by Gary Jubelin
I want to show how I am committed to them. On Wednesdays, I drive to Sydney for work, drive back, pick up the kids and drive them down to Sydney for their kung fu class, then we stay at my parents’ place in Dural, then on Thursday morning I drive them up to school in Copacabana, then drive back to work in Sydney.
One evening a week, I pick Gemma up from ballet and drop her home. Mostly she just sits in the back of the car talking to friends, not giving me a second thought. Twice a week I spend the night standing on a cold soccer field coaching Jake’s soccer team, then drop him home, then often drive to Sydney and stay at Pam’s place.
It’s manic but work sustains me. I’m still high when the doctor’s report finally arrives and we go to Wilson’s apartment near the railway station in Sutherland to arrest her. I knock on the door and can hear her moving around inside. She doesn’t answer, so we wait, knocking again and calling out, ‘We know you’re in there Linda, come on out.’ The last thing I want to do is turn this into another siege, like what happened with Isaac.
Eventually she does open the door, wearing tracky dacks, a T-shirt and a look of innocent surprise.
‘You’re under arrest for the murder of Jayden March. You’re not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say may be used in evidence,’ I tell her. He response is shock, horror. She says she can’t believe it.
We walk her to our unmarked car, drive to the police station and I charge her. I still feel good but the next morning, at Wilson’s first court hearing, I start to come down. The court seats are hard and uncomfortable. These cases leave you low sometimes, sickened by what you’ve seen in the morgue or the interview room, or by what one person will do to another.
You carry that tragedy around, the trauma, anguish and anger. You learn to use it as a motivating force that will carry you through the many court hearings and meetings with lawyers ahead, which can last months or years, before the person you’ve arrested faces trial. But it still weighs you down. You miss the simple, clean excitement of the pursuit, of the arrest.
So you are always looking for another case, to start the chase again. You start to crave another Homicide investigation.
At home, Pam and I take our phones to bed, and both reach out beside us in the darkness when one rings. We’re used to these constant interruptions, which often send one of us stumbling to the shower, then to throw on some clothes before hurrying out of the door, heading for another crime scene.
Cold, exhausted or reluctant to leave your bed and a warm embrace behind you, there is always that excitement you’ve been craving. If this job is an addiction, then you are getting another hit.
Sometimes, the chase does not begin with a phone call. In July 2001, it begins with an email waiting for me in the morning, when I arrive at work. It’s from Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. We’d asked them to help track someone down and they say it looks like he’s in London.
The email has a phone number for a contact in the local cops, so I go into Kincumber Police Station near my apartment on the Central Coast late that night to call them. They say they’re confident he’s there; they’ve checked his post and even done physical surveillance. We have to move, I say to Jaco. He agrees. Jason and I will fly to London.
Pam’s not impressed when I tell her I’m taking a second trip to Europe within weeks, but she understands it. She simply nods when I tell her we’ve found where Gordon Wood is living. Of course we have to go, she knows that. Working Homicide, when the call comes, you answer.
Pam also knows the case; the death of a young woman, a bright, popular 24-year-old who was the third child in a family of four and moved to Sydney hoping to make it as a model
Her body was found at the base of The Gap, a towering, dark cliff standing at the entrance to Sydney Harbour, in the early hours of Thursday 8 June 1995.
I’d only got to know Caroline Byrne in death, during the years since, from her family and friends and from looking at photographs. Tall and blonde, with wide brown eyes, it’s easy to understand how she did find modelling work, while also teaching deportment for Sydney’s famous queen of etiquette, June Dally-Watkins.
This is our job. As detectives, we meet people for the first time in death. We often get the call to go to work at night and when it comes, we head for the door and drive towards the crime scene.
We go where no one else will. Not knowing where the chase will end when we begin it.
Over the years, I’d also noticed how, in almost every photograph I’ve seen of Caroline, she’s smiling.
* * *
I said ‘I’m in’ the moment I heard Paul Jacob was leading the reinvestigation. That was mid-1998 and we were to be a team of six, including myself and Jason. By then, the case was already making headlines.
At first, in 1995, the local police had found Caroline was depressed and likely taken her own life. They interviewed her fiancé, Gordon, who told them he’d been at home the evening before and fell asleep in front of the television. Waking after midnight, he realised Caroline wasn’t there and went out searching for her. Driving around the places they’d often been to in the city’s wealthy eastern suburbs, he ended up at The Gap. Caroline’s car was parked in a back alley, close to the cliff edge.
Gordon telephoned her father and brother, waking them up to tell them she was missing, then drove across the city to collect them before returning to the cliffs. He told them he’d last seen his fiancée the day before, showed them her car, with Caroline’s brown leather wallet inside it, and led them up the rough, stone steps towards the cliff edge.
Borrowing a fisherman’s torch, Gordon searched the darkness. Caroline’s father, Tony, thought that it was hopeless and turned back. Gordon led her brother Peter to the edge and they peered down, using the handheld torch to look into the void below. Gordon thought he could see something. Peter couldn’t.
The cops were called, bringing more powerful lighting equipment to pierce the darkness, without success, while Gordon stood with his head and hands on the rail that ran along the clifftop overlooking the black ocean. ‘I can’t believe she’s done it,’ he told one cop, and another, ‘I’m pretty sure my girlfriend has jumped off The Gap.’
It seemed that he was right. Caroline’s body was recovered beneath the place where Gordon had pointed over the cliff edge using his borrowed torchlight.
In January 1996, Caroline’s father wrote to the cops, saying they had given up too quickly and suggesting Caroline was murdered. That June, the cops spoke to Gordon again. He repeated that he thought she’d killed herself. Her mother had done the same thing a few years before, he said.
An inquest into Caroline’s death was held in November 1997, and the media loved it. A young, blonde model made for good pictures in newspaper pages and on television bulletins. They also loved the names of those from the big end of town who were mentioned in evidence.
When he was called into the witness box, Gordon said how, at the time, he’d been working as a personal assistant and chauffeur to Rene Rivkin, an eccentric businessman who made his name share-brokering for genuinely big names like Kerry Packer and Sir Peter Abeles.
Rivkin himself was also colourful, and caught up in a scandal. He’d made a fortune when his Offset Alpine Printing business burned down in 1993, after being insured for several times what he had paid for it. Asked where he was on the day before Caroline was found, Gordon said he’d been to a restaurant where his boss was having lunch, then drove one of Rivkin’s friends into the city. This friend was Graham Richardson, a former federal minister in the Hawke and Keating governments and a Labor Party numbers man. His name alone made headlines.
Gordon denied any involvement in Caroline’s death. When the inquest ended, with little or no evidence of her last hours to go on, the coroner could not decide whether it was a murder, suicide or accident.
But the headlines continued. In March 1998, Gordon gave a television interview, in which he again denied involvement. Asked ‘D
o you accept that you are under suspicion in this in affair?’ Gordon replied ‘I’m not under suspicion by the police.’
By April, hounded by the media, he’d sold his car, cut off his phone, broke the lease on his flat in Bondi and left Australia.
Now the coroner wanted the case investigated again and Jaco had been asked to lead it.
Jaco encouraged us to spend time with Caroline’s family, learning to like them as people and to grieve for the trauma that her death had caused them. We re-interviewed old witnesses and spoke to others who the police had never dealt with. Our job was to talk to everybody who might know anything about her. After that email from Interpol arrived in 2001, we decided it was time to talk to Gordon.
At first, the senior bosses who allocate our resources are reluctant to let us do it. Two return flights to the UK would cost a lot, and they doubt it is worth it.
‘Why would Gordon talk?’ they ask. He’d spoken to police before. He’d already fronted the inquest and the media.
‘Get us there and I guarantee he will do an interview,’ I argue. It is a risk. If I am wrong, and Gordon won’t talk, the case could stall. After three years without any obvious result, there’s pressure coming on us now to drop it. In Homicide, each week means new cases to solve and there are only so many detectives. Pursuing even one old death like Caroline’s means leaving questions hanging over a more recent case, for lack of anyone to answer them.
But, like Jaco, I care too much to let this investigation go. The Byrne family are good, gentle and decent people. Caroline was their sister and their daughter. We’d sat in her father’s home and seen the photos that he kept of her. Whether she died in an accident, a suicide or something else, her family deserve to know what happened.
That was our job, to follow where the case led us, even if it meant flying halfway around the world to do it.
* * *
In person, Gordon Wood looks just like Chesty Bond, the cartoon character who used to advertise white singlets when I was growing up.
Like Chesty, Gordon is groomed. He has that same wave of blond hair, bulging muscles and square jaw. Watching him carrying a gym bag back to his apartment in Chelsea, southwest London, I think of Chesty’s smiling, easy confidence. He seems at home here, walking between the rows of tall, grand properties with big bay windows, which go for a small fortune. I put the thought aside. This morning, Monday 23 July 2001, Jason and I are sitting here inside a borrowed, unmarked police car, watching Gordon walk towards us, for one reason only.
He stops as we get out and stand on the footpath. I introduce us, saying ‘Look, Gordon, we’re from Australia. We’re here about Caroline Byrne. We’d like to interview you.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he replies.
‘But she was your fiancée. We’re investigating her death.’
He shakes his head and turns towards the apartment building, but doesn’t hurry away. He still has that same, assured self-confidence about his movements.
‘Why are you worried about speaking to a couple of cops from Australia?’ I ask him.
Gordon pauses. We try to make something from his hesitation, giving him a phone number for the nearby Kensington Police Station, where we’ve based ourselves with help from the local cops.
He looks at it and I smile at him before we leave, trying also to look confident.
The truth is, I still fear we have come all this way for nothing. We can’t make Gordon talk to us. He’ll only do so if he wants to.
Soon after, Gordon calls. He says he’s considered our offer, spoken to his advisors and decided to accept it. We arrange to speak to him in the afternoon and, when he arrives, I see he’s changed his clothes, he’s looking dapper and carrying a bag of muffins and take-away coffees, which he offers to us.
I take them and throw them in the bin.
‘Now, we’re here to talk to you about the death of Caroline,’ I tell Gordon.
I Don’t Think It’s Going to be Easy
23 July 2001: 16 years in
The paint is peeling from the four walls of the interview room. Jason and I open the door and walk in behind Gordon Wood. He sits. We sit. We look at each other.
Outside, the streets are full of fierce summer sunlight. In here, Jason and I are weary, having not slept for days. We spent the whole of the flight over from Sydney awake, reading the different witness statements, phone records and investigator’s notes produced during the different police investigations, and kept on working through them last night in our hotel.
This morning, spinning with exhaustion, I ran through London’s Hyde Park, then swam in the Serpentine, a narrow lake inside the park, where the grass and trees come down to meet the water. Pulling myself out, as the cold water dried in the early sunlight, it felt as if some of the stresses I carry on every investigation – Will we solve this? What if I do the wrong thing? What if the answer escapes me? – were carried away also.
I found a place on the grass to practise my qigong, away from other people.
Caroline’s family, I thought, had spoken of Gordon’s big personality. He was likely to bring that energy to our conversation when we met him. With no authority to make him sit and answer questions, I could not expect to dominate him or match his energy with mine in a confrontation.
I had to find a way to balance our energies instead, to make him want to engage in this. Just like the yin-yang symbol, where both yin and yang reach around and complement each other.
First, I had to find my own balance. Starting my qigong, I stood shoulder-width apart, hands cupped near the centre of my body, raising them, palms upwards, almost to eye-level, before turning the palms over and lowering them until the fingertips were almost touching near my belly again.
My breathing was in time with the movement. Breathe in when my hands come up. Breathe out when my hands return to my centre. With each breath out, I let the tensions built up during those sleepless nights pass out of my body. My heart rate slowed.
I felt ready.
Inside the interview room, Jason checks through the stack of witness statements and other documents we’ve brought with us from Sydney. If I forget to ask a question, he’ll point it out.
‘All right,’ I say, looking at Gordon. ‘Let’s start the interview.’ Jason starts the ERISP machine recording, a transcript of which would later be tendered in court, at Gordon’s trial.
* * *
‘Do you agree that on 12 June 1995, you provided police with a statement in relation to your knowledge of issues surrounding the death of Caroline Byrne?’ I ask Gordon.
‘I have no recollection of when it was.’
‘I agree it’s a long time ago. Perhaps I’ll be able to assist by showing you a copy of a statement in your name, Gordon Eric Wood.’
I give him a copy of the five-page statement, as well as the three-page transcript of an interview he did with police a month later. I also hand Gordon a longer transcript from another interview done the following year, a copy of his evidence to the inquest in 1998 and a transcript of his TV interview.
Tired as I am from the sleepless nights, I feel alert. I watch Gordon as he lines up the sheets of paper around him on the table.
‘Mr Wood, can you describe to me your relationship with Caroline Byrne?’ I ask him.
‘She was my fiancée.’
‘Could you expand on that?’
He continues: ‘She was the love of my life. I believe that I was the same for her. It was a very magical and special relationship with a special woman, and I was a very lucky man for three years.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Can you tell me what impact Caroline’s death has had on your life?’
‘No, I can’t actually. Not in words.’
‘Mr Wood, it’s been documented’ – I point at the piles of paper between us – ‘that you believe Caroline committed . . .’
I pause. He’s starting to break down in tears.
‘Sorry,’ he apologises.
‘No, it’s quite a
ll right. Take your time. Do you need a tissue?’ I ask, and there is some water, if he needs it.
‘Thanks.’ He takes a breath and says again, ‘I’m sorry.’
I wasn’t expecting this. Try to keep your balance, I think. In qigong, you learn how the slightest difference in the positioning of a foot, or even of your weight within your foot, can leave you unstable and quickly exhausted.
‘You understand that we are going to be asking a lot of questions today?’ I ask.
‘I know.’
‘We’d like to cover all the issues.’
‘Go for it, mate.’ He looks at me across the table. ‘Go for it,’ he says again.
I ask why he believes Caroline took her own life. He tells me she’d once attempted to kill herself before. He says her mother’s suicide meant Caroline might have had a ‘congenital predisposition’. Two days before her death, she’d seen a doctor who diagnosed depression and referred her to a psychiatrist.
‘Through the course of our inquiries, and they’ve been fairly substantial . . .’
‘Mmmm?’ he says, looking at me calmly.
‘. . . you appear to be the only person that believes Caroline’s taken her own life.’
‘I would say that most people in their heart of hearts, who are close to Caroline, would believe she committed suicide,’ he says. ‘I would say her family probably, you know, at the Pearly Gates, talking to God, would say, “OK, yeah, I buy it. She committed suicide.”’
‘I’ll stop you there,’ I say. I need a moment to gather my thoughts.
‘It’s not just her family,’ I say. We’ve interviewed her friends. Her workmates.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s been a long, protracted inquiry.’ We’ve spoken to her doctor, Cindy Pan, who said Caroline seemed calm, almost serene. Yes, Gordon was right – Cindy did refer her to a psychiatrist. But, ‘No one there has indicated to us that they believe Caroline was suicidal.’