by Gary Jubelin
It feels like I’ve got some balance in my life again. Pam and I are going well and I’m also secure in my relationship with Jake and Gemma. Last year, the townhouse behind where they live with their mum, my ex-wife, Debbie, came up for sale and I bought it. It’s rented out, I don’t know if I’ll ever live in it, but what it does is show the kids that I’m not going anywhere.
Pam could have doubted that decision, but she didn’t. She’s never been jealous of Debbie and is always graceful in the way she lets me prioritise the kids. She’s a classy lady, I think, walking to get the post. Life’s working out. Looking out at the ocean, I watch a surfer ride one of the lefts that form near the north edge of the bay.
Looking down, I see divorce papers waiting in the mailbox.
My first reaction is overwhelming sadness. Yes, it was me who walked out but the uncaring lawyer’s letter enclosing the formal paperwork is a stark statement that our marriage is now over. I failed. This isn’t the life I had imagined growing up.
‘I’ll sign the papers, but you could have told me they were coming,’ I say when I next see Debbie, to pick up the kids. She nods.
Getting divorced so soon after buying the townhouse also means I’m still struggling for money, and relying on overtime payments from work. Fortunately, we get a lot of overtime in Homicide.
* * *
Throughout October 2003, Jason and I are kept busy with the trial of Linda Wilson over the death of one-year-old Jayden March, making sure witnesses turn up at court and answering the prosecution lawyers’ questions about this or that piece of the evidence.
In November, we finally convince Rocco to sign a formal witness statement in relation to Terry Falconer’s death and Glenn, Luke, Jason and I spend a week of 10- to 12-hour days holed up with him in a rented house north of Sydney, getting his account down on paper. It runs to 87 pages and he is at his worst throughout this time, his paranoia crawling up the walls.
It’s taken us so long to get this done because Rocco understands that this is the moment he loses control of the whole process. Before now, when he agreed to work as an informant and even during the meetings when he was wearing a wire, there was always the slim chance that, if discovered, he could try to talk his way out of it. Signing a witness statement means there is no such explanation. He can never go back.
If we take this to court and the Perishes are not convicted, he’s a dead man.
‘If you fuck this up, I’ll kill you,’ he tells me.
‘Mate, I always knew that was the case. I’m not gonna fuck it up,’ I try to reassure him.
Rocco refuses to take part in WitSec, the witness security program, because he doesn’t trust it, so instead the police force pays for a one-way flight out of Sydney. The cops on the strike force also chip in what we can out of our own pockets, so Rocco has about $2000 when he gets on board the plane. It makes me deeply uncomfortable, after everything he’s been through, that this is all he gets in return. Should this case get to court, the barristers involved will make more than that much daily.
Yet Rocco doesn’t think that. The day before his flight, he comes to our offices in Strawberry Hills, and when we hand over the plane ticket, he looks at it like he can’t believe it.
‘Mate, I didn’t think you were going to do this,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know if I could trust you but you’ve given me a shot at it.’
He reaches beneath his shirt and produces a loaded automatic pistol with a laser sight. ‘I suppose you can have this now,’ he says, laying it on the table.
* * *
Linda Wilson is sentenced two days before Christmas 2003. In the end, she’s found guilty of manslaughter, not murder, and the judge is more understanding of her than I was.
He finds that the injuries to Jayden’s head were caused by ‘impact and shaking’. He says the jury’s decision not to find Wilson guilty of murder means they ‘must have rejected the hypothesis in the prosecution case that it was the offender, and the offender alone, who inflicted all the injuries’.
It is a ‘reasonable possibility’ that Wilson’s husband, Tony, actually inflicted some of these injuries, says the judge. She’s ‘had a troubled life’. There’s evidence of a personality disorder: ‘she was unsuited to the task of foster carer and . . . sooner or later, she would have been demonstrably unable to cope with her responsibilities’.
It’s worse than that, I think. Jayden’s death could have been prevented. There were warning signs flashing, if only anyone had noticed. Like the fact Wilson and her husband, Tony, applied to be foster parents in Queensland but were knocked back, so they moved south and tried again in New South Wales, where they were accepted.
Like how Jayden had been taken to hospital more than once before he died, where the doctors had told the Department of Community Services (DoCS) that they were worried about him. Two DoCS workers visited Wilson’s house and spent hours with her and Jayden just days before his death. Yet they saw nothing.
As a Homicide detective, I cannot protect the victims in my cases. I get involved only after they have died. Hoping to prevent another similar tragedy, after Jayden’s death, I filed a report saying, ‘There are a number of issues involving DoCS that have been identified. These issues might require further investigation.’ I met with the coroner to tell him about how DoCS had handled the case and he wrote to the minister.
In response, the department told me to ease up. ‘You’ve got to think bigger here, Gary,’ they told me. ‘Do you know how many other kids we have in care? It’s thousands. We don’t want all those parents to worry. We don’t want to generate more fear.’
To my shame, I believed them. It was the first time I’d been caught up in politics. Sitting in court, I think I was mistaken.
The judge gives Wilson nine years in prison, with a non-parole period of six years and 11 months. An appeal court will later reduce this to six years with a non-parole period of four years and six months.
Four and a half years. A boy is dead.
I watch Wilson as the judge stands and leaves the courtroom. She doesn’t blink. I think of all the other children, like the thousands in DoCS’ care, or the three children in Bowraville for whom it is already too late.
In this case, I played by the rules. I shut my mouth.
You don’t fucking do this on my watch, I think. This doesn’t fucking happen.
I won’t make the same mistakes again.
Walking Evil
1 January 2004: 18 years in
The phone rings before dawn on New Year’s Day. Pam and I wake, but I’m on call, so I know it’s for me. Despite not drinking last night, we still sat up until midnight to see 2004 in, and I can feel how little sleep I’ve managed. It’s not yet five o’clock.
Pam smiles and rolls over. It will be her turn to answer soon enough. Her turn to spend a week responding to every fatal brawl or suspicious-looking suicide in New South Wales, every drug-related robbery gone wrong or bloodied body discovered stabbed to death in the back seat of a Holden, every call-out to a fly-blown house whose neighbours have finally decided that they can’t stand the stench during this run of 30- and 40-degree summer days. For most of these on-call cases, we oversee the initial investigation and maybe advise the local detectives on how to take it forward, then hand the work over to them. The tougher ones, where the crime is particularly awful or looks like it will need specialists to track down the killer, we keep.
Maybe this isn’t one of those, I think, reaching for my notebook in the darkness. Maybe this is a straightforward case. An open goal. I ask for the details.
They’re brief – a man, deceased, maybe a shotgun to the head – but enough to tell me my night’s sleep is over.
I call Nigel Warren and Luke, who’s come over to Homicide since working on Strike Force Tuno, and tell them to get moving, then grab the clothes I lay out ready every night when I’m on call, fall into the shower, then the car, making more phone calls as I drive down the empty highway to Sydney.
Mor
e information is coming in: the victim was a 54-year-old, Michael Davies. He ran a cleaning firm. About 4.30am, his wife got home from work to find Michael’s body in their bedroom. She called 000 and the operator dispatched an ambulance, as well as the local police.
When they arrived, the room looked like a nightmare. As the forensics team started to look at the blood spatter, they realised Michael wasn’t killed by a shotgun. It was more likely something blunt and heavy. But only a frenzied attack could do that kind of damage to another person.
I’m facing something evil and the new year is only a few hours old.
In Campsie, west Sydney, I drive down roads of unsuspecting, sleeping houses, until I see the blue lights. I duck under the crime scene tape and am shown into the bedroom. Michael’s body is still lying where his killer left it. A camera flashes as the forensic technicians record the scene as evidence. Down the hall are children’s bedrooms.
I’m told that when Michael’s wife came home, she found their two-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, who seemed unharmed. But her 10-year-old daughter, from a previous relationship, also lives in the house and, right now, she is missing. The property has a garage out the back. Inside, some cushions and discarded children’s nightwear are lying on the floor.
By mid-morning, I’m facing a row of grim faces at the first of the day’s briefings at the nearby Campsie Police Station.
‘This is as real as it gets,’ I tell the uniformed cops gathered from five different local area commands, as well as detectives from some of the other specialised squads and tactical police from the State Protection Group.
I explain how the four-year-old boy said he saw a man inside their house last night and recognised him as one of his father’s mates. The dead man’s wife has told us her husband invited the man to stay with them over Christmas, but he stormed out after a few days. He was a strange man, she says, with a black beard and tangled hair. He worked as a cleaner with her husband sometimes. His name is Jeffrey Hillsley.
Nobody speaks. The room is small and cramped, with people standing shoulder to shoulder against the walls.
Hillsley is reason for us to worry, I say. He’s 52, with a string of child sex convictions. In 1984 he was jailed for the abduction and sexual assault of a child. Released on parole in 1986, he was later found with a young girl, locked in a toilet at his workplace. Jailed again in 1990 for assaulting two girls, he briefly escaped before being recaptured and sent back to prison. Over the years he’s sent a series of letters to the parole board, including one that read: ‘A message for the community – I will be back. Thank God for the little girls.’
He signed it ‘Walking Evil’.
Eyes harden all around the room, but it gets worse. A report from a former prison officer says Hillsley told him something. He claimed to have been mistreated while in prison, saying, ‘The screws have bashed me and the more that happens to me the more the kids will suffer. They won’t find me next time; it will be another Samantha Knight.’
Samantha was a nine-year-old girl who disappeared in 1986 and has never been found, though another serial paedophile was recently convicted of her manslaughter.
Hillsley’s now been released from prison, I tell the team. Earlier today we got his address and I was there when the tactical police broke down his door. We didn’t find him or the girl, but we did find handwritten notes containing references to the missing 10-year-old, which made me even more worried. The fear is that he’s planned this. We have to find her.
‘A child’s life’s at risk,’ I urge them. ‘I want everyone to switch on.’
I speak to one of the bosses at police headquarters, which recently moved out of the city centre to a new, glass-fronted office block in Parramatta, western Sydney. What used to be called Crime Agencies is now State Crime Command and the Homicide Squad has a big, dedicated office on the eighth floor. Inside the glass doors, the wall of the office is covered with yellowed newspaper clippings of famous old cases, with headlines like ‘Murder hunt’ and ‘The killer who came knocking’. At any time, the squad might be working on over 100 open cases and have another 600 which are still unsolved and being regularly reviewed. Even in this context, what’s happening this New Year’s Day is different.
‘It’s fucking big,’ I say on the telephone. A young girl is missing. And, from what I’ve seen so far today, people don’t come much worse than Hillsley.
The commissioner will be briefed on this, as will the police minister. The press will also want a piece of it, which always makes the bosses nervous. I say we have to use that as an opportunity. We need the missing girl’s description on TV and the radio. It might mean somebody comes forward. At the same time, we have to protect Michael’s family from reporters, who will soon have their phone number, will have parked their TV trucks outside the crime scene and will be knocking on their neighbours’ doors.
‘We have to get the media solid.’
* * *
The day passes in a blur of decisions and it is dark again outside.
The 10-year-old is safe. She managed to escape from Hillsley somewhere in the streets around her home, running alone down the empty roads as everybody else enjoyed the New Year holiday, until she got back to her family. It’s a godsend. Having seen the damage Hillsley had done, I couldn’t bear to think of that happening to a child.
A medical examination showed she’d been sexually assaulted. Hillsley himself is brought in around 9.40pm, smelling of sweat and dirt, and dressed in filthy jeans and a grey T-shirt. He says that he’s been walking the streets since the murder happened, and was arrested while hiding in a stormwater drain behind the Sunbeam factory in South Campsie, near where the 10-year-old ran away from him.
When Luke and I walk into the interview room, Hillsley is waiting for us inside it. His long, unkempt Ned Kelly beard curls down towards his skinny stomach. I notice there’s a graze on his head and that his teeth are bloodied. Outside the room, he has already told me he went to Michael’s place to bash him because he had the shits with him. But I need it on tape. An admission isn’t worth much without a record.
Luke and I sit facing each other, the ERISP machine facing Hillsley. Luke looks as serious as I feel right now as he prepares to make notes of the interview. He’s a good fit for me on this job, a deep thinker, the kind to ponder case law rather than charge in headfirst. We need that calm in here because, outside the room, there are a lot of tough guys walking around saying that Hillsley should be bashed, or even gelded. If they just had five minutes in a room with him . . .
Maybe, I think, there might have been a time for that, but it’s not now. I don’t know how I would have acted if we hadn’t found the 10-year-old. If Hillsley had been sitting here, refusing to say where she was, would I have crossed the line? I think I would. I would have bashed him to make him talk.
Afterwards, I would have put my hand up and said, This is why I did it. We were trying to save a girl’s life. But now she’s safe, I never have to know what I’d have done. My job instead is to put him in prison.
I switch on the ERISP machine and start to talk, ‘This is an electronically recorded interview between Detective Sergeant Jubelin and Jeffrey Hillsley.’
Hillsley smiles.
I try to control my emotions. If I lose it with him, like those tough guys outside say that they want to, I risk losing his confession.
I continue, ‘The time this interview is commenced at is 10.05pm.’
My daily meditation helps. At home, I use it to re-centre myself, to bring myself back into balance from the wild highs and crashing lows of a cop’s life. I’m finding the same discipline can help me deal with work itself. Hillsley’s smiling at me – so what? I just accept it. That ability to become detached, to relax into a zen state is becoming my confessional priest, a way to reconcile the pressure calls I am constantly making.
I ask him, ‘Can you tell me the circumstances of how you came to be at Michael Davies’ place in the last 24 hours?’
�
��The reason why?’
I don’t react.
He starts to talk. ‘I was over at Michael’s place over the Christmas break, he asked me to come over for about three to four days. We were putting some mulch on his garden. And Michael likes to get into your personal life. I was telling him about a friend of mine who had three strokes before it actually killed him and Michael started joking about three strokes, you know, and I thought that was a bit of, um, no respect for my friend, no respect for my personal life. And that’s what really pushed me over the edge.’
He looks at me. Is he enjoying this? It’s like he wants me to react. I need to show him that isn’t going to happen.
‘Where did this conversation take place?’ I ask him. I want him to know I’m only interested in the facts.
He says in the front garden.
I ask him for the time and date.
He wants to talk about the killing, saying, ‘I’m afraid after that day in the garden, Michael was heading for it.’
‘Explain that to me,’ I say, trying to unpick what he is saying. ‘When he was heading for it, what exactly do you mean by that?’
‘I only wanted to bash him. I didn’t want to kill him. I mean, Michael’s got a lot of goodness in him too, you know.’
‘Right.’ I keep my voice level.
‘He’s got a lovely family and a lovely wife and, I mean, I didn’t want to take him away from them. It was just, I really just wanted to bash him.’
This is perverse. It’s like he’s trying to push my buttons.
I stare at him, expressionless. His eyes flicker away, as if he finds my lack of response a disappointment.
He tells me how he walked from home to Michael’s house on New Year’s Eve, carrying a knife and a hammer in his rucksack. He’s savouring the details: a dark blue bag with two pockets on either side; a claw hammer with a yellow shaft; a knife from his drawer at home with one sharp edge. He says the knife was for his own protection.