by Gary Jubelin
Corrective Services just called, he tells me. Matthews has taken his own life. He won’t be talking to anyone.
When we leave work, Jaco takes us to the Blue Gum Hotel, and I suppose it’s a celebration. The case is over. Only, with one suicide, two people still missing and no bodies discovered, I am still unsettled. I shift in my seat and Jaco looks at me as if he knows what I am thinking.
While I have little sympathy for Martin, who may have been a grubby paedophile if you believe the boy at the slot-car track, I do care about Bernadette, and about her family. Over the months, I’ve become close to her parents and sister, who’ve gone through so much pain and have so many questions without answers. For years they have suspected Matthews played a role.
During our investigation, we spoke to an old neighbour who remembered seeing Matthews digging in the backyard of a house where he and Bernadette lived at the time. We went in with a forensics team to dig it up, I was wearing my suit, but asked them for a shovel and started tearing at the earth.
Without warning, someone called a halt. They’d found some teeth. A chill ran down my back to think this might be her body. As it turned out, they were just old dentures, nothing to do with Bernadette.
For the investigation to end this way feels worse, somehow, than if she’d been the victim of a clear-cut murder. Maybe Bernadette’s family have been spared the full horror of what happened, but they are left with only questions, still unable to grieve.
Night falls outside the hotel and, once again, we do start to enjoy ourselves. As cops, we go through these investigations together and each one ties you more closely to the people who you work with. I’m proud to have worked this one with Jaco. We talk about the note that Matthews left, a note saying he’s innocent, only we don’t believe it.
I’m sure his suicide is an admission of guilt.
As we keep drinking, I’ve no desire to go home. Not this evening. I don’t ask myself if we pushed Matthews too hard but, still, I know that I’m a different person from the man who woke up this morning. Looking up, I recognise an older bloke who walks into the Blue Gum. Years ago, he sexually assaulted someone I grew up with, someone I am close to, although she never went to the police.
When I found out, I made a promise to myself that I would throttle him if I ever saw him. But tonight I don’t do it.
I’ve already killed one person today, I think. I can’t bring more grief into the world.
The Path That You Have Chosen
1996: 11 years in
While we’re out working murders, the royal commission keeps on investigating the detectives. It’s like a door was opened when it revealed the corruption at Kings Cross and people are now racing to go through it. Trevor Haken has named names. Dozens of them. Other witnesses come forward, some of them offering to give evidence against others in return for not facing punishment themselves.
The royal commission’s investigators keep spreading their attention outwards, looking into police units across the State. Any cop in New South Wales could be under surveillance and I can see the effect it has; we can’t stand it.
Every morning, I pick up the newspaper and ask myself, God, what have we done this time? Cops stealing money, cops running protection rackets, cops selling heroin out of the back of police stations. The worst humiliation is suffered by the Gosford drug squad boss, Wayne Eade, who’s shown on tape discussing drug deals and the purchase of a child abuse video with a prostitute, who turns out to be an informer for the royal commission.
The tape is released to the press and shown on prime time news.
The royal commission is also investigating claims paedophile rings are operating among the highest levels of politics, media, the judiciary and the police. I know nothing about any of this but, still, the feeling is of distrust and vulnerability. Each whispered conversation in the corridor or silent exchange of glances between other detectives takes on a new meaning, and helps feed the sense of paranoia. I find myself asking who might crack and what they might be saying.
As an investigative strategy, I can see that it is working.
‘Give me the commission’s powers and I’ll lock up every crook in Sydney,’ I joke in the Homicide Squad office, but I mean it. The royal commission is aggressive, they can coerce evidence from suspects, they’re unafraid to use both undercover tactics and the media to provoke witnesses into talking, and they record those conversations on listening devices. Watching them go about their investigations, I’m not prepared to celebrate what they’re doing to the cops, but I do think we can learn from them.
Outside of work, I’m keeping up with my studies, doing a Bachelor of Policing, not because I want to get ahead of other people at work, but out of fear of being left behind by my colleagues. A lot of my assignments are about the royal commission, arguing the police should be given the same coercive powers.
The feeling of being exposed only gets worse as the royal commission investigators work their way higher through the police hierarchy. In February 1996, the police commissioner, Tony Lauer, resigns.
The same month, the royal commission is extended and given another year to complete its investigations. It feels inescapable. I find myself unsure if I can trust my own defences and suspicious of others in the force.
* * *
Looking for someone to rely on, I turn to Ben (not his real name), the sifu who trains me in kickboxing, kung fu and qigong. I’ve known Ben since the early 1990s, when I started training with him and the two of us have grown close over the years since.
Ben’s new gym has a boxing ring and I recognise the feeling from those police jobs where we go in with guns; it’s the same rush of adrenaline, excitement and, only after, sickness in my stomach.
With Ben, I’m training harder than I ever have before, but when I watch him fight I still see he can do things that I cannot. I ask him, ‘What’s the secret?’ and he talks about using the body’s natural energy rather than its muscle, only I don’t really follow what he’s saying. Then, during one class, with the lights off and our eyes closed, we go through a series of gentle movements, opening our arms wide, then bringing them together, repeating this over and over before standing in silence with our hands about 15 centimetres apart. I can feel a resistance between my hands. It’s like a ball of energy, about the size of a beachball. I start playing with it, moving it, pushing it and feeling it push back, almost disbelieving.
That is my natural energy, my chi, Ben says. I learn to feel it flowing through my body. Ben teaches me to channel it. If there’s a blockage, I can feel it grinding.
He and I also meditate together, emptying our minds of everything except our breathing. Afterwards, I feel refreshed. My doubts and my uncertainties are quieter.
Ben talks about yin and yang, the two opposing principles of nature in Chinese philosophy. It’s the same thing the hippies used to talk about around the campfire when I was a surf bum, only Ben tells me that while it sounds like hippy shit, it isn’t. He says that when you’re fighting and you throw a punch, that blow starts out weak – that’s yin – then it grows strong at mid-range – yang – before its force fades at the point of full extension – yin again. I can use this against my opponent: when he throws a punch and misses, he moves from yang to yin and is at his weakest. Then, Ben says, I should feint to throw my opponent off balance, and attack. Drive over him before he can recover.
That isn’t hippy shit. Each time I walk into his gym, I bow to Ben and he returns the salute. He is a few years older than me, and when he speaks, I listen. He talks about how a warrior must have honour, and how honour is founded on justice and on your obligation to others. Quoting Confucius, he tells me, ‘To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.’
After training, the two of us sit cross-legged on the floor and talk, sometimes for hours. Often, we’re still sitting, reflected in the gym’s mirrored walls, long after everybody else goes home. We talk about fighting, police work, how the royal commission has shown me things tha
t make me ashamed to be a policeman and how it’s changed the way I think about my colleagues.
He tells me to hold up my feelings of shame and anger at what I’ve seen, look at them and ask myself if they’re the right reaction.
‘Maybe I should say something if I suspect that stuff’s been happening,’ I say to Ben.
‘That’s not the path that you have chosen,’ Ben says. ‘Your path is to endure this. The only thing you can control is what you do yourself.’
Once again, I consider leaving the police and he offers me employment. I think about it. I feel comfortable sitting with him on the bare mats in a way I don’t always feel going to work as a detective amid this long-running scandal. I am certain what Ben’s teaching me is important.
One night, the telephone keeps ringing from his office but we don’t answer. After three or four calls, I say to Ben, ‘I think that’s probably Debbie looking for me.’ She understands the importance I place on my training and the influence Ben has on me, but she is still a young mum, at home, alone. Eventually, I answer. It is Debbie.
* * *
In September 1996, Detective Sergeant Wayne Johnson shoots his estranged wife and then himself after being named at the royal commission. Another detective jumps to his death from the seventh floor of a building. Other cops are found hanged or gassed in their cars. The stories start to multiply of grown men breaking down after the royal commission’s investigators arrived at Christmas time, on wedding anniversaries or at children’s birthday parties.
Just like it did with Trevor Haken, and I did with Bruce Matthews, the royal commission wants to take advantage of its suspects when they’re vulnerable and more likely to cooperate. The price is paid in careers, hopes and shattered marriages.
In May 1997, the royal commissioner, James Wood, hands down the first volume of his final report, which is bound in red and as thick as the phone books we are supposed to use to beat our suspects. Over the past three years, hundreds of cops have had allegations made against them and dozens will now be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions for potential criminal action.
The worst of the allegations, of a network of high-ranking paedophiles who protect one another, are found to be unproven, but the royal commission does accuse the police of failing to protect children across the State from being sexually exploited. And there is no avoiding the other evils it’s uncovered. In his report, Justice Wood finds ‘the only conclusion open on the evidence . . . is that a state of systemic and entrenched corruption’ exists within the force. ‘The consequences of corruption are devastating for a police service as a whole, and for its individual members. They are similarly devastating for the community which police are expected to serve.’
It’s hard to learn that some of those you looked up to were crooked. Harder still to live with the way the newspapers, defence lawyers and politicians seem to treat every detective as if we are just as corrupt. This job is hard enough, and it only gets harder when the people we rely on, like our victims’ families and witnesses, become afraid to trust us. Justice Wood says there’s no such thing as individual bad apples, but no one seems prepared to go out in front of the media cameras and explain that the whole barrel isn’t completely rotten.
In fact, it is the opposite, it feels like our top brass desert us. One deputy commissioner goes so far as to say publicly that we are all a disgrace and should be sent back to uniform.
It makes me realise I can’t trust our bosses.
Our new police commissioner, Peter Ryan, talks about wanting to ‘draw a line in the sand’ and leave history behind it. But over the past three years I’ve learned that you can’t simply draw a line and say, ‘That’s it.’
Take the example they taught us about at the police academy: ‘If a child has been murdered and you find the offender standing over the dead body can you bash him?’ The answer you’re supposed to give is ‘No’.
But what if the child is still alive? What if only the offender knows how to save that child, but he won’t talk. Would you be prepared to bash him then? If it saved that child’s life, then who would not forgive you?
Every one of us goes back and forth across the line, sometimes. In the court cases that follow the royal commission, a few of their own investigators are accused of supplying and encouraging a heroin dealer in order to further its investigations, and of falsifying evidence that led to some cops’ dismissal.
If true, that is surely noble-cause corruption too.
In the end, only seven cops are jailed as a result of the royal commission’s work, including the former chief of the Kings Cross detectives, Chook Fowler. Instead, I watch as hundreds of cops are targeted for dismissal or internal investigation. Others retire, disillusioned.
A generation of detectives, good and bad, is lost and a link to our past goes with them. These were veterans, toughened investigators who’d seen the worst the world can offer and learned their lessons from the generation before them. Some of the younger cops who come in to replace them are good enough, but they’re different. More polished. More professional. I fear the force risks becoming too safe, too risk averse. Within the Homicide Squad, I notice how our ranks become depleted as those detectives who are left get promoted or moved to fill the gaps left elsewhere, or simply walk away saying they’ve had their fill of the police force.
The murders never stop though. The few of us detectives who are left have a responsibility, I think, to reach back to the past and try to mend that broken chain together.
In the end, I never got called to give evidence before the royal commission. After it finishes, a new, permanent watchdog is set up in its place, called the Police Integrity Commission (PIC). One afternoon, I’m driving home, listening to the car radio when I hear news of another investigation. They play another undercover recording and, this time, I recognise the voices. They are from North Region. My region. There’s talk of suspects being loaded and of guns being dumped in the Hawkesbury River. Several detectives I’ve worked with, including Strongboy, who went with me through the door of Isaac’s apartment, are among those said to be involved in it.
Strongboy ends up rolling over and becoming an informer. Later, a good friend of mine gets caught up with the PIC and I drive him to the hearing at their offices in central Sydney. ‘Mate, I don’t know what to say,’ I tell him. ‘I know that you’re honest.’
* * *
Looking for something to hold on to, I find it in my cases. At home, I might struggle to explain this to Debbie, but if I could, I’d tell her that, at least in Homicide, it’s black and white; good guys and bad guys, a killer and a victim. Everything is certain.
* * *
By chance, I bump into Geoff, my old partner who was jailed for soliciting bribes from a local brothel. I’ve bought a beer and am turning back towards my mates when I see Geoff standing there alone, a broken man and a sad one. He’s drinking at the Hornsby RSL, of all places, the same bar he would disappear to when we were supposed to be working a shift together.
To my surprise, I no longer feel any anger towards him.
‘Hey, Geoff,’ I say. ‘Long time no see.’ Knowing he’s spent time in prison, I make a joke of it: ‘What have you been up to over the last few years?’
He laughs a little. I laugh. We shake hands and have a short, awkward conversation. Maybe I’ve become more forgiving. After all, while Geoff has been inside, I’ve seen so many different people in so many different situations. I’ve helped put some of them in jail and seen them come out having served their sentence. Some of them I’ve even had a beer with afterwards. I’ve learned that luck, like who your parents are, what your childhood was like, who you end up working with, plays a huge part in everyone’s life story.
Everyone has failings, I think. Maybe some of the idealism that once made me so angry with Geoff has since been tarnished. Maybe I’m just a rougher, beaten and battered version of myself, still shell-shocked by the impact of the royal commission.
Geoff’s served
his time, I think. The justice system’s had its piece of him.
The differences between us, cop and criminal, seem small and unimportant as we stand there in the RSL together.
At the same time, they are everything. I am a cop; he is a crook.
I am a cop, and I still have other cops, like my sergeant, Paul Jacob, to look up to. Like me, Jaco survived the royal commission with his integrity unquestioned. If working Homicide is simple, it is also demanding. It’s like a contact sport and Jaco goes in hard, but fairly. I’m on his team. He is my coach, my captain. During a case that comes to dominate the next two decades of my life, I will rely on his example.
I have to believe the justice system works.
Bowraville
December 1996: 11 years in
Right in the middle of the royal commission, Jaco is given an unusual job. He spends a week working alone on a cold case: the disappearance of three children in a small town called Bowraville, which sits on one of the slow rivers that run down from the Great Dividing Range through the rich, green cattle-farming country on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. His task is to establish whether there are grounds to reinvestigate the case, following a formal request from a local cop who once worked it, without success.
We talk about it in the office. Jaco says the first victim was Colleen Walker-Craig, a pretty, popular 16-year-old who disappeared just over six years ago, on 13 September 1990. Colleen was at that point in life when she was becoming independent; she’d left school and moved between her mother’s home and the houses of relatives. That September, she arranged to meet her mum at a local footy tournament, which was when her family realised that she was missing. After seven months, in April 1991, her clothes were dragged out of the local river.
Three weeks after Colleen was last seen, on 4 October 1990, four-year-old Evelyn Clarice Greenup also disappeared. She was a quiet girl, not the sort to run off, her family said. Photographs show her wide-eyed, with chubby cheeks and a bow in her hair, or wearing a pink cardigan. Her remains were found later that same April, dumped in the forest near a dirt road running through the hills above Bowraville.