by Gary Jubelin
Evelyn’s skull, found lying on dried leaf litter in the bed of a gully, showed what looked like a stab wound to the right temple.
Sixteen-year-old Clinton Speedy-Duroux was the third victim. His family described him as being a Pied Piper, someone who all the other kids would follow. Clinton loved dancing, turned somersaults off the bank of the Nambucca River and, when he played footy, scored two tries to help his team win the local grand final. He disappeared on 1 February 1991, four months after Evelyn. His body, or what was left of it given the heat and the animals around that summer, was found just over two weeks later, lying near the same dirt road where Evelyn’s body was found.
The autopsy found Clinton’s left jaw had been broken, as if by a blow, and there was a narrow hole in his cheek, just below the right eye socket. The pathologist believed the same implement could have been used to kill both Evelyn and Clinton.
Each of the three went missing following a party in Bowraville. All three kids were Indigenous.
When Colleen disappeared, the local cops did nothing, Jaco told me. Her family said the police told them, ‘Maybe she’s gone walkabout’. No crime scene was established. No search was carried out.
Evelyn’s family said they were told the same thing although, at least, given her age, this time the police did go out looking for her. But they were looking for a missing person, a little girl who had got lost. They weren’t looking at human intervention, or trying to recover forensic evidence. No one linked her disappearance to Colleen’s.
Clinton’s family told a similar story. This time, the local detective was called. He interviewed a white man from Bowraville, James Hide (not his real name), in whose caravan Clinton was sleeping before his disappearance. But still there was no crime scene, no forensics. Clinton’s family, too, say the cops told them maybe he’d gone walkabout.
It was only when Evelyn’s and Clinton’s bodies, and Colleen’s clothes, were recovered, that the police could no longer ignore them. Three local detectives were told to take a look. They had little support, few resources and no access to computers, which by then were starting to be used across the force, particularly on complex cases, like multiple murders. Instead, they took their witness statements on a typewriter one of them carried round with him in the boot of his car. They were also told to keep on working their other cases.
On 8 April 1991, James was arrested and charged with killing Clinton. On 16 October he was charged with the murder of Evelyn. The 25-year-old worked in Bowraville’s tanning factory, dragging bloodied skins around. It’s heavy work, and he was big and powerful.
A judge ruled that the two cases – Evelyn’s and Clinton’s – would be heard in separate trials, meaning each jury would be told only one child had disappeared from Bowraville, not three.
In February 1994, on the third anniversary of the day Clinton’s remains were discovered, a jury found James not guilty of the murder. Soon after, the State Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided to drop the charge against him over Evelyn’s murder.
Colleen’s body was never found and no one charged over her disappearance, Jaco told me.
He filed his report in May 1996 for review by the Major Crime Squad, North, commander and the commander of the North Region. It described James as the ‘suspect’ despite the verdict of the court, saying, ‘In my opinion there is certainly no question that all efforts should be made to investigate these very serious criminal matters to a successful conclusion.
‘If it is accepted Hide is responsible for each of these deaths he is a “serial killer” who may escape prosecution for these crimes if no further effort is made’.
The report made it way up through the police hierarchy to our new commissioner, Peter Ryan. In December, I’m allocated to a dedicated task force, called Ancud, set up to reinvestigate the killings.
This time round, we have eight detectives and two full-time analysts to go through the folders full of evidence and documents produced during the first investigation. Being in a task force is new to me and when I ask what the name means, someone laughs and says it’s a small town in southern Chile but don’t worry about it, the names are randomly selected. I should pay more attention instead to the choice of commander – not Jaco this time but Rod Lynch, a veteran of the police force’s most high-profile recent investigation, into the serial backpacker killer Ivan Milat, who was convicted of seven murders only a few months earlier.
Rod is a serious cop and knows how to work a serial murder, so I don’t feel too bad about not having Jaco here to guide me. I’ve served my apprenticeship under him in Homicide, I reckon. I owe him. I’ll only be a junior investigator on this task force, following Rod’s instructions, but if I do it well, I like to think that will reflect well on Jaco. He’ll always be my sergeant. My sifu.
* * *
At home, nothing is so simple. As 1996 draws to a close, I am increasingly unsettled. Finding the balance between work and home is hard and likely to be harder still working on this task force. I’m missing out on seeing the kids grow up. Already, work regularly means getting home too late each Friday to do my chores and dedicate the weekend to the family, as I promised myself. Often, we’re working through the weekend.
Debbie is always patient, but it feels like we’re in different worlds. She’s at home with the children while I’m standing in bloody crime scenes. I’m struggling to unite the two sides, the light and dark. I carry too much darkness home with me. I’m still doing qigong and meditation, still running and playing soccer, pushing myself harder, trying to balance this darkness, but it’s not always successful.
I have a growing sense that something needs to change. The year ends and, once again, I decide to leave Major Crime and go back to plain clothes work in Hornsby.
I type up the green transfer request. Only, I don’t hear back. And soon the Bowraville investigation leads me to forget it.
* * *
Bowraville is a long drive, on lonely roads through thick green bushland, from our offices in Chatswood. I head up there for the first time with my new partner on the task force, Tony. When we arrive, we drive down the high street running between two hills through the centre of the town, watching the heat shimmer in the air above the baking bitumen.
Most of Bowraville’s roughly 1100 inhabitants live close to the high street, in a cluster of pretty, pastel-coloured brick and timber houses. Most of these families are white. Bowraville’s black population live either on the fringes, or in a strip of single-storey houses lower down, strung out along the unmarked, pitted ribbon of road leading to the town’s cemetery. This area is called the Mission and it’s where the three children were staying when each of them went missing. Maybe it’s because I’m a city cop, or just because I’m naïve, but I wasn’t expecting the town to be so segregated.
A few months later, in May 1997, a report presented to the Federal Parliament helps me understand what I am seeing in Bowraville. Called Bringing Them Home, it causes a sensation, explaining to people who, like me, were never taught this stuff in school, how Indigenous people were forced to live in missions set up by the churches, supposedly for their own protection, and how their children could be taken from them by police and State officials, and sent to live instead in white homes and institutions.
These people are from what is called the Stolen Generations, and were still being taken in places across Australia when I was growing up in North Epping, only, again, nobody told me.
Driving around the Mission with Tony, the black children playing footy in the park stop their game to watch us. We get out and have a look at the house where both Colleen and Clinton were staying when they disappeared. Other little faces peer round the door. A collection of old car parts is propped up along the fence and plastic garden furniture is scattered in the front yard.
Three doors up, at Number 6, is the house from where Evelyn went missing. The front window opens on to a room in which she had been sleeping.
It hits me in the stomach: the houses are
so close together. Three kids, all staying on the same street, disappear over five months, during the course of one long summer. Two of their bodies were found dumped beside a dirt road in the bushland I can see behind the Mission houses. The third child’s clothes – Colleen’s – were dragged out of the water, near to where that dirt road crosses a bridge above the river.
I look again at Number 6. A bedsheet is pulled across the window as a curtain. At home, my own kids are five and three, making them one year older and younger respectively than Evelyn was at the time she went missing. It isn’t hard for me to think how little she was then, to picture her walking or talking, or reaching up to her mother for a cuddle. To see how easy it would be to harm her.
The sound of laughter tells us the kids in the park behind us have restarted their footy game. In other houses, other children are watching us through the windows. Turning, I see two boys, maybe 12 or 13, walking down the road, loose-limbed and grinning, their arms around each other’s shoulders. That’s Anthony, I think. My childhood friend. We were just as close as those two boys are. I remember what it felt like then, to have your whole lives ahead of you.
If only it could stay that way. If only.
People on the Mission rioted after James was found not guilty of killing Clinton. They marched on the Bowraville Police Station, breaking windows in the white people’s houses as they passed. One group, led by the women and including several schoolchildren, gathered outside James’s mother’s place, just around the corner from the Mission, throwing rocks.
Knocking on doors in Bowraville, we find we are met with hostility and suspicion. It is as if the town and its police force have turned against each other and, six years after the murders took place, their memory is still hanging heavy in the air. Most of the time, we breathe it in without noticing but on others, particularly the hottest, humid days when the air feels thick with misery and trauma, or when some redneck on the high street wants to know why we’re bothering trying to find the killer – ‘What are you trying to find this bastard for, to thank him?’ – or someone on the Mission shouts at us to fuck off because they won’t talk to a white policeman, I feel trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, exposed to a world we thought we knew, but didn’t.
What I see in that small town makes me ashamed to be an Australian.
The only way out of this is to solve the murders. But finding the people we need to talk to isn’t easy. On the Mission, things don’t work the same way as they do in Sydney. You can’t work to city time. For starters, no one on the Mission makes appointments. Instead, we turn up at an address and ask whoever we find there if they’ve seen the person who we want to speak to.
‘He’s been up that way,’ somebody will offer, waving a hand towards the town or, in the other direction, the cemetery. We head off, following where they’re pointing, only to find someone else who tells us he’s been seen at Top Pub, and so we drive up there, and so it goes on.
It’s not always a bad thing. It slows me down and helps me take a more thoughtful approach.
Outside the Mission kindergarten, behind the house where Colleen and Clinton were staying, I approach one of the community’s female elders. She watches me walk up, and before I say anything, she snaps, ‘Why should I trust you? You’re a cop.’
I stop and look at her, then say, ‘I understand.’ Only I don’t. We’re the good guys, surely?
‘White cops like you came here and took our children,’ she says.
I say that I just want to find out what happened to Colleen, Evelyn and Clinton.
She looks at me. I can see the sorrow in her face, beneath the anger.
Later, I’ll learn this woman is Aunty Elaine Walker, Colleen’s aunt, and one of those who led the march on Bowraville’s police station. I’ll go back and talk to her again and she will tell me more about being an Indigenous person in Australia than we learned at school in Sydney: like how her people have been bullied, beaten, shot at or raped, forced from their homes and, even during my lifetime, barred from the local shops and pubs in Bowraville.
She tells me no one listened to the families when they said their children had been murdered. The families know the reason, she says. ‘It’s because they’re Aboriginal.
‘Things only happen when we get the media’s attention or we protest,’ she says.
As the months pass, Aunty Elaine helps me get to know the murdered children’s families, including her sister Muriel, Colleen’s mother, who is like a rollercoaster, driven to extremes of high and low emotion by the loss of her daughter. She introduces me to Evelyn’s family, and I quickly form a friendship with the four-year-old’s aunt, Michelle Jarrett, a big, bossy woman whose wide smile disarms you. I like her immediately.
Clinton’s father, Thomas Duroux, also lives in Bowraville, though he’s separated from his son’s mother. He’s quieter than Michelle and Muriel, seemingly a man of few words, though always polite and respectful.
Sitting with him in the shade of the big, old white mahogany tree opposite his house, I’m almost afraid to ask Thomas about Clinton, as if he finds what happened too painful to talk about and having to answer will release all the emotion he is carrying, tearing him apart again.
The Mission is unlike anywhere I’ve known. There are different tribes, the Gumbaynggirr and the Dhanggati, different traditions, different laws and different ways of asking questions. Aunty Elaine tells me that, under Aboriginal law, anyone responsible for another’s death accepts there must be payback. So far, the Australian justice system has given them nothing, she tells me. Their children have been murdered and nobody jailed as a result.
As a white policeman, how do I navigate this difference between the two worlds we inhabit? Aunty Elaine teaches me to change the way I ask my questions. Don’t force somebody to make eye-contact, she says. On the Mission that’s seen as impolite and confronting. Take the time to sit and talk with people, and offer something of yourself up first, so they can judge if they want to trust you.
Under her guidance, my communication skills increase and so do my responsibilities. Choosing which witnesses to believe and which I think are mistaken or lying, could decide the route of the investigation. Getting that judgment right might mean the families get justice. I make mistakes. Sometimes, I don’t understand what people tell me, because I’m used to asking direct questions, not the roundabout way that they talk on the Mission. Too often, early on, I don’t listen properly to what they’re saying because that isn’t how people talk in the city, or I misinterpret their answers due to my own unconscious biases.
I spend hours sitting under that white mahogany, which Aunty Elaine says is called the Tree of Knowledge, just talking to the people on the Mission. They start to open up.
Aunty Elaine walks past and sees me sitting on the grass in my suit. She laughs and says, ‘You’ve got so much to learn, whitefella.’
I tell her that I want to learn. There’s something different about this case. It overwhelms me. I like the fact that, the more work I put in, the more Aunty Elaine seems prepared to trust me.
I want to repay that trust. Growing up, I made a choice. I could have been a surf bum but I became a cop, which meant giving up that freedom. There’ll always be a part of me that loves to surf and drink with my old mates, or dreams about travelling the world searching out the perfect break, but I want something more from life. I want to be the person people turn to when they really need somebody.
I don’t think I ever spent a minute once I’d joined the cops asking myself why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. Sitting under the Tree of Knowledge had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. At home, with Debbie and the kids, my family rely on me. Now, on the Mission, these other children’s families were relying on me, too. It was my job to find their loved ones’ killer.
That is what makes working Homicide so important, I realise. It is the ultimate responsibility. It is a heavy burden.
I tell Aunty Elaine I’ll do everythin
g I can to get justice for the children.
She looks at me as if to say, Don’t fuck with me, policeman.
* * *
Rod Lynch tells us not to focus on James Hide, who’s already been found not guilty of killing Clinton. So, instead, we look at a local white man who’s recently got out of jail and is rumoured to have been involved in the children’s disappearance. The yellowing, old files from the first investigation are also full of other details, possible leads and rumours about what might have happened. One theory says a carful of blackfellas who’d driven up from Sydney were responsible. Another, which seems to have been provoked by local gossip, backed up by confidential reports from the State Department of Family and Community Services, says Evelyn’s mum was a drinker who could not look after her daughter properly and so other members of her family had hidden the four-year-old, to prevent her being taken into care.
The cops who worked the case at the beginning followed that lead up, setting up surveillance on a house in another country town where they thought Evelyn might be living. Only, as it turned out, she wasn’t. They also pursued reports of a stranger seen making an approach to three young Aboriginal girls during the school holidays, and of a white man seen driving with a dark-skinned girl sitting in the front passenger seat, who had something tied around her mouth.
Rod warns us that the Milat investigation was led astray in the early days by rumours and false sightings. One by one, we rule each of them out.
Reading through the boxes of old witness statements is equally confusing. Different people claimed to have seen each of the children alive after the dates on which their parents reported their disappearance.