I Catch Killers

by Gary Jubelin

  One witness said she’d seen Colleen the day after the party from which she supposedly went missing. Another witness saw her at 7am on Saturday 15 September, two days after the party. A third said Colleen was sitting in a white Commodore parked outside the party, a fourth that Colleen left in the early hours to catch a train to Sydney. According to this version of what happened, she was then going to travel with some other people from the Mission to the small inland town of Goodooga, up near the Queensland border.

  It was the same with Evelyn and Clinton. Three people said they’d seen someone matching Clinton’s appearance hitch-hiking out of Bowraville on the morning after his father said he went missing. Around a dozen witnesses claimed to have seen four-year-old Evelyn at different places on the day after her mother said she disappeared.

  These sightings created problems for the original detectives. No one saw James carry out the murders, although he had been at each of the parties from which the children apparently went missing. If the children had, in fact, been seen alive after these parties happened, then there was nothing to link James to their disappearance. If these witnesses were right, then we could rule him out.

  But not every witness sighting can be trusted – that’s something else they learned on the Milat investigation.

  I remember Andy Waterman, the detective sergeant who told me Bruce Matthews necked himself in prison, telling me he learned that lesson when he, too, spent time on the Milat task force. Andy was a dedicated detective and said they spent ages chasing up false sightings. Memory plays tricks on people. And sometimes the way police ask the questions can cause a witness to think they’ve seen something they haven’t.

  In Bowraville, it turns out, the cops had gone around with photographs of the missing children, asking if anyone had seen them. Do that, and you risk prompting someone’s memory. They’re likely to believe the person in the photograph is the person they saw, even if it is now weeks or months after the event. What they should have done was ask these witnesses to pick the person they remembered out of a collection of different photos.

  I shake my head at this. It’s basic police work. And now, so many people claim to have seen the murdered children after the time their parents insisted they’d gone missing that it feels like we are chasing ghosts.

  Rod Lynch also wants us to test these sightings of the children, to see if we can trust them. We go back to these witnesses, sometimes driving across the State to find them, and they start casting further doubt on their own recollections. According to their written statements, different people saw Evelyn at James Park, Lanes Waterhole and in the Reibels supermarket on Bowraville High Street, places further apart than you could expect a four-year-old to walk to. But we find some of these witnesses were children, interviewed without adults present. Some admit they didn’t know Evelyn themselves but only thought they’d seen her later, after they heard the four-year-old was missing. Others are uncertain of times and dates, or say the first police to interview them themselves suggested the day on which the sighting had occurred.

  The sense of shame I feel as we start to unpick the first investigation is not so different from the feeling of watching what the royal commission uncovered. In both, the police failed to do the job they were supposed to. In some ways this is worse than those videotapes of cops taking backhanders. Here, the police force had a responsibility to the families of the victims and we ducked it. We moved too slowly when the children first went missing and then too few resources were dedicated to the investigation. It should have been led by Homicide detectives, but it wasn’t.

  Even Colleen’s mother, who first reported her daughter missing, had to wait six months before the police took her formal statement. No wonder the families believe they have not been properly listened to.

  * * *

  By late 1997, my request for a transfer out of Homicide and back to Hornsby seems to have been lost in the never-never and, instead of spending more time with my family, I’m now working full-time on a serial killing that took place about six hours north of Sydney. Debbie seems to be happy at home and I’m caught up working on the murders, but it means long periods of separation. Our team works 10 days on and four days off, and each time I drive away from Debbie and the kids, it feels like I’m leaving behind a part of me. When I come back, it feels as if I’m a stranger. After my four days at home, I start to feel like we are sort of back together, and then it’s time to leave and drive back to Bowraville again.

  I’m probably away for about half of the first year I work on the murders. With Christmas ahead of us, I fear that Debbie and I are becoming different people. How can we not be, when her life is caring for the children while mine is finding a child killer? I am the one to blame, I tell myself during the long drives back towards the Mid North Coast from Sydney. I’m the one who’s changed, not Debbie.

  * * *

  Our bosses are starting to complain that we’ve made little progress and the Ancud Task Force starts to be cut back. Our commander Rod Lynch is promoted; others leave or are rotated out. They’re not replaced.

  Eventually, by the autumn of 1998, it’s just me and a young detective, Jason Evers, who got put on the task force as a reward for bringing in a big drug bust, which seized four kilograms of hashish from a hotel in Gladesville. The first time I go to Jason’s house to pick him up, an irate woman answers the door in her dressing gown.

  ‘Is Jason here?’ I ask politely.

  ‘No, he’s not!’ She slams the door.

  It turns out Jason’s marriage has just ended. For the next six weeks I pick him up in a park in North Ryde because he’s staying in different places until he finds a house, and the easiest place for him to park his car is behind the toilet block at the oval.

  I like him, though. Jason is raw, a plain clothes constable and not yet a designated detective, but he’s smart. He smiles and swaggers like a natural comedian, which balances out my seriousness, and he cares about the victims – a few years ago, Jason was a victim himself, when a man forced him to lie on the ground during a robbery and put a loaded shotgun to his head, not realising Jason was a cop at the time. A week later, the same crook did another hold-up, during which he shot somebody. To Jason, working on a murder case means standing up on behalf of those who didn’t get the same chance he did.

  We spend days together driving across the State, trying to track down witnesses who’ve left Bowraville since the murders happened. There is now enough evidence, I am certain, to discount the witnesses who claimed at the time to have seen Evelyn after the night of the party on which her mum said she went missing.

  That puts James back into the frame.

  In May 1998, we ask the DPP to reverse the decision to drop the charge against James for the murder of Evelyn. I spend months working alone on the submission, while Jason is caught up completing his detective training. The room set aside for Task Force Ancud is the largest I have ever worked in and, with no one else working on the investigation, I get so lonely during the days that I start phoning up to take part in the competitions broadcast on the radio, just to get some human contact.

  After a year of waiting, in May 1999, the DPP comes back to us. They’re not convinced. The lawyers refuse our request to put James on trial.

  We have to break the news to Evelyn’s mother. I feel that we have failed the family. Aunty Elaine had asked me, ‘Why should we trust you?’ and I hadn’t come up with an answer. Worse, after the DPP’s decision, my bosses decide to shut the investigation down.

  I lie awake at night and think about the case; not putting somebody in prison means a serial killer is still out there.

  It could have been different, I think. The decision to separate Evelyn’s and Clinton’s trials when James was first arrested means no court has ever heard about the deaths of all three of the children together and about the similarities between them. Look at the Ivan Milat case. If they had also broken all the murders of his seven victims up into separate court hearings, he might have been fou
nd not guilty. Instead, he was tried on all seven at once and convicted. Staring at the darkened ceiling, it seems so unfair.

  During the days, I try to lose myself in work and training, pushing myself harder, seeking complete exhaustion. And if work is hard, then life at home is harder. I’m not the person Debbie married any longer. Instead, I want to be this person I’ve become, the Homicide detective. I want more of this life, more of the intensity, more of this sense of purpose, more of the bright lights – not that there are too many of those in Bowraville.

  But I don’t think Debbie has changed with me. I start to resent the way that her life seems so perfect. She does aerobics every morning, then hangs out with friends while the kids are at school.

  Hoping to recapture the carefree, surfing lifestyle we shared when we first got together, in the winter of 1999 Debbie and I move to the Central Coast, to be near the beach. It ends up putting more distance between us. Copacabana, where we find a house, is a long, 80-kilometre commute to the Homicide Squad’s offices in Chatswood, and the constant driving kills me. There just isn’t time for anything except work, sleep and commuting. I leave home before the kids are up, and after two hours of wrestling with myself through the traffic each morning and evening, am too tired to enjoy the family when I get home.

  I feel unfit. Without the time to practise, my martial arts and meditation suffer. A nerve in my back flares up from all the constant sitting in the car. Everything is slipping out of balance. During the long hours of commuting, I start to question if I really want to be married, then hate myself for asking the question.

  At the worst times, awake in bed, listening to Debbie’s gentle breathing, I start to think that she’s holding me back from being the person I want to be. For our anniversary, 21 November, we go to watch a movie then to a Chinese restaurant. My nose is bent out of shape from where I broke it sparring the day before. We sit there together eating and I realise that we’ve become one of those couples who have nothing to say to each other.

  I start to look for reasons to stay longer at the office. In the Homicide Squad, each of the detectives rotates through on-call duty, meaning we spend a week where we will handle any fresh report of murder across New South Wales. When a new job comes in at 5pm, I think, Happy days, I don’t have to go home.

  I feel like all these thoughts mean I am not a good person any longer. I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating.

  Debbie and I talk about splitting up. During one of these unhappy conversations, she gets into her car and drives off. I get the kids together and we go after her, eventually finding her in tears at Avoca Beach. I think she wants me to say we can make the marriage work, only I cannot say it.

  Early in 2000, I tell Debbie I need a break.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, and tell her I will stay at my sister Karen’s.

  The day I move out will always be the darkest in my memory. The kids are hanging on to me while I pack my bags into the car in our driveway. As I’m about to drive away, Jake, who’s eight, is standing at the door saying ‘Daddy, where are you going?’ Debbie stands behind him, crying.

  I stay in contact with the kids. Speaking to six-year-old Gemma on the phone, she asks me, ‘Daddy, why can’t you come home?’ and I sit there thinking: What sort of a human being am I? My kids have always looked at me as someone to rely on, and I’ve failed them. I know I’m the one who wrecked this family.

  Only later will I ask myself: if I had my time over, would I make the same decision? Those years we had together as a young family are the happiest I remember.

  But I can’t know the answer. Right now, this seems like the path I have to follow.

  Round Two

  No Good to Anyone

  1 June 2001: 16 years in

  This is hell on wheels, staring at the chain of brake lights stretching out in front of me on the road, mind numb, shut in by grey buildings on either side, skipping through radio stations searching for a distraction.

  Wishing I didn’t have to take this three-hour drive to and from work every morning and evening. Reminding myself that this was my own choice.

  Behind me is the Central Coast, which I left before 5am. At the house in Copacabana, Debbie and the kids might be just waking up; only their home hasn’t been my home for over a year now, not since I walked out on our family.

  I stayed with my parents in Dural for a couple of months afterwards, but that became uncomfortable. Not that they made me feel bad – when I told Dad about the separation he asked, ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’, but did not try to stop me – the problem was that I started to get comfortable having my dinners cooked for me and Mum doing my ironing. In my mid 30s, I was becoming a child again.

  My parents’ place was also too far from Jake and Gemma, who have to be my priority. So in the spring of 2000 I found the cheapest place available in Copacabana: a granny flat that I rented for $105 a week. I scrounged up a bed and a tiny black and white TV that I sat on a cardboard box taken from the office. I had one suit and two shirts, which meant I was constantly washing shirts then hanging them out to dry for the morning.

  It wasn’t nice being in the dog-box but that felt right, because it felt like punishment.

  After separating from Debbie, I was full of self-loathing. I didn’t really understand my own decision to break up our marriage and didn’t seem to recognise the person I saw in the mirror every morning. Searching for some inner peace amid this turmoil, I bought a stone statue of Buddha sitting cross-legged, which came cheap as the head had broken off and been fixed back together. It looked like I felt, beaten up and shattered, and I would sit and meditate in front of it for hours.

  Other times, I would stare out at the calm water in Copacabana bay, beyond the white lines of advancing waves, and find some peace in that, too. At least my dog-box overlooks the ocean.

  The old friends Debbie and I shared stopped calling, as if they also thought I needed to be punished. We used to go on holidays together but now I wasn’t asked to join them, although Debbie and the kids were. That hurt. Some of them were schoolmates.

  I told myself that they were right to rally around Debbie and knew I was strong enough to look after myself. I could live with that explanation, though it was painful when I found out two particularly good mates had been up to the Central Coast to see her but not told me they were in the area. I was best man at both of their weddings.

  I’ve thrown myself completely into my work, instead. Last year, I took two weeks off and shut myself inside the unit, studying to pass the test to become a detective sergeant. I got myself so focused that I didn’t watch TV or pick up a newspaper, so I had no distractions, and walked into the interview like I was heading into combat. I won the promotion. It means I now lead Homicide investigations, just like my old mentors Jim Williams and Paul Jacob.

  Jason Evers, who I worked with in Bowraville and is now himself a designated detective, has come over to the Homicide Squad and works on my team. He’s still got the same swagger to him and on our jobs he is the yang to my yin, the light to my darkness. We worked closely together on the first case I led from start to finish, investigating the killing of Barbara Saunders, a blameless 53-year-old, a devoted wife and mother of twins, who was shot on her way home from Normanhurst Railway Station on a Friday afternoon two weeks before Christmas 2000.

  Jason and I were standing at the crime scene when Barbara’s husband, Keith, turned up, looking for her, that evening. We treated him as a potential suspect, sitting him down for an interview at the police station and going in with aggression, looking to unsettle him so if there was a lie in what he was saying, he would be more likely to stumble over it.

  Keith seemed to shrink before us, already traumatised by his wife’s death and now with two detectives coming after him. In that moment, I was the avenging angel. I wasn’t looking to his feelings, or at his past, at the memories he and Barbara made together, I was looking to the future, to an arres
t, to an appearance before a Supreme Court jury, to a possible prison sentence.

  Later, when Jason and I were satisfied of Keith’s innocence, I apologised to him for how hard we went at him. He shook his head, saying, ‘At that moment I knew the right people were working on this investigation. I knew how far and how hard you would go if you thought someone had murdered Barbara.’ I took heart from that.

  The killer turned out to be a 19-year-old, Nicholas Grayson, who had a long history of petty criminal offences, which got more serious as the years passed, until he was doing break-and-enters, stole a gun, then used it to shoot Barbara in an attempt to steal her handbag.

  He denied shooting her at first, but we could show he’d used Barbara’s stolen credit card after her death. When he claimed to have been somewhere else that Friday afternoon, we interviewed the people he claimed to have been with, and they did not defend him.

  In court, Grayson pleaded guilty and was jailed for a minimum of 12 years. It didn’t seem like much in return for taking someone’s life and we apologised to Keith again after the verdict.

  He said it didn’t matter how long the killer got, nothing was going to bring his wife back. I carried those words around with me afterwards, feeling their heavy weight. It made me question if you can ever trust the courts to deal with a murder fairly. You can’t balance out the result of Barbara’s killing; her killer gets 12 years inside, her family get a life sentence.

  Inside the car, I stare at the road ahead, where the red tail-lights of the close-packed cars are edging their way forward. Fucking hell, I think, I’ve got work to do today. On these long drives, when you’ve heard the same news on the hourly bulletins at six and seven, the radio can only keep you distracted for so long before your thoughts take over and then you’re stuck in the car with them.