.
Jim has left the force by then and another detective, Roger, gets in contact from one of the district anti-theft units. He knows I worked the case and says one of his informants claims a local man, Paul Suters, is trying to sell a microwave, which came from James’s home. It’s strange but we follow it up. Suters was 19 when the killing happened, and at the time he did casual work for the neighbour Jim and I had our eyes on.
Roger and I interview Suters, who is now 23 and working as an electrical goods salesman. He admits to being involved. He says he was the lookout, waiting outside the front of James’s house while a mate, just a young kid, went round the back and knocked on the door. We also match his fingerprints to those on a piece of cardboard found inside James’s station wagon back in 1992.
The neighbour encouraged them to do it, Suters tells us. He told them James had money lying round the house. James was not supposed to be there – only he was. Suters says he doesn’t know what happened, who came at who or whether the younger bloke panicked, but he ended up hitting James with a Maglite torch that he was carrying and the older man collapsed.
The two of them used his station wagon to drive the body to the stretch of nearby bushland, by the oval, where they buried him before making off with $120, the microwave oven and a clock from inside the house.
I tell Suters that if he wants to help himself, he needs to help us go after the younger man who did the job with him and is now also in his early twenties. Suters agrees, and we get him to set up a meeting between them at a motel in nearby Mount Kuring-Gai, which we record using listening devices.
The conversation gives us a part of what happened. The younger man admits to being there and that they buried the body. We don’t get an admission that he played a direct part in James’s killing, but it’s enough to take them both to court.
Roger and I go back to the neighbour, expecting to bounce him. After all, Suters has told us that the whole thing was his idea. But when I ask about the killing he looks at me blankly, saying, ‘I don’t remember.’ Looking around his house, I see notes stuck to the cupboard doors and walls, saying ‘Shut fridge’ and ‘Turn off lights’.
He has dementia. There’s no point dragging him to court.
The prosecutor, Margaret Cunneen, smiles at me when I take the case to her, looking at the time that’s passed since I first worked it with Jim. ‘Jesus, you don’t give up do you?’ she says, laughing.
By the time both of the young men involved are tried and sentenced, it will be eight years since James was killed. Suters is charged with murder but pleads guilty to manslaughter, and the judge reduces his sentence because of what he called Suters’ ‘contrition and remorse evidenced in the most material manner’ in helping with our investigation.
Suters gets two years of weekend detention served in a State facility beside the Hunter River, not too far from his home.
The younger man is charged with being an accessory after the killing, with Margaret telling me that there is simply not enough evidence to convict him of more. Sentencing him, the judge says that he ‘presented as a young man who is now completely rehabilitated’. He isn’t jailed. He still lives in the Hornsby area, working as an electrician. Afterwards, I sometimes see him driving his van to work.
I feel offended by the way the trials have played out. The two men broke into James’s house. James was beaten with a torch. James died. They buried him.
Maybe they were only kids back then. Maybe they’d been manipulated by the neighbour. Maybe the judge has found it in his heart to forgive them, but to me it feels like two years of weekend detention is like saying James’s life counted for nothing. Like no one in the courtroom cared for him. Like no one championed his cause.
* * *
Not long after James Kelly’s body is discovered, a custody sergeant from Hornsby calls me at home.
‘We’ve got someone in the cells who’s demanding to see you. We can’t settle him down. He’s bloody assaulted everyone. Can you come in?’
‘Who is it?’
‘Aboriginal bloke. Anthony.’
I can’t help smiling. My best mate from childhood. Of course, part of me is sad Anthony’s in the cells but the fact he’s asking to see me means I meant something to him. It means my memory of our friendship is real, not imagined.
‘What happened?’ I ask the sergeant.
‘He was on a train and beat up a guard. When the cops came, he had a go at them as well.’ They’ve charged him with assault.
I drive straight over, unsure what to expect. After writing to each other for a couple of years when he ran away from home, the two of us have lost contact. He must have somehow kept a track on me and known I joined the cops.
The moment I open the cell door and can see him, Anthony and I start laughing like we did when we were kids. We hug and sit down on the floor and talk. It freaks us out a little how, despite the time apart, we still feel the same connection.
We talk about how our lives have gone since our last letters up until this moment. He says enough for me to guess at the tough time he’s had, then looks at me and shakes his head and laughs again about how crazy it is that I joined the police.
‘How did you end up a copper?’ he asks. I tell him.
We talk about how we used to steal our parents’ grog and cigarettes, break into building sites and smash the windows. He looks at me, his face serious for a moment, and I realise each of us has played a part in the making of the other. He was a wild spirit and I was the voice of caution, asking, ‘Should we really do this?’
‘Yeah, yeah, let’s do it. It will be great,’ he’d tell me, and sometimes I would go along and other times he’d see that I was right. That’s what made us such great mates. We balanced out each other.
Growing up with Anthony has also made me a better detective. Looking back, I can see how all the different parts connected: wanting to do bad stuff with Anthony, having a father who would kill me if he caught me, and learning to cover up our tracks in order to escape. This experience taught me how to chase crooks as an adult, because I understand their temptations and can ask myself what I would do in their place.
I walk him to the courthouse and watch as he’s released on bail. He looks like the same person I knew as a young kid, only now in the dock, staring up at the magistrate. Afterwards, I help him sign his bail forms and want to ask if he will come and stay at my place, but I cannot. Before I walked into his cell, I checked his criminal record. There are a lot of violent crimes on there. He isn’t the same person. Even understanding how he got here, being adopted, running away, spending time in a boys’ home, and having shared a part of his history, I can’t expose my family to him. At home, Debbie and I have a baby now, and we’re planning for another.
I take Anthony to lunch and we promise to meet up at some point in the future, though I doubt it will happen.
This job already involves a constant battle to stop the trauma I see at work from bleeding into my home life.
And, each year, that gets harder.
Perfect Formula for Happiness
Mid-1970s
It’s raining on the day it happens. I’m in my first year of high school and sport is washed out, so the teachers put us all in the big assembly hall and put on a movie.
It’s a surf film called Morning of the Earth. I know nothing about surfing, but in those first few psychedelic minutes, as the camera shows surfers cutting white lines through blue water, while the people standing on the beaches watch them in fascination, and everything, including the film itself, seems to have been
bleached by sunlight, I want to be a part of that world.
Despite living 30 kilometres from the ocean, I use my wages from working at my grandfather’s recycling plant to buy a board. Like any kid, I’m looking for an identity, a purpose.
It’s not like I put much of myself into my education, so long as I am having fun and doing enough not to get in trouble with my father. But I work hard at surfing. The walls in my bedroom become a mural of surfing pictures, of blue water and sunlight. On weekends, I convince my parents to drive me to the coast.
Then my sister Karen starts going out with a guy called Mark, who is three years older than me and has long hair bleached by hours in the sun and saltwater, just like in the movie. He surfs. I convince him to take me with him.
Paddling out and sitting on my surfboard beyond the breakers, where the water is still enough that you barely feel it moving beneath you, I feel at peace. Just staring at the ocean. It’s a kind of meditation, I guess, though I don’t go in for all that sitting-in-a-lotus-position, hippy bullshit. Even after Mark splits up with my sister, we keep on going surfing. Driving out to the beaches at Manly, Newport and Avalon, with my feet on the dashboard while Mark drives, I tell myself there might be no perfect formula for happiness, but this seems pretty close.
I keep working to buy surfboards, and in my mid-teens get a second job with one of my uncles. He’s an electrician, and a good one, but we don’t do much electrical work.
I think what he really wants is a companion or a lookout. My uncle has a drug habit. He takes all sorts. He’ll pick me up after school and we’ll go to Kings Cross, where there’s a doctor he meets with. Or we’ll drive around and park somewhere, then I’ll sit in the car alone and wait until my uncle comes back, smiling.
What work we do sometimes takes us into the Cross’s strip clubs. One time, my uncle turns up at our house with three or four strippers wanting to use our pool. He’s wearing flares, with his hair long and a thick beard. To my amazement, Mum and Dad let them swim. Strict as they are, I learn that my parents are also open minded. There’s no judgment. I like that, although Mum says we’re not allowed to watch the women swimming.
My uncle gets on the grog a fair bit too. I’ll often stay over at his place if we’ve got an early start the next morning, and he’ll pour me Bourbon and Cokes. Not shots, either, but big glasses. I learn to pour half of each glass into a pot plant, so I don’t have to match him, drink for drink. That would floor me.
I learn other lessons too, about self-reliance.
One afternoon when we are actually working, I’m up in the ceiling cavity running some cables into place when I hear banging and crashing from the room below. I hear an argument break out. When I get down out of the ceiling, my uncle is off his face and, not being able to find the wire he wanted, has smashed up the Gyprock wall to locate it.
‘What the fuck have you done?’ the owner demands, only my uncle is too far gone to answer.
I calm things down. Another time, I’m pulling wires through under a house and calling out to my uncle but getting no answer. When I give up and go to find him, he’s passed out and collapsed, with his legs and body hanging on either side of the balcony. I call his wife, who comes to pick him up.
One Saturday morning, my uncle wants to go to a pub, an early opener, and we get there around 8am. I’m due to play soccer that afternoon and don’t want to drink, so he says, ‘Let’s play pool’, but stumbles at the table and knocks the balls flying. The blokes whose game he’s interrupted tip their cues upside down and move towards him.
I step in, saying, ‘Sorry guys, he’s drunk. We’re out of here,’ and we back out onto the street again, with me between them and my uncle.
On days like this, I learn that life’s not perfect and neither are people, so it’s better not to judge them. In fact, over the years, I learn more from my uncle, about myself, and about people with all their different strengths and vulnerabilities, than I could find in any book. My uncle has his faults but he is a good person who loves his family and does his best to support them.
And between working with him and at the recycling plant, I’m earning decent wages. By the time I leave Epping Boys’ High, I have saved up $2000 to buy a car, a brown Datsun. It’s nothing much to look at but it means I can drive myself to the beach.
I sleep in the car to extend my surfing trips over the weekends and wake with sunlight burning through the car windows, then paddle out and sit on my board looking at where the ocean meets the horizon. I surf hard, grow my hair long, taste the salt on my skin each evening and fall asleep each night exhausted. Later, I replace the Datsun with the Mitsubishi L300 Express van and fit it out with cupboards and a mattress in the back, so I can stretch out.
Leaving school at 17, I go straight into a job as an electrician’s apprentice. I make $67 a week, less than I was making working for my uncle or my grandfather, but enough to support myself while living my real life at the beach on the weekend. My education’s done with, and I’m not looking to replace it with anything too demanding.
You Don’t Leave the Fucking Stick-Ups
September 1992: seven years in
A phone call from work on my day off rarely means something good but this time there’s a tone in Jim’s voice that says it’s not just another drunken assault or robbery that means cancelling my plans with Debbie and going into the office.
‘You’ve been invited to join the Stick-Ups,’ Jim says. He means the Armed Hold-Up Squad. I’m stunned. To my eyes, the Stick-Ups are the big boys. If Hornsby detectives are the local leagues, then they are the first graders.
Across the state, the police force is divided into four regions, North, Northwest, South and Southwest, with the corners of each meeting in the centre of Sydney, where most of our work is, and their areas of responsibility stretching out over the vast expanses of coastline, bush and desert to the State’s borders. Each region has a Major Crime Squad, which handles the toughest cases and is run by an inspector. Under the inspector sit senior detective sergeants in charge of different, specialised squads who tackle specific offences, such as Homicide, the Armed Hold-Ups, Organised Crime and so on.
‘They must have seen something they like in you,’ Jim says. He doesn’t admit it, but I guess someone from the squad asked him for his opinion and he told them I was ready. It is to be a six-month trial.
I hang up the phone feeling 10 feet tall. The Armed Hold-Up Squad do heavy work. The number of violent robberies across the State has increased in recent years. By the spring of 1992, it feels like every week another bank or armoured van is hit, and people are regularly getting shot at.
The Stick-Ups go after the very worst of those offenders and have built their reputation on the back of serious detectives such as the squad sergeant, Dennis ‘Doodles’ O’Toole, who to my young eyes is a living legends.
Being asked to join them must mean that I’m a real policeman.
* * *
My first Monday morning with the Stick-Ups, 14 September 1992, is like being back in uniform and walking into the Hornsby detectives’ office. This is the next level up and I stand there as Doodles introduces me, saying nothing and just waiting for one of the proper cops to turn around and ask me what I’m doing here and whether I belong.
The squad is based in Chatswood, closer to the city centre, and Dad dropped me off on his way into work this morning. The Major Crime office is probably six times bigger than in Hornsby and littered with paperwork from the different briefs of evidence being assembled or picked over by the detectives, who also seem bigger, smarter and more confident than anything I’m used to. But they make me welcome as Doodles shows me round.
‘This is your desk, this is the meal room, let us know if you’re going out,’ he tells me. Leaning back against the meal room wall, he looks out into the office, nods and says, ‘Round here, we work hard and play hard.’
As a detective constable, my job is mainly to help collect evidence; taking statements, going out and showing ph
otographs to witnesses, asking if they can identify these people, chasing up CCTV footage, which is becoming increasingly available as more banks and building societies get cameras fitted, then working through the footage, looking for particular designs on T-shirts, hats, or anything you could use to link the person on the tape to a suspect. As the new guy, I watch how the older cops connect all these little pieces to build up a case.
Three days into my first week, a crook called Christopher Binse holds up a bank at a shopping centre less than two blocks from our headquarters. Binse has a reputation; less than a week ago, on 8 September 1992, he broke out of a locked ward at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne armed with a pistol. Today, he went in wearing a balaclava, jumped over the bank counter, terrifying the tellers and fired off a gun. He’s also wanted over a string of other robberies and likes to pull stunts, like taunting the Victorian police in his home State, sending them postcards timed to arrive with each new heist, signing his nickname ‘Badne$$’.
A few days later, I’m told we’ve got a tip-off that Binse is holed up in another crook’s house. Doodles says we’re going to arrest him but warns Binse is the most dangerous man in Australia and sure to want to shoot it out if he gets cornered. We set up a surveillance unit in an electrician’s van outside the house and surround the property with cops, all heavily armed. I’m sitting in a car parked around the corner, carrying a shotgun. When Binse drives out, we follow him. He goes through a set of traffic lights, then slows. Two police cars slam into the sides of the saloon that he’s driving. Badne$$ is pulled out of the wrecked car at gunpoint.