I Catch Killers

by Gary Jubelin

  I asked him what force would it take to cause those bruises? How long would they have been visible before Jayden died?

  I want to know if what Wilson says now will contradict his explanation. Because then I’ll know she’s lying to me. And a lie can be exposed in court.

  That’s the tightrope she and I are treading, as I try to tempt her out over the void.

  ‘Would it be fair to describe him as always hungry?’ I continue.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe,’ she says. ‘Each child’s different.’

  The wheels of the ERISP machine’s three audio cassettes turn slowly, recording our conversation. The only other person in the room is Jason Evers, who’s silently making notes, looking down at the paperwork in front of him, but who I know will be feeling just as strained and taut as I am. As partners, we’ve spent so much time together over the past few years that I know him almost as well as I do Pam, if not better. I rate Jason for his big heart and his determination to stand up for victims. That heart will be beating just as fast as mine right now.

  Wilson looks at me, at Jason, at the ERISP machine camera opposite where she is sitting, then away, at the four cream-coloured walls on either side, each of them so close that any of us could easily stand up and touch them.

  ‘A happy child?’ I ask her.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘How was he in terms of communication? I understand he was one month short of turning two?’

  ‘Well, he couldn’t talk. He was calling us Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad.’

  You weren’t his mum and dad, I think. You were his foster parents. I’ve spoken to his real mum.

  The State Government’s Department of Community Services (DoCS) had taken Jayden from his mother. They thought she wasn’t a suitable parent. Being Aboriginal, he should have gone to an Indigenous foster home, but for some reason that hadn’t happened. Working this case, it has been hard to escape the thoughts of those other three Aboriginal children who disappeared from Bowraville. Whose bodies, or the two of them that were found, had suffered awful injuries – just like Jayden. Whose killer is still out there.

  But I don’t let my face reveal my thoughts – or Wilson doesn’t notice.

  Her own face is a mask of innocence, the turned-down mouth and double chin framed by long, bleached hair, its natural colour showing at the roots. ‘That’s basically all he could say,’ she tells me. ‘I didn’t know if he wanted something really or he didn’t. Because he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t express how he was feeling. Or I just had to use my imagination as a mother.’

  You weren’t his mother. You didn’t protect him. Wilson talks about her experience of caring for her own young children, who are no longer living with her. I listen, reliving the experience of watching Jayden’s autopsy. The smell of antiseptic. The little body lying on the huge steel tray made to carry an adult corpse. The helpless feeling of wanting to protect him.

  The pathologist found bruises on both sides of Jayden’s head, bleeding inside his skull and in both eyes, a swollen brain, a ruptured stomach and bruises to his penis. Those were just the recent injuries. There was evidence of others, which could have been weeks old.

  Jason and I had stood there, watching on in silence. Both of us had seen other bodies, and other autopsies, so we’d had some preparation. The days when I could simply gloss over the mention of a ‘post-mortem’ in a newspaper report of some killing or accident are gone. Now the word triggers an explosion of senses; the black and white tiles leading to the mortuary, the whine of the trolley wheels, the scalpel making its incision, the drill, the crack as a section of skull is lifted clear, the revulsion in my stomach.

  Every one of those experiences hardened me. Becoming hard has helped me to stand there, unmoving, during the next autopsy, because as Homicide detectives, they are a part of every job we do.

  Inside the morgue, I won’t let anyone, not Jason, the pathologists nor the forensic technicians, see my disgust, my weakness. My job is to be the hardcase, the Homicide detective. There’s no way I will let anybody see how Homicide could break me.

  And so I’d stood there, wearing the blue surgical gowns they give you to wear, watching and listening to the pathologist describe what he was doing. At one point, Jason pointed to a bruise and asked, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s a pinch mark,’ the pathologist replied. It seemed sadistic.

  We needed to be hard to stand that sight.

  Wilson tells me Jayden and his three-year-old sister needed close supervision. ‘Just rough playing with each other,’ she says.

  ‘Right.’ I nod encouragement.

  ‘She started turning on the hot plates at home and just running from one side of the lounge room to the other side and banging into Jayden. I felt as if you know, if something was going to happen, it would be an accident.’

  What game is she playing? I think. Is she trying to make Jayden’s sister a suspect? I know that the autopsy showed Jayden was hit with a force equivalent to those felt in a high-speed car crash. There’s no way, surely, those injuries could have been caused by his sister playing.

  Wilson says Jayden was often sick when he and his sister got back from access visits to their birth mother. ‘For a few days, he wouldn’t want to eat.’

  I ask, ‘Was this a regular thing?’

  ‘Yeah, it happened. I’m not trying to put the blame on anybody.’

  ‘No, no,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not blaming anybody,’ she continues, the pink skin of her cheeks wobbles under the ceiling light as she is talking. ‘But he was fine up until he started having access visits.’

  You are trying to blame somebody. Or at least trying to make me think there are other people worth blaming. But all I say is ‘Right.’

  We have looked at other potential suspects. We looked at Jayden’s birth mother, but it did not make sense. She last saw Jayden during an access visit five days before his death, while his injuries are more recent.

  Wilson says how, three times in the three months Jayden was living with her, she took him to hospital saying he had vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal migraines. ‘I suppose I’m an overprotective mother.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You know, especially not being your own child.’

  After their third visit, Wilson says that she complained to the hospital in writing. ‘They were very rude.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I felt insulted with some of the questions they’d been asking. The doctor there, he said to me, “Oh, you’re back again.”’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I felt highly insulted.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He turned around and said, “How long have you been fostering?” and “Do you enjoy fostering?” and “Would you rather look after older children?”’

  ‘What do you think he was alluding to with those comments?’ I ask her. I know the doctor reported his concerns to DoCS.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘That’s why I wrote the letter.’

  ‘Obviously you were insulted.’

  ‘Because he was questioning my parenting.’

  ‘Right.’ I think about the listening devices we put in her home and how they recorded the visits of other men, while Tony was at work. About how the kids were tucked away in the flat while Wilson entertained them.

  Jayden died on a Tuesday, I say. Can we go back over her movements during the previous days?

  On the weekend, she and Tony took the kids out, but she can’t remember where.

  ‘If you did take them out, you’d have constant care of them?’ I ask.

  ‘Just the four of us went out.’

  ‘OK. So you don’t leave them in baby crèches, movies or wherever?’

  ‘No,’ she says. They were always with her.

  If they were always with you, no one else could have harmed them.

  On the Monday, Jayden’s last full day alive, Wilson gave him a bath. I ask, ‘Did you notice any injuries on him?’

  ‘No.’


  ‘Would that stand out, was it normal for him to be bruised?’

  ‘I’ve never seen a bruise on Jayden.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Never seen a bruise on Jayden.’

  ‘Right.’

  Wilson is less certain what happened on the Monday. The kids had been watching TV and playing together. If she went out, it would have been after 10 o’clock, when their cartoons had finished.

  ‘I’m always home by lunchtime because I watch the soapies,’ she says. Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless.

  ‘Can you recall that particular day, on Monday?’ I ask her.

  ‘That’s probably what happened.’

  ‘Yes, but let’s take that word “probably” out.’ I’ve seen too many good court cases lost because the defence lawyer argued his client had only said that something ‘probably’ happened. We’re nearing the end of the tightrope. I don’t want either of us to slip now.

  ‘Well that was my routine,’ she tells me.

  ‘You did not differ from that routine on that Monday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, at no time was Jayden in the custody of any other person?’

  ‘No.’

  Got you. Wilson has limited the pool of potential killers to herself and her husband.

  As if she realises her mistake, she starts talking quickly, telling me that when Tony got home from work on Monday evening, Jayden was sick, flopping around, and she couldn’t get him to stand up.

  But she’d previously said Jayden was playing around the flat on Monday.

  ‘How were the kids playing if Jayden couldn’t get up?’ I ask her.

  ‘Just playing around like, on the lounge or on the floor, in the bedroom, whatever, like that.’

  ‘Just so we’re not misunderstanding ourselves here, you told me that Jayden couldn’t get up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then you’re saying they’re running around the house?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She’s shaken. She says Jayden was sick for four days running, since the Friday.

  I ask her why, if Jayden was so sick, did she not call an ambulance, as she had with the previous hospital visits?

  Is that a flash of anger? How good is she at hiding her feelings? ‘Maybe he was just being stubborn, it could have been anything,’ she says.

  We move on to the Tuesday. The day Jayden died. That morning, he woke up as usual, she says.

  ‘What was he doing?’ I ask.

  ‘He was running around fine, he was OK.’

  Running around? The doctor said that with his injuries, he would not have been running anywhere.

  Wilson bathed Jayden again, she says, and dressed him, then left him on the floor.

  ‘I was only gone for a couple of minutes or so.’ When she came back he was making funny noises. So she ran with him to the doctor’s surgery.

  ‘Why did you run?’

  ‘I wanted to get there quickly because he was sick.’

  ‘I’m just trying to paint a picture here . . . it’s important to me, how you got there. So you describe it, how you got there.’

  ‘I wasn’t just walking, I was running and walking very fast.’

  The ERISP machine interrupts us with a beeping to tell us the cassettes need replacing. I breathe out and suspend the interview as Jason changes them.

  Five minutes later, we resume. I’m focused.

  ‘You are particular about your supervision of Jayden?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘You have no knowledge of any injuries?’

  ‘No.’

  I picture Jayden lying on the steel tray.

  ‘OK. All right. We’ll just move on to a different section now. Just so you understand . . . myself and Jason, we are from Homicide,’ I tell her.

  ‘Mmmm.’ She’s noncommittal, unsure what to make of the change in my voice.

  ‘We became notified of this matter when the autopsy was being performed.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘The autopsy found out how Jayden died,’ I tell her. ‘There is no way the one-year-old was running around on that morning.’ I tell her how the doctors say some of his injuries look older than the others. These would have been visible before his death, including when she gave him a bath on both the Tuesday and the Monday.

  The atmosphere inside the room now is electric. Having brought her out above the void on her tightrope, I want to shake her off it.

  ‘I’m just in shock,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s heartbreaking.’

  I don’t believe you. I ask her directly, ‘How did he suffer those injuries?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. He didn’t have a mark on him while he was in my care.’

  ‘Is your husband capable of inflicting these injuries?’

  ‘No. None whatsoever, not at all.’

  ‘What do you base that on?’

  ‘My husband and I have never hit a child, especially foster children. We took on fostering out of the goodness of our hearts, and to hear this, I’m just, it’s just, it’s very hard for me to believe.’

  Maybe you didn’t hit him, I think. Did you shake him?

  ‘Now in terms of taking Jayden up to the doctor the day Jayden died, you and I went through it in detail about how you got up there. You said you travelled briskly?’

  ‘That’s right, yeah.’ She doesn’t know where this is going.

  ‘A run–walk, a fast walk?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I lay out six photographs on the table, each showing grainy, black and white CCTV footage of Wilson carrying Jayden to the doctor’s. She doesn’t look like she is trying to move quickly. I ask her what is in the photos.

  ‘That’s me,’ she says, pointing at one. She looks at the next. ‘Maybe the railway station. It’s probably me and Jayden. Yeah, that’s Jayden and me.’

  ‘Is there anything that looks like, if that image is you, that you’re running?’

  ‘Oh.’ The look on her face changes, like she’s been struck. ‘No, not really, no.’ She knows now that I suspect she has been lying.

  Part of me would rather not have these suspicions. Whether it’s instinct or some old-fashioned value I learned growing up in the suburbs, where women were expected to be only wives, mothers and home-makers, but I still find it difficult to think I’m going to charge a woman with killing a child she was looking after. It’s like some of my own innocence has been lost during this interview.

  I want to give Wilson a chance. An out. A way to explain this. I ask her, ‘Is there anything you want to say in relation to this matter?’

  Her face settles back into the same, blameless expression she wore on her way into the interview room. ‘I’m just in shock. It’s just hard to believe. He’s just an innocent little boy.’

  He was.

  ‘OK. This interview is now concluded. The time is now 10.13 by my watch. OK?’

  ‘Ah, hmm,’ Wilson mutters.

  I lean forward, stretching out towards the ERISP machine. ‘Right. I’ll just turn that off now.’ You have one last chance to explain this.

  ‘OK,’ says Wilson. The interview is over.

  Paris. London.

  July 2001: 16 years in

  I’m on a high after the interview with Linda Wilson, and I stay there. Once a case reaches the threshold where I think I’m going to get a result, I feel like I am flying.

  These are the moments that make up for the lows the job brings with it. Like Pam’s silence. She doesn’t talk to me for days after I chose working little Jayden’s case over a third night together in Paris.

  She’ll calm down, I tell myself. She knows the rush of working a case, when the chase is on and you are getting close and nothing else exists outside police work. When your senses are fired up, so even the light shining through the office window as you type up the paperwork for an arrest seems brighter than it’s ever been and you can think more clearly than you ever have before, or work for days while barely slee
ping.

  Pam knows how a case consumes you.

  At work, we collect the final pieces of evidence we’ll need before a final decision on whether to charge Wilson over Jayden’s death: the listening device recordings from her home, which need to be monitored in real-time and then transcribed, and a formal, written report from the paediatric surgeon who helped me understand his injuries.

  I chase the doctor for days, calling him, visiting the hospital and following him around. He keeps saying he has other work to do. Other, living patients. I don’t give up and eventually, he says he’s going to take out a restraining order if I keep on harassing him, but I get the paperwork.

  The listening devices are less productive and give us little evidence against Wilson. Instead, while we are working back one night in Sutherland Police Station, the detective who’s monitoring this surveillance comes up and tells me he’s worried about her.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ I ask.

  He says she sounds like she’s drunk or has taken something. He can hear her talking to herself, alone in her apartment, and fears she might hurt herself.

  Everybody in the office looks at me. It is a judgment call. As police officers, our first responsibility is to preserve life, not to avenge it, and so we have to act. But move too soon and we will blow our surveillance operation.

  I ask for the local uniformed police to be sent to her unit, ready to go in if we need them. We keep listening to Wilson’s voice, unaware that she’s being recorded, while I sit and ask myself if I can keep this running or if now is the moment I need to send the cops in or even call an ambulance.

  The minutes pass.

  We hear a key turn in the lock. Her husband, Tony, is home. Whatever’s happening in their apartment, he can face it. I exhale. I can feel my heartbeat thudding in my chest. The surveillance continues.

  At home, Pam and I reconcile. I keep making the long drives between Sutherland, her apartment in Chinatown and my place on the Central Coast. Jake has just turned 10 and Gemma will soon be eight. I flog myself to make it back from work for their school sports days and concerts.